Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism 9781350098947, 9781350098978, 9781350098954

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Degeneration Redux
Defining Modernism
Shape
Notes
1 Avatars
Cesare Lombroso
Max Nordau
Magnus Hirschfeld
A Coda: Otto Weininger
Notes
2 Bad Seeds: Mervyn LeRoy’s American Crime
The Gangster Film and Little Caesar
Social Justice: They Won’t Forget and The House I Live In
The Evil Child and The Bad Seed
Notes
3 Fitness Movements: Literary Degeneration and Jewish Muscle in Joyce’s Ulysses and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy
Nordau’s Degeneration Splits
Pat Barker and Regeneration
Generation and James Joyce’s Ulysses
Notes
4 Sexology’s Photoshop
Claude Cahun
Adi Nes
Notes
CODA Otto Weininger and the Jewish Joke as Terminus
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Unfit

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Unfit Jewish Degeneration and Modernism Marilyn Reizbaum

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Marilyn Reizbaum, 2020 Marilyn Reizbaum has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. viii–x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Adi Ness All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-9894-7 ePDF: 978-1-3500-9895-4 eBook: 978-1-3500-9896-1 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

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Introduction Avatars Bad Seeds: Mervyn LeRoy’s American Crime Fitness Movements: Literary Degeneration and Jewish Muscle in Joyce’s Ulysses and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy Sexology’s Photoshop Coda: Otto Weininger and the Jewish Joke as Terminus

Bibliography Index

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1 25 65 109 169

205 213 224

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Illustrations 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14

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Entartete Music: Eine Abbrechung von Staatsrat Dr. H.S. Ziegler, Degenerate Art Exhibition, Neue Galerie, 2014 “Metatropischer Transvestitismus” [Metatropic Tranvestism] (Magnus Hirschfeld Institute) Unknown, Hirschfeld, and Dorchen (Viola, vol. 3, no. 119, July 1, 1933) Opera Square book burning, Berlin, May 10, 1933 (Magnus Hirschfeld Institute, courtesy of Rainer Herrn) Still from Little Caesar (Warner Bros., 1931) Thomas Fitzpatrick, “The Modern ‘Frankenstein’,” from the Weekly Freeman, August 17, 1895 Claude Cahun collage, from Disavowals (Aveux non Avenus, 1930) (courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections) Claude Cahun, self-portrait, cover of Bifur (5), 1929 Claude Cahun, self-portrait, monochrome print, c. 1920 (courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections) Claude Cahun, “Que Me Veux-Tu?” (“What do you want of me?”), 1928 Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp), photo by Man Ray 1921 (The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY; Man Ray 2015 Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ ADAGP, Paris 2018; Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artist’s Rights Society (ARS), New York 2018) Vita Sackville-West, photo by Howard Coster, 1934 (© National Portrait Gallery, London) Vita Sackville-West—“Orlando about the year 1840,” Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1929) (taken by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in 1927) Claude Cahun, Hands (no date, c. 1939?) (courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections)

2 48 50 51 79 142 175 176 177 178

181 182 183 184

Illustrations

15 Adi Nes, Soldier Series, Untitled (1999) (“The Last Supper Before Going Out to Battle”) (90 × 148 cm) (© Adi Nes, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, NY) 16 Adi Nes, Soldier Series, Untitled (1996) (“Muscle Guy”) (90 × 90 cm) (© Adi Nes, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, NY) 17 Adi Nes, Soldier Series, Untitled (1994) (90 × 90 cm) (© Adi Nes, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, NY) 18 Adi Nes, Prisoner Series (2003) (90 × 123 cm) (© Adi Nes, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, NY) 19 Adi Nes, The Village Series, 2008 (C-print mounted on aluminum, 100 × 125 cm) (© Adi Nes, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, NY) 20 Pablo Picasso, Boy Leading a Horse, 1906 (2018 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art)

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Acknowledgments I have been engaged with this project for more than a decade, often wondering what possessed me to take on such a wide-ranging study, one that tested my disciplinary limits and sometimes seemed uncomfortably unwieldy. A kernel of an idea for it came at the beginning of this new millennium from a seminar organized by Bryan Cheyette at the University Southampton on the topic of the “Image of the Jews in European Liberal Culture, 1789–1914.” My subject was Max Nordau’s Jewish legacy for twentieth-century literature. I had vaguely known Nordau as the Zionist icon, after whom a boulevard was named in Tel Aviv (Shderot Nordau), one I had walked numerous times, as one does, without regard for its namesake. I had marked Nordau’s name in my study of Joyce and began to trace the steps. My essay drawn on the work for the seminar appeared in the 2003 special issue of Jewish Culture and History, dedicated to the topic of the seminar and edited by Bryan and Nadia Valman. Parts of that essay appear in Unfit; I wish to acknowledge and thank Bryan and Nadia and the journal here. And so the project began. Modernist studies facilitated this journey by their own acute redirections, laying the ground for the book’s intersections and reshaping my abiding sense that there is import in what is missing. I hope with this study I may contribute to the discussion among the many modernists both on and off these pages. While the undertaking of this book has sometimes seemed less than a blessing, I am very much blessed by the friends and colleagues who stay the course. Speaking of modernists, I am not through thanking Bryan Cheyette, for the transformative scholarly dent (crater?) he has made in this subject of Jewishness and modernism, his collegiality and support for my own work, here with Bloomsbury Academic, and always. Paul Saint-Amour and Joe Valente, whose generosity I can always try to repay; they gave me the hard word on what had to be done. Doug Mao, who took the time and care to engage with Unfit. Karen Lawrence, whose example I emulate and whose friendship and support I have cherished since that first cup of coffee in Zurich. Hana Wirth Nesher, another gift from Karen, whose love, support, and interlocution I am privileged to rely on. My heart and thanks go out especially to Jonathan Freedman, for his partnership in this enterprise of bringing Jewishness to the literary table. viii

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I first met Jonathan at Yale where he was among the graduate cohort of my dearest friend Margaret Arculus. Thank you, Margaret (not a modernist!), for endless conversations, beginning at Saxe Coburg Street in Edinburgh, for commodiously returning to Edinburgh with all points along the way, and for your no-nonsense advice about Unfit and everything else. Thank you to my friends Hannan Hever, Orly Lubin (‫)נשיקות‬, Lee Edelman, Sonia Hofkosh, Margot Livesey, Eitan Bar Yosef, and Joe Boone for their brilliance and faith. To the amazing Joe Litvak, who, thankfully, was waiting at Bowdoin when I arrived and, thankfully, remains close, goes so much gratitude for his inspiration and unstinting consolations. I have such great admiration for my Bowdoin friends and colleagues: What words can I find that would be adequate to express my love and gratitude for the formidable and wonderful Aviva Briefel. Always generous, always helpful, always brilliant, who also always means business. Thank you for your ferocious insight and gentle patience. Jennifer Scanlon, a model of professional grace and warmth, whose support for this project and always is a blessing indeed. Bill VanderWolk and Michele Lettiere, David Hecht, Ann Kibbie, Aaron Kitch, Allison Cooper, David Israel, Jill Smith, Michael Arthur. Tess Chakkalakal, and Pamela Fletcher, who kindly read early parts of Unfit and wisely advised. Unfit would be undone were it not for the contributions of former students and helpmates—the marvelous Linda Kinstler, Jae-Yeon Yoo, and Amanda Minoff, for their editorial savvy and generous enthusiasm. Many thanks, also, to Laurie Holland, Jon Farr-Weinfeld, and Paul Benham for their technical support. I wish to acknowledge the institutions that supported my research for this project along the way, including the American Academy in Rome whose summer residency facilitated my study of Italian and Lombroso; the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute in Berlin, with very special thanks to Rainer Herrn, my Kiwi collaborator, and Ralf Dose; Humboldt Universität, whose Hirschfeld archive was invaluable, and to Christina van Braun for her guidance there; Sussex University, and Laura Marcus in particular, for inviting me to the Otto Weininger centenary, at the millennial turn. I am grateful to Adi Nes, for so generously permitting me to include his photographs in Unfit and for the time we have spent talking about them. And most of all, I am very grateful to Bowdoin for continually supporting my work with all the means at its disposal.

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My thanks to the Bloomsbury editorial staff, especially David Avital, and also Lucy Brown, for shepherding the project through the publication process. This book is dedicated to my family: My mother, the very fit Rose Reizbaum, who refuses to turn 100; her courage, tenacity and humor in the face of all the odds is breathtaking. May she live to 120. To my sister Toby and my brother-inlaw Peter Glick for their putting-up powers in every sense of that expression; to my adorable niece Lauren and nephew David, their spouses Russell and Reena, and their doubly adorable children; to my cousins, friends, and special advocates all at once, Yifat Cohen and Naama Meishar; to my godchildren, Leah and Jonah Hecht. I’m lucky.

Introduction

Degeneration theory dominated late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought. Despite its influence across wide a swath of fields, degeneration is a term that is hard to define. The elasticity of this term for a number of dominant discourses, such as eugenics, race and sex science, and aesthetic decadence, has rendered it inchoate. But degeneration theory has not lost its power. The cluster of ideas associated with degeneration, among them “purity,” “fitness,” and “good form,” roughly distribute to matters moral, physical, and aesthetic, and through their interplay, they all provide an underpinning of modernism which has been insufficiently mapped. As this book contends, these ideas are crucially inflected by the Jewish subject, often made exemplary of the theories born of degeneration. The insistence on the parochiality and fixity of the Jewish subject has inhibited a more fluid, more global vision of degeneration and its legacies for modernism. My purpose here is to revisit a term that demonstrates the mobility of discourses across a number of borders, concomitant with modernism’s expansion of its scope. I am engaged here with a more expansive modernism, one that has emerged with the critical developments in modernist studies in the last decade and more. Modernism is recognized as a “world phenomenon,” which enables innovative intersections between older paradigms and the networks of affiliation that have emerged in the field’s interrogation of itself; guided by its own foundational tenets to open rather than foreclose on questions of inclusion, period, style, translation, and national, geographic, and linguistic frameworks. The field has therefore moved away from a Eurocentric view of modernism’s origins, of the European theatre’s centripetal influence on aesthetic movements at the fin de siècle, or a conviction that all formal rupture or experimentation is modernist by default. “But still one modernism,” Eric Hayot and Rebecca Walkowitz conclude in their New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, “insofar as it corresponds to a set of historical circumstances that have not happened exactly this way before and that have carried in their wake a variety of social changes (capitalism, 1

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Figure 1 Entartete Music: Eine Abbrechung von Staatsrat Dr. H.S. Ziegler, Degenerate Art Exhibition, Neue Galerie, 2014. https://i.redd.it/xh54p45fh2l11.jpg

secularization, modernity) that, for now, seem to define a period and a state of affairs.”1 Such categorical conclusions, however contingent, were key to my decisions about what is selected for study here. This more expansive way of thinking about modernism is in tune with the currency of global circulation: “drawing out connections across several geographies, often following an idea as it travels among various readers and writers and visual artists.”2 “Often the pathways are the routes born of colonialism . . . What is the interplay of roots and routes in those circulations across the globe?” asks Susan Friedman in her discussion of planetary modernism.3 The Jewish subject embodies a circulatory figure of double exemplarity, whose paradoxical historical status as both the paradigmatic deracinated traveler and cosmopolitan insider makes it exceptional

Introduction

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for modernism—by seeming at once too local and too universal. Unfit argues that the Jewish subject is imbricated culturally, translationally, and formally within modernism. The cover image of an exhibition guide for the 1938 Degenerate Music Exhibition (Figure 1), which took place in Düsseldorf one year after the infamous Munich Degenerate Art exhibit, was displayed as part of the New York City Neue Galerie’s 2014 exhibit, “Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Germany, 1937.” Recalling Richard Wagner’s notorious concept of “Judaization” from “Judaism in Music” (1850), the image conflates the bogeymen of degenerate music—black jazz, the red well-known to signal “Bolshevik” modernists such as the “Jewish Bolshevik” Kurt Weill; atonal music à la Jewish Arnold Schoenberg, including Ernst Krenek, whose 1927 opera about jazz was a big hit in Berlin and later reviled (“Jonny spielt auf ”—Jonny Strikes Up). The image is a distortion of the figure on the cover of the opera’s playbill. I was particularly struck by the placement of this outstanding image in the stairwell landing leading up to the main floor of the Neue Galerie exhibit, serving as a reminder of degeneration’s originary connections to Jewishness. They are present not only in the Jewish ethnicity of the music’s practitioners, but also in the Jewish stamp, buttonholing the dehumanized minstrel. It is a stamp that predates the Nazi depiction of the ills of modernism represented in the D.A. exhibit. In Olaf Peters’ essay in the catalogue, “From Nordau to Hitler,” he discusses the significance of one of Unfit’s signal degenerationists—Max Nordau—to degeneration theory’s impact on art, and tracks Nordau’s influence on the Nazi formulation of degeneracy. Yet, while Peters mentions Nordau’s Jewish background, that complicating factor is not considered as implicated in the theory. Unfit seeks to remedy the effacement of degeneration’s “roots and routes” in Jewishness and in modernism, and the circumscription of Jewish degeneration to a particular historical moment, as replayed in exhibits like this.4 As was made apparent in the 1937 Munich exhibition, the scientific aims of degeneration theory were extended to the interpretation of an art work, so that it may be perceived “eugenically, as a figure for the Jewish body.”5 Because of Nazism’s association with eugenics, it is a term that still sets off alarms. Eugenics gave way to race and sex science and is central to the concept of degeneration, and both have their roots in post-Darwinian evolutionary theory. Using the Greek for “good in birth or stock,” Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton coined “eugenics” in 1882, to develop a science of hereditary destiny (talent and character), positive or negative. As his biographer puts it, “Galton brought into the vocabulary a word whose dark connotations have ever since been associated

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with his name.”6 We now understand that while the science of Galton and others was intended to improve lives through progress—through good biological outcomes—its biopolitical aims were often destructive. That is, in seeking to eliminate de- or malformations, the science reified human imperfection. As many have observed, particularly in the current centenary commemorations, the depletion and degradation resulting from the First World War were assessed as degenerative in the scientific parlance of the period. The question is, was the need for remedy, or the condition of degeneration, or both, “intrinsic to modernity”?7 And how does the answer reflect on aesthetic movements like modernism that sought to respond to the question and have come to define the “modern condition”? As one of the critics who have reflected on the reactionary politics of historically key modernist figures, Robert Caserio writes: “After the political disillusionment produced by World War I, writers whose métier was experimentation with literary forms invested in what they took to be experimental political forms. Fascism was one of them, for worse rather than for better.”8 Deriving from degeneration theory more generally, a modern sensibility fixated on “good” form precedes the rise of fascism, instantiating the Jewish connection long before Nazism’s rise to power. In fact, in many of the formative arenas of modernist aesthetics—the British Isles, the European continent, and the Americas—the hinge figure was “the Jew,” sometimes symbolic, more often literal. The Jew was the measure against which “good stock” might be assessed; but the social, cultural, or scientific value of “goodness” had a double valence, as an aspirational or lost ideal. This dual sentiment was in keeping with an Eliotic idea of a deracinated modernity, infamously, “née Rabinowitz” (“Sweeney Among the Nightingales”), and at the same time with what became the motto of modernism—“make it Jew”—however misbegotten that idea now proves to be.9 This book’s contention, then, that the development of modernism must be viewed through the lens of the intersection between degeneration theory and Jewishness, underscores the integrality of this intersection to modernism’s innovations and misprisions. In fact, almost everywhere you turn in modernist arenas, you will encounter the forged presence of Jews and degeneration. This does not mean that all modernist authors, characters, or subjects are Jewish per se, but that they operate within a constellation of ideas and associations informed by Jewishness. Part of my aim here is to amplify that claim. Perhaps it goes without saying that the once-upon-a-time pantheon of high modernists—Eliot, Pound, Woolf, and Joyce—are all integrally concerned with Jews and Jewishness,

Introduction

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however differently. I think also of Wilde’s Salome, Dorothy Richardson’s Michael Shatov, Conrad’s secret agents. And these are just what were the more standard modernist sites. There is Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy, Chaplin’s Dictator, Bolaño’s Distant Star, Wagner’s and Schoenberg’s duet. The reach of this subject is global in genre, geography, and generation. While here the central paradigm of “Jewish degeneration” is mostly circumscribed by the European and American contexts, it might be extended to include all of the Americas and South Asia, for example, with authors like Anita Desai and Amitav Ghosh. As I argue about Joyce’s work, the historical occlusion of the centrality of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses must be seen as willful, and such myopia is reflected in the work Ulysses does in querying the “unsuitability” of certain social and literary subjects. In making this broader claim about the role of Jewishness, I am holding up a kind of looking glass to modernist studies. A recent case in point is Susan Friedman’s planetary concept of diasporic modernism, adhering to modernity’s combination of the “violence of dislocation and the regeneration of relocation.”10 The Jewish subject is historically seen as constitutive of the concept of diaspora, yet in Friedman’s presentation of the category of diasporic modernism, the Jewish figure does not appear; in the distinction Friedman establishes, even Joyce’s Ulysses treats exile as “individual rather than communal, expressing the spirit of modern rebellion against the conventionalities of their homelands” [sic], along with Pound, Eliot, and H.D, grouped by Friedman here in the old style.11 The Jewish subject per se may not be present in either of the texts that Friedman pairs in her discussion of diasporic modernism—Amié Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée—but by her own definition of the relational nature of such categories, Joyce’s novel is part of the “cultural traffic” in terms similar to those applied to Césaire and Cha, because of his hand-off to the Blooms. Bryan Cheyette glosses the anxiety or even fatigue in metaphorizing the Jewish subject as the universal other or the “eternally suffering Jew,” which might account for Friedman’s omission. Referring to Zadie Smith in his conclusion to Diaspora of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History, Cheyette writes: “There is a tension between superseding the ‘classic’ expression of diaspora and victimhood and, at the same time, recognizing diaspora Jewishness as living history that can enable it to make connections across histories and communities.”12 Unfit identifies a nexus of influence that conjoins different forms—literary and film studies and visual arts—through figures that are unified by several common factors, but perhaps most suggestively and controversially by one: their

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Jewishness. Cesare Lombroso (Criminal Man) (1835–1909), Max Nordau (Degeneration) (1849–1923), Magnus Hirschfeld (The Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress) (1868–1935), and Otto Weininger (Sex and Character) (1880–1903) were all physicians and/or scientists in the German sense of academician and they were all Jewish. Together they represent a significant force in the interlocution of relevant ideas of criminality, literary decadence, and sexology as part of the larger swirl of degeneration theories through which we may re-view modernism and its after effects. Accordingly, the exemplary works examined here correspond to each idea in a way that inscribes the Jewish dimension: these include Little Caesar (1931) and The Bad Seed (1956), American film classics that were formative in the establishment of the crime genre and are illustrative of vernacular modernism; James Joyce’s Ulysses, which critically reflects Nordau’s aim in Degeneration to graft the basic concept of the degenerate or misfit onto literary value or fitness and not solely through its “Jewish” protagonist Leopold Bloom; and Claude Cahun’s photography, audaciously engaged with sexological theories that were responsive to degeneration.13 As both authors and subjects of their work, in the sense that Jews were often exemplary of the theories they promulgated, Lombroso, Nordau, Hirschfeld, Weininger, and others like them, emblematize a conceptualization of Jewishness as contradictory, insidious, hidden, or oblique. The fissures created by such a relationship, in part, account for the kinks in the methodologies and trajectories of these thinkers; in turn, such fissures and kinks have been staged by modernist techniques. The general theories and affiliations among Lombroso, Nordau, Hirschfeld, and Weininger, channeled through the Jewish connection, the virality of degeneration’s cultural assimilation, and the importance of degeneration theory for understanding developments within early modernism (and beyond), dictate the shape of this project. The approach here is not strictly historical. Instead, I have created pairings of each theorist with artistic work—for example, Nordau with James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (1991–5)—which serve to reconfigure our understanding of the way periods and movements have framed the works. The selection derives from a circuit that began with Joyce and Nordau, whose connection emerged during extended investigations of Joyce’s interactions with Zionist texts. These led me to degeneration theory more generally and, in turn, to the web of connections traceable to it. Though degeneration theory was widespread, its origins arguably French, the German field for Jewish scientists was particularly active, accounting for its dominant role in this project.14 The primary texts, novels, poems, and films

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examined here are anglophone (American, English, Irish), the visual art from France and Israel. Those found connections between Nordau and Joyce led almost directly to Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, not only because the title invokes the relevant theories, which are integral to the novels, but also because of her selection of the Jew-ish Siegfried Sassoon as one of the major protagonists, along with the recognition of the novels as millennial retrospective. While the novels’ form is arguably more historical fiction than modernist, Regeneration commends itself to this project through a number of formal innovations, including its inscription of the First World War poetry of writers like Sassoon and Wilfred Owen who transformed English poetics in line with modernist principles. The photography of Claude Cahun and Adi Nes bridges the twentieth century from disparate parts of the globe, and the divide between scientific and artistic perceptions of the photographic medium as representational. Jewishness is crucial to their queer aesthetic, putting them in dialogue with Hirschfeld’s theories and with each other. Cahun’s contribution became indispensable to Unfit because of her role in the surrealist movement, her singular response to sexology and her conversancy with English letters (she translated Havelock Ellis). Israel seemed a compulsory endpoint for this discussion of Jewish degeneration. Through degeneration theories, fitness and purity became interchangeable umbrella terms for social, biological, and aesthetic values. The test of “fitness” is everywhere apparent, in the production of “ideal” bodies and texts; yet the revolutions that constitute modernist movements, while sometimes colluding with this value, mostly inverted it, famously in the “distorted” figures of surrealism, the “degenerate” heroes of early and late modernist writing, the “disfigurations” of poetic form. Such an inverted value is concomitant with recent approaches in the study of modernism. As Mark Wollaeger puts it in his introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, “Sharing the belief that there is no pure path to be taken, the contributions here, which extend and reflect on the three-way expansion mapped by Mao and Walkowitz [‘temporal, spatial, vertical’], demonstrate the value of impurity.”15 While it may not seem controversial to contend that these ideas are integral to modernism, making claims about a relationship among thinkers from different backgrounds, countries, and, in some cases, periods, is risky. Yet, modernist studies have been engaged fruitfully in making just such claims. One might have said it is bad science—or bad politics, especially in response to the assertion of Jewishness as the adhesive of that relationship, an assertion firmly in the camp of degeneration theory, whose proponents argued that ethnicity was a determinative social factor (e.g., Arthur de Gobineau). But what is Jewish? In his

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famous work, Jewish Statistics: Social, Vital and Anthropometric (1891), British anthropologist Joseph Jacobs (1854–1916), a student of Galton, set out to use race science as a liberatory discourse, in which he argued that Jews were an undiluted race, genetically pure, thereby accounting for recurring positive traits. Lombroso saw Jews as a mixed race—“mongrel” is the description that would take hold. Jacobs’ approach might be a way of ennobling what is otherwise seen as the damningly marginal, impure, or segregationist culture of Jews. His propositions about the integrity of the Jewish community have been used by philo- and anti-Semites alike, a paradox that obtains in the studies undertaken by the Jewish scientists examined here. Though they are affiliated by science, to connect them by ethnicity risks universalizing the properties of Jewishness, through the very act of identification or naming for which these figures and others like them were rebuked. The act of lumping together, typing, then underwrites what some have called a myth and what others insist upon: an integral relation among Jews, regardless of geography or religious practice. Consider the recent work by the French photographer Frédéric Brenner (Diaspora: Homelands in Exile, 2003), where he sought to recover something like the “Jewish community” by finding the continuity in the dispersion that constitutes such communities. He wonders whether some places, like Mea Shearim in Israel, a cordoned-off orthodox enclave, represent “a remnant of a vanished world, or a replica of something that never existed as such?”16 What he discovered through his photographic mapping is a primary discontinuity that nevertheless yields up iconic narrative connections and contiguities. In the spirit of Brenner’s discovery, I would like to suggest a different kind of line among these figures, one that may be dangerously determined by race, but is more like a Foucauldian genealogy—an effective history of several major thinkers who perform the roles of both authors and subjects of their texts. I hope, through this genealogy, to hear “complex reverberations,” more than trace direct lines of inheritance or influence. At the same time, the fraught history surrounding associations established through race is a factor in this counterhistory. For while Jews seem decidedly, perhaps defensively to be missing from the pages of these figures’ work on degeneration, Jews became exemplary for the race and sex science that emerged from them so that their Jewishness becomes a source of dialectical tension. This book also makes the case for the continuity of these reverberations. It is surprising, for example, to discover a recent biography of the German literary scholar Erich Auerbach that addresses the paradoxical undertow of Auerbach’s Jewishness, from which and because of which he was in exile (he fled from Nazi

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Germany), and its impact on the influential Mimesis (1946).17 The biographer wishes to make the case that the work’s reaffirmation of Western civilization was facilitated by the historical and intellectual environment Auerbach found in Turkey. The reviewer of the biography in the New York Times Book Review wonders whether Auerbach’s impulse to affirm the tradition under attack by the Nazis was an orientation toward or disorientation from his conflicted Jewishness, and further asks how we can separate the philosopher from the Jew. I ask what difference it makes when we don’t. Of course, there were many degenerationists who were not Jewish, but many of these derive their theories from or in response to this “Jewish” set (e.g., Richard Krafft-Ebing, B.A. Morel, Havelock Ellis, Francis Galton). In keeping with critics like William Greenslade, who identify Lombroso as an engine for dominant cultural narratives about criminal character, I further locate the narratives as Jewish, meaning that while the subjects are not always expressly identified in these terms, the constellation of ideas that produce them are inflected by Jewish ideas and ideas about Jews within the milieus in which they are produced. (“Jew-ish” might also signal partiality as in the case of Leopold Bloom’s or Siegfried Sassoon’s Jewish backgrounds see p. 7, above.) This coinage also signals the overdetermined nature of the idea of the Jew, which is paradoxical given the historical singularity attributed to Jews. Jews or Jew-ish figures have often functioned as the premier other, the proxy, the alibi for acts of discrimination of all kinds, including rhetorical ones. “Engine” may be a suggestive term when we speak about twentieth-century narratives that concern Jewish subjects and, in fact, Greenslade seems to make the connection with the train metaphor when he uses “termini” to qualify Dachau as the inevitable destination of Lombroso’s degenerationist ideas.18 Though he may find Lombroso blameworthy, Greenslade never mentions Lombroso’s religious affiliation, which remains in most instances a recessed or hidden aspect of his biography. The critical choice to obscure the author in the discussion of his work is itself a modernist move, but in Lombroso’s case historians have been consistent about the omission of this particular detail. One might argue that this is a conscious choice not to sensationalize or even derail the discussion of his work, but this seems unpersuasive about an author whose theories thrived on sensation.

Degeneration Redux One of the salient features of such a study is the interrogation it permits of the interface between science and the arts, an interface whose significance has

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recently been reevaluated and ignited within literary study. In a review essay of works on science and literature (“Why Modernist Studies and Science Studies Need Each Other”), Mark Morrison suggests that science itself must be reviewed as a culture in its own right, and as the unstable ground of modernist literary milieu. As he reminds us, much of the literary enterprise in the period in which degeneration theories emerged sought the prestige of the new science often by scientizing itself. Morrison begins his review by quoting Ezra Pound (“The Serious Artist,” 1913): “Bad art is inaccurate art. It is art that makes false reports. If a scientist falsifies a report either deliberately or through negligence we consider him as either a criminal or a bad scientist according to the enormity of his offence, and he is punished or despised accordingly.”19 Pound’s comment resonates with the first figure in this study, Lombroso, whose influential theories about the born criminal and penology were also decried as bad science, all proving to make Lombroso himself a criminal progenitor; that is, he promoted a successful view of the criminal and was adjudged as criminal for doing so. His punishment was foretold by the atavistic place he would necessarily occupy as “bad scientist” and as Jew; these were synonymous in his milieu, the synonym owing in many ways to his own scientific theories. The art inspired by Lombroso’s theories turns Pound’s proposition on its head, such that bad science may produce great art—or conversely, criminal art, in the best modernist sense of transgressively innovative. “Bad,” as the slang reversals of the term have demonstrated, is an unstable signifier. As Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz put it in the introduction to their collection Bad Modernisms: “To this day, no other name for a field of cultural production evokes quite the constellation of negativity, risk of aesthetic failure, and bad behavior that ‘modernism’ does.”20 So while Pound is setting out to validate good art through the measure of “good” science, he was becoming a kind of poster boy for bad behavior, particularly for his fascism and anti-Semitism. He was at once deemed an avant-gardiste and a political arrière-gardiste, one might say, sometimes stymied and also enabled by contradictory impulses.21 This kind of relationship between art and science also brings to mind Max Nordau, the second degeneration theorist in this study, whose literary fitness regimes articulated in Degeneration reflected the ethnographies and developments within psychology of the period in the way that hierarchies of human value were conflated with literary value. Nordau defined almost any modern art movement in terms of the author’s instability or disability, physical or mental: for example, Impressionism “shows the conscious state of a person receiving impressions . . . sensuous elements but not knowledge itself . . .

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Impressionism in literature is an example of that atavism which we have noticed as the most distinctive feature in the mental life of degenerates.”22 Baudelaire and Wilde were exemplary “degenerate” artists for Nordau. He particularly takes to task Wilde’s maxim in “The Critic as Artist” that “aesthetics are higher than ethics,” and Wilde’s (Vivian’s) proclamation in the “The Decay of Lying” that “life imitates art.” This book’s aim to map the influence of nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury degeneration theories onto key developments within modernism marks a departure from most of the previous studies undertaken to examine the origins, nature, and effects of degenerationism, which appear in the social sciences where its impact was more readily apparent. Regardless of the repudiations by contemporaries and subsequent generations, critics in many fields continue to discover the profound impact of these theories across a wide spectrum of modern thought and expression: an “avalanche” is how Daniel Pick describes the effect in one of the key studies of degeneration that also takes into account the literary sphere.23 Though hard to pin down, the working definition of degeneration for the purposes of this book revolves around the idea of “fitness” or “good form,” biological, cultural or national, conceptual and aesthetic. The term was coined by one of the first theorists of degeneration, B.A. Morel, in his study Traité des dégénérescences (1857); “a morbid deviation from the original,” the key definitional phrase traversing all of this discourse, also stems from this work. This is an idea in terms of or against which the modern is assessed, famously, to “make it new,” in that it criminalizes any variance from an ideal or standard. The idea of innovation is complicated, as I have suggested above regarding the ideal of progress, or Pound’s dualism, by the way in which seemingly contradictory impulses, to innovate and to conserve, may be integrated. Relevant to such interpolations, Michael North has located the origins of Pound’s catchall modernist slogan of “make it new” in an obscure and ancient Chinese phrase or motto, which bespoke recyclings rather than departures; North concludes thereby that “the role of novelty in the development of aesthetic modernism is distorted and the nature of novelty itself is simplified.”24 Certainly in light of Walter Benjamin’s idea of the loss of “aura” in the advent of the modern phenomenon of reproducibility, the notion of “new” may be understood as “re-new”; in fact, the novelty resides in the loss of the rarefied, such loss being the very thing Morel’s dictum laments. Throughout the book, I emphasize the intersection of science with the arts, returning to the idea that modern science is the unstable ground of a modernist literary milieu. Of the recent

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studies in this vein that have brought degeneration to bear on modernism, Joseph Valente’s work on cognitive disability stands out for making degeneration symptomology an essential backdrop to any discussion of disability in modernist work.25

Defining Modernism A further word about how I am using modernism here. For some, the critical developments within modernist studies have enriched the field and, for others, diminished it. Susan Stanford Friedman does a good job of delineating the developments and their discontents at the new millennium, in her 2001 essay “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism.” She ends by noting the value of both the dialogic meanings of the three terms and also of their contradiction: “Definitional excursions into the meanings of modern, modernity and modernism begin and end in reading the specificities of these contradictions.” The specificities to which she refers are found in the impulse to order or define as a response to the chaos of the modern; at the same time “modernity’s grand narratives institute their own radical dismantling, etc.”26 Of course, there have been many more developments in the almost twenty years since that essay, more openings, clarifications, contestations, as indicated at the beginning of this introduction and throughout Unfit (including Friedman’s own re-definitions and dismantlings). In the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (2011), Michael Levinson proposes a need to examine the attachment to a term that has become almost obsolete and anachronistic. He suggests that “we are still learning not to be Modernist,” neither letting go nor knowing where to go. The key word in his assessment, however, would seem to be “still,” to which the volume is dedicated with its assignment of Modernism’s contributions to a wide array of genres and fields.27 In his recent book Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form, Paul Saint-Amour offers a compelling riposte to a sense that modernism has been stretched out of shape, with the coinage of the term “weak modernism,” one that might be understood to reflect the dissipation of the field in the process of its interrogations and subsequent extensions, but becomes useful in Saint-Amour’s nuanced handling for accommodating the pluralization of modernism—“once a capitalized singular noun with a bounded referent . . . rethought as a transnational and transhistorical phenomenon.”28 He elaborates:

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Modernist studies has become a strong field—populous, varied, generative, selfreflexive—in proportion as its immanent theory of modernism has weakened and become less axiomatic, more conjectural, more conjunctural. In fact, we could say that modernist studies underwent a delay in emerging as a field partly because its immanent theory of modernism remained for several decades too strong to permit the kinds of horizontal frictions and attachments necessary for field-formation.29

Strong or weak, the qualification for Saint-Amour and for me has in part to do with identifying the texts we are using as modernist per se. How do I make the claim for a filmmaker like Mervyn LeRoy, known for films such as Little Caesar (1931) and Gypsy (1962)? Why should Pat Barker qualify, whom many would see as more of a realist or a postmodernist—and in this regard, what are the historical permissions of periodization for a writer after the 1940s or 1950s? Is Joyce a high modernist, one of those strong definitions that weakens the radical claims made for his work? Photography and modernism may be a natural alignment, especially in the formal interchanges between surrealism and modernism. But what makes Adi Nes, a contemporary Israeli photographer, suitable for a discussion of sexology’s mediation through the photographic image in the Europe of the 1920s and 1930s? In each case, I argue, in a kind of variation on Saint-Amour’s claim or disclaimer above, that modernism’s power and reach stand in direct proportion to the ongoing discussion and expansion (or waning) of its early definition; modernism may be more “weakly” theorized through this lens. Also, paradoxically perhaps, the legacies of modernism are crucial to this discussion, while the degeneration theories under consideration are worried precisely for their contentions about inheritance. Moreover, “weak” and “strong” are charged terms, even ironic for a study like this, whose theories under scrutiny used this particular binary for scurrilous reasons and outcomes. It is interesting to note how Levinson refers to Modernism at one point as “conveniently limp,” while Saint-Amour eschews any effort to render a more “muscular” redefinition of modernism.30 The notion of a kind of radical contradictoriness, which is dynamic, not settled, is more in keeping with the way modernism signifies in this study (Moral #2 in Friedman’s taxonomy).31 Nevertheless, certain old and new qualities identified with the movement are accessed here in the selection of texts and the interpretive models: cinematic vernacular modernism, for example, for the discussion of LeRoy’s work; the hyperrealism of Nes’ work as a kind of modernist abstraction of the body. As I argue here, the trope of Jewish degeneration is commensurate with this more expansive modernism, traversing boundaries of all kinds, national, generic,

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and temporal. If it is “bad science” to establish a genealogy of Jewish thinkers across fields and periods, it might be faulty literary method or politics that enables these boundary breaks. For her “queer genealogy” in Getting Medieval, Carolyn Dinshaw follows what she calls “a queer historical impulse, an impulse toward making connections across time between, on the one hand, lives, texts, and other cultural phenomena left out of sexual categories back then and, on the other, those left out of current sexual categories now.” The broad category of sex, partly contingent on systems of representation, is productive of “slippery characteristics” which she argues “are the condition, not failure of, historical analysis.”32 Her idea of a “touch across time” is useful for the conception of my project in two ways: it corresponds to the Foucauldian genealogy that frames my discussion of degeneration theory here through the Jewish subject, which has been historically omitted; it permits a vision of such connections as a queer trajectory, i.e., not a straight line, while also amplifying the queer dimension of sexological work, where the Jewish element is embedded in, but left out of discussions, then and now. It is of course necessary to mark how the conflation of race and sex by Otto Weininger in Sex and Character expands the idea of nonnormativity beyond sexual categories; but more importantly, the techniques used by Magnus Hirschfeld to identify sexual categories heuristically illustrate their instability. Such “slipperiness” may account for, both permit and invalidate, the conflation of sexual deviation and Jew. This in turn reflects on what Dinshaw calls the condition, “not the failure of historical analysis.”33

Shape The book comprises four chapters and a coda. After the first chapter that introduces Lombroso, Nordau, Hirschfeld, and Weininger, their major theories, and some of the connective tissue among them, the succeeding chapters and the coda trace to a specific theoretical arena of one figure in relation to a specified development within modernism. Chapters  2, 3, and 4 proceed more or less chronologically according to the figures’ lifespan. But they are also grouped so that Lombroso and Nordau, teacher and student, follow one another; and Hirschfeld is followed by the coda that suggestively brings in Otto Weininger, whose formative theories on the relationship between sex and race, conflated by German in one word—Geschlecht—overwrote the others. Given the overlap of ideas among them, the four are difficult to neatly isolate. Nevertheless, each chapter is governed by a specific trope or design that characterizes and connects

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the writings of the theorist and selected/representative work through a particular genre and/or medium. Such a structure permits a wide selection of illustrative texts. The particular texts I have chosen are in each case exemplary, though, as the discussion around them makes clear, not exclusive in the work they do. The authors oscillate between those lesser and better known. Most outstanding in this former category is Mervyn LeRoy, prolific producer of Hollywood films deemed classics, whose profile is nevertheless submerged in film studies annals. I believe this study should contribute to some overdue remediation of that condition and continue making the case for viewing Hollywood cinema as modernist. The pairing of Joyce and Pat Barker works well for Chapter  3 in its consideration of Degeneration’s aesthetic valuations, since their novels’ subjects perform the double function of character and concept (i.e., the Jew-ish Sassoon and his war poetry, both degenerate); further, Barker and Joyce are not themselves Jewish, which underscores a crucial aspect of the study, that Jewishness is an embedded dimension of modernist work in a variety of ways. So while the Jewishness of the theorists is examined for its impact on their theories about degeneration, the work that illustrates the theories reproduces the impact as a subject of the text: for instance, the persistent question about the function of Leopold Bloom’s Jewishness in a major modern novel by a “minor” Irish writer. That is, “minor” in a Deleuzian sense, which recalibrates the terms by which greatness or canonical was historically established, certainly a subject of Joyce’s great work.34 Such recalibration makes the Jewish Kafka a case in point. Other pairings are conceivable here—e.g., Djuna Barnes and J.M. Coetzee or Virginia Woolf and W. G. Sebald—which the Joyce–Barker paradigm affords as a register of the afterlife of degeneration. In the visual arts, examined in Chapter  4, there are many possibilities; photography as the quintessentially modern art form, one that Hirschfeld employed in his sexological methodology, is the medium of the chapter, which juxtaposes Claude Cahun’s recessed Jewishness in the presentation of her queer aesthetic with contemporary Israeli Adi Nes’s overt address to this combination. Nes’s Arab ethnicity and work complicate the mostly AngloAmerican, European frame of Unfit. The coda fittingly takes up the idea of terminus, in the Greensladian sense, by connecting the Jewish joke and the train, a common trope of mobility in modernist writing and a figure of deportation and death in the twentieth century invocative of Jews. There is chronological overlap with almost all the works discussed and when they appear out of order, the discussion conforms to an organizational logic internal to that chapter, as will be explained more fully in the chapter descriptions below.

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Chapter 1 (Avatars) presents the biographies and central theories of the three main figures, including a more abbreviated discussion of Otto Weininger, and the interface among them, as an antechamber for the ideas that dominate the readings. The chapter isolates the different strains of degeneration identified with each figure/discourse and amplified by this book: criminological, aesthetic, sexological. Lombroso, Nordau, Hirschfeld, and Weininger are avatars of the concept of Jewish degeneration. Even with Lombroso’s important predecessors in this arena, such as France’s B.A. Morel and England’s Francis Galton, the appellation “father of criminology” has come to define him alone. Lombroso was, perhaps like his own subjects, notorious, because he was sensational and sometimes sensationally wrong. And like his subjects, to use his own terms, he was quite the progenitor, producing a formidable line of degeneration theories and theorists: as the nominal Doktorvater of Max Nordau; father-in-law of Guglielmo Ferrero, with whom he coauthored La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale (translated into English as The Female Offender, 1893);35 and intellectual father to many of his era, including Otto Weininger.36 His science was the touchstone for many finde-siècle writers, some of who, like Frank Norris, endorsed him, while others, like Joseph Conrad, contributed to the chorus of repudiation. More recent historians of his work have concluded about Lombroso: Many of his conclusions seemed silly, and his project a particularly frightful example of bad science. But our views have changed, based on our careful reading of his criminological oeuvre, our investigation of his place in Italian history, and our research on the evolution of criminology in other countries, Lombroso now appears to have been a curious, engaged, and energetic polymath with a tremendous appetite for literature, art and folklore, as well as for natural science, medicine, psychiatry and law. That he was careless and often wrong about the conclusions he drew from the disparate data provided by these fields does not detract from the significance of his enterprise.37

While many argued during and after Lombroso’s life that his theories were empirically flaccid, Nordau would safeguard against this kind of charge by, paradoxically, producing an aggressive discourse of degeneracy in the influential Degeneration (1892). Nordau’s well-known prescription for an assertion of muscle, first for literature and then for Jews (“Musklejudentum” 1903), derives directly from his wish to return to an antique disposition, both historical and literary, in order to correct and resist the upheaval or instability of the modern, one which underscored the deracination of the Jew, in particular. This approach

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renders his concept of the new—i.e., the new Jew—as coterminous with his assessment of the new literature, and therefore a retrograde idea. While Nordau kept his Jewishness submerged along with the topic of Jews within his discussions of artistic degeneracy, he drew on a discourse of racism and anti-Semitism already well established. He writes about Jews elsewhere, in his novels and plays, for example, but not in his cultural critique or literary criticism, as Stephen Arata refers to it. There have been a few attempts to account for the omission (e.g., Jacques Le Rider), which take the view, for example, that Nordau was thereby strategically writing Jews out of the discourse of degeneration. Yet, his ideas about degeneration are embedded in his later Zionist tracts. The gaps between the background and the work, and the early and the later Nordau, underscore the aporia within determinations of modern movements. One can only conclude after looking at Magnus Hirschfeld’s life and work that he was crucial to the debates around sexuality in the first part of the twentieth century and can then only ponder his relative anonymity. His advocacy of gay rights and sexual emancipation were the cause of his celebrity, notoriety, and maybe even anonymity. His materials were destroyed, not translated, after all: in the Berlin libraries today, entries for his work indicate verloren (lost), a euphemism for burned. Hirschfeld knew Lombroso’s work and met Nordau several times, in Paris; Freud knew and commented on his work, ultimately dismissing his theories of bisexuality. Though at first tentative about Zionism, Hirschfeld, like Lombroso, rejected it finally, instead valorizing “wandering” for the Jews as liberatory, in spite of or perhaps because of his recognition of the coming storm of Nazism. Hirschfeld embarked upon a world tour in the 1930s and it is ironic in light of his idea about Jewish wandering that, having been stripped of his German citizenship during his absence, he was unable to return to Germany and died in exile, in Nice, in 1935. His concept of race in this way mirrored his theory of sexual spectrum; race was “phantom,” in his term. But within both, contradictions inhered. Given the liberality of his theories, Hirschfeld might seem the least likely of the figures to be included in this study under the category of degenerationist, but even when defending homosexuality he would classify it as a biological mutation or defect, one which would remedy itself in time because of non-reproduction—in effect, a logic of erasure. Weininger, who is the youngest of all, died first by committing suicide in 1903, and appears last here in this assemblage. There are several ironies that attend his participation in this company. Born in 1880, he was the most modern of the four, able as a Jew to qualify in Philosophy at the University of Vienna. He

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is the only one who was not and did not need to be credentialed as a medical doctor to be legitimated. He is the only one of the four to convert to Christianity and at the same time the one who most directly addresses Judaism in his work on degeneration. While some still debate the legitimacy of Weininger’s insights regarding bisexuality, the work and life are also assessed as the most scurrilous of the four and most exemplarily homologous. Chapter  2 (Bad Seeds: Mervyn LeRoy’s American Crime) begins by establishing Lombroso’s long shadow over the issues of crime and penology. Though much of Cesare Lombroso’s work has been repudiated, his ideas about biological determinism and criminology have arguably underwritten modern penal and behaviorist theory, still extant. Lombroso is perhaps best known anecdotally by the diagrams and charts that image his signal theories of phrenology and physiognomy—cranial measurements and facial “abnormalities.” Chapter 2 does not deploy these, which have become relic artifacts and even art, but they are implicated in the theories about the born criminal, delineated in Chapter 1. In line with these “scientific” methods, however, the chapter develops the idea of “Jewface,” which fixes the imagination of Jewishness (however elusive it persists in being) as cultural practice. Drawing on Michael Rogin’s discussion of “Blackface,” I argue that the performance or surrogation of Jewishness may become a means of disavowal masquerading as an act of empathy.38 The chapter makes the case for Lombroso’s impact through the medium of film, the new technology that, more than extending the capabilities of the photograph for the thematization of sight, disseminated and newly aestheticized the criminal, inflected broadly as Jew-ish. The crime film was adept at producing and popularizing the hero as criminal, an avatar of the modern anti-hero. The chapter focuses on the work of one American director, Mervyn LeRoy, himself Jewish, whose long career (1927–68) embodies a complex of American themes that often turn on the susceptibility of the “new” America to old ideas, and to questions of inheritance and disguise, both biopolitical and literary. I take Lombroso to a consideration of film because of the symbiotic development of the medium and the crime genre in the early twentieth century; I focus on Mervyn LeRoy’s work, both because of its role in the creation of the genre subcategories— gangster, social justice and evil child—and his complementary Lombrosian “condition” as a Jewish director in early Hollywood. I begin with LeRoy’s initiatory contribution to the gangster genre, Little Caesar (1931), starring Edward G. Robinson, whose career is implicated in this hive of relations; then move to the patriotic or social justice film, with They Won’t Forget (1937), loosely based on the Leo Frank lynching case, and The House I Live In (1946); I finally turn to the

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subject of the evil child in The Bad Seed (1956), a pop psychology, post-Second World War fable where Lombroso’s theories are brought to bear in laying out the nature–nurture debate that preoccupied the first part of the twentieth century. The chapter places Hollywood genres within the category of “cinematic vernacular modernism,” in line with Miriam Hansen’s idea that “Hollywood globalized a new sensorium” through which it attempted to create “new subjectivities and subjects.”39 Lombroso’s crime theories overwrite these Hollywood film genres in what is an obvious modern location of the ideas of degeneration. Chapter  3 (Fitness Regimes: Literary Degeneration and Jewish Muscle in Joyce’s Ulysses and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy) turns on the trope of “fitness.” The works presented in Chapter  3 foreground the gaps in Nordau’s career and work, as well as bringing into play the particular historical figure of muscularity that Nordau’s work animates. Of course, Nordau is tapping into a broader discourse on fitness stemming from the concern with degeneration in this period, as the texts the chapter discusses evince: Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991). They look back, both in their narratives of history and in their internal narratives, to consider the conundra of the millennial turn into modernity: Ulysses’ concerns may be seen as primarily aesthetic, a formal fitness or fitfulness; Barker’s trilogy is about regenerating history itself in the aftermath of the First World War. I begin with Barker since her work reimagines the past in an effort to view her contemporary millennial moment and also because she showcases some of the formal shifts characterized by the radical voices of First World War poetry that are potentially part of Nordau’s decadent retinue. Ulysses itself becomes the projection of a future modernist aesthetic, one determined by what are explored as retrograde political narratives, such as Zionism or Irish nationalism. Among modernists, Joyce especially recognized the potentially dangerous imperative of such trajectories and the at once playful potential of equating a modern aesthetic with the idea of progress, as particularized in the “unfit” figures that are the heroes of his major work. Chapter 4 (Sexology’s Photoshop) reads Jewishness into Hirschfeld’s theories about sexuality, which are typically considered as distinct from his Jewish background. In fact, Jewishness and homosexuality were analogues in Hirschfeld’s German milieu, underscoring regimes of pleasure and censorship, whose escalation between the wars is well known. The chapter examines Hirschfeld’s most outstanding methodology in his use of the photograph; the medium’s promise of indexicality for scientism was belied by the art photo, especially in surrealism’s embrace of photography. Hirschfeld exploited the interface between these uses of photography in his efforts to display and paradoxically classify the

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sexual spectrum. He staged and manipulated the images, all the while recurring to sexual dimorphism as the unstable normative referent. The photographic works of Claude Cahun (1896–1954) and Israeli photographer Adi Nes (1966–), who is outspokenly gay in a structurally (if not politically) hostile environment to homosexuality, are taken as exemplary of Hirschfeld’s theories. Cahun was clearly engaged by the discussion, as seen in her artwork and writing, having translated Havelock Ellis into French. Her remarkable photography has come into view in the last twenty years and models Hirschfeld’s theories as well as his method. She is placed within the context of her surrealist counterparts, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, and modernist contemporary Virginia Woolf, particularly in Orlando, which directly accesses the theories about sexual inversion and brings in photography to make a Hirschfeldian case for the non-indexicality of desire. As with Hirschfeld, Cahun’s work is mostly read outwith her Jewishness, which I argue she brings to bear on the concept/visualization of cross-dressing. Nes is a fitting resting place for a discussion of Hirschfeld, whose trip to Palestine was one of his last, and whose most tenacious twenty-first-century legacy for the interplay among ideology, ethnicity, and sexuality is being played out in and around Israel. Some kind of response to Otto Weininger’s theories emerges insistently throughout modernism. Drawing on the ideas of legacy so crucial to degeneration theory and the integrality of form to the designation of these, the coda picks up on Slavoj Žižek’s exposition of Weininger and the Jewish joke and relates the idea of destination/escape to the figure of the train, the setting for many Jewish jokes. Freud extrapolated from the Jewish joke in particular for his theory about the general efficacy of jokes. The joke, along with its generic analogues in the riddle, the epigram, etc., is an important conceptual medium in modernist expression. Furthermore, the train is a common trope of mobility in modernist writing. Weininger’s escapist theories are thwarted by the conundrum of such a trope in modern Jewish history, where the train, an abiding unsavory association with the Holocaust, is literally a dead end, reflected in the playful traps of the jokes on display. The joke in this way becomes both a terminus of degeneration theories and a locus of their extension, reminiscent of Weininger’s theories about sex and character; later appropriated by the Nazis, the theories’ ostensible blueprint for escape was tantamount to a death sentence. The problem of association between Jewishness and degeneration, especially in the aftermath of the Second World War, was a factor in the search for a title for this project. The same struggle is reflected in the title change of George Bernard Shaw’s 1908 diatribe against Max Nordau’s pathologization of modern arts in

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Degeneration (1892). In changing his original title from A Degenerate’s View of Nordau to The Sanity of Art, Shaw seems to have decided not to risk ignominy with his characteristic playfulness, moving instead to a more innocuous irony with the idea of “sanity.” The latter, however much it drew on the then current debate about the connection between genius and insanity, made it possible to speak about degeneration without being a degenerate. Or—in the case of Shaw’s critique of Nordau—without being an anti-Semite, a “state” which both Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau identified as a sign of degeneration (and which, incidentally, became Nordau’s measure of Shaw’s critique). It is telling to see the generally fearless Shaw pull his initial mocking tack, one in which, as “degenerate,” he would flaunt that which Nordau condemned in modern writing. My title seeks to do similar double work, claiming for modernism a dubious distinction of unfitness that would be celebrated and also worried. I began this introduction with an instance of a contemporary’s exhibit’s instantiation of Jewish degeneration’s origins in fascism. I would like to conclude by pointing to contemporary media’s recovery of Magnus Hirschfeld’s contribution to queer aesthetics. Whatever Jill Soloway’s intentions, the move to Hirschfeld as historical backdrop for the 2013–17 Amazon series Transparent brings both historical continuity and amplification to the central character’s transition (male to female), and illuminates the Jew-ish position within the idea of gender (category) confirmation. Soloway has been criticized for the liberties she takes with sexology’s history—primarily, having Hirschfeld present at the Berlin Institute of Sexual Science when it was sacked in 1933. But these do not seem to me egregious distortions. Hirschfeld is there to represent and voice a movement that was very much alive and active but has been relatively obscured. It could be argued that by evacuating Hirschfeld’s erasure, Soloway’s move once more erases his history. But I see the error as corrective, as it were, of the absence or removal of Hirschfeld, whose Jewishness kept him in exile from the institute and Germany and whose fate has kept him from a fuller appreciation by scholars. Transparent is both relevant to the reach of Jewish degeneration and to its impact on modernism since the series’ use of visual culture references the derivative aesthetics that continue to inform the production of bodies, virtually and otherwise. (For example, with its use and display of Catherine Opie’s photos from her series Portraits, which uses conventions of studio portraiture to photograph queer and trans subjects.) When we plug degeneration discourse and Jewishness back into one another, we acquire a longitudinal map of degeneration’s echoes, genealogies, and afterlives in the twentieth century and this new one.

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Notes 1 Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds., A New Vocabulary For Global Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 8. 2 Ibid., 2. 3 Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 77. 4 Neil Levi writes illuminatingly about the Munich degenerate art exhibit, in which he points out that while few of the works were created by or contained Jewish subjects, they were labeled as such: e.g., “Jewish all-too-Jewish,” “German farmers seen yiddishly”; Levi asks then how to interpret these, in Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). Levi develops a theory of “the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form” (2), where degeneration becomes the necessary reservoir for the ideas he interrogates, whereas Unfit seeks to undercut the anti-Semitic logic of degeneration. Michael Rogin references this poster in his discussion of Al Jolson’s “Blackface” in The Jazz Singer, and the poster advertising the film whose image was eerily similar (Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 58–60). 5 Ibid., 2. 6 Nicholas Wright Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 207. 7 In Modernism: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), Tim Armstrong asks, “Was moral, cultural, even biological degeneration intrinsic to modernity?” (1). 8 Robert Caserio, “Reactionary Modernism,” A Handbook of Modernist Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 140. 9 Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 162–70; my thanks to Paul Saint-Amour for early on pointing me to this discussion of the modernist motto. 10 Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 285. 11 Ibid., 286. 12 Bryan Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 40; 264. 13 See Marion Quirici’s discussion of disability and degeneration in Joyce, in her recent essay “Degeneration, Decadence, and Joyce’s Modern Disability Aesthetics,” Joyce Studies Annual (2016). 14 Two well-known French theorists: Bénédict Augustin Morel (1809–73), who perhaps originated the term “degeneration,” and whose work will be discussed throughout; and Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82), credited with developing the theory of the Aryan master race.

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15 Mark Wollaeger, Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 10. 16 Frédéric Brenner, Diaspora: Homelands in Exile (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), Introduction, x. 17 Kader Konuk, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 18 Todd Samuel Presner takes exception to this kind of genealogy or teleological interpretation—see Chapter 3. 19 Mark S. Morrison, “Why Modernist Studies and Science Studies Need Each Other”, Modernism/Modernity, vol. 9, no. 4 (November 2002): 675–82. 20 Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds., Bad Modernisms (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 4. 21 See Martin Puchner’s definition of the idea of modernism and rear-guardism in my discussion in Chapter 3: Martin Puchner, “The Aftershocks of Blast: Manifestos, Satire, and the Rear-Guardism of Modernism,” in Bad Modernisms, eds. Douglas Moa and Rebeccas L. Walkowitz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 45. 22 Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska, 1968), 483, 485. 23 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Pick has three subheadings in the literary section of his study—“questions of crime,” “fictions of degeneration,” “centers of decay”—which work well for this study, too, in that the three main chapters consider the American gangster film and counter crime narratives, “degenerate” modernist aesthetics, and the visual methodology of sexology, respectively. Some others who have considered the intersections between literature and degeneration theory: William Greenslade, Brandon Kershner, Sander Gilman, Stephen Arata. 24 North, Novelty, 162–70. 25 Joseph Valente, “Modernism and Cognitive Disability: A Genealogy,” in A Handbook of Modernism Studies, ed., Jean-Michel Rabaté (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2013), 379–98. 26 Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/ Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 8, no. 3; September 2001: 509–10. 27 Michael Levinson, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2. 28 Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 41. 29 Ibid., 42. 30 Ibid., 39.

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31 Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 497. 32 Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 1, 12. 33 Related concepts are Friedman’s concept of “planetary time” and Wai Chee Dimock’s idea of “deep time” in Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 34 See my discussion of this idea in “The Minor Work of James Joyce,” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2 (1993): 177–89. 35 Ferrero is also author of L’Europa giovane, 1897 (Young Europe), in which he espoused a “northern” view for the new Europe. Gina Lombroso-Ferrero translated some of Criminal Man and has written about her father in a memoir. Ferrero called his father-in-law “a Jewish prophet in the garb of a modern philosopher” and attributed his general pessimism to his Jewish background (in The Century, vol. 76 1908: 925 [online]). 36 In a chapter called “Portraits of Self-Abnegation,” Nancy Harrowitz discusses Lombroso as a source for Weininger: “It was in part the convolution of categories in Lombroso’s work that gave a future generation of Italian intellectuals such easy access to Otto Weininger’s contradictory and mingled categories of difference”; in Anti-Semitism, Misogyny and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao, Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 72. The connection has been confirmed by many. 37 Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter, in their introduction to a new translation of Lombroso’s Criminal Man (Duke and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 2. 38 See Joseph Roach’s conceptualization of the term “surrogation” in Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 39 Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 6, no. 2 (April 1999): 71.

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Degeneration discourse has an array of distinguished associates. The wide field may be organized in a number of ways. In the prominent European theater, the French psychiatrist Bénédict Morel’s Traité des dégénérescence physique (1857) defined the condition in medical-psychiatric terms; Viennese psychiatrist Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis became a standard text within the medicolegal glossary of “deviant” sexual practices, including sadomasochism, homosexuality, and bisexuality; he also diagnosed the “Jewish disease,” as mental illness or neurasthenia, resulting from inbreeding, which then produced hypersexuality. Fellow Viennese Otto Weininger does similar work, except that he approached it from a philosophical rather than medical orientation, and was much more emphatically anti-Semitic and misogynist, and even more influential. Freud is, of course, the most famous Viennese among them, but is rarely grouped with them because of his departure from most of their thinking on sexual matters and degeneration; and his creation of psychoanalysis distinguishes him, as should its epithet as the “Jewish science.” Havelock Ellis was Krafft-Ebing’s equivalent in England. English thinkers were mostly aligned along the Darwinian track of evolutionary science, including eugenicist Francis Galton, who, following on from French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s experiments in Paris, used photography for the developing area of forensics; he produced composites of “degenerate types,” among them the “Jewish type,” which Galton’s protégé, the biostatistician Karl Pearson, lauded. Another Galton student, Australian Joseph Jacobs, defensively or antidotally pioneered Jewish race science where he attempted to disavow the hereditary basis for racial characteristics.1 The German landscape was rife with sexual scientists, including many who will appear on the following pages and some who will not, such as Albert Moll, who differed from Hirschfeld by pathologizing homosexuality and by fiercely opposing Hirschfeld’s use of their findings for political aims (to repeal the legal criminalization of homosexuality). Karl Heinrich Ulrichs preceded Hirschfeld with the most comprehensive theory of homosexuality. Cesare Lombroso is probably most 25

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famous for his anthropological interventions into crime, certainly in the Italian field; his student Enrico Ferri is also notable for his work and his turn to fascism (Criminal Sociology, 1917). Nordau is singular in the work he did to theorize the aesthetics of degeneration (Oscar Wilde’s theory of decadence might be seen as a counterweight), though he was consumed with the ills of modern society as causal for this aesthetic condition.2 Referring to Morel’s seminal contribution to the concept of degeneration, Daniel Pick sums up: dégénérescence was more than just another mental condition, to set alongside the others in an interminable psychopathia sexualis; it became the condition of conditions, the ultimate signifier of pathology. Dégénérescence was thus perceived as the resolution to a felt imprecision of language and diagnosis. It served to anchor meaning, but paradoxically its own could never be fully stabilized, indeed was in doubt more than all the others; it explained everything and nothing as it moved back and forth between the clinic, the novel, the newspaper, and the government investigation. It suggested at once a technical diagnosis and a racial prophecy.3

Though we know it to be a more global phenomenon, Pick posited degeneration as “a European Disorder” in his study, owing to a number of historical circumstances, among them the anxieties produced by and the clash between emancipatory forces and industrialization, the origins of figures like Darwin, and the First World War, “which put paid to the dominance of dégénéresence within psychiatry and shifted the terms of debate.”4 Pick turns to England for his exemplary “fictions of crime,” in order to show the more obscure theories at work in the familiar—Sherlock Holmes, The Secret Agent, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, etc. But he does not observe as an aspect of these narratives the instability he identifies in degeneration discourse. In making a case for the grouping of Lombroso, Nordau, Hirschfeld, and Weininger as most relevant for a discussion of degeneration theory, Jewishness, and modernism, the question of how Jewish they are arises. The presentation of their biographies and major ideas below sets out both to answer the question and complicate it. Being Jewish in a period of emergent emancipatory movements throughout Europe and at time in which race theory most virulently appeared added layers to the “Jewish Question” (not just what are, but what to do with, Jews) that frame the lives of these theorists. Freud and Weininger differ from the others by their fame or infamy and for being more overt about their Jewishness and the role of Jewishness in their work. Weininger, exemplary of the interplay

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between author and subject by virtue of the condition identified by Theodor Lessing as “Jewish self-hatred,” is the subject of the Coda; Freud is referenced throughout, but especially in Chapter  2, where the psychoanalytic theories of identity and identification inflect Lombrosian crime narratives. Both are by this point overdetermined for discussions of modernism.5 Putting his Jewishness squarely on the table, especially in a later essay like “The Resistances to Psychoanalysis” (1925), Freud wonders whether anti-Semitism might account for the negative response to his work, but also, even, for the nature of the work. In declaring it no surprise perhaps that the founder of psychoanalysis is Jewish, Freud would seem to accede to the charge that his science is “Jewish,” but with an ambiguous tone of at once defiance and defeat. In this accession, Freud acknowledges directly what is crucially at work with Lombroso, Nordau, and Hirschfeld, if recessed: that they are both the subjects and authors of their theories and that their Jewishness is the medium of that duality.

Cesare Lombroso While Cesare Lombroso’s Jewishness seems to have been well known in his day—it would have to be given the laws governing Jews and other minorities in Italy before the Risorgimento—this is a fact about Lombroso that today is mostly surprising. Lombroso (1835–1909) came from a prominent and well-established northern Italian Jewish family, assimilated but cohesively Jewish. His daughters both wrote about their Jewish backgrounds and even worried about their father’s contribution to certain misapprehensions about Jews.6 When Lombroso does write about Jews, in L’antisemitismo e le scienze moderne (“Anti-Semitism and Modern Sciences,” 1894), he sets out to refute racial prejudice against Jews by, in effect, repudiating Judaism, and for this he has been labeled as self-hating.7 Central to his repudiation is the charge of atavism for the adherence to religious ritual, a concept central also to his theories about criminality. This response to religion is key for all four figures, whose contradictoriness on this matter was tied up with the split between religious and ethnic affiliations, a split underwritten by emancipatory movements in the period and the move toward cosmopolitanism for Jews, who at once fall prey to racialization as a result of degeneration theory. Lombroso wrote in his will that he wanted no flowers and no rabbi or clergy of any kind to be invited to his funeral, requests that are characterized by such a split in that Lombroso seems to observe the western Jewish burial custom that eschews flowers from cemeteries and yet also refuses a religious ceremony. He

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was bound by both impulses and the split is embedded in his central theory about the born criminal, who variously is both a throwback and a dupe. It is my contention that Lombroso’s ideas were crucially affected by his Jewish background and that his “condition” as Jewish criminologist is articulated in the literary typology of crime. The enfolding of subject and object that is performed by a figure like Lombroso, as scientist and Jew, criminologist and, by virtue of theories he helped to formulate, “criminal,” helps to explain the conundra in the identificatory methods that attach to the subject of criminality in science and art. One such conundrum may be seen in the way in which the “regressive” concepts of criminality, contagion, and atavism for which Lombroso’s theories were primary, and Jews often exemplary, became cornerstones of innovatory art forms and genres. That Lombroso was considered a source more than the subject of degeneration theories is key to my premise here in that, as Mary Gibson has put it,“complications in the application of race to behavior arose from the personal biographies of positivist criminologists. From the available record, it is reasonable to assume that Lombroso’s own Jewishness caused him to be sensitive to the new racial anti-Semitism in northern and eastern Europe that questioned the patriotism and threatened the civil and political rights of Jews.”8 Many of the vagaries in his work appear in the anomalous roles Jews occupy within his classifications or in the shifting concept of atavism, erratically assigned to Jews. As Gibson and others have suggested, his disciples and colleagues fashioned their theories in line with Lombroso’s “adjustments” out of deference or loyalty to him, even when the science might be flawed. At the very least, his background evinces a partiality within the science that calls the term “positivist” into question. At best, given how prevalent and generally applied his theories became, it opens a window onto a practice of detection in literature and film that, in the best Jamesian way, complicates the flaw in the evidence.9 The editors of the recent Cesare Lombroso Handbook sum up Lombroso’s career like this: “In the late nineteenth country, Lombroso popularized the bodycentered social-scientific study of aberrant behavior—criminality, pathology, madness, and violence.”10 Most crucial, perhaps, in this catalog, is “bodycentered,” especially when it comes to setting Lombroso in relation to Nordau, Hirschfeld, and Weininger, all of whom centered their ideas on the body but with very different outcomes, revolving around the idea of cure. Lombroso’s ideas about the born criminal and rehabilitation dictated that there was no recovery or escape from the condition of criminality, and this widely accepted stance in turn affected the development of the narrative of crime, which sometimes clashed

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with the science in its impulse toward resolution or palliation. For the most part, the plots resolve in the death of the criminal; any deviation in the narrative, a metaphorical reflection of the criminal, resides in the inextinguishable taint produced thereby—in Poe, Conan Doyle, Wilde, Stoker, etc. Lombroso changed his mind on the question of capital punishment, advocating for it, just after Italy had abolished it in 1889: To claim that the death penalty contradicts the laws of nature is to feign ignorance of the fact that progress in the animal world, and therefore the human world, is based on a struggle for existence that involves hideous massacres. Born criminals, programmed to do harm, are atavistic reproductions of not only savage men but also the most ferocious carnivores and rodents.11

Lombroso’s view is not only a prime example of social Darwinism but also a blueprint for the crime narrative as unremittingly savage and primitive, with the criminal becoming a rat—“a dirty rat” (one of the most misquoted lines in gangster film history, attributed to James Cagney), where rat resonantly becomes a stand-in for “Jew.”12 This particular characterization might be most closely associated with the Holocaust, but nineteenth-century fiction is replete with Jewish characters described in this way and criminals drawn on this typology (think of Fagin, whose grotesque characterization matches closely to that of a pack rat). The unremitting nature of the criminal, from the vampire to the evil child, is a convention of the crime or horror narrative and there is the conundrum of maker/monster in Frankenstein, and in Jekyll/Hyde, conforming to the intertwining of author and subject that is peculiar to Lombroso’s ideas about criminality and inheritance.13 The developing crime narrative showcased new technologies of disguise, which made enhanced concealment possible—it is, after all, the new science that enables Hyde—even while the science of detection was being elaborated. (Photography, for example, was susceptible to the contradictions that obtain in the criminal taxonomy, in its double function to index and detect, yet potentially stage and hide—explored further in Chapter 4).14 By the mid-nineteenth century, Poe and Conan Doyle were displaying these new wares and types. A case in point is the historical François Eugene Vidocq. James Joyce some fifty years later references the master detective who appears in Poe, Conan Doyle, and Lombroso.15 Turned from criminal to policeman, Vidocq single-handedly should have served to disprove Lombroso’s theories about the essentially irredeemable nature of criminality, but instead was employed by the police to underscore them. In fact, Lombroso argued that Vidocq’s facility in detection was born of

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the code of criminality he shared with other criminals, and even proposed that swindlers like him would best be put to police work for rehabilitative purposes.16 But this accommodation is insufficient to explain the turn in the figure of the criminal or the crime narrative to “good outcomes.” Ironically, Vidocq would compete, as it were, with Lombroso for the distinction of “father of modern criminology”; his own methods were revealed in his 1828 Memoirs of Vidocq: Master of Crime, assessed by some to be a kind of handbook of empirical evidence—firsthand accounts—and posited against Lombroso’s statistical methods (i.e., environmental vs. biological heredity).17 Central among Vidocq’s ploys was impersonation, which, as I have already suggested, should be inimical to a physiological etiology for crime; tellingly, he sometimes disguised himself as a Jewish merchant to be rendered both transparent and invisible—at once, identifiable and inscrutable or adaptable. This contradiction inheres in the Jewish subject, much like that of Vidocq’s criminal body and Lombroso’s body of work. Calling out Lombroso as both suspect and authority became commonplace among scientists and artists. In fact, to return to this idea that bad science might make good art, it is curious that through all the scientific invalidation, his sensational ideas prevailed primarily in cultural productions of them—a different kind of good outcome. Lombroso’s best-known work, Criminal Man, reveals his focus on the criminal rather than the crime, like that of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Over the history of revisions to this major text—five in all, between 1876 and 1897—he would increasingly situate human traits and character as inborn rather than environmental, and irremediable, despite the distinction he drew between petty (e.g., thievery) and serious crime (murder), and therefore between occasional and born criminals, and despite the contradictions that arose within the research on the etiology of disease, both physical and psychological. The explanation of physical anomalies as correlative with behavior and/or psychological malformations as inherited would not hold up: “Unlike classical criminologists who drew up scales of crime and punishment based on moral principles, Lombroso espoused observation of the bodies of criminals to find the facts,” but tended to ignore data that did not support his theories.18 The very method would be compromised by the tautology of appealing to prevailing stereotypes to corroborate the physical “evidence.”19 Such shifting causalities redounded upon the art of impersonation: in this case, concealment was physiological and contained, for instance, in the beautiful visage as lure, as in the femme fatale, or the “beauty of the devil,” as Lombroso refers to the masking of anomalies in prostitutes, in particular. “Another thing to keep in mind is that prostitution calls

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for a relative lack of peculiarities . . . which if present might cause disgust and repulsion: it also requires that such peculiarities be concealed through artifice. Certainly makeup—a virtual requirement of the prostitute’s sad trade— minimizes many of the degenerative characteristics that female criminals exhibit openly.”20 “In rare instances,” he concludes in the third edition of Criminal Man, “beautiful physiognomy is found in only a few intelligent criminals, especially swindlers,” which would match up categorically with the selling of wares or impersonators, such as Vidocq. Sensing always the potential for criticism of his erratic methods, Lombroso demurs: “even the most beautiful female criminals have a virile nature, and in them exaggerated jaw and cheekbones are never lacking” (CW , 143). Lombroso’s companion work to Criminal Man (L’uomo deliquente), La donna deliquente (1893), written with Ferrero, was first translated into English in 1895 as The Female Offender. In it, he sets out theories about the “nature” of criminality in gendered terms. Gibson and Rafter, who retranslated and retitled the work as Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman in 2004, comment that it was this rather than Criminal Man that introduced American and British readers to Lombroso’s criminal anthropology. The translations of these titles into English in1895 and again in 1911, however unwittingly, posit a key difference in views of the sexes, not exclusive to Lombroso, of course: men commit crimes; women offend the sensibilities. Even in Italian, where the primary titles have parity—L’uomo delinquente (1876) and La Donna delinquent (1893)—the subtitle of the latter makes the distinction: “la prostituta e la donna normal” (“the prostitute and the normal woman,” which was, by the way, omitted from the first English translation, as perhaps, too risqué or offensive). The spectrum of difference is established in the nature of woman’s sexuality, which is their offense or crime. Women appear on the lower end of the positivistic scale: they are less sensitive to pain, less intelligent, less moral, except in relation to their maternal instinct which was their only normative and retributive dimension. Their overall ostensible physical insensitivity to pain and lack of sexual sensation were seen as markers of evolution, of sexual modesty, and as accounting for their capacity for childbirth. All these contribute significantly to the mythology of women’s sexuality, a legacy of Victorianism, in part, that any sign of sexual pleasure or expression was atavistic, a signal of animality. The critique of sensitivity removed, as Gibson argues, what was once seen as an acute part of women’s moral compass; emotionality was now the mark of pathology, disorder, and “nervous irritation”— what would become in Freud’s and Charcot’s (and Krafft-Ebing’s) term, “neurasthenia” (which was also raced as Jewish). Lombroso’s theories about

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moral insanity, in which he conflates criminality and madness, coincide with the particular assessment of women, like criminals who exhibit a “dullness of touch compatible with their moral vacuity.”21 Yet another paradoxical dimension here is that “normal” women were credited with piety, which then imposed on them not only a physical but also a spiritual or psychical taxonomy, “a kind of backhanded compliment from a group of anti-clerical if not atheistic men.”22 While acknowledging that Lombroso was not alone in his theories about women, Gibson and Rafter make the claim that Lombroso’s work “constitutes perhaps the most extended proof of women’s inferiority ever attempted.”23 They recognize the profound influence of those ideas on much of the literature regarding women that came after, and the migration of gendered traits to criminality, regardless of the sex of the criminal—all of which will pertain to the discussion here of the gangster and his moll, but more so to the evil child that is gendered female, anomalous in its own right. One of Lombroso’s primary concepts to come under attack was atavism: a recurrence to primitivity, which he himself pronounced “inadequate to explain multiple anomalies in born criminals, especially the morally insane.” But rather than abandoning it, Lombroso adds disease as a possible cause of arrested development or the degeneration of biological and mental functions. Although Lombroso criticizes other criminologists for relying too heavily on degeneration theory, he finds it useful for explaining how social factors—such as alcoholism, venereal disease, or malnutrition—might initiate biological and psychological regression in individuals and their progeny.24 Lombroso adapted degeneration theory for his criminal anthropology to expand the classification, eventually using atavism and degeneration interchangeably, despite for him their disparate developments from biology and environmental causes, respectively. With each expansion or contraction, the contradictions accumulate and lead to debates concerning moral responsibility, for example, or the reliability of the system of classification overall. He would never demonstrate the basic tenet of degeneration theory—the measure of “normal”—through never clarifying “deviance,” and as Gibson suggests, the background of the scientist might be brought to account for the “flaw.”25 A notable area of contradiction and adjustment arises in Lombroso’s discussion of Jews, who were, both before and after the post-Risorgimento emancipatory policies regarding Jews and other minorities, “a prevailing stereotype,” subject to many acts of state anti-Semitism, or, at the very least, second-class citizenship (e.g., Jews were confined to ghettos—an Italian word in its origin, after all—until 1848 in most cities and until 1870 in Rome; there were

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the usual prohibitions regarding owning property, attending public schools, and holding jobs). Despite his elaboration of a racist typology within his analyses of geographical variation (for example, that there was less crime in eastern Italy attested to the greater degree of Aryanness in the population there), Lombroso would object to such theories when they were applied to his own locale, which may be understood as a self-reflexive chink. Lombroso would sometimes include Jews in his statistical surveys of different groups regarding such things as incidence of alcoholism, perhaps as a way of having them compare favorably to other groups, as Jews historically did in this regard. He argued that “race clearly influences crime among Jews and Gypsies,” although in opposite directions. According to the statistics, in some countries the level of criminality among Jews is lower than that of their fellow citizens. The rates would be lower still if Jews did not gravitate toward professions like shopkeeping and manufacturing, which have very high levels of criminality among all population groups. In the course of his address, he would undermine the racial category, arguing that “Jewish crime rates began to decrease as soon as political life was opened to them” (he was not so forgiving to Gypsies).26 Yet, his categories indelibly marked Jews. Lombroso wrote about Jews substantively only once in a pamphlet that has to date not been translated into English. In L’antisemitismo e le scienze moderne (“Anti-Semitism and Modern Science,” 1894), he diagnoses the “disease” of antiSemitism while at the same time condemning key ritual practices of Jews as the signs and sources of their atavism. He thereby justifies and pathologizes both the subject of the discrimination and the author of it. Using science to pathologize both the anti-Semites and the Jews, he concludes that science guards against the “perils of partiality.” This seems a perverse and paradoxical logic. Of course, this culture of belief, that the empirical would defy bias, became the bulwark of the new science against the irrational. While speaking of partiality, Lombroso never mentions his own Jewishness in this or any of the rest of his work. The contradictory logic locates or is located in his Jewishness, unmentioned but ironically displayed in Lombroso’s own partiality. In his assessment, Jews would mostly rise to the “advanced” state when released, either from outer (state) or inner (religious) confinement so that an escape hatch was provided: Jews both instantiated and defied his theories. This modern bifurcation between the culture and religion of the Jews plays itself out in the Zionist project, the implications of which for modernism will be explored in Chapter 3. In Faces of Degeneration, Daniel Pick admonishes us to be mindful of Lombroso’s historical moment and setting, as does Mary Gibson in her extensive studies. Lombroso may seem reactionary at the beginning of the twenty-first

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century, but he was seen as a progressive in his own day in his support of unification between the north and south of Italy (the Risorgimento was completed in 1870); and despite his occasional contributions to the racial and class categories that divided them, his political stance was in keeping with what some saw as the necessary task of amalgamating a progressive North with a retrograde South to make a modern nation.27 This position came perhaps out of the liberalism of his Jewish background, even if guided by defensiveness about it.28 Coming into modernity meant becoming secular for many postenlightenment Jews and, like many of his fellow scientists, Lombroso struggled with the place and image of Jewishness within this new sphere. A logic of erasure emerges, which we see with all of the scientists in this study and so many of the major Jewish figures of the period. Arguably, then, the Risorgimento remedy for difference of assimilation/ acculturation constitutes a form of erasure.29 Lombroso offers it as remedy for Jews who had been relegated—by him, too—to the atavistic margins. Lombroso asserted that anti-Semitism would cease once Jews had disappeared, little by little, in five or six centuries, through intermarriage. Theodor Herzl would have a theory akin to this about disappearing a certain set of European Jewry— the equivalent to Lombroso’s unrefined southern Italians—except for Herzl this constituted a migration from Europe to a Jewish homeland.30 Herzl and Lombroso believed that those who subscribed to modernity—i.e., secularity— should remain in Europe or emigrate to “the most modern centers”—as in North America or Australia—and be given “maximum political equality,” and for Herzl, those adhering to religious Judaism should go to Palestine to realize the Zionist dream of a safe haven.31 Italy’s endorsement of the Balfour Declaration in 1918 may be read with this backdrop and that of the Risorgimento impulse to replace religion with a progressive philosophical foundation for the modern Italian state, which in the process conflated progressive with repressive regimes and, eventually, biology with nationalism. Scholars have reread the support of Zionism around Europe in this period as, in fact, anti- rather than philo-Semitic. The rear view suggests instead a prefiguration of Hitler’s Final Solution, a way ostensibly of supporting the Jewish cause in an act of liberalism, while really addressing the Jewish Question through a program of evacuation.32 And this “solution” would support Lombroso’s main idea of criminal ineradicability, which came to dominate the discourse about Jews. Lombroso’s “sin of omission” regarding his own Jewishness is perhaps not surprising when considering, more than his political circumstances, the sensational character of his theory of criminal anthropology, which would

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necessarily come to define him. “The technology of monstrosity” on which it draws, as Halberstam and others have shown, and as Lombroso, in his eureka description of the brigand Villella reveals (see below), has deep roots, far beyond the Gothic. Renzo Villa has dismissed Lombroso’s science as an “iconography of evil that drew on traditions as old as the medieval bestiary and representations of hell.”33 For instance, The Rat-Catcher of Hamelin’s backstory has sometimes been given a Jewish gloss and was adapted for anti-Semitic cartoons in the nineteenth century. Lombroso could choose from a gallery of monsters, real and imagined, many of whom were drawn on the anti-Jew-ish bias; “it is the oldest and easiest prejudice to prove,” James Joyce playfully remarked, suggesting that the bias becomes its own proof.34 Jack the Ripper, for example, was famously identified as Jewish.35 Halberstam has made the case for monstrous selfreflexivity in her discussion of Frankenstein: “The monstrosity of Frankenstein is literally built into the textuality of the novel to the point where textuality itself is responsible for generating monsters.”36 This extends beyond the idea that Lombroso’s theories are the progenitor of the born criminal or that of the copycat crime, to the nature of their unfolding and the embeddedness of author in the matter—the count in the account, as it were. Certainly, the rambling and graphic nature of Lombroso’s oeuvre was productive of a chain of monstrous theories for the “mismeasure of man,” to echo Stephen J. Gould’s characterization.37 Joseph Valente argues for such strategies of identification or self-reflexivity when considering Dracula by suggesting that Lombroso’s physiognomic categories suit the doctor as well as the vampire, as with the doctor in the novel, the Nordic Van Helsing, whose physical traits may seem to qualify as superior. But in Van Helsing’s elaborated description, we may detect some signs of the born criminal— the bushy eyebrows, the “broadening nostrils”;38 he is a foreigner with foreign speech and habits, exhibiting what may be construed as improper feelings toward Mina. And like Lombroso himself, who, despite his degrees of legitimation (Van Helsing’s many degrees are listed after his name), becomes defined by his theories by virtue of his “race.” Even Lombroso’s skull, as was observed in its analysis after his death, had the same configuration as that of his original “criminal man,” the brigand Villella, according to Lombroso’s measurements. This irony was not lost upon the community that inherited the theories but recognized, luckily for Lombroso, the instability of their proof.39 Nevertheless, Lombroso, even more than his theories, provided a model for the degenerate doctor on whom characters like Van Helsing, Jekyll, and Holmes are drawn. Lombroso’s general impact on literary developments in the period, in particular of genre and character, is suggestive of the way culture was pathologized by

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scientism. Lombroso often cited literature to underscore his arguments, further delegitimizing his scientific method: Raskolnikov (in Crime and Punishment) is referenced as an example of criminaloid who is a “marvelous portrait of an occasional criminal as a variant of the born criminal”; the former simply has weak resistance defined by his weakness to resist external pressures, “while the latter is driven by an internal compulsion to find a crime and commit it.”40 And literature would return the favor by making Lombroso a dubious source. Of course, Lombroso was not alone. Freud famously used literary examples as case studies and Magnus Hirschfeld used the visual arts, making seamless and collaborative the relations between fields whose wedge nevertheless grew insistently wider in this period.41 Yet, Lombroso was demonstrably the most capricious. In Man of Genius (1891), Lombroso theorizes about the psychopathology of the artist—true genius would produce madness—but also muses on the sociology of reception in positing that groundbreakers in any field would be dismissed as insane or degenerate. Lombroso’s term for a fear of new ideas, “misoneism,” is one he would turn on his faithful student Nordau, whose insight would be attenuated by his resistance to modern forms. Such a construction of genius reads again as selfjustification, especially given the terms on which Lombroso’s own theories were discounted—Lombroso was called pozzo, or loony.

Max Nordau Max Nordau (1849–1923) was born in Hungary into a religious Jewish family; his father was an orthodox rabbi. Many have noted his name change from Südfeld to Nordau as a marker of his wish to rehabilitate his Jewish origins, from “southern field” to “northern meadow.”42 He wrote in German—plays, novels, cultural critique—seeing himself as a German subject; he went to Paris to study medicine, where he also became a journalist for a German newspaper, and eventually a Zionist ideologue, writing Zionist tracts that are foundational for the state of Israel, established twenty-five years after his death, in 1948. It seems that the Dreyfus affair was a catalyst for his shift in ground from an assimilationist to a Zionist, along with a recognition, even in some of his plays, that Jewish emancipation was not working. He abandoned religion altogether, and his support of Zionism was a reaction to racism, and therefore a political rather than cultural nationalism. As a journalist, writer of novels, plays, and essays, a trained medical doctor with an interest in psychology, and as a Jew in nineteenth-century Europe,

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Nordau would seem well situated to make the case about the degenerate artist; one might even say, he inhabited or had embodied knowledge of the condition he sought to identify. He seems both indebted to and almost petulantly dismissive of Lombroso’s signature identificatory theories when he writes, “it is not necessary to measure the cranium of an author, or to see the lobe of a painter’s ear, in order to recognize the fact that he belongs to the class of degenerates.”43 He has little time for the romanticized mad artist figure that Lombroso would tolerate in Man of Genius (which became a staple of iconic authorship). Though ultimately he was interested in both fractured minds and bodies, one sees in this dismissal of Lombroso a kind of anxiety of influence and the nub of Nordau’s focus in his earlier treatises on mental rather than physical states: such artists that were identified by him as degenerate were criminally insane and, with a few contradictory exceptions, irremediable. More importantly, the test of the artists’ normalcy was in the art rather than in the science, though this equation might then be turned around to track physiological health onto literary worth, as in the case of Oscar Wilde, the “English Aesthete,” exemplary for Nordau’s theories of artistic degeneration. When Nordau describes Wilde as “despising Nature” in Degeneration, he cannot help but raise the specter of the diseased homosexual, though he might be referring to Wilde’s cosmopolitan commentary on realism. As with all the figures examined in this book, the authority of science is key in making the claims stick: most egregiously, Nordau lays out his scientific credentials time and again, while making claims that are hardly empirical. Degeneration caused a sensation of response, admired and contested by many. So while it now mostly reads like cant, it is important to recognize its enormous influence in the period. It may be said that Nordau’s medicalization of literature was formative. Nordau identified the “symptoms” of degenerate art, “mental stigma” which one could read back from the work: “that which nearly all degenerates lack is a sense of morality and of right and wrong”; the excesses of emotionalism and impulsiveness, productive of hysteria and egomania; mental weakness which is expressed in pessimism and “self-abhorrence”; mysticism, which he equates with “religious mania” (Symbolism fell into this category); and mechanical realism (Zola). His method was erratic and contradictory, “failings,” which as I will discuss in Chapter  3, he abhors but which are constitutive of his method, and definitive in some sense of modernist work he decries. Most ironically, perhaps, what was true of Otto Weininger—that the Nazis employed his theories of Jewish inferiority (and his example) for their destructive schemes—is also true of Nordau, to whom the definition of degenerate or decadent art may be substantially attributed.44

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In Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification, Neil Levi makes a case for the Jewishness of modernist form, by drawing on Wagner’s anti-Semitic idea of Verjüdung, whereby “the ‘Jewish spirit’ had somehow permeated society and its key institutions . . . to undermine the German psyche itself ”45; Levi further argues that Nordau’s concept of “degeneration” became a reworking of Wagner’s “Judaization” in an effort to strip the Jewishness out of the idea for self-reflexive reasons. Such appropriation would be ironic in light of Nordau’s condemnation of Wagner’s anti-Semitism, but such a move is also in keeping with Nordau’s contradictory and contrarian impulses. Nordau’s move from a focus on degenerationism in art to political Zionism over the course of his career becomes particularly notable in these terms, and its import has been both debated and ignored by those who attach to one part or other of his career. Apart from the spur of the Dreyfus affair (coincident with the publication of Degeneration), his encounter with Theodor Herzl, and, in particular, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 1896), importantly influenced his turn to Zionism. But it was solidified in 1897 with his appearance at the First World Jewish Congress in Zurich, and with his coinage of the term “Muscular Judaism,” presented there and in his publications by that title for Jewish Sports Journal (Die Jüdische Turnzeitung, beginning in 1900). In these, he prescribes the template “fit” for a modern Jew, modeled on an antique Maccabean warrior. Degeneration has five sections: “fin-de-siècle,” “mysticism,” “ego-mania,” “realism,” and “the twentieth century”. It purports to track a changing cultural and literary milieu, coincident of course with the turn into the new century. Its impulse is retrograde, which in its own terms would be salutary. He taps into the idea of a “spirit of the age,” only to identify it as “sick” because it subscribes to an imperative for change that is destructive and illusory. He sees such periodization as arbitrary: Every day on our globe 130,000 human beings are born, for whom the world begins with this same day, and the young citizen of the world is neither feebler nor fresher for leaping into life in the midst of the death-throes of 1900, nor on the birthday of the twentieth century. But it is a habit of the human mind to protect externally its own subjective states. And it is in accordance with this naively egoistic tendency that the French ascribe their own senility to the century, and speak of the fin-de-siècle when they ought correctly to say fin-de-race.46

Nordau stars this last phrase to explain “I assert only the decay of the rich inhabitants of great cities and leading classes.” He faults the “influential circles” for

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the navel-gazing decadence he perceives. Therefore, one should not misunderstand the trend of this seemingly conservative impulse as a wish to safeguard an aristocratic or elitist cultural preserve; as with so many of the contradictions in the book, this would be at odds with Nordau’s “radical” critique. Overall, Nordau’s rhetorical excesses imbue his subjects with a kind of reparative liveliness. Perhaps it is, in part, a socialist impulse in Nordau that propels him toward Zionism. He wrote a number of foundational Zionist essays, most of which are collected in Zionistische Schriften (1909). His philosophy about Zionism concurred with that of Herzl, which was not one of statism but of a national homeland for Jews for whom assimilation had failed in the countries in which they were resident. Along with Herzl, he envisioned an egalitarian society, free of religion, and an agrarian one, where “physically degenerate” Jews, rendered “sedentary” by the societies in which they dwelled as second class, would be brought into “contact with the plough and mother earth,” a kibbutz (socialist collective) ideal.47 He saw the contemporary generation of Jews as rejecting a “Mission of Jewdom,” said to consist in this, that the Jews must live forever in dispersion among the peoples in order to act as their teachers and models of morality, and to educate them gradually to pure rationalism, to a general brotherhood of mankind, and to an ideal of cosmopolitanism. They declare the mission swagger to be either presumption or foolishness.

He qualified Herzl’s vision, as expressed in The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat), as “the starting point, not the program,” which would have to rid itself of “the fantastic details of Herzl’s vision of the future”; in this “fantastic” sense, Herzl’s prescription was “literature,” rather than political tract, as would be clear from his fictive version, the utopic Altneuland (1902). Nordau’s practicality also involved a rejection of “crude materialism, to which assimilation Jews, on account of want of a worthy ideal, are only too apt to sink . . .”; this vision was in keeping with the agrarian ideal, where, in keeping with the biblical image, fantastical in its own right, the land returns to the garden. It would be a national home for a disenfranchised people.48 It is important to note that Nordau had his misgivings about the excesses of nationalist fervor, exhorting his readers to be “on guard against all illusions as to itself,” but reassuring them that it is a “natural phase in the process of development into a people” and idealizing that “the Jewish nationalist does not suffer from self-inflation.” He admonished, too, against the suppression of the rights and status of the local inhabitants of Palestine.49 It seems Nordau believed that the

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experience of being Jewish in an anti-Semitic world would protect Jews from nationalism’s inherent contradictions, just as the muscle he prescribed would not reproduce the conditions for “self-inflation.” In the same way one may perceive Nordau’s earlier work on degeneration as a forerunner of his Zionist theory, one might see the contradiction within his practical or political Zionism as his legacy or epitaph: his wish to make it real, where for Herzl it could only be a dream (Herzl died in 1904), could not be strictly controlled in Nordau’s own utopian vision, as a “work of love and civilization, a work of justice and wisdom.” Born of the “desire to save eight to ten millions of their kindred from intolerable suffering” and to “deprive anti-Semitism—which everywhere lowers public morals and develops the very worst instincts—of its victim,” the new Zionist Jew is nevertheless dependent on the old degenerate one.50 Needing to evacuate the victim, to serve in “equal degree the unhappy Jew and the Christian peoples,” Zionism would come to be defined by both a political and a rhetorical conundrum of dependency and protection. At the very least, Nordau acceded to a model of perfection dictated by his detractors, which provides the major point of continuity between his work on degeneration and Zionism. While critics have generally focused on one phase of his career—as HansPeter Söder puts it, on the bad or the good Nordau, a split Söder disputes—few have attended to the literary work, despite Nordau becoming an arbiter of literary value and taste.51 We may determine that the interplay between Nordau’s incarnations as degenerationist and Zionist is continuous, if contentious, as articulated by William James in his observation that Nordau brought “medical materialism” to ethnic body politics. That is, the medical arguments Nordau uses to delimit the corpus of art parallel the political criteria he establishes to make the case for a Jewish national regime and a requisite rehabilitation of the Jewish body. We may see the kernel of this aim in his play, Dr. Kohn, written in the same period as Degeneration, in which the titular character, who wishes to marry the daughter of a convert Jew (to Christianity) and is resisted, uses race theory to justify his claim: Jewishness is not eradicable through conversion, he argues— the same as Otto Weininger’s logic in Sex and Character. But perhaps it is remediable through an emulation of good taste.52 Nordau turns his retrogressive demonization of the new art movements, in Degeneration, into the politics of recovery in his Zionist writings. In Conventional Lies, he weighs the relative merits of these approaches; as evidenced in Dr. Kohn, the despair he assigns to the self-deception of Jewish assimilation is translated into a verve regarding Jewish national self-realization. His vehement denouncement of Zola in Degeneration then seems ironic in light of Zola’s defense of Dreyfus, and yet

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these contradictions seem to accrue to the contradictory heart of his project— which is to resist an avant-garde that he saw as, among other things, fundamentally anti-Semitic, in favor of a stability that was both reactionary and elusive. Nietzsche and Wagner, despite the latter’s more aesthetically traditional impulses, would exemplify this connection for Nordau. Instability in art was a kind of prescription of wandering, which, as a modernist revaluation of good, Nordau seemed to associate with the historical taint and characterological mercury of Jewish social instability. These would-be polarities that characterize the work may be detected even in the name change he makes between southern field (Südfeld) and northern meadow (Nordau), indicative of representational splits in many senses—geographical, ethnic, nominal, etc.—and yet, of course, they are interdependent, as with the various strains in his work.53 Nordau’s ideas about literary value at once correlate to standards of respectability and citizenship or nationhood, providing him yet another continuity with his move to Zionism. Jews at this historical moment were becoming simultaneously protagonists in a nascent nationalist narrative as well as exemplary degenerate subjects, interdependently, as in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and even Herzl’s Altneuland. Referring to Nordau’s archness and yet skittishness, one critic has argued that his “extremism may be explained by and was perhaps finally checked by his self-doubt,” the latter born necessarily of his Hungarian Jewish background and the instability in his own cultural position, and a “symptom” of degeneracy he identifies in the fin-de-siècle frame of mind.54 He insisted on his identification with German nationality, while both observing that the majority of German people had no interest in art in the impoverishing aftermath of the Thirty Years War, and excoriating “German hysteria” for manifesting itself in anti-Semitism, that most dangerous form of persecution—a mania, in which the person believing himself persecuted becomes a savage persecutor, capable of all crimes.55 A mania, one might argue, afflicting Nordau himself. Such schismatic observations, among other things, signal the import of degenerationism for the advance of national literatures, which may be seen as both a modernist and an anti-modernist impulse. Söder argues that Nordau was continuously playfully and otherwise engaged by paradox, to wit his Paradoxes, and this, too, is ironic, since such instability in meaning would be deemed exemplary of Nordau’s literary degenerates: paradox, irony, contradiction were the hallmarks of a modernism that he would vilify (what he called variously symbolism, impressionism, realism, mysticism).56 The splits that characterize his career, as manifested within the work, are illustrative, in fact, for modernism. Nordau’s shift from degenerationism in art to political

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Zionism, among other things, helps to explain the Jewish or Jew-ish figure as a lynchpin of this dynamic interface between science and art, and decadence with modernism. Nordau’s artistic decadents are not Jewish per se, but in his characterization of the avant-garde, they become categorically Jew-ish, i.e., neurasthenic, nystagmic (Impressionists had “ocular degeneracy”), echolalic— linguistically and otherwise impotent; in short, misfit in body and mind.57 Consider also the Jewish subjects of writers such as Wilde and Zola (or, later, Djuna Barnes, not in Nordau’s pantheon, but qualified to be), who are constructed in terms of, or against that “unfit” measure. One might turn to all the Jewish artist suspects in this regard, such as Arthur Schnitzler, Mahler, Egon Schiele, whom Nordau seems assiduously to avoid in his treatise, while rendering Jewish characters exhibiting these traits in his literary works, Dr. Kohn or The Right to Love. Nordau’s evasions are achieved through a displacement of anti-Semitism into a more general typology and pathology of art. This move is instructive for an understanding not only of Nordau’s shifts but also of modernist aesthetics, wherein the badge of honor was potentially one of shame: a “bad” or wayward modernism, in which the anti-hero, the iconoclast, the unsettled predominates, productive of contradictory valuations (e.g., T.S. Eliot’s lament vs. Joyce’s celebration).58 Ironically, some of the most quotable attributes of the “new Jew” formulated in “Muscle Judaism” would be lifted from Degeneration, thereby demonstrating the Jews were there all the time, if only associatively: “the herd requires a herdsman of strong muscles and ready blow”; decadents are in competition with men “who rise early, and are not weary before sunset, who have clear heads, solid stomachs and hard muscles.”59 This latter constitutes the idealized image of the Chalutz (Zionist pioneer). In a recent edition of Dr. Jekyll and Hyde,60 its editor, Martin A. Danahay, adds Nordau to a prefatory appendix in order to frame Stevenson’s conception and to contend that Stevenson himself would have been criminally framed by Nordau. It would seem counterintuitive to make the same case of aesthetic reflexivity for Nordau that he made for his subjects, when to do so is to make the Jew-ish case. The idea that came into uneasy being in this period, that art by nature is deviant, is really the crux of Nordau’s paradoxical career, which finds a conceptual continuity in his personal history: a need to defend against a sense of innate unrespectability, all the while proving the exception to make the case. A more extensive discussion of certain aspects of Nordau’s work and the interchange between periods of that work appears in Chapter 3, as a key into the novels considered there.

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Magnus Hirschfeld Born in 1865 in Kolberg, Poland, into a prominent Jewish family, Magnus Hirschfeld acknowledged his homosexuality early, became secular, and studied medicine. He wrote his first sexological tract in 1896, Sappho und Sokrates, published under the pseudonym Th. Ramien, where he began to lay out his theories about the sexual spectrum.61 Beginning with dimorphism, Hirschfeld would propose an infinite number of gradations between. He had moved his practice to Berlin where he established the Institute of Sexology in 1919, the first of its kind anywhere. His prominence was acknowledged by many of his foremost contemporaries in the field of sexual science, including Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, as duly recorded in their contributions to such Hirschfeld productions as the Yearbook for Sexual Intermediacy (Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 1899–1922) and in Havelock Ellis’s important study of “Sexual Inversion.”62 J. Edgar Bauer, who has written extensively about Hirschfeld, insists that we should understand “Hirschfeld’s oeuvre as the most eminent antecedent of queer studies.”63 If so, that notable work, in fact, has been understudied, especially outside of contemporary gay studies, in the midst of an intensive renewal of interest in fin-de-siècle sexology in the last several decades. Havelock Ellis (who lauded Hirschfeld’s groundbreaking work as “foremost in the field of sexual science”), Krafft-Ebing and Otto Weininger are more often cited, as are those practicing similar photographic and archival methods, such as Francis Galton, Jean-Martin Charcot, including Lombroso—and later, Alfred Kinsey.64 The Jewish dimension of Hirschfeld’s life and work has been represented as mostly a biographical detail. He was not attentive to his Jewish background, but his ideas were inescapably inflected by Jewishness, most certainly in the case of their infamy. As part of Hans Ostwald’s Großstadt-Dokumente, a series of studies on metropolitan life in 1904, Hirschfeld produced the pamphlet on Berlins Drittes Geschlecht (Berlin’s Third Sex).65 The term “third sex” took on an important currency in the identification of sexual variation when it was first developed, and has become associated with Hirschfeld, even though he abandoned it quite quickly in favor of “Zwischenstufe” (“intermediary”) in Geschlechtsubergänge: Mischungen männlicher und weiblicher Geschlechtcharaktere (Sexuelle Zwischenstufen) (Leipzig, 1905). Although he had intended “the third sex” to act as a kind of marker for the sexual spectrum, it was perceived as a fixed rather than a fluid location of difference—a supplemental type, in keeping with the theories of his most

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important predecessor in the field, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.66 Edgar Bauer lauds the shift from fixed to fluid or spectrum as important and finally distinctive for Hirschfeld in creating a landmark concept of modern gender theory. Referring to sexual binarism, Hirschfeld writes, But it is a mistake if one imagines that both are two fully separate entities, one from the other; to the contrary, the constantly present merging of both into one, the unending condition of mixing variables that begins with the man’s semen and the woman’s egg, each creating masculine–feminine, hermaphroditic organizations, this monism of the sexes is the core for the genesis and substance of the personality.

Moreover, Hirschfeld coined the term “transvestite” for a study that theorized cross-dressing as a sexual impulse but not one necessarily connected to homosexuality; this was an important breakthrough or widening of the term of “inversion”—of the distinction between desire and gender formation—and for the relationship between representation and sexuality.67 Hirschfeld addressed the matter of race, and Jews in particular, much later in his career, in “Phantom Rasse: Ein Hirngespinst als Welt Gefahr,”68 in Racism (a posthumous compilation in English of related and unfinished work on this topic), and in Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers, written after a trip to Palestine, while in exile in the last years of his life. One of the first important works of sexual ethnology, it was translated into English as Men and Women: The World Journey of a Sexologist or Women East and West: Impressions of a Sex Expert, both 1933.69 In keeping, perhaps, with his efforts to draw a theory about race that paralleled that of sex and sexuality as biological but non-essentializing, Hirschfeld approved only tentatively of Zionism, “assuming certain developments.”70 He praised its socialist underpinnings and fell in line with many other Jewish intellectuals of the period, whose ideological resistance gave way to tacit acceptance in the 1930s (Emma Goldman, for example, and even Nordau, as we have seen in his initial skepticism about cultural Zionism). Hirschfeld acknowledged Zionism’s promise to rehabilitate and rescue Jews from their inferior and endangered status in European countries, but also recognized the problem of resettlement among the Arab population in Palestine. Commenting on the paltry immigration numbers as of 1930, he stops short of saying the idea was a “fiasco,” but by using the word, he raises the specter of it.71 Perceiving in these statements a less nuanced commentary on race, Heike Bauer has suggested that, “although for Hirschfeld, the ‘natural human’ was sexualized, the reception of his sexology led him to argue that the racialization of the human is an invention of normative discourses that

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aim to naturalize the scientific truths to specific political effects.”72 In other words, while sex is prismatic, race should be spectral. All of this would suggest that race was the more vexed issue for Hirschfeld. As many have observed, Hirschfeld rarely addresses his own Jewishness, even when speaking on Jewish subjects as on his trips to Palestine—certainly not publicly.73 In one instance he notes the project of a researcher at Hebrew University to assemble Jewish notables for the purposes of displaying their backgrounds in relation to their achievements. He comments that “up till then I was quite ignorant of the Jewish origins of many great men represented and many people would be as surprised as I.”74 His forthrightness about sexual matters is not necessarily contradicted but certainly illuminated by his neutral self-presentation; it appears Hirschfeld sought legitimacy for his theories by achieving for himself what he claimed for his patients—the capacity to present a desiring self—in his case, of the scientist, unraced and unsexed. Hirschfeld comes more sharply into view by observing several conundra regarding his work: first, that he needed scientific method to validate his theories and would at once subvert it when the method resisted his impulses, which, as is documented, tended toward the normative, especially in the use of the medical photo.75 Some scholars have attempted to rationalize this inclination by suggesting that Hirschfeld is thereby reinforcing the “natural” deviance of the subject, a sort of commentary on Morel’s definition of degeneration as a “morbid deviation from the norm”; others argue that, regardless of Hirschfeld’s intention, “we may take the practice as salutary in that by considering the ways in which nature is conceptualized alongside ideas of the ‘norm,’ we gain a sense of the institution of normativity.”76 Such recurrence to the normative points to the second problem—the paradox in a theory about sexual variety that should at the same time be adjusted to accommodate an either ahistorical binarism of ideal men and woman, what he called fully male or female, or to conform to heterosexuality, if not as the legitimate, then the desirable, “safe” sexual orientation. Heteronormativity was not only culturally but legally safe, given the prohibition against homosexual acts in Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code (more on this law below). Though he arguably addressed men and women equally by recurring to the normative constructions of male and female, a certain inequality would emerge regarding women or the feminine: for example, “whether her abilities are sufficient to perform the highest accomplishments of culture”; in that regard, he rejected the social explanation provided by feminism, assessing “rather the natural state of women in and of itself.”77 In later work, reflected in World Journey, he stated that the “first object of study in sex ethnology

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is the position of women in relation to men,” a hierarchy he did not displace, his sexual spectrum withal. Further, Hirschfeld sought but would also resist what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the unequivocal ground of queerness and selfdisclosure.78 In all, the sexed and sexual subject as performance would seem to prevail, despite Hirschfeld’s insistence on the biological constitution of sexual desire. Such conundra will be important when considering the artists that harken back to Hirschfeld, not so much because Claude Cahun and Adi Nes eradicate or correct them, but because of the integral relation of the paradoxes to their work. Hirschfeld’s use of photography as scientific tool is key for any consideration of his method and his production. Hirschfeld understood the “ideal of Observation”: the commonplace apprehension at the time that “you could not really claim to have seen anything until you had photographed it.” In the words of Albert Londe, Jean-Martin Charcot’s medical photographer for his controversial work at the Salpêtrière hospital in 1878, “the photographic plate is the scientist’s true retina.”79 At the same time, Hirschfeld was concerned with the influence of the “typologies of observation,” where “the facies revealed by these popular means of investigation and observation [such as the ‘science’ of physiognomy] was the paradoxical typicality of deviance.”80 Photography as modern medium instantiated the conundrum of identification and classification. Walter Benjamin famously attended to this idea in his “Short History of Photography,” where he observes the new mechanism of physiognomic typology. Writing about August Sander’s photographic series on the face, he portends that “shifts in power such as have become common today make it clear that physiognomic classification has become a matter of vital importance. No matter if one is left or right wing, everyone will have to become accustomed to having his origins identified on sight.” Such a statement from Benjamin is particularly resonant here, given his theories about optical memory and given that his very own “Jewish face” marked him for doom. The impress of the photographic image could everywhere be felt, leading many to observe as Benjamin prophetically did: “not he who was ignorant of writing but ignorant of photography would be the illiterate of the future.”81 In Benjamin’s observations we see the shift from the scientific to the art arena or the imbrication of one in the other, however much they would become incompatible on the very matter of identification and even though many of the scientists themselves would practice the science in the manner of the art. In the notable instances of Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon, the double entendre of photographic exposure was productive of a “logical rupture,” in that the photographers’ manipulation of the apparatus would at once make a

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claim for the specificity of the subject.82 Even Londe would attest to the evidentiary paradoxes in this spectacular method, and to their usefulness, that the camera constituted rather than documented pathology.83 Such manipulations were especially relevant to surrealist photographic portraiture, where blurring affected the perception of sexual and gender difference, and, with particular relevance to a discussion of “Hirschfeld,” redounded on the artist, whose own ambivalence or distantiation may be perceived in the photographic process (taking two quite different examples, Man Ray and André Kertész).84 Kathrin Peters describes the blurring of boundaries in Hirschfeld’s use of photography as akin to contemporary digitization, revealing “man” and “woman” as masquerade—the superimposition of absolute categories on subjects that are already split from within.85 Even if belief in the indexicality of the photo for the scientist made it imperative to display the “correct” image, the merging of forms is more apparent in Hirschfeld’s photographic pantheon: the science of photography became the art of the proof. There has been recent work by Rainer Herrn, Katharina Sykora, David James Prickett, and Kathrin Peters that outlines some of this “play” in Hirschfeld’s use of photography—in the apparent stagings and their import for his theories and aims.86 His methods were variously ingenious and clunky. He had collected thousands of photographs before they were mostly destroyed in 1933, along with the institute. The wall of photos exhibited different “cases” (sexual biology, sexual pathology, sexual ethnology, sexual sociology), or illustrated intermediary categories.87 These are cataloged in Volume IV of Geschlechtskunde (1930), the epigraph of which reads, “Bilder sollen bilden” [“pictures should educate”].88 He would invite patients “to submit photos of self and the type of person who attracts one.”89 What might seem to us now casual or even “unscientific” methods were inherited and employed by many, including Alfred Kinsey (e.g., extensive interviews and questionnaires). Sykora examines how Hirschfeld would make his categories fit and un-fit by the very fit of the dress his subjects were posed in. Peters argues that his groundbreaking work helped to underscore rather than resolve what she calls the “puzzle pictures” of sexuality. In Figure  2, we see figures cross-dressed to make the perfect middle-class married couple/match. As the caption says, “she” is the man and “he” is the woman, raising the question, “man or woman,” or even, to invoke another rhetorical challenge, what “is” is. The origin of the photo is unclear, but given the caption, it is understood that the photo is staged. The couple is defined under the rubric of “metatropic,” where a mannish woman and a womanish man are displayed. Hirschfeld subscribed to the idea, based partially in his belief in the

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Figure 2 Metatropischer Transvestitismus [Metatropic Tranvestism]. Transvestisches Ehepaar in glücklicher [Happy Transvestite Married Couple]. Die Frau ist ein femininer Mann, der Mann eine virile Frau mit angegeklebtem Bart. [The woman is a feminine man, the man is a mannish woman with taped-on mustache.]90 Magnus Hirschfeld Institute.

influence of hormones, that males were aggressive, females submissive, and that these would “transition” into sexual and/or gendered postures. The clincher here is the mustache, which is stuck on for the finishing touch. Hirschfeld does not explain and one wonders whether this “man” is too womanish or if the mustache is the signing of gender, acting as another kind of apparel? Also ambiguous,

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again, as Rainer Herrn observes, is to what degree the ideal heterosexual “pose” is determined by this “eugenic moment” in history and/or whether sexual desire is implicated in these performances.91 With these seeming cracks in his method, which have the effect of disguise as much as revelation, it is unclear whether he exploited or was subject to the inconsistencies. He would seem to be in line with race and sex scientists who posited and posed their subjects as the wishmarks of their “scientific” fancies (e.g., Charcot). But given his defiant stance on matters of sexual expression, the impulse to hide, leave things out or to put them in—perhaps to “discredit legibility”92—derives, I suggest, from the Jew-ish place that is metonymous with sexual abnormality or deviance.93 As we see again and again, the recurrence to a heteronormativity in Hirschfeld’s subjects or models would in certain ways be mirrored in the images Hirschfeld projected of himself. While encouraging his patients to be themselves, albeit cautiously given the potential legal and social ramifications, his projection of a “neutral” image, i.e., professionally clad in male attire (man-ly), seems pointedly evasive. He was rarely pictured in medical attire, as if to gesture toward a closeness or solidarity with his patients. Yet the image of the doctor in the uniform of the respectable bourgeois had less to do with his patients, it seems, than with an ideal that haunted and evaded him of the legitimate scientist, the Aryan man. Pictured in Figure 3 with his long-time domestic and associate, the transsexual Dorchen, and another unidentified transvestite, all together in a sort of family photo, Hirschfeld’s discomfort is palpable; this model of affinity seems to dismiss or to mock the family.94 Ironically, his uniform in this context renders him in obvious disguise, right down to the mustache, which appears overwrought, much like the one placed on the “man” of the metatropical couple. He appears to be in a tight spot, with crossed arms. Hirschfeld’s “passing” as the scientist might seek to perform neutrality both of his sexual and racial designation, one that he could not hide, prima facie, because Jewishness had become equated with homosexuality in his milieu.95 Hirschfeld’s own ideas about the womanly aspect of homosexual construction and desire came to define him and became the point of contention among other advocates of sex between men such as Benedict Friedländer (i.e., Jew = womanly); in fact, Friedländer’s virulent anti-Semitism, at once self-repudiating and misogynistic, provided the negative proof of the conflation between homosexuality and Jewishness (The Renaissance of Eros Uranius, 1904). As Hirschfeld’s men-lovingmen (Eigene/Männerheld) detractors like Adolf Brand and Hans Blüher would say, getting the woman out, whether in concept of orientation or affect, was to get

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Figure 3 Unknown, Hirschfeld, and Dorchen. Viola, vol. 3, no. 119, July 1, 1933.

the Jew out, a combination that had been established in race science and in “Hirschfeld.”96 As Brand put it, “Weil Hirschfeld kein ‘richtiger’ Mann sei, tauge er nicht als Ansführer der Homosexuellenbewegung. Nur ein weiblicher Mann könne die Idee entwickeln und vertreten.” [Since Hirschfeld is not a real man, he does not qualify as a leader of the homosexual movement. Only a womanly man could develop and represent the idea as he has].97 The culture was saturated with this conflation of Jew with homosexuality. Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, the law against male homosexuality or lewd acts between men, which Hirschfeld would indefatigably seek to repeal, hand in hand with the unlikely compatriots that were those same detractors, would ironically become a certain kind of model for the Nuremberg laws against Jews established in the year of Hirschfeld’s death (Einstein was a signatory for the repeal of Paragraph 175). Within those laws, prohibiting, among other things,

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sexual intercourse between Aryans and Jews, non-Aryans quickly became equated with Jews, just as unnatural sexual acts or homosexuality became defined as Jew-ish.98 Likewise, the connection between effeminacy and Jewish men, produced by the likes of Brand, were determinative of the reception of Hirschfeld’s scientific theories about sexuality overall. Even Freud, at first a supporter of Hirschfeld, would come to disapprove of Hirschfeld’s scientific method and to characterize him, oddly or tellingly, fearfully or self-reflexively, as “flabby.”99 Jew-ish production makes the theories naturally unfit, indeed flabby (schlaff).100 The German scientific establishment claim about Einstein’s theories— that they were un-German or non-Aryan—applied to scientific discourse more generally, as Freud, too, would suffer to discover, who for most of his career sought to distance psychoanalysis from the label of Jewish science.101 The fact is that in order to begin and mostly to sustain their campaign against Hirschfeld, the Nazis would criminalize him in Jewish terms. Hirschfeld had “brought the oriental vice into Germany.”102 A bust of Hirschfeld, nicked from the institute on the day of its destruction, was used as a prop at the infamous book burning in Berlin’s opera square, with the tag line “Criminal Jew” written on a banner underneath. Hirschfeld’s writing on race and Jews postdates this event, produced while in exile, though his sexological work had “Jew” written all over it. Harking back to

Figure 4 Opera Square book burning, Berlin, May 10, 1933. Magnus Hirschfeld Institute, courtesy of Rainer Herrn.103

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Benjamin, we see in the image shown in Figure 4, and in the actions that ensued, at once a literal effacing of Hirschfeld and of the culture of signification he sought to establish. But at the same time, as the discussion of the photographers in this study reveals, an “en-Jewment” emerges, not through the stamp of Jewishness delivered by Hirschfeld’s effigy, but by the radical acts that succeed him, reviving him, and marking themselves as Jew-ish, with a not uncomplicated pleasure.104

A Coda: Otto Weininger Otto Weininger’s (1880–1903) work has been much examined and excoriated in recent years, primarily within gender studies, though at the centenary conference on Weininger in Sussex in 2003 there was an effort to rehabilitate him by considering his contributions to the scientism of his period. A secular Austrian Jew, Weininger wrote the infamous Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) (1903), widely reissued, translated, and read throughout the first part of the twentieth century, in which he produced anti-Semitic and misogynistic arguments simultaneously underwritten by and contributing to the expanding theories of degeneration. A new English translation of that work appeared in 2005, edited by Daniel Steuer and Laura Marcus (trans., Ladislaus Löb); Steuer entitles his introduction “A Book That Won’t Go Away.” When the book was completed, Weininger converted from Judaism to Christianity, and on the day of its publication he famously committed suicide in Beethoven’s house. As his letters reveal, he was haunted by a growing conviction that he was a criminal and that he would meet a violent end. So that this idiosyncratic work—which proposes Jewishness as a state of mind that could be changed and womanliness as an intractably damning condition, but also links these as inextricable—reads like a desperate search for self-rescue and an act of self-indictment. Having become the exemplar of the condition identified by Theodor Lessing as Jewish self-hatred (1930), he, along with his work, is pathologized in the very racialized terms he employs, despite having produced, however contradictorily, an escape hatch called the “Jewish state of mind.” The efforts to unlock the paradoxes in his work have sought to read the misogyny from the point of view of masculine crisis, or, relatedly, as yet another form of self-hatred, and to see its radical but unstable theory of bisexuality as resisting the prevalent biologistic thinking of the period. Unlike with these other figures, his Jewishness is thoroughly unsubmerged. In fact, it constitutes the nub

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of his theories about sexuality, and his self-repudiation becomes the medium of their sensation and, ironically, their longevity. I have examined the importance of his work for Joyce and there have been similar studies by Amy Feinberg and Barbara Will on Gertrude Stein, and Lara Trubowitz on Wyndham Lewis and Djuna Barnes. Barnes is a particular case in point, whose Nightwood (1936) takes Weininger’s theories about the pervasive negativity of Jews, being “nowhere and everywhere,” coupled with the non-existence of woman and raises the “condition” to a state of literary cosmopolitanism. Jacqueline Rose has brought Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage into view in these terms.105 In the visual and dramatic arts, Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, and many of the other German and Viennese modernists engaged with these theories and were eventually labeled degenerate artists by the Nazis, who, ironically, adapted Weininger’s theories for the Jewish categorization of degeneracy (along with Nordau’s theories of degenerate art), making him exemplary of this condition and laudable for his suicide.106 The “remedy” of suicide is reminiscent of Hirschfeld’s “built-in” solution for the eradication of homosexuality through non-reproduction. Further, his use of the word Geschlecht to represent “sex,” which is conflated with “race” in German, is designed to make the Jew-ish case inescapable. His theories in this respect, but also in their long reach and overdetermination, arguably overwrite the others. Weininger’s ubiquity and the irony that is constitutive of his formation as subject for Unfit, make him the perfect coda for this genealogy of Jewish degenerationists. The contradictions that inhere in and are transferred from the discourses produced by these influential Jewish degenerationists are not peculiar to modernist work of or about Jewish subjects. These “scientists” are often cited in fin-de siècle literary works, sometimes to mock the empirical nature of degeneration theories while appearing to validate them within the internal narratives; the doctors who appear in these works sometimes return the favor. In Conrad’s Secret Agent (1907), for example, with its themes of anarchism and atavism, Lombroso makes a rhetorical appearance as “an ass.” Bram Stoker famously has Mina Harker invoke Lombroso and Nordau on the criminal type in Dracula; though late Victorian Gothic, the novel is illustrative of Jewish or Jew-ish degeneration. Dracula is a figure of mobility very much like the discourses, and the novel is often seen as a crossover into modernism with its new technologies, formal variations, sexual subjects, and unsettled ending. The depiction of Dracula seems to emerge directly from Lombroso’s eureka description of the “famous brigand” Giuseppe Villella, whose skull shape, he argues, may be found in primates and some rodents and is identified as the template for the born criminal. This oft-quoted

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paragraph referencing Lombroso’s discovery of the criminal brain appears as a later introduction to Criminal Man, characterized by scholars as an “embellishment in order to produce a dramatic founding event for his new discipline,” more fancy than fact:107 This was not merely an idea but a revelation. At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handleshaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages, apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.

The connection between “the Jew” and the vampire seems apparent: he hails from eastern Europe, is infinitely adaptable except to the light, and physically conforms to a set of stereotypes—dark, long-nosed, talon-like nails; he defies Levitican proscription against marking the body. In the final image of Lombroso’s description, there is suggestively a reference to the blood libel, the oldest of myths about Jews (one that Joyce taps into, for instance), which reminds us of the Draculaen repulsion to crosses and may underwrite the whole vampiric tradition. In his assessment of the figure of Dracula, Jack Halberstam warns against stabilizing the connection between the identity of perversity and its relation to a particular set of traits, and thereby to participate in racialist discourse; he observes the inherent instability in the connection, ironically born of the methods of classification themselves. In the spirit of Lombroso, Halberstam describes how he came upon his own eureka revelation about this connection by reading about a suit against the American company General Mills for depicting Count Chocula on their cereal box wearing a Jewish star. Guarding against essentializing Jewishness in the image of Dracula, he identifies the discourse of anti-Semitism prevalent in the period to which the figure corresponds and is interested in the way most readings of the novel have, until very recently, occluded race. Halberstam famously writes: Dracula is otherness itself, a distilled version of all others produced by and within fictional texts, sexual science and psychopathology. He is monster and man, feminine and powerful, parasitical and wealthy; he is repulsive and fascinating, he exerts the consummate gaze but is scrutinized in all things, he

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lives forever but can be killed. Dracula is not simply a monster, but a technology of monstrosity.108

While exemplary fin-de siècle texts such as Dracula, by now overdetermined for the study of Victorianism, are not examined here, they are significant incubators of modernist literary and artistic formations of Jewish degeneration. This is particularly evident in the anxiety they produce around the question of inheritance—biological and literary. Dracula was no theorist but, as an avatar of Jewish degeneration, he prefigures and figures in modernist subjects here, and everywhere.

Notes 1 See Anne Maxwell’s excellent discussion of this cluster of eugenicists, in Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1870–1940 (Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2008), 48–107. 2 On the American response to degeneration, see Linda L. Malik, “Nordau’s Degeneration: The American Controversy,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 5, no. 4 (Oct–Dec 1989): 607–23. 3 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 8. 4 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 17 and see Dain Borges, “ ‘Puffy, Ugly, Slothful and Inert’: Degeneration in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880–1940,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 25, no. 2 (May 1993): 235–56. 5 See my previous work on Weininger in James Joyce’s Judaic Other (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) and “Weininger and the Bloom of Jewish SelfHatred in Joyce’s Ulysses,” in Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger, eds. Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995): 207–13. 6 Gina Ferrero-Lombroso, Cesare Lombroso: Storia della vita e delle opera narrate dalal figlia (Turin: Boca, 1915). 7 Nancy A. Harrowitz. Anti-Semitism, Misogyny and the Logic of Cultural Difference (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska, 1994) and David Forgacs, “Building the Body of the Nation: Lombroso’s L’antisemitismo and the Fin-de-siècle,” in the Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789–1914, eds. Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004): 96–110. 8 Mary Gibson, Born to Crime (Westport, CN and London: Praeger, 2002), 105. 9 See Michael Berkowitz on the topic of Lombroso’s Jewishness and the Jewishness of criminology: “A Hidden Theme of Self-Love? Eric Hobsbawm, Karl Marx, and

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Unfit Cesare Lombroso on ‘Jewish Criminality’ ” in The Cesare Lombroso Handbook, eds. Paul Knepper and P.J. Ystehede (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 253–67. The Cesare Lombroso Handbook, 4. Criminal Man, Edition 5, 348. Lombroso’s views on the criminality of women, Jews, and different races laid out the terms for race science but varied from his colleagues on which traits were inborn and therefore ineradicable. Mary Gibson argues that the standard racist views of the day are erroneously attributed to Lombroso. See Judith Halberstam’s discussion of monstrous form in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 31–2. “You dirty rat” is attributed to James Cagney. The epithet “dirty Jew” would seem to derive from this historical moment and literature. See Josh Lambert on “A Literary History of the Dirty Jew,” JBooks.com, http://jbooks.com/interviews/index/IP_Lambert_DJ.htm. The “mark of the beast,” or the Jew-ish antichrist, was deployed by many, including Conan Doyle in The Hound of the Baskervilles. See Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially the chapter on Stevenson. While I explore Magnus Hirschfeld’s use of photography as a means for his sexological classification, Lombroso’s photographic collection is an important part of the consideration of criminality and physical attributes, along with the work of Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon, in their development of the mug shot, for instance. Vidocq makes an appearance in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and as Lecoq in Émile Gaboriau’s detective stories, referenced by Sherlock Holmes in “A Study in Scarlet.” Lombroso brings him up several times in Criminal Man. Criminal Man, Edition 1, note 22. See also David G. Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 31. See James Morton’s The First Detective: The Life and Revolutionary Ties of Vidocq: Criminal Spy and Private Eye (London: Ebury Press, 2011). Joyce insinuates Vidocq’s memoirs into the dead priest’s library in “Araby” (Dubliners, 1915), in a very suggestive second paragraph which serves to implicate them as a source for the debate over what’s “wrong” with the priest in that story and indeed all of Joyce’s priests. Physical deformity is the reliable signal of the priest’s degeneration. Gibson, Born to Crime, 21, 28. Gibson, Introduction, Criminal Man, 25. Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, eds. Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson (Durham, NC and

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London: Duke University Press, 2004), 140–3. See Aviva Briefel’s argument about women as equated with artifice, which effectively pathologizes beauty in women, in The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2006). Lombroso, Criminal Man, Edition 3; Gibson’s Introduction, 10. Gibson, Born to Crime, 65. Lombroso, Criminal Woman, Editors’ Introduction, 32. Lombroso, Criminal Man, Editors’ Introduction, 11. Daniel Pick observes the relationship between Lombroso’s adaptation of degeneration theory and his attitudes about Italy’s politics: And in part this shift from the notion of atavism to degeneration reflected a growing sense of disenchantment with the whole direction of “Italy”—the perception of an ever wider gap between the ideals of Risorgimento and the squalid realities and factionalism in the new state. “Atavism,” it could be argued, localized the problem of crime to certain distinct and immutable creatures. But Italy’s problems appeared, even to the Lombrosian group, to be less and less localized. With the expansion of the cities and the social problems this generated, degeneration appeared to go way beyond the issue of rural brigandage, provincialism and superstition (Faces of Degeneration, 120–1).

26 Lombroso, Criminal Man, Edition 2, 118–19. 27 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 110, 122. 28 See Criminal Man, 118, for Lombroso’s defense of Jews, which breaks with his system of classification, though he extended no such caveats to blacks. See also Horn, Social Bodies, 35. 29 See Jonathan M. Hess’s work for a discussion of the comparable impact of German enlightenment, Germans Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002). 30 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (New York: Dover Publications, 1988); translated from the German, Der Judenstaat (Vienna, 1896). 31 Lombroso, L’Antisemitismo E Le Scienze Moderne, 104, 106: “La fusion si farebbe a poco a poco anche nei paesi più antisemiti come si è fatta in Italia e in Francia, e il paese utilizzerebbe dei tesori d’intelligenza che certo vano perduti per una questione di . . . battesimo” (“Assimilation would slowly occur even in the most anti-Semitic countries, as has happened in France and Italy. Countries would be able to make use of the huge resource of intelligence that is deflected by the question of baptism” [my translation]). Lombroso remains skeptical of Zionism, despite his embrace of Nordau and, like Nordau and so many other “modern” Jews in this period, was spurred by the Dreyfus case to consider these issues. See Lombroso’s essay on Dreyfus—“The Secret Spring in the Dreyfus Case,” The

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Unfit Independent, vol. 51 (June 22, 1899), online—in which he makes the case that the perpetrators of the crime against Dreyfus were born criminals and that this is yet another case in which atavism of anti-Semitism is proven, along with the anti-Jewish prejudice of Jesuits. In Knepper, too: “Lombroso and Jewish Social Science,” Cesare Lombroso Handbook, 180–3). See Eitan Bar Yosef, for example, for a discussion of such rereadings of the Balfour Declaration, which endorsed a homeland for Jews in Palestine. The Nordau chapter will consider the literary preoccupation with Balfour’s declarations. Villa, in Gibson, Born to Crime, 30. In Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 709; interview with Mrs. Maria Jolas. See Nancy A. Harrowitz, Anti-Semitism, Misogyny and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 55. Judith Walkowitz, too, discusses the Ripper and the anti-Jewish bias in City of Dreadful Night: Narratives of Sexual Danger in LateVictorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). As a counterpoint, Judith Halberstam warns against reading the technology of monstrosity with a Jewish bias. Perhaps Jew-ish is more apt (Skin Shows, 86–107). Halberstam, Skin Shows, 31. Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co, 1996). Gould devotes part of a chapter to a discussion of Lombroso. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Penguin, 1993), 235 and Joseph Valente Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 69, 102. Interview with Giacomo Giacobini, curator of the Science Museum of University of Torino (publication, 2003), 2005. The Lombroso criminal museum collection was part of this exhibit while the museum was being renovated. Lombroso, Criminal Man, 294. See Jonathan R. Hiller’s discussion of Lombroso’s use of Italian literature and opera, in particular, to validate his scientific theories and the pushback from the artistic community. Notably, he discusses Lombroso’s friendship with L. Campuana and his novel Un vampire (1904), in which the scientist, à la Van Helsing in Dracula, is a parody of Lombroso (in “Lombroso and the Science of Literature and Opera,” in Knepper and Ystehede, Cesare Lombroso Handbook, 226–52). See George Mosse, Introduction to Max Nordau’s Degeneration (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), xiii; Robert van der Laarse, “Masking the Other: Max Nordau’s Representation of Hidden Jewishness,” Historical Réflections/Reflections Historiques, vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 9. And many others. Nordau, Degeneration, 17.

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44 Todd Samuel Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (London: Routledge, 2007), 52. Presner does not want to attribute in this way, understandably, since it would seem to ascribe to Nordau the same scurrilous motives he ascribed to others. 45 Neil Levi, Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 24. It is Levi’s aim to show that the “fantasy of judaization” shaped both the interpretation and creation of modernist form, specifically through the anti-Semitic imagination (3). 46 Nordau, Degeneration, 2. 47 Max Nordau, “Zionism,” in Zionism and Anti-Semitism, trans., Gustav Gottheil (New York: Scott-Thaw Company, 1904), 42. 48 Ibid., 15–16, 25, 33. 49 Ibid., 19, 30: “Zionism rejects on principle all colonization on a small scale, and the idea of ‘sneaking’ into Palestine.” 50 Ibid., 43. It is interesting to note in this context that in Paradoxes (1885), in his discussion of “nationalism,” Nordau cites Jews as those who “cling with incomprehensible blindness and pertinacity” to traditions which render them outsiders, subscribing in this way at this point to Lombroso’s idea about Jewish atavism. Translated from the German Fifth Edition by J.R. McIlraith (London: William Heinemann, 1896), 317. 51 Hans Peter-Soder, “A Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Max Nordau and the Problem of Degeneracy,” in Disease and Medicine in Modern German Cultures, eds. Rudolf Käser and Vera Pohlan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 56–70. Söder also makes the case that Degeneration represents a subtext of nineteenth-century cultural discourse (65). Stephen Arata sees the work as literary criticism, in Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fen-de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23–7. 52 See Nordau’s discussion of taste in Degeneration, 51. Many have discussed Modernism’s ascription to and production of cultural eugenics (e.g., Donald J. Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats and the Culture of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)). Yeats becomes particularly relevant here given the way he insinuates these ideas of superior taste into his nationalist aesthetic project. I want to thank Joe Valente for suggesting to me a poem like “Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation” (1916), which extols the “high laughter, loveliness and ease” of the Big House. 53 Söder, “A Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?”: “With one fell swoop, Südfeld had not only changed his name, he had reversed the polarity: out of the negative he had created, the positive, out of ‘evil’ he had fashioned the ‘good’—as if through this act he could negate the dominant ontotheoloical discourse which continually had polarized Western thought” (56).

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54 Robert van der Laarse, “Masking the Other: Max Nordau’s Representation of Hidden Jewishness,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 1–31. Also in Nordau, Degeneration, 19–20. 55 Nordau, Degeneration, 209. 56 See Nordau’s Paradoxes (1885). Hans-Peter Söder, “Captain Dreyfus in Germany? Max Nordau’s Dr. Kohn as a Bourgois Tragedy,” Modern Judaism, vol. 15 (Spring 1995): 36. 57 See, for example, the discussion of Baudelaire and Wilde, Degeneration, 291–320. 58 See Neil Levi’s discussion of Wagner and Nordau, in Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification, Chapter 1. 59 Nordau, Degeneration, 472, 541. 60 Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2005). 61 Magnus Hirschfeld, Sappho und Sokrates (Leipzig: Verlag von Max Spohr, 1896). 62 See, for example, Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1, part 4, “Sexual Inversion” (New York: Random House, 1936), 74. 63 Edgar J. Bauer, “Magnus Hirschfeld’s Doctrine of Sexual Intermediaries and the Transgender Politics of (No-)Identity,” in Gert Hekma, ed., Past and Present of Radical Sexual Politics (Amsterdam: Mosse Foundation, 2004), 41–55. Bauer makes this remark referring to Gilles Deleuze’s assessment of Hirschfeld as such in “Sur la mort de l’homme et le surhomme,” 1986. 64 From the preface to Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897). 65 Magnus Hirschfeld, Berlins Drittes Geschlecht (Berlin and Leipzig: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger, 1904). 66 Ulrichs’ famous series published under the collective title of Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännliche Geschlechtsliebe (Research into the Riddle of Man-Man Love), published between 1864 and 1879, were edited under that title by Hirschfeld and appeared as a volume in 1898 (Leipzig: Spohr). Ulrichs coined the term Urning or Uranian for homosexual. 67 Hirschfeld, Die Transvestiten (Leipzig: Max Sphor, 1910); Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross Dress, trans. Michael A. Lombardi-Nash (New York: Prometheus Books, 1991), 18. 68 Magnus Hirschfeld, “Phantom Rasse: Ein Hirngespinst als Weltgefahr” (8 Forsetzung), Die Wahrheit, vol. 14, no. 6 (1935). Translated as “The Phantom of Race: a Chimeric World Epidemic.” See Rainer Herrn’s essay on this work by Hirschfeld, in Mittelungen der Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft, no. 18, June 3, 1993: 53–62. 69 Hirschfeld, “Phantom Rasse”; Racism, trans. and eds., Eden and Cedar Paul (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938); Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers (Brugg, Switzerland: Bözberg-Verlag, 1933). 70 Hirschfeld, Women East and West (London: Heinemann, 1935), 274.

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71 Hirschfeld, Weltreise, 389; in English edition, 298; there he also disparages Hebrew as a “fatal national conceit,” 276. 72 Heike Bauer, “ ‘Race,’ normativity and the history of sexuality: Magnus Hirschfeld’s Racism and the early-twentieth-century sexology,” Psychology and Sexuality, vol. 1, no. 3 (September 2010): 240; italics mine. 73 Ralf Dose translates a note in Hans Blüher’s diary as a record of Hirschfeld’s feelings about his Jewishness. I think it is important to consider the source, who would have an interest in the kind of disavowal expressed there: “I must protest now being called a Jew and on these grounds being ostracized and persecuted by these Nazi swine. I am a German, a German citizen, just as good as any Hindernburgh or Ludendorff, like Bismarck or our old Kaiser.” In his own notebook, he later writes: “Recently, the humiliation and degradation of Jews has been making greater and greater strides from day to day, like that of Blacks in America.” He goes on to say that living in Germany has become a moral impossibility. While being forced to acknowledge his Jewish descent, as he calls it, he would always rather claim that he was a “world citizen.” In Ralf Dose, Magnus Hirschfeld: The Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement, trans. Edward H. Willis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 36–7, also note 32. 74 Hirschfeld, Women East and West, 291. 75 See, for example, Herrn, Edgar Bauer, Heike Bauer, the Magnus-HirschfeldGesellschaft (Magnus Hirschfeld Institute), https://www.magnus-hirschfeld.de/ forschungsstelle. 76 Hirschfeld, Women East and West, 247; Hirschfeld discusses this matter in the foreword to Geschlechtsübergänge. 77 Hirschfeld, Transvestites, 216–17. 78 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 75. See Sedgwick’s discussion of the queer/Jewish intersection there. 79 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 32–3. 80 Tom Gunning, “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film,” in The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940, ed. Mark. S. Micale (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 147, 158. 81 Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 287, 294. 82 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October, vol. 39 (Winter 1986): 48; Galton, who coined the term “eugenics,” determined he “had captured the ‘typical features of

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Unfit the modern Jewish face,’ and particularly the Jewish gaze where their pathology can be found” (Galton, “Photographic Composites” 1885, in Sander L. Gilman, Freud, Race and Gender (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, 73–4)), and Bertillon perfected the composite photo and metric photography for purposes of identification. It is also worth considering Benjamin’s differentiation between art as photography and photography as art, the latter being more suspect. Benjamin admonishes that “when photography frees itself from physiognomic, political and scientific interests, then it becomes creative,” and this is a false note in that its “saleability,” its commercial aims (photo as fashion), evacuate it of its revelatory or constructive power (Benjamin, “Short History of Photography,” 24). Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 64–6. Hal Foster makes a similar observation when talking about the way some surrealist photography employs body cropping as defense against the threat of castration or difference; in Freud’s terms, “the fetish as ‘protection’ against castration is also the fetish as ‘memorial’ to it.” Foster continues: “It is this ambiguity of form that seems to disclose an ambivalence of intent in the artist, as well as to produce an ambivalence of affect in the viewer. Or at least in some viewers: wittingly or not, surrealist photography underscores sexual difference in spectatorship which is not the same things as sexual identity.” “Violation and Veiling in Surrealist Photography: Woman as Fetish, as Shattered Object, as Phallus,” in Surrealism: Desire Unbound (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 206. Kathrin Peters, Rätselbilder des Geschlechts: Körperwissen und Medialität um 1900 (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2010), 10. In the epilogue to Peters’ book she showcases Henrik Olesen’s work (Danish, Berlin based), which responds directly to Hirschfeld in this manner. The “blurring of boundaries” was seen as a Jewish trait—see, for example, Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 281. See Rainer Herrn, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft (Giessen: Psychosozial Verlag, 2005) and Sex Brennt Exhibition: Magnus Hirschfelds Institut für Sexualwissenshaft und die Bücherverbrennung (Museum der Charité, Berlin, May–September, 2008); David James Prickett, “Magnus Hirschfeld and the Photographic (Re)Invention of the Third Sex,” in Visual Culture and Twentieth-century Germany: Text as Spectacle, ed. Gail Finney (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 103–19; Katharina Sykora, “Umkleidekabin des Geschlecht: Sexualmedizinische Fotografie im frühen 20 Jahrhunder,” Fotogeschichte, vol. 24 , no. 92 (2004): 15–30. The wall, which was destroyed during the 1933 Nazi ransacking, has been partially reconstructed by the Hirschfeld Institute in Berlin. Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde auf Grund dreissigjâhrer Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet, IV Bilderteil (Stuttgart: Julius Pütmann, 1930).

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89 Magnus Hirschfeld, The Homosexuality of Men and Women, trans. Michael A. Lombardi-Nash (New York: Prometheus Books, 2000), 290. Many of the photos appear in the 1905 Geschlechtsübergänge. Most photos were collected rather than produced by Hirschfeld, but, as Peters says, that did not preclude him from having a “bilderpolitik” (Peters, Rätselbilder des Geschlechts, 164). 90 Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde IV , 620. Karl Giese, Hirschfeld’s assistant and partner after 1920, provided the caption, in Herrn, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts, 124. My translation of the German is given in brackets, here and throughout. It is interesting to note the comparison with contemporary artists’ insinuation of facial hair as a way of observing the discrimination of gender, such as in the work of Catherine Opie. Jack Halberstam discusses this in her work on “female masculinity.” The question turns on the “realness” of the hair, which then becomes a visual trap for the searching viewer. But Halberstam makes the question of gender ambiguity irrelevant by suggesting that these subjects (drag kings) participate in the “spectator sport.” 91 Herrn, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts, 124–5. 92 Prickett, “Magnus Hirschfeld,” 105. 93 The hyphen in this demarcation of Jew-ish, which renders the type more associative than definitive, is at the heart of Hirschfeld’s taxonomic conundra. 94 François Noudelmann, in Emily Apter, “Towards a Unisex Erotics: Claude Cahun and Geometric Modernism,” in Modernist Eroticisms: European Literature After Sexology, ed. Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 139. In Apter’s discussion of Cahun’s models of affinity, she cites Noudelmann’s work on this as “a relational event that collapses into selfidentification at the expense of alterity.” 95 See also Tafel III for another such image, in Geschlechtsübergänge. 96 See Jay Geller’s thorough and illuminating discussion of this material in “Freud, Blüher and the Secessio Inversa: Mannerbünde, Homosexuality, and Freud’s Theory of Cultural Formation,” in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, eds. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). In particular, he cites Blüher’s work and his essay “Three Fundamental Forms of Homosexuality,” in which he writes that “effeminacy is ultimately delineated as less an inborn possibility than an effect of decadence. And that, as the characteristic from of inversion in the Roman Empire, is a form of decadent homosexuality that grows out of race mixing, inbreeding and misery” (98). In his note, Geller observes that this last conclusion was omitted by Hirschfeld in his publication of the essay in the Jahrbuch (1913). Geller also addresses Blüher’s anti-Semitic tract, Seccessio Judaica (1922) and his Die Deutsche Wandervogelbewegung als erotisches Phänomnen (The German Youth Movement as Erotic Phenomenon, 1922), a template for Nazi youth, which dovetails with the fitness movements of the period. Adolf Brand was the founder of perhaps the first gay magazine—Der Eigene, which translates as

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Unfit “alike,” or men-loving-men (1896–1932), and author of Die Tante: Eine Spott-und Kampfnummer der Kunstzeitschrift Der Eigene (9 [1925]: 391–8). Friedländer subscribed to the notion that what distinguished “inverts” from heterosexuals was their abhorrence of woman, and this repulsion was synonymous with the response to colonials or non-Germans, like Jews. Both had a “bad smell.” One may bring to bear Otto Weininger’s infamous and influential work Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, Vienna and Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1903) as exemplary of this kind of discourse in which the female or feminine was equated with Jewishness and with the lower orders. Adolf Brand, in Herrn, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts, 39, note 14. I want to thank Susannah Heschel for her suggestion of this connection. The Freud–Jung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C.G Jung, ed. William McGuire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 453–4. See Bauer, “ ‘Race,’ normativity and the history of sexuality,” 244, who mentions this characterization of Hirschfeld by Freud, by way of pointing out Freud’s homophobia, but not, remarkably, given her thesis overall, the racialized nature of that remark. She also has a note about how the 1944 edition of the correspondence “silently leaves out this and other homophobic remarks made by Freud” (247). See Geller’s discussion of non-Aryan science and of Blüher’s Secessio Judaica, in which he talks about the “Jew Sigmund Freud” (93, 109). Hirschfeld, Racism, 152. Hirschfeld is referring to homosexuality here, specifically the act of sodomy. This photo provided by Herrn in the “Sex Brennt” exhibit, taken May 10, 1933. See Joseph Litvak’s The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), for a discussion of this coinage (e.g., p. 5). In Litvak’s formulation of “en-Jewment,” the equation of Jewishness with sexual variety, what would be termed “deviant,” but which is in other terms is the subversive enjoyment of it, would be productive secretly of Jew envy. Here Litvak argues that the underpinning of such envy is the refiguration of “the desirable into the despicable” (51). There has been speculation, for example, that the Nazis destroyed Hirschfeld’s Institute so early on because of the records of “Nazi” clients. Jacqueline Rose, “Dorothy Richardson and the Jew,” in Between “Race” and Culture: Representations of “the Jew” in English and American Literature, ed. Bryan Cheyette (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 114–28. See Abigail Gilman, Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, BeerHofmann and Schnitzler (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). Mary Gibson, Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2002), 20. Halberstam, Skin Shows, 88.

2

Bad Seeds: Mervyn LeRoy’s American Crime

In 1895, Max Nordau dedicated his influential Degeneration “To Professor Cesare Lombroso, Dear and Honoured Master.”1 The salutation is invocative of Dracula’s Renfield, whose thrall is reflected in Bram Stoker’s indebtedness to Lombroso’s degeneration theories, brought to account in the novel for the count’s criminal type.2 Using Lombrosian ideas of criminality, particularly that of the born criminal and atavism, this chapter examines the formations of identity and identification that underlie a modern fixation on murder and crime as well as the proliferation of the crime genre within the modernist canon, particularly within film. One might say Lombroso was a serial killer, since the impact of his work has not only produced a string of proponents who promulgated his ideas in sensational tabloid form, but the effect of all of this has been lethal, even to the author himself. That is, his systems of identification have a propensity to backfire, in the complex processes of exposure of the other that serve to expose the self. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud lays out his theories about identification, tying it to the Oedipal complex and thereby arguing, in short, that the process involves contradictory impulses, those of modeling and dissociation. Identification is in fact ambivalent from the very first: it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone’s removal. It behaves like a derivative of the first, oral phase of the organization of the libido, in which the object that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such. The cannibal, as we know, has remained at this standpoint; he has a devouring affection for his enemies and only people of whom he is fond.3

“It is precisely identity that becomes problematic in and through the work of identification.” The crux of the matter is in the pun of identification: the furor for classification that characterizes the modern era was invested in a losing proposition to form any “approximation of the status of an ontological given.”4 65

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The idea of serialization follows from Freud’s theory in that all identifications are partial—doomed to failure, in fact—and yet the impulse “must be continually renewed and serially reenacted, for the ego’s appetite is voracious and unappeasable.”5 The finding of an object is the refinding of it, as in the psychoanalytic process itself. Freud understood the psychoanalyst’s own vulnerability in the processes of identification, mirrored in the transference/ countertransference dynamic. This seriality is central, of course, to the crime narrative, but the seeming contradiction between subject and object within it is reflected in the self-same contradiction of identity and identification that pervades Lombroso’s work. In her compelling study of this subject of identification, in which she cites Lombroso as crucial, Diana Fuss makes a case for the success of American serial literature.6 I take the American case as exemplary, given Lombroso’s profound influence on race and penal science in the United States and the flourishing of the crime and detective genres within the American landscape during the twentieth century. An essay in the March 1937 issue of The American Journal of Sociology underscores the point by confirming a European disaffection with Lombroso: “the myth that Lombroso was the father of criminology appears to have been primarily an American product,” attributed to the lack of access to English translations of other continental work and to the “popularity of economic and political individualism and the romantic idealism connected with the idea of ‘equality of opportunity’.”7 Nicole Hahn Rafter explains the receptivity of the American context to Lombroso’s ideas in terms of the biopolitics of the “advent of eugenical thinking” related to birth control and social engineering, and the “scienticization of criminalistics and penology” in which “criminality could be read from the body.”8 The Americanization of a peculiarly Lombrosian culture of crime is here shown in the work of Mervyn LeRoy, whose directorial career spanned much of the twentieth century, and whose stable of films includes some of the most significant American works of the era in this arena, including Little Caesar (1931), arguably the initiator of the gangster genre in talkies (Raoul Walsh’s 1915 Regeneration, in silent film), and The Bad Seed (1956), which has become synonymous with the “evil child.” He also made social justice films, which, characteristic of the era, were hitched to the question of social engineering or rehabilitation (e.g., They Won’t Forget, 1937). The formulations of social and literary ills displayed therein are driven by a contradictory logic, like that of the unstable relationship between identification and identity, the scientist and the Jew, retrogression and innovation, and potentially between bad science and great art—and vice versa. On the question of the flaw in the logic or the peculiarity of

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the criminal narrative, Lindesmith and Levin concluded even in 1937: “the progress of science is often portrayed as a majestic and inevitable evolution of ideas . . . We have shown that this conception does not apply to criminology wherein myth and fashion and social conditions have often exercised an influence quite unrelated to the soundness of theories or to the implications of accumulated evidence.” LeRoy seems a good test case given his Hollywood profile, prolificacy, signal contributions, and, at the same time, surprising obscurity, born, in part, of critical assessments of him as mediocre or bad.9 In her spectacular use of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs to illustrate her thesis, Fuss raises the “violence encoded in cinematic form”: “Film has always been a technology of dismemberment and fragmentation. The contemporary horror film recalls cinema not only to its violent historical beginnings but to the abject materiality of its form . . . A system of ‘cuts’ and ‘sutures,’ the cinema borrows much of its technical vocabulary from the discourses of surgical medicine and pathology.”10 Miriam Hansen further frames the heuristic that film provides in this context through her theory of cinematic vernacular modernism. She seeks to dislodge modernism from a focus on aesthetics or style exclusively, to a focus on the nexus between modernism and modernity, one that situates artistic practices within a larger history of economics and sensory perception. I take the study of modernist aesthetics to encompass cultural practices that both articulated and mediated the experience of modernity, such as the massproduced and mass-consumed phenomena of fashion, design, advertising, architecture and urban environment, of photography, radio, and cinema. I am referring to this kind of modernism as “vernacular” (and avoiding the ideologically overdetermined term “popular”) because the term vernacular combines the dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, with connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity and translatability.11

Such an idea of cinematic vernacular is particularly salient for the gangster film, which created, even more than translated, everyday usage, idiom, dialect, etc., and produced media-circulated types which constitute part of the contradictory heart of modernist ideas and modern techniques: i.e., criminals and misfits— “throwbacks”—of all kinds, against and by which, nevertheless, the modern is measured. The “cultural circulation” of American cinema that Hansen examines becomes in some ways an engine of the mobile degeneration discourse that I here argue underwrites modernism. “If this vernacular had a transnational and translatable

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resonance, it was not just because of its optimal mobilization of biologically hardwired structures and universal narrative templates but, more important, because it played a key role in mediating competing cultural discourses on modernity and modernization, because it articulated, multiplied, and globalized a particular historical experience.”12 She argues further that the “classic” Hollywood film has a modernist and vernacular reflexivity: “the reflexive dimension of these films may consist precisely in the ways in which they allow their viewers to confront the constitutive ambivalence of modernity.”13 By crossing the Atlantic to Hollywood to discuss Lombroso’s indelible mark, I move forward into the modern technology of crime, to an obvious location or cultural repository of the theories of degeneration, in effect, to Hollyweird.14 Hollywood’s notoriety, its decadence, became synonymous with cosmopolitanism, or, in its more hidden, and sometimes not so hidden form, inflected as Jew-ish, as has been examined by such critics as Neil Gabler and Joseph Litvak.15 Such association is accounted for, in part, by the producers, so many of whom were immigrant Jews. The insidious implication that a “degenerate” group is the producer of an industry of cultural decadence had a hand in the creation of the Production Code Administration/Hays Code (hereafter, PCA) in the early 1930s.16 The PCA was established at this time to ward off “The Devil’s Camera,” so called by R.G. Burnett in his 1933 indictment of the industry. The devil to which he refers is code for the “others,” or in Hollywood terms, “the Jew,” given the industry’s preeminent producers in this period (Goldwyn-Mayer, Fox, Warner, etc.); paradoxically, assuming Lombroso’s “condition,” they were making films in which they are implicated. The dedication to Burnett’s book reads: “TO THE ULTIMATE SANITY OF THE WHITE RACES.”17 The PCA was used to demonize Hollywood, which created J. Edgar Hoover’s hit list of public enemies: “In the lineup of sinister influences in American popular culture, Hollywood had been named Media Enemy Number one.”18 Thomas Doherty draws on an article in the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle of what he calls “the touchstone year of 1934,” to address the insidious implications of anti-Semitism within and towards the industry: “The Jewish angle is not being dragged into the movie issue: it exists, whether you like it or not.” He continues, “To gauge how much of the outrage at Hollywood derived from anti-Semitism and how much from motives untainted by intolerance is sometimes difficult to calibrate.”19 Lombroso and his theories underlie and even underwrite Hollywood’s early canon, with its producers, subjects, and the reception that attend all of these. Mervyn LeRoy, active between 1927 and 1969, is exemplary in these terms. His career, though long, prolific, and illustrious, has somehow remained under

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the wire of critical attention. Arguably, he directed and/or produced some of the most popular and indeed accomplished films of the era; eight of the films he directed were nominated in the Best Picture category (more than any other such director until Martin Scorsese in 2013). In a 1937 New York Times overview of his work to that point, including the blockbusters I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932) and Little Caesar (1931), Frank Nugent refers to LeRoy as he was then commonly known—“Boy Wonder”—and lauds him for maturing as a director with his film of that year, They Won’t Forget. The film is drawn from Ward Greene’s novel, Death in the Deep South (1936), itself loosely based on the lynching of Leo Frank in 1915, probably the most famous case of Jewish lynching in American history. Nugent’s introductory barbs regarding LeRoy’s nepotism and narcissism perhaps render him “suspicious,” in Nugent’s word (LeRoy’s first wife was Harry Warner’s daughter Doris and he seems to have dubbed himself the “boy wonder”).20 And though the review goes on to extol LeRoy’s directorial talents and thereby to forgive him or rescue him from his “suspicious” behavior, this approach to LeRoy and even to his work seems to have prevailed. Nugent concludes by claiming that LeRoy can turn out “adult” pictures when the material is at hand, rehearsing his previous review of They Won’t Forget, which he praised for its “newsreel-like objectivity” and for being “uncompromising in its conclusions.” He pits it favorably against the other films on the topic of lynching made in the same period—Fritz Lang’s Fury, with Spencer Tracy, and Archie Mayo’s Black Legion, with Humphrey Bogart—both of which he castigates as melodramatic and stylized. But even in its praise, by making an exception in the case of this film as compared with LeRoy’s others, the review continues the perception of LeRoy as protégé, lackey perhaps, or “minor.” What Nugent signals as “adult” is also indicative of a debate about form that is crucial to LeRoy’s work overall, perhaps to his prominence or lack thereof, and which is informed by Lombrosian science, always hovering in the background. The debate in this period between American naturalism—soft determinism wedded to hard realism—and formal innovation is lodged in Lombroso’s ideas about biological determinism and detection (as Nugent also notes—“without undue reliance upon dramatic lighting, odd-angle shots and such ready-made atmospheric ingredients as fog and rain, he achieves a remarkable fluidity and variety of scene . . . always narrative is his chief concern”).21 Lang, Mayo, and LeRoy are all addressing the subject of mob violence, but they are telling different stories in different ways. The expectation of a hard-hitting drama that is true to life and might present remedy through exposure, if not rehabilitation, is in line with Lombroso’s theories, but there is a twist when considering the screenwriter

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for They Won’t Forget, Robert Rossen, who was dedicated to the socially relevant film and who was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).22 His aims in this instance would dovetail with Nugent’s preference for American realism, though ironically, the Jewish Rossen’s own “foreignness” or un-Americanness would make him also “suspicious.” A further factor here, conjoining makers and their productions, is the “suspect” Jewish subject, Leo Frank. LeRoy was Jewish, and though he does not hide it, he presents it as an inconsequential matter of fact. He describes his turn-of-the-century San Francisco Jewish family as “unstoried,” assimilated to the point of complete absorption.23 Indeed, the Jewish subject seems to be submerged, while often somewhere present in his oeuvre: in They Won’t Forget, where, as in the novel, the Jewish Frank is replaced by the Yankee infidel; in the Jewish criminal that is Emmanuel Goldenberg, aka Edward G. Robinson, who becomes the Italian mobster, made famous by LeRoy’s Little Caesar; softened in the criminal played by Paul Muni in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), which is a corrective to Muni’s role in Scarface (d. Hawks, 1932); in the unscrupulous newspaperman, played by Robinson in Five Star Final (1931); in the “suspicious” immigrant and the evil child, various permutations of which appear throughout his films. Even before McCarthyism, there was reason to hide, given not only the PCA’s but Hoover’s policing of “undesirables.” LeRoy becomes, in D.A. Miller’s terms, both the criminal and the police in his work, producing policing narratives that seem to be about “uncovering the rat” and setting things aright, establishing and inverting the narrative of criminality, so that the gangster will become the FBI, Vidocq-like (The FBI Story, 1959).24 But both the agent and the subject of correction are often unclearly delineated, even stylistically, in that LeRoy’s attachment to theatrical effects and his use of film noir can be at odds with the hardboiled resolutions he sets out to deliver. The subject might be veiled or “larvated,” and given LeRoy’s themes, such veiling goes undetected perhaps because disguise or impersonation is part of the performance.25 In this way, LeRoy’s work as part of Warner Bros., to borrow Joe Litvak’s formulation, yields not only a Jewish picture, but also a picture of Jews.26 And, in Hansen’s terms, is productive of a “modernist and vernacular reflexivity.” I am suggesting then, again, as with Lombroso, that LeRoy’s Jewishness is implicated, in fact imbricated, in this hive of relations, which becomes in his dramatizations a hall of mirrors. Choosing topics of oblique Jewishness might implicate LeRoy in obfuscation, or perhaps more importantly, in a kind of passing, by occluding Jewish subjects as one only can in 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and

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even 1960s America, before the literature and criticism of the Holocaust made writing about Jews an overt proposition. Films like Gentleman’s Agreement (d. Kazan, 1947), for example, were anxiously received as controversially direct (see below). Such obfuscation or passing might be deemed criminal on two scores: at once an act of apostasy and a license to “kill,” as it were, in its power to affect or “infect” the film audience. The PCA wished to censor the The Bad Seed, for example, arguing that it had the capacity to literally turn children into killers.27 Furthermore, hiding is childish behavior, an impersonation of innocence and as such a signifier of criminality. According to Lombroso, children marked the symbolic starting point in the evolutionary narrative or the “embryology of crime.”28 Criminal types are outsized children, he argued, morally unrealized or stunted. Finally, “hiding” in the post-war discourse regarding Jews occupies a resonantly empty space, a central signifier of the Jew-ish, not only in the sense of emergence—that is, coming out of hiding, to return to the metaphor of larvation—but also in the after effects of decimation. I will also put into play here, developed more extensively later in the chapter, the idea of “Jewface” as a governing trope in some of this work, where a Jewish or Jew-ish subject is assumed in disguised form. This is a variation on Michael Rogin’s argument about the uses of Blackface by Jews, to dissociate the subject from the “crime” that is their race.29 Jews would turn white by being black in Rogin’s formula, so the question here is what may be yielded in the impersonation of Jews, either in the case of Gregory Peck in Gentleman’s Agreement or in a more recessed form. As with Vidocq’s disguise, there is a dividend. LeRoy, along with Warner Bros., clearly had a knack for tapping into the age, both displaying and, I am arguing, hiding or glossing over its identifying marks. Subterfuge and hiddenness were his abiding subjects, even while Warner was lauded by, for instance, Groucho Marx as “the only studio with any guts” for its outspoken anti-Nazi stance in the 1930s and in particular, its production of Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939).30 The early films are mostly in focus here, but LeRoy’s film work throughout is stagey, whether he’s producing film versions of stage plays, such as The Bad Seed (1956); or in his productions of musicals, such as the backstage Depression-era classic with Busby Berkeley productions, Gold Diggers of 1933, with its remarkable Depression-era anthem, “Forgotten Man”; or the remake of Roberta, Lovely to Look At (1952) and its 1950s kitsch, including standards like “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” which are the real stars of the show. Notable in this category is Gypsy (1962), which opens with a proscenium curtain. So many of his films also stage social and/or political issues, which might be said of all of the above, along with, more overtly, The House I Live In (1945), The FBI

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Story (1959), and The Green Berets (1968). There seems to be an ongoing debate within the films about their aims—whether about patriotism or social justice or the question of their compatibility—a debate that LeRoy makes evident in his autobiographical essays. LeRoy was clearly engaged with the crucial social issues of the moment, distributed as entertainment for a mass audience (e.g., the corrupt justice system in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang). On the other hand, “not wanting to be stuck with any label” (i.e., “a film liberal”), LeRoy would demur: “I have never felt that motion pictures were the place to champion any cause. If you want to send a message, you should go to Western Union.”31 He makes this remark when discussing They Won’t Forget, and it appears strangely defensive in the context of Warner Bros.’ series of “patriotic shorts” in the 1930s—for example, Sons of Liberty (1939), which starred Claude Rains as a heroic Jewish colonial, Haym Salomon. LeRoy’s films overall would belie this protest: add to Chain Gang and Gold Diggers of 1933, Random Harvest (1942), starring Greer Garson and a haggard Ronald Coleman, that seeks like the others to ennoble the veterans of the First World War and to suggest an era that is haunted by loss. Even The FBI Story (1959), with its pandering patriotism, is a “message” movie (also, the flipside of the gangster or crime film).32 One might argue that to employ the form of the Hollywood film is its own practice of concealment of such aims—it’s only entertainment—and that the opening curtain is a smoke screen, in fact.33 The uneasiness within the films registers a troubled mass consumption of high–low genres, but also a sense of shame; there is something to hide. In this way, the stylistic turns that are continuous with the more avant-garde film aesthetic of the period, like that of Lang (elements of noir, codas, symbolism), could be read as a retreat from the real or “natural” subject. I will be discussing three categories of LeRoy films, each with its variation on Lombrosian criminality, which forms both an actual and submerged backdrop to their production and reception: gangster, social justice, and evil child. Recalling the contradictory nature of Lombrosian ideas of criminality and reform, and of the nature of visual evidence, LeRoy’s film technique exhibits a contradictory impulse both to ratify and to rectify the subject. The self-reflexivity of the motion picture is heightened especially by the pace and editing of the gangster film genre, even while it employs seemingly traditional plot lines and sequence shots. Visualization is, of course, a kind of anatomization of crime. Modernist film increasingly rendered vision itself a subject and often took a punitive stance on “looking,” marking its voyeurism and potentially violent nature (e.g., Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, 1966, or Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom,

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1960); seeing is often, paradoxically, rendered unreliable, in contradistinction to the science of the period.34 In the crime film, seeing is the premium sense, which might be punishable by law, both inside and outside the film given its potential for public harm. The three categories of LeRoy’s oeuvre presented here are critically framed by vernacular modernism, Jewface, and identification– exculpation.

The Gangster Film and Little Caesar LeRoy was making Little Caesar (1930) just as the PCA was coming into being and, for the most part, the film went unhindered. It is often touted as the gold standard of gangster films and peculiarly American. In LeRoy’s accounting of his decision to make the film, as represented in his memoir Take One (1976), he reports varying motives: his instinct told him the time was right for the American public to eschew escapism—what the studios were peddling—and instead be “shaken up” by the brutal realism of the Depression-era moment. As he observes, the film inaugurated a serial appetite in the American public for the gangster film and much debate about the nature of the frenzy.35 According to LeRoy, complaints were lodged about the glorification of crime displayed in Little Caesar, but LeRoy resisted that idea, demurring that his film’s “mirror of truth” revealed that “crime does not pay.” LeRoy argued that most people “loved it” but, of course, this could be no riposte to a charge of “lowering the moral standards,” in the words of the PCA. LeRoy’s idea about the genre conformed to and perhaps even contributed a formulaic structure, in response to what would eventually be the PCA’s objections. However much this particular film is singular within the genre, LeRoy’s decision to follow W.R. Burnett’s novel’s focus on the criminal rather than the crimes (urged, too, by Edward G. Robinson) instantiated the Lombrosian model of criminality. Thomas Doherty identifies the “exculpatory preface” that one finds in many early gangster films as a transparent ploy by which Hollywood exercised its power and self-interest to deliver “a public service and cautionary notice . . . While the message might be that crime does not pay, it surely paid at the box office window.”36 Boaz Hagin points to the variant “exculpatory afterword” that LeRoy devises in Little Caesar, in which the villain not only dies a gruesome death, but also seems to repent, different from the double insurance (exculpatory preface and afterword) against censorship that Doherty discusses in a film like Public Enemy, which followed shortly on the heels of Little Caesar.37 (Little

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Caesar begins instead with an epigraph from “Matthew” about living and dying by the sword.) Of course, the idea of repentance or exculpation would be at odds with Hollywood’s aim to subscribe, in effect, to Lombroso’s theories of hereditary criminality, and in that case why should the censor ban films for their power to affect or reflect the public? The films would underscore their message about the born criminal by locating the gangster as a deviant within his family—i.e., environment does not prevail in every case. The search for absolution reflected in the consistent exculpatory theme in LeRoy’s films is predicated upon a narrative of unregenerate criminality. Yet to the degree that the Hollywood family was culpable, making the directors themselves sinister gangsters in the eyes of the PCA, such a message might be counterproductive. “Whatever we may speculate, Hollywood gives us ambiguous and contradictory information.”38 What of the public frenzy surrounding the genre? The Depression era was certainly important for the flourishing of a genre that dramatized fear of and fantasy about the establishment. Diana Fuss theorizes the double function of identification–exculpation as central to the success of America’s serial literature (here she references newspaper accounts of serial killers or serial killings of children): “The identification with a psychotic murderer provides gratification of a death wish against others while simultaneously ensuring exculpation through the projection of guilt on to the self-same cultural anomaly.”39 In other words, a wish to do harm and a need for disavowal of such a wish may be satisfied in one neat stroke. Such a double function is enacted with the gangster genre’s appeal to a wish for a comeuppance against the big boss or “big boy.” The stock figure of the crime boss is, of course, a double for the establishment, so often paired and in collusion with the police. While the arriviste gangster emulates him, the boss himself is an imitation or parody of the aristocrat, an ambiguous figure within the American cultural imaginary. Like LeRoy, the audience, too, becomes the criminal and the police. Here the mobster of perversion satisfies the hidden desire both to be and deny or vanquish the criminal.40 Mary Hahn Rafter’s ideas about America’s “eugenical thinking” help to account for some of the appeal. As David Ruth explains it, “the determinist’s explanations of crime fit comfortably in the rambling, capacious structure of progressive social thought,” which, while it eschewed ethnic divisions, divided groups along class lines, so that “reform often had as its goal the social control of groups that seemed dangerously distant from middle class values.”41 Scientists became the new remedialists. This helps to explain the attraction in that period to a narrative that played out the struggle between competing social theories.

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Much has been written about the relationship among the first three major gangster films: The Public Enemy (d. William Wellman, 1931) and Scarface (d. Howard Hawks, 1932) followed closely on the heels of Little Caesar. Doherty remarks that the three represent the catalog of outsiders of the period, the Italian, Jew, and Irishman, in as much as these films merged the actors with their personae. The plots are roughly the same—the rise from the streets to elite gangsterdom, the exculpatory prefaces, the spectacular demise of the antiheroes. According to Doherty, “The three films also evenhandedly parcel out social pathology and sexual aberration: homosexuality (Little Caesar), misogyny (The Public Enemy), and incest (Scarface),” although this is too neat.42 In all the films, social and biological deviance are collapsed, as are female sexual perversity and racialized male degeneracy in the figure of the encroaching immigrant of early twentieth-century America. The ambiguity at the heart of the criminal figure is underscored by this interface in that the manly toughness portrayed by the gangster needs to be subtly compromised, even when, as in the case of Cagney’s violence, he resists the feminine, symbolically performed in the infamous grapefruit-in-the-face scene with Mae Clark; but the feminine is also something neither he nor any of his counterparts can shake. The roughing up of women may be read as homosocial, and certainly translates as recuperative of masculinity. Mirrored in this double effect is the recuperation of the anti-hero gangster and his staying power, along with the ambivalence toward the assimilation of the immigrant. There has been much discussion of the homoerotic dimension of the gangster narrative, as perversely mirroring the social structures. Doherty comments on the “queer flashes”: “The imputation of homosexuality, played usually for laughs, sometimes as threat.” Gaylyn Studlar discusses the importance of violence to the representation of homosocial desire: “This was especially so within a system of filmic representation that cultivated ambiguities of expression in order to suggest forbidden behaviors and conduct regarded as immoral by many censorship authorities and the industries’ own system of moral self-regulation.”43 Studlar references the theory of sexual inversion as underwriting the spectacle of criminal homoeroticism, in line with Lombroso’s view about homosexuality as atavistic. Studlar does not directly acknowledge that homosexuality was often coded through Jewishness.44 But she does discuss characters like “the Levantine,” Joel Cairo, played by Peter Lorre, another actor often playing to type as both sexual and Jew-ish/foreign deviant. To wit, every Robinson bio insists on his straightness—husband to a socialite. And Studlar rehearses that the word “gunsel” was thought to derive from Yiddish slang, without seeing the connection that the

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Jewish, while less automatically detectable, is synonymous with effeminacy and sexual deviance.45 Such encoding was perhaps more obviously true of the European setting, particularly German/Austrian; the foreignness of the catamite types invokes the immigrant gangster. The author of the novel Little Caesar, W.R. Burnett, loved LeRoy’s adaptation and Robinson’s portrayal of the title character, but lamented that there were no actual Italian actors used in the film. As Doherty points out, in conjunction with Neal Gabler and David Ruth, the Jewish producers of these films perform a kind of Blackface when engaging Jewish actors to play Italian undesirables. Giorgio Bertillini suggests that, prior to the gangster film, Italian undesirables played by Italian impersonators—he refers to George Beban who became identified with The Italian (1915)—“preserved a racialized legal and ideological distinction between Italian and American individuals, while bringing the audience somewhat closer to a character of goodwill whose misfortunes could have easily (and ‘naturally’) prompted familiar criminal actions.”46 He then argues that the gangster film portrayed already assimilated Americans in a double bind, whose “very American ambition clashed against the marginalizing reality of social origin and racial identity.”47 While the PCA from 1934 until after the Second World War would prohibit stereotyped ethnic portraiture and demand due respect of religion, and while Jews disappeared from the screen in large part along with the rise of Nazism, there were no holds barred in ethnic representation in the pre-code era. Jewish actors, nevertheless, appeared most often as impersonators of other ethnic groups, with the exception of Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, though there, too, as Rogin has argued, impersonation paradoxically becomes a key factor in the rehabilitation of the Jewish figure.48 As impersonators, Jews or other outsiders manage to dissociate themselves from the type while universalizing the racialized degenerate as, at least, quasi-sympathetic in Bertillini’s terms—and in sensational terms, making desirable the undesirable through performance. This was hard to do in the face of Lombroso’s theories on which these portrayals drew, which meant that the Italian criminal, famously from Sicily, was cast in the inescapable role of brigand (southern Italian).49 It was politically expedient to cast members of minority groups as lawbreakers, thereby exposing the perils of urban diversity.50 Of the three roles in this gangster trio, the Irishman Tom Powers is performatively played by the Irishman James Cagney, while the Jewish Robinson and Muni play the Italian mobsters with whom they became so identified. Of the three, Robinson is arguably the only one who does not become rehabilitated within the films or thereafter in their careers. Cagney’s ruthlessness is fetching

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and becomes the flip-side equivalent of his Yankee Doodle Dandy. He is puckish, though he later played Bottom rather than Puck in the 1935 Midsummer’s Night Dream. Further, there are signals in Public Enemy that play to a certain cultural conception of heroism, as discussed by Doherty and Ruth, etc. Tom Powers characterizes his brother’s “straightness” as chump-like, arguing in an antiAmerican dream screed that going to school is learning how to be poor. The “Black and Tan” sign in the backdrop of one scene signals the mixed-raceclientele club to which he and his sidekick go by invoking the 1929 Duke Ellington film by that name; however, it also seems a tip to an insider Irish audience about the heroism of this urban fighter by bringing to mind, for those in the know, the ruthless regiment of former British soldiers called the Black and Tans, employed by the Royal Irish Constabulary in British-occupied Ireland to fight the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The character’s notorious misogyny, as I have already suggested, was necessary to counteract any suggestion of “Irish” diminution or sexual aberrance in his relationship with his sidekick. Cagney’s shortness is thereby, both physically and symbolically, vigorously contrasted with Robinson’s in comparable scenes. Muni’s “scar”-face, anything but deformed even in this film, becomes ennobled in his later role as victim of the system, in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. Robinson’s physical stature, his background, and the pronounced homoeroticism of his breakout film would be the submerged context of his career, arguably rendering him as “Little Caesar” always. Despite changing his name (as did Muni, born Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund) from the more ethnic Emanuel Goldenberg to the anglicized Robinson, a nominal concealment was insufficient. Robinson’s performance, his “believability,” and the persistence of his association with the role give the film its iconic status or staying power. He is the enemy, one of the markers of the age. And his unregeneracy is productive of the quality of seriality we associate with the genre. Like a bad penny, he resurfaces. It is curious that Enrico Bandella’s gangster appellation should in fact diminish him. One of the staples of the genre is to move up, to become a “big boy” (consider “Scarface” and “Tom Powers” by comparison); yet, the nickname “Little Caesar” fixes him in a diminutive relation to the conqueror, even one who is a tyrant with a bad end. There is something mocking in it—Robinson himself described his character as “a little punk trying to be big.”51 This subtext of this and other gangster films, that of the biology and psychobiology of the criminal man, coincides with a set text governing descriptions of Robinson. While he narrates himself as having been born when stepping on the soil of America, after immigrating from Bucharest, Romania, in 1903, he was reborn through Rico as

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the very figure he thought to leave behind.52 Descriptions of him in bios seem insistently to protest that he is cultured and erudite and well-spoken, all “good traits” that are belied by his insistent typecasting as the criminal, just as the mention of Romania might conjure the association with the Jew-ish Dracula. The recurrence to his erudition and articulacy is a case in point, when played off against the peculiar speech affect that Robinson made famous in Rico. Robinson’s delivery gives the memorable lines their idiosyncratic character. The cadences and locution became determinative of a kind of gangster speak, an urban poetics, punctuated by “yeah” or a metrically equivalent grunt, continuous perhaps with the broken language of the immigrant. Lombroso was fascinated with what he called “criminal jargon,” concluding that “criminals speak like savages because they are savages, living amidst the flower of European civilization.”53 LeRoy concurred in his way—“Eddie lived that part of Rico. He put in all those grunts himself—they weren’t in the text and I didn’t suggest them to him. He said the line with so much authenticity, they became real.”54 Robinson was a Yiddish speaker, suggestive here of the telltale signs of the “minor” language. The question comes up repeatedly: is Robinson acting or does it just come naturally? Even whilst protesting that he is the “flower” that Lombroso invokes. LeRoy continually underscores this contradiction. He notes that Robinson could “play any type of part and that he had the physical properties we felt would be right for Rico Bandello alias Little Caesar”; but not before observing, “We all knew him, off screen, as a kind, gentle, brilliant young man.”55 Such “properties” render him unsuitable for any leading or romantic role, even when he is cast as such. LeRoy confirms and demurs all at once: “The film typed Eddie, a gentle man, a gangster for years afterward. There is nothing inherently wrong in typing—when you think about it objectively, typing is a tribute to an actor’s skill in creating a part the public believes.”56 This reads like a rationalization for continuing to cast him in just such roles (e.g., in Five Star Final, 1931). But the question seems to be begged in LeRoy’s remarks about whether the type or typing came first. Robinson’s quest to play a leading man almost always returned him to the criminal element, as in Fritz Lang’s 1944 Woman in the Window or late in his career, in Key Largo (1948, where he resonantly plays Rocco). His heroic roles often have him fighting Nazis, a kind of Blackface in the way of rehabilitating him as Jew, or the roles reinscribe him as Jew—as enemy and/or victim, in Anatole Litvak’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) or Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946). LeRoy makes mimicry one motif of the film, having the camera often focus Rico’s eye on the trappings of his pursuit, as when he very conspicuously spies

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the diamond pin worn by both Pete Montana and Arnie Storch, the big boss and his rival, and the killing wish it betokens.57 Lombroso considered imitation, a form of impersonation, integral to the etiology of crime, arguing, for example, that the punishment of crime only emboldened others toward copycat crime. Fortifying his theories about atavism, he claimed that imitation was “dominant among the vulgar classes,” and crucial to the explanation of “crowd behavior” (most evident in LeRoy’s “lynching” film).58 This theory is in tune with the Freudian idea of internalization, imitation/ingestion, and infection. In Little Caesar, mimicry functions to destabilize rather than reify desire in that what brings Rico down is his Achilles heel, his soft spot for his former sidekick Joe Massara, whom he can neither become (have) nor kill. In the problem of identification, his aim is unclear or unsteady. At the same time, Rico classically performs surety. He does not shy away from displaying bravado or being on display (imitating Capone): when, for example, the photographers come in to a party for him to record his triumphant rise, he brandishes the diamond watch given to him by the men; but by the end of the scene, he learns his trophy is a deadly hand-me-down. The marker of success backfires infinitely. Imitation

Figure 5 Still from Little Caesar. Warner Bros., 1931.

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plays out as both a parody of assimilation and criminal seriality, even in aesthetic terms, given LeRoy’s close-up camera work and the seriality of the genre itself. Like impersonation, it seeks to disguise the criminality that ostensibly cannot be hidden. Rico’s public hubris, however much it was meant to be imitative of Capone, seems a cover for his fears about his physical incapacity for imitation. One of the memorable scenes in Little Caesar is of Rico being fitted for his tuxedo in preparation for his visit to the boss—“the big boy”—who has summoned him for a promotion. In this scene, the motif of criminal performance as mimicry is crystallized. LeRoy beautifully portrays the posturing, the reaching, by making Rico get up on the table, to try on the tuxedo—what he later at the boss’s “dump” refers to as a “monkey suit”—both characterizations by him protesting too much. Of course, getting up on the table has the effect of reminding his audience of his “low” stature. “They rig you up better than this in the stir,” he says, as he peers uncomfortably into the mirror. We see him up there, too, through the adoring eyes of his sidekick Otero, who is himself described by one of the other gangsters as “he’s little but he’s the goods all right.” Otero’s role is to look up to Rico, here conveyed by the architecture of the scene and by Otero’s comment that Rico is getting up in the world. Rico’s rather fey pose in the mirror is meant to mimic a fawning waiter but seems an unintentional bad parody of the “big boy,” who is ethnically clean, rich, and classy, and whom little Rico will fall short and foul of. The idea of aping is repeated in the reference to the tuxedo as a monkey suit and is, of course, a tip to the atavistic nature of the criminal. Rico is clearly uncomfortable right up to his silly pose at the conclusion of the scene, which is a feeble performance of confidence, because every pose he strikes is a servile one—the waiter, the prisoner, the lackey—as reflected in his contention that the prison uniform is a better fit. Perhaps he mocks the big boy, perhaps himself, since it is always he who is reflected back. The metaphor of turning tables applies to the question about determinism: is Rico’s parody a displacement or an embodiment of the “big boy”? This mirror shot in Little Caesar is repeated almost exactly in Public Enemy, in the typical scenario of rising through imitation, but there Cagney is being fitted by a caricaturally effeminate tailor, while his partner Matt looks on with a mixture of admiration and disgust, registering suspicion of this rite of passage. While Otero’s loving admiration is checked in Tom’s sidekick, the homoerotics of the gangster is reproduced. Doherty describes Otero in this scene as barely sublimating his “rapturous desire.”59 All of these scenes are produced as necessary to the genre; they are mirroring scenes, in some cases literally, as in that between

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Rico and Otero, where the question becomes whether the gangster is formed by or reflected in the image that we see. LeRoy does this in a signature way, performatively, reproduced in the criminal child, Rhoda, in The Bad Seed (who preens before the mirror with her femme fatale shades). This hall of mirrors is tricky, not for its distortion but for what it displays suggestively as hidden, larvated, emergent, whether it be in Robinson’s fey pose at the end of the scene, while Otero gazes at him lovingly, or in the thin disguise of the actor’s Jewishness with the Italian veneer, something Lombroso himself employed, not only as Jew per se, but also as a northern Italian, who condemned the southern as the criminal type. At the conclusion of Little Caesar, Rico famously intones one of the few lines the pre-PCA censors demanded be changed from the novel: “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?” “God” was replaced by “mercy” to avoid the spectacle of the gangster’s blasphemy. But in making the change, an unwitting allowance of mercy has been extended to the criminal, through a suggestion of repentance or absolution. This produces a flaw in the Burnett design of the criminal man, which conforms to Lombroso’s scheme. The third-person self-referentiality, a tendency Rico has throughout, here effects a kind of disembodiment, in keeping with the censorship of the criminal body, but it also mimics an imperial affect, which Rico has ventriloquized throughout. The grammar of his demise, however, renders him mostly inscrutable. Rico’s end, both crude and perhaps unintentionally pathetic, may be read in a number of ways. On the one hand, he dies a suitable death for the moralizing view—ashes to ashes, gutter to gutter. The cop Flaherty, Little Caesar’s Javert, has been belittling him in print to flush him out, and now mocks Rico’s vanity as what draws him to his downfall. But even here he is drawn out to a more hidden scheme. The very last shot pulls back on the scene, and focuses on the billboard behind which he has retreated and dies. It contains the ironic and enormous images of Joe Massara and Olga holding hands, “laughing, singing, dancing,” in every way an affront to Rico. The reflexive shot is like many in LeRoy’s work, exhibiting a marquee (created for the film by screenwriter Robert N. Lee ); “The Grand Theatre presents,” which appears at the top, may be a disclaimer, along with Rico’s dying words “Mother of Mercy”; all is performance, aimed at the censor or the ambivalent audience, just as the exculpatory foreword at the beginning of these gangster films demurs on the question of glorification. It becomes a check to the cheek of affiliation with the martyr in this perverse pieta, where Rico, lying on the ground, is cradled in a way by the backside of the billboard above. The display offers a representation of normativity, which is the symbol of his demise—the cops shoot through the

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billboard to kill Rico—but is also a nod to the performative nature of the world presented by the film. The advertised performance in which Joe and Olga appear—Tipsy, Topsy, Turvy—references the Victorian sense of “roll over” and/or “take a tumble,” but also the idea of sexual inversion, both of which converge in this inglorious ending. LeRoy’s description of his first encounter with Burnett’s novel is striking for his excitement about the project. As he admits, the film turned around his career, but in his discussion of it, we get a sense of a kind of overidentification with the character of Little Caesar himself, who wanted to “make it big and be big,” just as Robinson had described him.60 LeRoy felt the success of the film elevated him to innovator, keeping “always a step above workmen.” In these same terms and almost in the same breath, LeRoy complains that those jealous of his success “said cruel things aimed at cutting me down.”61 In what is meant to be a tell-all book, he strangely leaves unspoken the content of the things said about him, saying only in veiled terms that these were “complete fabrications that were so ludicrous they were laughable.” He intimates that the charge of nepotism (he was married to Warner’s daughter) was at issue, but what is at stake about LeRoy’s shame remains hidden, as if said behind the readers’ backs. Perhaps his fear of being cast into the role of “bad” director—workman, sell-out—or alternatively, his seeming distress about not becoming one of the directors personae, accounts for his emphatic protest that he had avoided becoming a type, even while praising Robinson’s skill in doing so. LeRoy’s various positions bring the staging of Robinson’s mirror scene into view. Rather than looking at Rico, the director’s camera looks with him at the mirror, as though criminal avatar or product rather than producer of the image. LeRoy’s unsteadiness is reflected in Edward G. Robinson’s indelible pose.

Social Justice: They Won’t Forget and The House I Live In In LeRoy’s move from what eventually were regarded as the “socially significant” gangster series to his next films, particularly They Won’t Forget in 1937, he worried that he was being spurned as a “film liberal,” as though to anticipate McCarthyism.62 In fact, so many of his associates on this film, particularly Robert Rossen, and on The House I Live In (1945) would later be called up and/or blacklisted by HUAC. LeRoy takes pride in They Won’t Forget, relishes its accolades, and argues that its feature of “the fine Negro actor,” Clinton Rosemond [LeRoy misspells his name as “Roseman”63] paved the way for actors like Poitier,

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even if Rosemond was forgotten, overshadowed perhaps. (He had already provocatively portrayed Blacks in Gold Diggers, giving Etta Moten a major vocal in the final “Forgotten Man” number.) In this last section of the chapter in Take One where this discussion of Rosemond appears, the intersection of these two “message” films provides the poles that might define LeRoy’s career, the narratives and counter- or submerged narrative of the American stories that were the subjects of his films. Considering his entire oeuvre, one sees the consistent bounce between the subversive and the patriotic, both kinds of “message” films that turn on the ideas of uncover, under-cover. They Won’t Forget and The House I Live In, which bookended the Second World War, hover around the referent of Jew: in the first, Rosemond, performing Jewface, disturbs the settled question of race in his role as witness against the white “villain” who displaces his historical avatar Leo Frank; in the latter, the Jew now overtly stands in for the “Black” (who is omitted complementarily by Sinatra in his rendition of the song by Abel Meeropol, on which the film is based—see below).64 The Jewish–Black proxy relation, alternatively Jewface and Blackface, reflects Lombroso’s Darwinian conception of race, where the Negro is lowest on the evolutionary scale and the Jew higher up on the march toward Aryanism, and sometimes contradictorily exceptional for Lombroso in that Jews might overcome their position through social mobilization (White Man and Colored Man, 1871). This stand-in relation pervades LeRoy’s oeuvre in various permutations, especially in his social justice films (despite the fact that neither social mobility nor whiteness will save the Leo Frank stand-in in They Won’t Forget). The kind of message that They Won’t Forget was sending in 1937 is not transparent. It precedes the slew of civil rights films over the next forty years, wherein Blacks are unjustly victimized by the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow. Unlike these, neither the novel nor the film makes race its overt subject. Greene’s novel instead is about American Civil War ressentiment, an indictment of the South by a Southerner, as some critics observed. Greene was a journalist covering the Frank trial and he came back to it in several writings. He claimed that race was the excuse not the matter, as much as sectionalism and state pride.65 Matthew Bernstein surmises that Greene wished to avoid the “hornet’s nest of controversy that might arise had he incorporated [the Frank case].” He suggests that pronorthern sentiments replace philosemitic ones in the character of the defense attorney’s summation. But it seems more likely that Greene felt his point would be lost should the Jewish plot be insinuated, justifying any negative sentiment or mob violence displayed. Both the novel and the film follow the Frank character who was a Northerner, transplanted to Georgia from New York, but they ennoble

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him by making him a teacher, rather than reproducing the Jew-ish type that the real Frank as factory manager represented. Robert Hale and his blonde wife seem to be Christians with northern, liberal attitudes—she comments to a reporter who is trying to entrap her that her husband feels “they are still fighting the Civil War down here.” Hale becomes dupe for a ruthless and ambitious district attorney, played by Claude Rains, who wants to make his mark with the case. The British actor playing a bigoted and ruthless Southerner seems yet another displacement. Southern antipathy toward the carpetbagger and internal corruption should help the D.A. override any aversion to accusing the white Hale over the black janitor Redwine (played by Rosemond), who testifies and then recants his testimony that he saw a nervous Hale around the time of the factory girl, Mary Clay’s death. A case in point is the class of the girl, who is clearly poor and portrayed as morally dubious (though she is sanctified by her death), which nevertheless do not make her suspect when played off against Hale and Redwine. The word “trash” is used by one of the Clay clan to describe the Hales, a kind of reaction formation by virtue of class and fraternity. The Irishness of the historical Mary Phagan, on whom the girl is based, is curiously written out here, as though to remove a competing “white” ethnicity of a lower order. (Further, she is played by the newly discovered “sexy” Lana Turner as another distraction.)66 As the prosecuting attorney says, “Any fool can ride to glory on a helpless Negro janitor. I’m out for bigger game.”67 But regardless of Greene’s and LeRoy’s motives for their casting choices, displacing the guilty Black with the white Hale still seems a dubious plot element without knowledge of the backstory that the white Northerner is a Jew. Such a figuration of white dominance, though oblique, explanatorily precedes Gregory Peck’s Jewface performance in Gentleman’s Agreement, discussed below. They Won’t Forget begins with what is tantamount to an exculpatory preface about the legacy of the contest between South and North: the presentation of competing anthems (a medley of Confederate songs, including “Dixie,” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” are alternated), images (of the Lincoln Memorial and veteran Confederate soldiers), and documentation of original conceptions of the Union (with quotations from the Gettysburg Address on the proposition of equality and from Robert E. Lee that the “Union established by our forefather should be preserved”) would seem to establish neutrality, though the film is not neutral on the question of justice. In Lombrosian terms, we have an originalist view (still debated with respect to the Constitution) pitted against an evolutionary conception of, or, depending on one’s point of view, a “degeneration” of that ideal

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over which the Civil War was and is still being fought, according to the film. The story is set in the imaginary town of Flodden, Georgia—Atlanta and Marietta are the historical locations—invoking another famous battlefield of pre-civil war between the Scots and the English (1513). The specter of conflict between the American North and South mirrors in certain respects the roughly concurrent Risorgimento backdrop to Lombroso’s signal theories, and the criminal geography that he produced in accordance with them. In the same way that Lombroso’s racial theories about that divide were contradicted by his defense of Jews against anti-Semitism, Greene’s and LeRoy’s narratives muddle the overdetermined issue of race in the American context (the Scottsboro Boys case occurred the year before the film was released). Greene’s novel presents the racial element of the Civil War in the same way that the violence is visualized in LeRoy’s film, through “metonymic displacement,”68 of the kind lauded by Frank Nugent in his review of the film, where a swinging mailbag on a train stands in for the lynched man. While such filmic metonyms might serve the historical inconclusivity of the Frank case, LeRoy tips his hand, along with Greene, to proclaim the innocence of the accused and the guilt of the culture, rife with “hatred, fear, and prejudice,” in the words of the summation of the Northern defense attorney. At the same time, the standins, such as the Northerner–Black–Jew trio, have an obfuscatory quality, as much as they might be salutary for popular audiences. The newspaper headline, “the Prejudice Angle” regularly flashing across the screen, reminds us of the rigging of the case that happens both within and by the film—that is, both disguise the true subject or victim, even in a way the novel does not. Ward Greene does not entirely white out the Jew: all the journalists from the North who take up his cause are Jewish, as is the lawyer. There is a holdout juror who is accused of being Jewish until he relents. All of this is missing from LeRoy’s otherwise faithful adaptation. One might explain these metonyms by the PCA’s censorship of displays of lynching and overt racial or religious politics, but this should not have put off LeRoy, who had already defiantly made Chain Gang about American injustice and who would make Five Star Final (1931) about the unethical sensationalism of the press. The obfuscatory effect here is in keeping with LeRoy’s work overall, which characteristically engages such “metonymic displacement,” as a way of hedging his bets against disclosure of the “true” criminal subject. It is telling that such effects double for stylistic innovation. But why the hedge? In 1937, Hollywood was not yet ready for the classic, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) starring Gregory Peck, but it was only ten years shy of Peck’s avenger role in Gentleman’s Agreement, a film exemplary of that

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combination of bad art with good “science.” Peck plays a journalist impersonating a Jew to get a story on anti-Semitism. The film is a post-war fable about American guilt, indicting myths about American rectitude, that is doled out with a generous portion of self-righteousness. But it unleashes perhaps more than it intends, inducing, as Joe Litvak has argued, “a paranoia for Christians.” Litvak suggests that perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the film is how well the WASP can pass—or even, given the role of actor John Garfield, who seems to play himself, a Jew needing to pass—how “the Jew can turn into you.”69 Litvak points to the obligatory mirror scene in such passing films, in which Peck, as Philip Green, makes the case not only for the ability to pass but thereby also for the interchangeability of WASP and Jew. It has also been pointed out that Peck’s gentlemanliness or gentileness (thinking back to this conflation with Robinson) is what made his impersonation palatable, perhaps like making a case for Leo Frank’s innocence through his impersonator, Hale. But such a strategy also seems to confirm, contrary to Robinson’s case, that they could only be playacting. In LeRoy’s adaptation of Greene’s novel, this message is delivered more insidiously, since the Northerner Robert Hale is in an already rehabilitated position, as Peck, in effect. The Jew is transmogrified into the uppity Northerner. His being a New Yorker is code for cosmopolitanism or Jewishness, just as Phillip Green’s residence in New York rather than Connecticut becomes another enabling aspect of his passing, as is his profession as journalist. Furthermore, Hale’s Jewface is at once a kind of Blackface, as it is in the terms of the historical event, where Jew stands in for the lynched Black. This proxy relation in the history of representation on stage and film becomes increasingly standard (e.g., The Jazz Singer), even inasmuch as the role of the Jewish manager raping young gentile girls anticipates the 1930s charge against Hollywood producers, directors, etc. Both draw on a history of false accusation, including blood libel, reflected in the Jewish trials of the century (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank, Rosenbergs).70 The proxy seems always to be the Jew, whether for criminal Italians or subhuman Blacks or dirty Commies, reifying the contradictory nature of Jews as both performing and inhabiting these roles. Jeffrey Melnick has written specifically about the Frank case in these transactional terms. Melnick discusses an inversion of the Blackface dynamic, where Blacks might assume Jewishness or a Jewface in order to become “dirty white.” One might think of Imitation of Life (1934, d. John M. Stahl; 1959, d. Douglas Sirk), where in the later, more popular version, Sarah Jane, daughter of the black maid, now called Linda, is played by, as is often pointed out, an actress of part-Jewish, part-Mexican ethnicity (Susan Kohner). The novel on

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which the films were based was written by the Jewish-American writer Fannie Hurst, though this credit is lost in the Sirk version. While the mirror in The Jazz Singer famously reveals the blackness and at once the whiteness of the Jew, the mirror scene in Imitation of Life provides a commentary on the incapacity of the mirror or the camera to reveal what should be overt, thereby dismantling the racial essentialism. It underscores the unsettling “truth” observed by Litvak, that the Black or Jew could “turn into you.” In Imitation as in The Jazz Singer and elsewhere (such as in The Bad Seed, below), all turns on the indisputable biological origin of the “mammy,” regardless of what the mirror says. A Lombrosian flawed logic is constitutive of the ambiguity. The Frank case continues to be a flashpoint in the history of American racism and there have been many fictionalized recountings. In film, in addition to They Won’t Forget,” Melnick and others laud Oscar Micheaux’s Murder in Harlem (1935), which also writes the Jewish historical avatar out of the film. In Micheaux’s film, the villain is “passing” itself, while in LeRoy’s, and in Fritz Lang’s Fury, based on another infamous lynching case, American primitivity rather than race seem to be at issue.71 Given the array of occupants of Frank’s role, one can’t help but wonder to whom the “They” in LeRoy’s title refers, oddly prescient of the phrase that would come to be identified with the Holocaust in its aftermath—“NEVER FORGET” (and now with 9/11).72 It might refer to a smoldering sense of Southern defeat, as indicated by the aged Confederate soldiers at the beginning of the film, or provide the collective pronoun for Blacks and Jews. Melnick argues that “a major theme around the Frank case is that African Americans and Jews could be understood as intimately related even as they participated in a lifeand-death struggle against each other.”73 The poet Moishe Leyb Halpern, writing in Yiddish, in New York in the first part of the twentieth century, visualizes the relationship most aptly in his lynching poem “Salute,” where he witnesses the lynching of a black man and makes himself as Jew—“partner in crime, not said a word”—through his silence and his artistic enterprise: Who stood at a distance there to think— Playing pocket pool, with your fingers curled— To dream up a poem for yourself and the world.

Halpern was probably inspired by the Frank case, but his self-indictment is perhaps most telling with respect to the dangers for a Jew of imaginatively or otherwise occupying this position, as subject, viewer, or viewmaster.74 LeRoy’s ten-minute short The House I Live In (1945) would seem to be a postwar propaganda film for American values and also, perhaps paradoxically, an

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effort to combat a culture of bigotry in the aftermath of a war in which Americans died ostensibly defending Jews—or values that would abhor persecution of any kind (just preceding Gentleman’s Agreement). It won an honorary Academy Award (1946) for “subject of tolerance in a short” and a Golden Globe for Best Film in Promoting International Good Will (1946).75 As Art Simon sees it, “It would become an important text of the Popular Front, that coalition of left and liberal forces devoted to anti-fascism, the fight against lynching and antiSemitism and the campaign on behalf of socially democratic electoral politics.”76 In it, Frank Sinatra, who is recording an album, steps outside the sound studio for a cigarette break, just as a pack of boys, all white, are chasing another, also white but with dark hair, who has been backed onto a stone wall. Sinatra intervenes and discovers that it is the boy’s “different religion” that has made him a pariah. He interrupts one boy’s defamation of the “ ‘prey’ as a dirty—,” leaving the slur and the subject unspoken but epithetically understood. “You must be some of them Nazi werewolves,” Sinatra provokes. Lecturing the boys about American values of acceptance, he makes two points for the case against prejudice: first, he recuperates physical difference by claiming that all share the same blood, to wit the donation that the suspect boy’s parents have made to the local blood bank from which perhaps the wounded father of the most vociferous one of the pack might have benefited; second, he narrates the heroic participation of Jews and Irish in the war effort, both Judaism and Catholicism being unsavory—they are not just passive victims or cowards, as the lingering postwar images of submissive Jews, in particular, conveyed. He references a famous incident of the bombing of a Japanese warship (Haruna) in which the bombardier Meyer Levin released the bomb. Sinatra was well known at this time to advocate for anti-racism and social tolerance, and these points of acquittal are of course crucial to theories of racial difference and degeneration: biology/virility and character/heroism. The marquee mis-en-scène—a lush recording studio on the inside conjoined with the concrete, cramped neighborhood just outside—along with the framing device of the music, beginning with Sinatra’s recording of “If You Are But a Dream” and concluding with “The House I live In,” composed by Earl Robinson, lyrics by Abel Meeropol (lyrics made popular by the film), works to package the short in terms of the need for a revitalized American dream. Sinatra, too, is in need of some repackaging, it seems, when his profession as singer is dismissed by the scrappy kid as “sissy,” tipping to an early image of Sinatra as scrawny. Entreating the boys to listen to him sing, Sinatra cautions, “No hissing.” The camera leaves the cramped close-ups of the exchanges between them only once,

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when Sinatra recounts the bravery of Kelly and Levin in the bombing of the Haruna, in the first major victory over the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. Sinatra tells the boys to close their eyes and the scene is visualized: starring a blonde and burly Levin with his face pressed into the bombsight, either a presupposition of a heroic type or a superimposition of that type onto the Jewish bomber, who would have typically been imaged as the boy with dark hair hiding behind Sinatra during this address (Simon discusses the boy actor as barely Jewish because of his visage). In a way, the film would seem to commit Stanley Crouch’s “historical sin,”77 another kind of Jewface, by making a Jewish boy the symbolic subject of American prejudice, a sympathetic proxy in a post-Second World War milieu. But the subject was not a sidestep according to the scriptwriter, Albert Maltz, one of the Hollywood Ten, whose career was ruined as a result of his refusal to testify before HUAC in 1948. Maltz’s encounter with HUAC would confirm for him what he had been writing on the subject of American anti-Semitism before this, wherein he took a position close to that of Jean Paul Sartre in Anti-Semite and Jew (1946), that “the destroyer of the Jew is inevitably the destroyer of the Bill of Rights.”78 He established the magazine Equality to counter the racist publication of the anti-Semitic Father Charles Coughlin. He helped to write Edward G. Robinson’s defense against HUAC’s indictment of him. For Maltz, Jews and Blacks were conjoined as subjects of American racism. Remarkably, The House I Live In brings together a number of iconic and similarly victimized figures: besides Maltz and Meeropol aka Lewis Allen, who continued to dodge HUAC at great cost, there is the composer Robinson, who in response to being blacklisted would later in his career write almost exclusively American patriotic music. Meeropol complained that his song had been thus reduced by the film’s omission of the verse in which the line “my neighbors white and black” appeared. It is not clear how this occurred, whether by LeRoy’s or Maltz’s or even Sinatra’s design, but it is reminiscent of the cooptation of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” an homage to the Depression-era worker that was sanitized for patriotic use.79 The star Sinatra, who would later ward off accusations of communist sympathies because of his role in this film (eventually, all anti-discrimination organizations would be associated with the Popular Front and subjected to this characterization), signals here his Italian immigrant lineage, which was often foregrounded as detractive; despite later being infamously associated with the mob, he is here arguably inverting the stand-in relation of first, Jews for Italians and, second, Italians for criminals. In fact, he stands up for Jews. The film

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reinstates the role of art in the common good, although it emerges from a Benjaminian debate about the relationship between art and propaganda, and shifts roles mercurially in its reception as both anti-fascist and pro-communist, in a way that marks a changing post-war American landscape. Its enormous popularity may nevertheless be attributed to its star and projection of a valorous American self, responding to the exposé within the film that, as Maltz put it, “America is a danger to itself.” One can’t help but wonder why LeRoy escapes recrimination in the midst of such a hit parade of “un-Americans.” There is no record of LeRoy’s complicity with HUAC, but one might speculate that he was protected as part of the, ironically, complicitous Warner camp.80 While the film’s refusal to name names— the boy who is being chased and discriminated against is never identified except by suggestion (“he’s a dirty—”) or by proxy (the flyer Levin)—may be seen as a wish to broaden the concept of prejudice to a “unitary concept,” it has also been accused of obfuscation on this point.81 The blank that is produced after the epithet “dirty” is productive of a double function, even a kind of double exculpation, of both erasing and rescuing the Jew, perhaps from Jew-ishness itself, in addition to whatever displacement of race the stand-in, literally standup Jewish stooge permits. And this is like LeRoy’s double agent role, a tightrope he seems to walk through much of his career: where his commitment to social good may be read from both sides of a national, ethnic, or even ethical divide; where there is an impulse to hide and display the criminal, to have it change places with the heroic; where a Jewish aesthetic potentially attributed to him might be conceived as a criminal act. An interesting aside here is that LeRoy wore a necklace given to him by Sinatra during the making of the film that was double-sided, with a Jewish star and St. Christopher’s medal. Another interesting note here is Abel Meeropol’s adoption of the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after their execution for treason in 1953. This historical fact anticipates the spectacle of such a legacy dramatized in LeRoy’s The Bad Seed, where the displaced Jewish children Robert and Michael seem to shadow the evil Aryan child, Rhoda Penmark, who doubles for the American ideal and its genetic mutation within the post-war nuclear era.

The Evil Child and The Bad Seed LeRoy’s screen adaptation of William March’s 1954 novel The Bad Seed was first adapted for the stage by Maxwell Anderson. Both the novel and the film were

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post-war witch-hunting sensations (also called “Cold War horror”). In the way that the title and the concept of the “bad seed” have become synonymous with the criminal child, the work joins the pantheon of such nominal literary icons— Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein—in that the images conjured by the text, like Lombroso’s types, are a matter of cultural record, detached, as it were, from the texts that produced them. Like them, the evil child draws on Lombroso’s biggest claim of the born criminal, more than just the embryonic symbol of criminality. Early on in the novel, Christine, the mother of the evil child, thinks of the term “the bad seed” in conjunction with a thought about the age in which she is living: It seemed to her suddenly that violence was an inescapable factor of the heart, perhaps the most important factor of all—an ineradicable thing that lay, like a bad seed, behind kindness, behind compassion, behind the embrace of love itself. Sometimes it lay deeply hidden, sometimes it lay close to the surface; but always it was there, ready to appear, under the right conditions, in all its irrational dreadfulness.82

In the film, this thought is interjected into a commentary by a visiting criminologist to reprise the obsolete theory of the hereditary nature of criminality, something that March wished to accomplish through his novel, at least, inasmuch as it would serve to debunk the mid-1950s all-pervasive environmental theory of behavior. But it also reads like a popular description of “Psychology Today,” then taking hold in United States. One can see the film as a pretext for the debate between these scientific dispositions, though it pulls its punch on the conclusion of the matter. The film is a logical site for such a discussion since it projects the debate about criminality onto the screen for public viewing long after it would seem that the environmental theory would have trumped the view on heredity. As film, it would, of course, have a wider audience than the novel, despite the latter’s popularity. The PCA efforts at censorship of the script underscored its potential sensationality for the viewing public.83 The Bad Seed seems thus anachronistic, underscored by Rhoda, the film’s evil star, who is the avatar of degeneration in an era of would-be buoyancy and reconstruction. America’s myth of itself as the exceptional state, built on choice rather than inheritance, should have provided the paradigm—the cultural metonymy for self-fashioning, sanctioned by God. Eisenhower and Truman would invoke chosenness, especially in relation to the creation and use of the atomic bomb. (“In God We Trust” was made an official part of coinage in 1956.)

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But the post-war era returned to the science of determinism, even if in disguised form, as a reaction to a perception of cultural regression produced by the war. In this way, as with the evil child itself, the film is a throwback, the ironic dividend of the myth of progress. At the same time, the new science had produced a fear about mechanization, destruction, or erosion of the human or human will. Biology was destiny if, for example, we are nothing but “chemical action.” Such theories smacked of eugenics with its markers of imperfection. This apprehension of hereditary badness had to remain hidden in a post-war America whose image as victor depended on its un-subscription to such views (though ironically, homegrown Black racism seemed exempted from such imperatives), and its demonstrated “goodness.” In 1931, the American critic and commentator, Walter Lippmann put it this way: “Our civilization has become so extensive and complex that we are for the most part mere spectators of events in which by a hidden chain of causes we are implicated.”84 One was caught between a rationale for the disappearance of moral will and an American mythology of moral superiority. The chain invoked the present and future nuclear reaction, stuck in this vacillating concept of progression/regression. Generations of Americans were familiar with LeRoy’s The Bad Seed, mostly through its numerous television reruns in the late 1950s and 60s. It was remade for television in 1985. The distinction made in its description as either a midcentury psychological thriller or a horror film is dictated by the possibility of explanation or resolution. Rhoda’s actual crimes are given short shrift in the film, which renders instead her visage and the narrative of her end the most captivating elements. Reading the face marks the film’s distinction from its novelistic or even stage origins, in that the camera’s focus on the visual markers directs both the characters and the viewers to consider, as it were, Lombroso’s criteria for an assessment of criminality: whether Rhoda can be you. In brief, Rhoda Penmark is the eight-year-old girl, played by a blond, pigtailed, Rockwell-esque Patty McCormack, whose steely stare is by now iconic. Her mother, Christine, discovers in the course of the narrative the true story of her own life—that she was adopted by her famous crime writer/reporter father, Richard Bravo (indeed!), in the course of one of his investigations of the notorious serial murderer, Bessie Denker, who is, of course, Christine’s biological mother. She is compelled to discover this fact when because of unsettling events involving her own daughter, she returns to a nagging sense that she is adopted— “the commonest of changeling fantasies,” as her neighbor, and amateur psychologist, Monica, informs her. What has been worrying about Rhoda is her incriminating behavior around the sudden and violent death of one of her

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classmates who had won the penmanship medal Rhoda had coveted. Through the symbolism of her last name and the nature of the contest, the aesthetics of writing punningly stands in for what may be marked physiologically; and the practice of handwriting analysis as a means of character identification, deriving from Lombroso and popular by this time, invokes the crime forensics of fingerprints.85 This kind of marking works both to underscore her hyperperfection and also in contradistinction to Rhoda’s appearance, which belies her criminality. Rhoda soon confesses to killing the boy, and also the owner of another coveted object before this. Her confession is coldly calculating rather than guilty—she wishes to enlist her mother and ward off any form of punishment. She goes on to kill the janitor who teases her into a murderous rage and one can see the gestation of another murderous impulse in her relationship to the neighbor, the childless Monica Breedlove (yet another symbolic name). The film reverses the ending of the novel, in which, having decided that the only way to eliminate the bad seed is to kill it and herself, its genetic producer, the mother dies, while the child survives. The survival of the bad seed despite everything (adoption, too) suggests, counter to the social narrative of environment over heredity, and in keeping with the implications of Lombroso’s theories, that there is no possibility of extinction of the degenerative gene. In the book, then, the child’s survival makes for the threat to the social order; it would seem the mother’s function to restore life by undoing it is foiled or displaced by science with its mechanisms of restoration. Rhoda’s recovery seems nothing short of miraculous, given the number of sleeping pills she has swallowed; there is an eerie sense in the novel that the degenerative gene’s virulence would trump any mode of extermination, like Dracula, who dies at the end of Stoker’s novel while his seed germinates in Mina’s little boy, so prominently figured on the last page of that novel. The miracle of Rhoda’s rebirth is also March’s way of mocking any idea of divine intervention, to which the film turns in its revised ending. Laboring under the sanctions and prohibitions imposed by the PCA against child killers and bad mothers (anti-natalism), LeRoy and screenwriter John Lee Mahin both recast the ending and sold their rendition as an adaptation from the stage play, which would be congenial to LeRoy’s stylistic impulses, and continuous with the need to hyperbolize the deadly narrative—as though it were not already sufficiently melodramatic. The film’s reversal of the conclusion of the novel sets things right, as it were, letting the mother live and killing the child, deus ex machina style—literally a lightning bolt from heaven fells Rhoda and thwarts her plans to retrieve the medal her mother has discarded, the symbolic rather than forensic “evidence” of her guilt. So while the novel might have delegitimized

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the social sciences or the “pseudo-sciences” of psychoanalysis and sociology, both prominently if speciously addressed by summarily mocking their explanatory force, the film seems to move to a different kind of evidence by retrieving God from a post-Darwinian wasteland. LeRoy recounts how this new ending was the writer’s idea, a change coerced by the PCA and the studio, to which he objected: “Ordinarily, I would go along with their philosophical objection: In films that millions of innocents see, guilt should be punished. This time, however, we were dealing with a fable, not reality. The culprit here was not some hardened criminal, or even a soft criminal, but a child, and nobody could possibly take that seriously.”86 This attitude may account for what seems a mock seriousness in the reflexivity of the conclusion’s melodramatic spectacle. The smoke produced by the bolt that kills Rhoda not only realizes the canny janitor’s taunting prediction of Rhoda’s death in the electric chair, but overrides such fate in its generic treatment; it is almost kitsch spectacle, as the poof of smoke rises and the camera follows it heavenward, giving a whole new meaning to another cultural imperative of the moment—BABY BOOM. Not God, and not science, but Hollywood’s wizardry may produce or destroy the bad seed. (LeRoy was director for a time and producer of The Wizard of Oz.) However far-fetched, Rhoda’s filmic demise is set out to be exquisitely satisfying. It provides relief, since one has been necessarily in a conflict of identification with Rhoda. Or, at least, struggling with that visage and how to accommodate it. “That look!” “That enchanting smile!” (inherited, as we discover, from her grandmother, Bessie). On the face of it, Rhoda appears the very antithesis of degeneration, the exemplar of innocence and wholesomeness, and the promise of the post-war future—Morel’s “original type”, against which deviance is determined.87 The instability in this figure would seem to reflect the instability in Lombroso’s whole system of identification. But while Lombroso’s science is almost always vulnerable to such criticism, the contradictions, as exhibited here, are illuminating. In the film, Tasker, the criminologist, or crime writer, is a mouthpiece for Lombroso and like him a source for discovery. He rehearses Lombroso’s theory or demurral that sometimes the criminal may seem hyper-virtuous, so that the clue is in the excess, enhanced by Rhoda’s and LeRoy’s stagey style. Rhoda beguiles us even as her crimes are revealed. Rhoda as “attraction” demands of the viewer to square or perhaps “queer” her perfection with her femme fatality, another sign of excess, and a good reason why the murderous protagonist and the producer of this narrative might be gendered female; despite the film’s role in generating the figure of the child murderer, the choice of a girl reads back as generically anomalous. In her

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introduction to the novel, reissued in 1997, Elaine Showalter addresses this choice and the suggestion in general in the novel that women are the literal producers of the bad seed. She acknowledges the novel’s representation of women as more sinister than men, but observes the narrative’s “masked attraction and identification with the little girl who so cleverly conceals her murderous impulses and crimes.”88 March appears informed by Lombroso’s castigations of women as “big children,” who are morally deficient, and more prone to atavism by being closer to nature; he warns that a woman criminal, unleashed to her natural tendencies, is always more ferocious than a man. However, Lombroso’s offer that cultural constraint and maternality would ward off such natural inclinations are foiled by the narrative.89 He might explain the failure through his insistence that criminal women inclined toward prostitution, which then overtook the maternal impulse for reform. Rhoda’s coquettishness and Christine’s sexuality, which the film pointedly displays, conform to Lombroso’s prescriptions in the sense that the criminal operation is abetted by the natural crime of female sexuality. Arguably, the film sensationalizes for the box office: Perin Gurel points out how one publicity ad has the mother in a transparent negligee, standing over the dying child whom she has poisoned, the fruit of her womb; the caption salaciously and misleadingly reads—“hidden shame out in the open—and the most terrifying rock-bottom a woman ever hit for love.”90 This latter in particular mobilizes the idea of female prostitution. In the framework of such theories, Christine is irredeemable in any aspect, both as the bearer of the bad seed and by her efforts to eradicate it, which might read perversely as a lack of maternal instinct to rescue and protect. The productively enabling insensitivity of women to childbirth is here translated into something sinister: a double murder, in fact; “child killer” describes both Christine and Rhoda. Despite the PCA’s taboos against the use of seduction, the film makes Rhoda into the adorable and sinister object of desire (she is visibly eroticized by almost everyone in the film, man and woman); her desirability is metonymous in turn, with the very objects she kills for, giving desirability this same transitive double sense as we find in the murder act. In the parlance of the post-war era, the attraction is sublimated: we would kill for her (she is to die for) or, alternately, in the way the narrative turns this about, she must be eliminated, whatever it takes—again, perversely, even kill her ourselves, “to save ourselves.” Her blond perfection in these terms makes her a double for the Aryan ideal, but her attraction makes it impossible to misread her character solely as a demonization of the German for the delectation of this post-war American audience, even with the suggestion of her German past. The name Denker in the novel is certainly

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meant to have a German ring but the film expands on this idea and gives Christine the original name of Ingol, which she hears her mother calling in her recognition dream. However, Rhoda’s image is even more unsettling. In her very appearance/physiognomy, we see the cryptogrammatic evidence of what is desirable, collapsing what was fought both for and against. The criminal German lurks behind the American ideal. The telling or framed look is a recurring figure of the film, as if to ask the viewer (as Bravo is asked about his granddaughter) to detect the criminal among us. There were other films in the period that sensationalized the idea of the “Nazi among us,” like Welles’ The Stranger (1946), in which he starred, along with Edward G. Robinson, as the Nazi hunter (or, more pedantically, Tomorrow the World, 1933, which features an evil German child who is deprogrammed, but which is more aptly about the Jew among us.) The horror of LeRoy’s film, as distinct from these others, is in both the excess and the recess of the figure of the evil child—blonde, blue-eyed, polite, charming, and ruthless—who turns out to be “perfection” in an American iconographic sense as well. The contradiction at the heart of this image of Rhoda is in the identification of and with one’s dream come true and worst nightmare. Rhoda’s criminality, her murderousness, is not just an aberration or a perversion of nature. She is typologically a monster, no less a cultural trophy than the markers of perfection that she kills for. In postwar terms, she serves as symbolic self-incrimination and absolution. Yet, “scientifically” proven, she is inbred and here to stay, despite Hollywood’s machinations. Another bad penny. This cultural duplicity amplifies the copycat fear expressed by the PCA; “the powerful effect on impressionable children” might be the mirroring one.91 Rhoda is transgressive also in her appropriation of the cinematic gaze.92 “Look” takes on a punning, doubling sense, too. There are several telling instances of such looks or looking: Rhoda looks at herself in the mirror in the living room mirror twice, once early on, as she tries on bejeweled sunglasses given to her by Monica, and again after her crime has been disclosed. The glasses are glamorous and the camera holds her gaze. One recalls the popular starlet icon cum femmes fatales of the era; Monica recalls these Hollywood avatars as the camera focuses on Rhoda admiring herself. In fact, a review of the film invoked Marilyn Monroe when describing Rhoda—“whom she could stand next to when you take those manicured pigtails off her.”93 The image also anticipates Lolita, soon to appear. All are susceptible of this double role of desirability and danger, vulnerability and deadliness—like the child whose image seems somehow skewed in those big glasses. Rhoda is a chilling future projection, which becomes clearer in the

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second instance toward the end of the film, where she checks her image in the mirror while her mother looks on, as though to hold her gaze in that hereditary visage. LeRoy emphasizes the point by creating a doubling scene in which the mother is wearing similar femme fatale sunglasses as she drops Rhoda off at the killing picnic. The mirroring of Christine in her daughter and vice versa happens in a number of variations throughout. It is a displaced effect in the scene with Christine and the mother of the murdered boy, played by a dissolute and/or dissolving Eileen Heckart, whose alcoholic display of grief is a tour de force of unmasking, in contrast to the dissembling of Rhoda. As Christine, Miss Fern (the teacher who has come to insinuate guilt), and the audience look on, the grieving mother is rendered more contemptible than pathetic, because her display is a sign of her lower caste, which marrying up—only nouveau riche— could not eradicate. The two mothers face-to-face perform what seems to be a recognizable human drama, one that reinforces the hidden American ideal of gentility’s patronizing, averted gaze. Mrs. Daigle, who was a hairdresser before marrying, fights back against the perceived derogation by attempting to denaturalize her judges: she points to Miss Fern, the proper principal of the children’s school, to expose her dyed hair; she approaches the truth of Christine’s criminal generation, by pronouncing her own dead son better than Rhoda, as the medal decreed. This too reads as crass through the unruly excess of her behavior. Her degenerative gene is on full exhibit, thrown into rhetorical and unwittingly ironic relief by her constant references to Christine’s superior breeding. Even if one perceives the suggestion of a kinship between the flawed Mrs. Daigle (signifying ethnic—French-Canadian, in fact), and the perfect and perfectly WASP Rhoda, as atavistic, one might miss the interface between them and their would-be mediator Christine. Her genteel/gentile façade is just that—its own distraction from the culprit of her “repressed” origins. Contrary to appearances, they all look alike. There is also the revelation moment between Christine and her father (again, contrived by the film), when she discovers that she is the daughter of Bessie, confirming her suspicions about Rhoda. Her immediate response is to beat her womb. Father Bravo is incredulous, and when Rhoda comes into the room, he lifts her to examine her face, using Lombroso’s measure of identification to make the call against Bravo’s own insistence upon the sociological explanation of violence. As he gazes at her intently, Rhoda asks, “Why do you look at me?” He turns to the camera to testify, ostensibly to his adoptive daughter, and shakes his head: “No.” He cannot find the evidence of criminality in her face/look.

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If Rhoda is a double for both the American and the Aryan ideal, the remedy must signify in a double sense as well. How shall the conundrum be resolved? What might be extracted to maintain the desirable image or object? For the Nazi, as well as for the communist witch-hunters, it was “the Jew-ish,” both literally and figuratively; in this post-war, Cold War fable, that figure cannot help but resonate with the drama of hidden menace and criminal impersonation of perfection. The paradox of hiddenness obtains here, as “looks” in Lombrosian terms fail to make their mark. In fact, Lombroso argued in his characteristically contradictory manner about Jews, that they were more Aryan than Semites by the metrics of craniology and given the ethnic mixing that has produced a large percentage of blonds among Jews.94 The Jew-ish is the hidden figure in this text, just as Lombroso is his own textual cryptogram, for as the Jew of his narratives he is the type he must both inhabit and inhibit. And, as the film would have it, Rhoda must die, which for one reason or another is the remedy the audience requires. Rhoda’s end is disturbingly satisfying because such a hyperfantastical or, equally, moralistic conclusion alters yet another deadly narrative of criminal fate, in yet another double sense, that of European Jewry. In these terms, LeRoy’s film indicts his society for presuming to distinguish itself from the enemy in the face of its own criminal acts: the atom bomb, the St. Louis (voyage of the damned), an averted gaze, while at once enabling absolution for social and political complicity. LeRoy’s protest against the criminality of the child—“she’s just a kid”—suggests at least a conflicted stance and, in some degree, that the import of the film is hidden even from himself. His contradictory remarks about the film signal a conflict that is projected onto the screen. Is it a crime of interpretive malfeasance to assume a Jewish face for this narrative, a projection of a kind of perverse passing? Apart from the signification of Jew-ishness I have been arguing for, the most direct reference within the film comes in relation to the “Jewish science” of psychology—to Freud, through the fictional analyst Dr. Kettlebaum, by whose therapy Monica Breedlove is undone rather than healed. We may understand this as a critique of the pop psychology of the moment, but here in another way, the Jew is lurking behind the scenes, impersonating the doctor who will do harm with a charlatan cure. Much like the director’s remedy for contamination that constitutes yet another child-killing. Coincidentally, LeRoy’s own name figures, as though in another cryptogram, in the guise of Leroy, the degenerate janitor, whose greatest sins as exhibited in the film (but not in the novel) are lasciviousness, and mostly knowingness. He can see through Rhoda in his identification with her, in the old takes-one-to-know-one style, but also in the Freudian sense: they are rivals, and he is consumed by the fire she sets (in the basement where he sleeps). The audience, too, should be able to see

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through Rhoda’s stagey hyperperfection, which signifies as a kind of passing. The identification with, or of her, is consistent with Litvak’s argument about Jew envy: Rhoda’s resonance with a stereotype of Jewish degeneracy makes her an object of envy—for doing and wishing things that those in power seek—who must therefore be turned into a despicable subject. Litvak quotes Melanie Klein in this regard— “envy insists on spoiling the desired object”—which is consistent with the arguments about identification. “Likeness must never be confused with liking,” except, of course, between the subject and object of identification.95 Lombroso’s contention that a natural disposition toward orality is a cause for deviant behavior in the born criminal is invoked by Diana Fuss in her discussion of the fascination with serial killers in the form of Hannibal Lecter and Jeffrey Dahmer; in a Freudian paradigm of ingestion/infection, the likes of Lecter and Dahmer actualize their identification processes through cannibalism. Identification is itself, as Fuss reminds us, an act of serial murder: “At the base of every identification lies a murderous wish: the subject’s desire to cannibalize the other who inhabits the place it longs to occupy.”96 Dahmer’s appearance, reminiscent of the voracious Rhoda, seems both an eyesore and a sight for sore eyes, for as Fuss suggests, Dahmer, a white man of German descent, was often rhetorically recast in the image of his victims, mostly men of color, as one means of evading or rationalizing his Aryan visage. In a note, Fuss points out the disturbing association between Dahmer’s mutilation of his victims, his interest in medical pathology, the “social undesirables” who were his subjects, and the Nazi crimes against Jews in the Holocaust.97 This very same constellation exists in The Bad Seed. Just as Rhoda wished to consume or occupy her objects of desire, so too, her victims often refer to her in the terms of ingestion/identification—she is delectable—and in her double function she aptly fulfills the wish of having your cake, as it were, and eating it too. Monica says of Rhoda’s visits to her upstairs apartment that she “would like to have her for supper every evening.” Fuss sets up an analogy between the act of racial imperialism Dahmer performs in his ingestion of his victims and the popular consumption of narratives about serial killing and the criminals who perpetrate them, for the discharge and/or relief they permit of “criminal” or criminalized needs. It is here that she identifies the double function of identification–exculpation which she sees at the heart of the success of America’s “new” serial literature (newspaper accounts of serial killers or the serial killings of children and their fictive incarnations): Fuss writes, “identification with a psychotic murderer provides gratification of a death wish against others while simultaneously ensuring exculpation through the projection of guilt onto the self-same cultural anomaly: ‘the monster of perversion.’ ”98

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In keeping with his theatrical impulse, or perhaps with an uneasy sense about divine intervention (though it might be argued the impulse was marshaled in order to fortify the impression that the film was more fiction than fact),99 LeRoy stages a coda bow by the actors, in which the “evil child” is unmasked as performance. Nancy Kelly’s spanking of Patty McCormick renders her everybody’s “bad girl,” and domesticates the evil with performative corporal punishment. (Looking at it now, though, it seems violent and exhibitionistic.) The artificial is not necessarily at odds with the Lombrosian idea of the criminal, who is a deviation from natural perfection and whose deviation necessitates and enables him, like Vidocq, to be a poseur. Taking off of the gangster genre in response to the PCA, the coda functions as an exculpatory afterword. This artificiality and self-consciousness about form is at work suggestively in the film, with Christine posing as an author in order to glean information about the criminal narrative and thereby her own story, which at once dovetails with an apprehension of her as “unnatural.” There is some suggestion that the author can rewrite the story, as has LeRoy March’s story, but also that the author is implicated in its criminal act, which looks back to Max Nordau’s pathologization of artists; not unlike, of course, the circumstances of the film itself, which rewrites the end but all along raises the question of creative culpability. Within LeRoy’s film version, the progenitor of evil is suspect but saved and it is unclear how to read that outcome, after all. As Jackson and others have suggested, Rhoda Penmark precedes Dahmer as a “lasting cultural referent for children whose asocial, violently structured lives gain national attention,” but Jackson goes further when he argues the referent then demands “that the convincing performance of white children must be reevaluated.”100 As Jew-ish subjects, whose Aryaness is a cover, they serve to dispel the horror and shame that attend their acts, their cultural reproduction and the satisfaction taken in their demise. Examining Mervyn LeRoy’s work in this extended dialogue with Lombrosian theories of criminality helps to assess his achievement and reception, but also representatively to gauge the undertow of the Jew-ish subject for the literary production and exculpation of criminal acts.

Notes 1 Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993); translated from the second edition of the German work Entartung: “Statt eines

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5 6 7

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10 11 12 13 14

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Vorwortes. Herrn Professor Cesare Lombroso in Turin; Hochgeehrter und theurer Meister.” See Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), for example, pp. 135 and 439, for instances of such invocations, respectively. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–74), vol. 18: 105. I am here indebted to Diana Fuss’s Identification Papers (New York and London: Routledge, 1995) for her work on this subject. Fuss, Identification Papers, 2–3. Fuss attests to Lombroso’s identificatory methods— e.g., phrenology—as crucial for these processes and the production of the means of surveillance that is required to find and repel and/or emulate another. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 100. Alfred Lindesmith and Yale Levin, “The Lombrosian Myth in Criminology,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 42, no. 5 (1937): 666–7. At the conclusion of his essay “Criminal Anthropology: Its Origin and Application” (The Forum, vol. 20 (1895–6): 33–49), he lauds North America as the new frontier for his kind of work. Nicole Hahn Rafter, “Criminal Anthropology: Its Reception in the United States and the Nature of its Appeal,” in Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 163–4. In American Directors, vol. 1, eds. Jean-Pierre Coursodon with Pierre Sauvage (New York: McGraw Hill, 1983): George Sadoul’s assessment of LeRoy as a “ ‘film maker of great stature and artistry in the thirties who later became an impersonal, routine director of largely uninteresting films’ reflects a standard critical line on LeRoy, especially among commentators with a bias toward ‘realism’ in its various forms” (218). It was noted after the Oscar nominations for 2013 that Martin Scorsese had joined the exclusive club of directors with most nominations for best picture, tying with Mervyn LeRoy, who had received eight over his career. Fuss, Identification Papers, 90. Miriam Bratu Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 6, no. 2 (April 1999): 68. Ibid. Ibid., 71. In The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009), Joseph Litvak discusses the concept of “Jew envy” in relation to the culture of Hollywood: “the cushy life of that pays de concagne that the wits of the right call Hollyweird; or, in the less glamorous but even more degenerate groves of academe, not far, by the way, from the Communist workers’ paradise—work turning into play, sobriety into exhilaration, discipline into delight” (61).

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15 Neil Gabler, An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Anchor, 1989) and Litvak, The Un-Americans. 16 See Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Citing journalist Karl Kitchen, in 1922: “If the Jews who shaped its policies were cultured gentleman of taste and refinement there would be no occasion to find fault with them. But the men who control the motion picture industry are foreign-born Jews of the lowest type” (201). 17 Richard George Burnett, The Devil’s Camera: Menace of a Film-Ridden World (London: Epworth Press, 1932). Burnett would walk the line between a view that validated film as transformative and one that feared it for that very reason: There have been many splendid films; our point is that they are, nevertheless, few in number compared with the vast output. For every production of the moral tone and superlative merit of King of Kings, Ben Hur, or Disraeli there have been scores of sinister exploitations of vice and crime and blasphemy. And even when films of such high accomplishment are shown, more often than not the programme is spoiled by filth and evil suggestion in other pictures. A few of the “stars” have stood out commendably against the evil [sic] which corrupts good morals, but these upholders of a great tradition are in a small minority. Most of the actors and actresses seem ready to go to any length in nakedness and decadence to earn the salaries doled out to them by the little group of mainly Jewish promoters who control the greater part of what is now one of the most skilfully organized industries in the world (11). 18 Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1920–34 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 157. 19 Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor, 201. 20 Frank S. Nugent, “A Boy Grows Up: With ‘They Won’t Forget,’ Mervyn LeRoy,” New York Times, July 18, 1937, online; see also Mervyn LeRoy’s memoir, Take One (London: W.H. Allen, 1974). 21 See also Perin Gurel’s essay on this aspect of LeRoy’s work, “A Natural Little Girl: Reproduction and Naturalism in The Bad Seed as Novel, Play, and Film,” though she focuses on The Bad Seed. In Adaptation, vol. 3, no. 2 (June, 2010): 132–54, online. 22 Rossen, who added an “s” to his last name, was devoted to social and socialist themes. He was blacklisted in 1951, but “named names” at his second appearance before HUAC in 1953, which salvaged his career. 23 LeRoy, Take One, 13. 24 Some might argue that such inversions had to do with the waning of the gangster genre, whose types nevertheless persisted in this new incarnation. 25 “Larvated” is a term set out by William March in The Bad Seed, which, as we shall see, is a biological condition symptomatic of disease and a metamorphic stage of criminality.

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26 Litvak, The Un-Americans, 74. 27 See Chuck Jackson’s, “Little, Violent, White: The Bad Seed and the Matter of Children,” The Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 28, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 64–73. 28 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 188–97. 29 Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996). 30 See Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler 1933–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 311 and 404, note 1. In Doherty’s discussion of the Warner Bros.’ social consciousness films and patriotic shorts, he does not mention Jack Warner’s “patriotic” turn toward the blacklist. LeRoy discusses the blacklist in Take One, quite carefully, it appears. He laments the fear and informing, claims distance and unconcern for himself, since he was not “a political person. I am, however, strongly pro-American and I had come to recognize that some Communist propaganda was creeping into the movies. I felt it was a good thing to root out, but I deplored the excesses that went with the rooting-out process” (LeRoy, Take One, 157–8). 31 LeRoy, Take One, 132. 32 The FBI Story showcases the non-immigrant gangsters of the period, such as Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd. In the treatment of the Ku Klux Klan, a Jewish home is the one scene of destruction shown to illustrate their methods. 33 LeRoy’s attitudes or pronouncements shift radically over the course of Take One, even within a few pages. Only three pages separate disparate attitudes about the aims of his films. After discoursing on entertainment as a primary virtue, he will insist on being proud of a picture not “because of its entertainment value alone, but because of the issues that need airing” (e.g., 15, 18). 34 See Laura Marcus, “Modernism and Visual Culture,” in A Handbook of Modernism Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013): 249. 35 LeRoy, Take One, 93. 36 Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, 154, 155. 37 Ibid., 155; Boaz Hagin, Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Chapter 3. 38 Hagin, Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema, 43. 39 Fuss, Identification Papers, 100. 40 Fuss’s term is the “monster of perversion,” when referring to serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer. This will be further discussed in relation to The Bad Seed. 41 David E. Ruth, Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918–1934 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996): 23. 42 Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, 146. 43 Ibid., 120; Gaylyn Studlar, “A Gunsel is Being Beaten: Gangster Masculinity and the Homoerotics of the Crime Film, 1941–1942”, in Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet, and

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Peter Stanfield, eds., Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005): 124. Homosexuality would be equated with communism, particularly later in a cold war setting—syllogistically, then, again with Jews. See Cindy Hendershot, “The Cold War Horror Film: Taboo and Transgression in The Bad Seed, The Fly, and Psycho,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 29 (2001): 3. Robinson, as will be discussed later, was targeted by HUAC; Lorre, like Robinson, was also targeted (by HUAC). In Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2000), Rachel Rubin does observe the Jewishness of homoeroticism and brings the intersection to the question of form, particularly the representation of speech. Studlar, “A Gunsel is Being Beaten,” 125–7. Giorgio Bertillini, “Black Hands and White Hearts: Southern Italian Immigrants, Crime, and Race in Early American Cinema,” in Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005): 224. Ibid., 229. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 81–90. Ibid., 223 and 210–11. In contradistinction to the caricatural, witty Jew who performed the schlemiel, Marx Brothers, or Charlie Chaplin style, “aping the gentile or playing the parvenu”— Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: a Hidden Tradition,” in The Jewish Writings, eds. Jerome Kohn and Ron H, Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 275–97. One might think of the reversal played out in these very terms by Roberto Benigni in 1995, when the Italian actor plays the “criminal” Jew in fascist Italy in Life is Beautiful; and below, Frank Sinatra will be discussed in terms of such reversal. In Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature, Rachel Rubin argues that the gangster subject provided a way for Jewishness to be explored in the movies: “The Jew is not particularly marked as criminal (a gangster identified explicitly as Jewish did not make an appearance until the 1960s); rather, qualities of the ‘criminal’ are frequently figured through Jewishness (particularly Jewish speech), by Jews” (103). LeRoy, Take One, 98. Later accusations of un-Americaness by HUAC particularly stung Robinson because of his fervent adoption of his new country—Albert Maltz helped him write his defense speech; see below. Robinson’s consciousness about his Jewishness is revealed in his diary. His diaries and other artifacts are part of the collection of the “Motion Picture Actors and Actresses—United States” at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Lombroso, Criminal Man, 78. LeRoy, Take One, 99. Ibid., 94–5. Ibid., 99 (my italics). Lombroso’s description of the physical type of criminals did not generally include smallness—more misshapen and heavy, like Stevenson’s Mr Hyde.

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57 LeRoy discusses this scene and his filmic technique in suggesting rather than displaying violence through the symbolic diamond pin (Take One, 98). 58 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 64, 377, note 18. 59 Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, 147. 60 Gabler argues the very same about Jack Warner, “who imagined himself in rebellion against the niceties and hypocrisy of the establishment, and that’s what he projected in his actors and his films” (An Empire of their Own, 191). 61 LeRoy, Take One, 101. 62 Ibid., 132–3. 63 Ibid., 132. 64 Frank was lynched in Georgia in 1915, following a trial in which he was found guilty and a commuted sentence by the governor. 65 Matthew H. Bernstein, Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and Television (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 72. 66 LeRoy, Take One, 130–1. 67 A softening from the novel: “he’s playing ball . . . and no nigger will do.” Ward Greene, Death in the Deep South: A Novel about Murder (New York: Stackpole Sons, 1936), 32. 68 Bernstein, Screening a Lynching, 96–7. 69 Litvak, The Un-Americans, 103, 99. 70 Steven Ross, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 91. 71 When the townspeople in Fury collect as a mob in the saloon and run out toward the jailhouse, there is a black man listening at the door, and stepping out of the way as they burst out. It’s a signal by Lang, it seems, of the predominant victims of lynching. More recent treatments of Frank include a novel by David Mamet (The Old Religion, 1997) and a play based on a book by Alfred Uhry (Parade, 1998). 72 See Bernstein, Screening a Lynching, 102. 73 Jeffrey Melnick, Black–Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 88. 74 Irving Howe, Ruth Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk (eds), Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (New York: Viking Press, 1987), 208. I think here of “Sketchbook by Art Spiegelman” and his self-indictment via his critique of Benigni’s academy award for Life is Beautiful (New Yorker, March 15, 1999). Benigni is thought to have made the film as payback to the Germans for his father’s arrest during the Second World War, transmogrifying his fascist soldier father, considered “dirty white” by Aryan standards, into a Jewish victim. 75 For a good discussion of how anti-Semitism stood in for all prejudice in the post-war era, in line with the aims of the Popular Front for the production of a “unitary concept of prejudice,” see Art Simon’s essay on LeRoy’s short, “The House I Live In: Albert Maltz and the Fight Against Anti-Semitism,” in Frank Krutnik, Steve

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Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield (eds.), Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 179. Simon does not discuss LeRoy’s role in any respect. In a way, as Joe Litvak would argue, this is a removal of the Jewish or neutralizing of it. Ibid., 170. Philip Roth’s 2004 The Plot Against America is prominent among the instances of a recent renewal of interest in the Frank case. He makes reference to it directly at the conclusion of his novel. Roth brings into view what LeRoy omits, despite arguing throughout his career, through his characters and his essays, and as history has proven, that America is a different place for Jews than was Europe. Also consider his earlier rendering of that other Frank, Anne, in The Ghost Writer, where he addresses the question of her Jewish sanctification. Roth invokes the Leo Frank case in Plot as a warning to the fictional older son about uppity Jews who presume to “draw” gentiles, to assume them in some way, to pass—an authorially self-reflexive moment, one might say. It is unsurprising that Roth goes to the Leo Frank “shrine,” as one critic has put it, to punctuate his fantasy narrative about the all too imaginable—if what the novel is trying to do is remind readers of deep roots of racism, including anti-Semitism in the US. In I Married a Communist, Roth observes that McCarthy “took us back to our origins, back to the seventeenth century and the stocks”; he is talking there about the spectacle of “moral disgrace as public entertainment” (New York: Vintage, 1999: 284). In a review of Plot, Stanley Crouch remarks on the blatant and to his mind scandalous omission of blacks from Roth’s imaginative landscape of a fascist America. He accuses Roth of a kind of Blackface—assuming the role of Black at the price of their exclusion and the distortion of history. While one might concede the point, the argument between Crouch and Roth (or Roth’s novel) rehearses the conflict at the heart of the Frank case, where after all, according to history, the wrong man got lynched. That is, to make the case for the black janitor’s guilt is to cleave toward historical accuracy when it comes to assigning guilt and yet, ostensibly, to exonerate the Jew through the death of the black man. But there is no winning here. Roth’s invocation is then to go to the exception to prove the rule of deep-seated racism, and in doing so to invoke the potential interchangeability in some respects of Blacks and Jews in an American setting, rather than, as Crouch insists, committing an egregious act of historical amnesia. Crouch, “Roth’s historical sin,” Salon, October 12, 2004, https://www.salon.com/2004/10/11/crouch_9/. Simon, “The House I Live In,” 172. See Simon, “The House I Live In,” who recounts Michael Meeropol’s (Abel’s son) reaction of anger at the removal of the verse—182, and note 45 on p. 319. See Litvak, The Un-Americans, 72–4. Paul Buhle and David Wagner, Blacklisted: The Film Lover’s Guide to the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: Palgrave, 2003), referenced in Simon, “The House I Live In,” 179.

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82 William March, The Bad Seed (London: Prion Books, 1999), 29–30. 83 See Jackson, “Little, Violent, White” for a discussion of the PCA’s objection to the potential for copycat crime, as well as the connection of race and violent children in media; and Gurel, “A Natural Little Girl”, for her suggestion that the novel, play, and film be considered together in order to see the shifting premise around heredity. 84 Walter Lippmann, “The Underworld: A Stultified Conscience,” Forum, no. 85 (February 1931): 66, quoted in Ruth, Inventing the Public Enemy, p.18 and note 32. 85 Lombroso, Criminal Man, Edition 2, 111. 86 LeRoy, Take One, 198. 87 B.A. Morel, Traité des Dégénérescences Physiques, Intellectuelles et Morales de l’Espèce Humaine et des Causes qui Produisent ces Variétés Maladives (Paris: Balliere, 1875). 88 Elaine Showalter, “Introduction,” in William March, The Bad Seed (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1997), xi. 89 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 19–20. 90 Gurel, “A Natural Little Girl,” 148. On the use of publicity ad as salacious lure, see also Hendershot, “The Cold War Horror Film”, 20–32. There, too, she queers the sexual dimension of Rhoda’s desirability/undesirability, both recessed and glaring, in terms of a connection between homosexuality and communism. 91 Gurel points to Rhoda’s Nazi-like appearance and also to her encodedness as pop-culture communist dissembler (Gurel, “A Natural Little Girl,” 142). Most recently, Michael Haneke has made the cultural connection between such recessed badness and physiognomic cultural perfection in The White Ribbon (2009). See also Jackson, “Little, Violent, White,” who discusses the anomaly of whiteness the film presents and its relation to events like Columbine, etc. He ponders “the way in which normalized invisible constructions of whiteness affect contemporary cultural constructions of the evil child.” This coincides with Fuss’s arguments about the serial killer genre. 92 Gurel, “A Natural Little Girl,” 148. 93 Bosley Crowther, “Screen: ‘The Bad Seed’; Members of Broadway Cast are Starred,” New York Times, September 13, 1956: 39; Gurel, “A Natural Little Girl,” 149. 94 Lombroso, “Antisemitism and Modern Science,” 14–15. 95 Litvak, The Un-Americans, 50–1; 62. 96 Fuss, Identification Papers, 93. 97 Ibid., 104, note 54. 98 Ibid., 100. 99 Gurel, “A Natural Little Girl,” 147. 100 Jackson, “Little, Violent, White,” 66, 73.

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Fitness Movements: Literary Degeneration and Jewish Muscle in Joyce’s Ulysses and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy

In Max Nordau’s dedication of Degeneration (1892) to Cesare Lombroso, he identifies a difference between them that becomes crucial to any understanding of the impact of their ideas on the development of modernism and renders Nordau’s position of all the figures in this study perhaps the most seamless in this connection. Nordau’s turn to a “domain of art and literature” into which “neither you [Lombroso] nor your disciples have hitherto borne the torch of your method” is exemplary at once of the intersection of science and art in the advent of the “modern” and of a conceptual schism endemic in the period between the scientific method and the “irrational” or mystical impulse, as Nordau termed it. “Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics,” he continues—“they are often authors and artists. These, however, manifest the same mental characteristics, and for the most part the same somatic features, as the members of their above-mentioned anthropological family, who satisfy their unhealthy impulses with the knife of the assassin or the bomb of the dynamiters, instead of pen and pencil.”1 The two works examined in this chapter, as with Mervyn LeRoy’s oeuvre, bookend the twentieth century; but contrary to LeRoy, in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy (1991–5), the Jewish subject occupies a central role, representatively a transformative figure in a changing cultural and aesthetic landscape. They attest to the primacy of Nordau’s collective ideas from different vantage points in the century. Treating these works in reverse chronological order of their writing has the advantage of tracking Nordau’s career from a focus on degeneration to one on Zionism within the literature. Further, Joyce has Ulysses, set in 1904, mark and anticipate the war period, which comes into view for Barker only at the end of the century. Tracking back from the 1990s, Barker records the beginnings of a seismic historical and 109

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aesthetic shift at the fin de siècle as the twentieth century approaches a new millennium; Joyce exemplifies the shift, while only anticipating the storm. Together, they illustrate the way in which Nordau’s influential theories instantiate physical taxonomies of degeneration, in both works configured importantly by Jew-ish characters, which were then translated into aesthetic forms associated with modernism/modernity. Barker’s trilogy title seems more than serendipity. The three novels that comprise the trilogy—Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road—are bound together by three major characters—the poet Siegfried Sassoon, the fictional working-class soldier Billy Prior, and the famous anthropologist Dr. W.H.R. Rivers—and each novel may be assigned primarily to one of these, respectively. It is one of Barker’s formal innovations to mix historical and fictional characters. One might contest the contention of centrality of the Jew-ish Siegfried Sassoon over that of Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, just as Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus vied for the major position in early discussions of Ulysses. But I argue that Sassoon is the character of centripetal force throughout and an ingenious choice for Barker in her epic redress of the First World War’s iconic value for assessments of the modern, through questions about literary representation and human value. Barker is certainly interested in memory, but I do not think she is setting the record straight. If anything, she is queering memory in line with an evolution of literary practice, then and now—in 1914– 18 and 1991–5—with the emergence and the reassessments of modernism, respectively. Her re-vision coincides with the critical address to British empirism and postcolonialism, masculinity studies, canonicity, and with memory itself, redolent of the march toward a millennial turn, with its backward glance, and resonant of Nordau’s retrovision. This glance is often produced as nostalgia, which, while not Barker’s mode, is certainly characteristic of such viewing. Some, like Blake Morrison, have critiqued the “predictability” of Barker’s themes, as those characteristic of the 1990s (gender based). By harnessing what are in fact the themes of the fin de siècle, and incorporating the Jewish aspect, the novels, in Sharon Ouditt’s assessment, “draw out a combination of the very familiar with the barely documented.”2 I suppose Ulysses is now an obvious choice for an early representative of modernist work that has a Jewish figure at its core. I argue that it is exemplary and, further, reflects on Barker’s choice, among others. Nordau becomes particularly relevant in the parallels Ulysses establishes between its deracinated Jew and Irishman; and in the would-be remedies for their condition, in its consideration of Zionism in analogue with Fenianism (anachronistically in 1904) as national liberation movements. Homecomings are literarily as well as

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historically vexed. Also importantly, like Barker’s trilogy, Ulysses does something unexpected with the figure of the Jew, which redounds upon the term of hero or artist. Bloom is, to borrow from Hannah Arendt, a pariah as a human type: a schlemiel, political rebel, the suspect and the man of good will. Like Regeneration, too, Ulysses reads back and forward, famously through a nightmare of history from which the novel as much as any character is trying to awake. And it was and continues to be the subject of much consternation and debate, lauded and settled as great, and resisted as destructive to literature itself.3 This chapter foregrounds the trope of fitness, which neatly conjoins the scientific and literary preoccupations of this historical moment, reflected in Nordau’s own. One might say “fitness” encapsulates the theories of degeneration, to the extent it was promoted as antidote, and overwrites modernism, as with the play on “bad” and “good” modernisms. The idea of fitness—health, propriety, belonging—is key specifically to both Barker’s and Joyce’s novels. The widespread fitness regimes so popular in the first part of the twentieth century, in which Nordau was notably involved, were emblematic of a rage (both fashion and mania) about physical, mental, national, and artistic health. The conjunction of soldiers, athletes, and dubious literary heroes are conflated in these terms, all symbols of either a dying or a revitalized national body, reflected in a misshapen body of literature. The concept of manliness but, more specifically, bodybuilding, would be applicable to the nation as much as to a canon of worthy works.4 Nordau’s contribution becomes critical, as does an understanding of the reflexive continuity between his seemingly disparate positions on these matters. The idea of fitness as integrally literary is, however paradoxically, a modernist maxim. Paradoxical in the sense that the fitness or mettle of a work might be tested/demanded while the tenets of the movement dictated fits and breaks of all kinds.5 The observation that Nordau’s work “became de rigeur for both critics and defenders of literary modernism,” is punningly apt.6 The chapter has been divided into three sections—“Nordau’s Degeneration Splits,”“Pat Barker and Regeneration,” and “Generation and James Joyce’s Ulysses.” The first outlines in specific instances Nordau’s theories from the periods of Degeneration and the Zionist tracts, demonstrating the interplay between them, and establishing that interplay as a critical framework for the discussions that follow on Barker and Joyce. In the case of the Regeneration Trilogy, the focus falls more on the impact of Nordau’s early theories about art; in Ulysses, the focus is on the idea of modernist conclusions or remedies and therefore on Nordau’s later career with respect to Zionist trajectories. But they are also dialogical in

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these terms and consequentially on the subject of Jew-ish degeneration. The chapter departs from the others in its breadth, owing to the bifurcation in Nordau’s career and to the effects produced by it.

Nordau’s Degeneration Splits Nordau’s main targets in Degeneration were the Decadents, attacked as diseased in form, and content, and person, among these chiefly Ibsen, Zola, Nietzsche, and Wagner; Wagner would eventually become the symbol of a social order that Nordau initially accused him of threatening, but he was, for Nordau, an enemy nonetheless as a virulent anti-Semite. Nordau takes up as his best English example Oscar Wilde, under the category of “Ego-mania” and psychoanalyzes: “what really determines his actions is the hysterical craving to be noticed, to occupy the attention of the work with himself, to get talked about.” The English translation of Degeneration came out during the Wilde trials; Stephen Arata observes how it was touted while Wilde burned.7 Nordau regards any nonconformity as anti-sociality, even monstrosity. In this sense, he equated Wilde’s sexual liberality with artistic license. The word “philistine” recurs abundantly in Nordau’s mockery of the “aesthete’s” construction of the bewildered or resistant public—ironically, his mockery as a form of resistance marks Nordau as the would-be philistine. Nordau also turns to the question of aesthetics or art for art’s sake, to insist that Wilde’s being and therefore his art do not derive from a “strong desire for beauty, but from a malevolent mania for contradiction.”8 This charge again is comically reflexive, given Nordau’s penchant for the same “mania,” and also telling in terms of the splits that occurred in this period between aesthetic experience and formalism, i.e., that traditional notions of beauty were eschewed in favor of structural integrity. Further, Nordau ridicules Wilde’s assertion of life imitating art (“The Decay of Lying,” 1891) by contextualizing his aesthetics in scientific terms, rendering Wilde’s propositions as “artistic mysticism”: “He [Wilde] asserts [sic] that painters have changed the climate, that for the last ten years there have been fogs in London, because the Impressionists have painted fogs—a statement so silly as to require no refutation.” (Nordau determines from this same example that Wilde’s art, egomaniacal and therefore morally bankrupt, stands in for all the Decadents: “that is to avoid, and be diametrically opposed to, the natural and the true.”9 In other words, the “unnatural” is the major factor in what amounts to Nordau’s aesthetic Darwinism and “style was the primary vehicle for the spread of degenerative practices.”10

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It’s a two-way street—bad character makes for bad art and bad art is a cultural contagion. Nordau’s idea of artistic avantism seems counterintuitive, involving an odd mixture of Lukácsian realism and Wildean aestheticism. In his own emphatic prescriptions, he ironically thereby denounces moralism or didacticism in favor of his idea of an objective realism; for example, he applauds Harriet Beecher Stowe, “who did not preach against slavery, nor risk projects in favour of its suppression” (the very issues that have been at the center of furious debate in Stowe’s work).11 Nordau highlights the question of the meaning of Realism itself in this period, which was liberally applied in many directions. His main target on this matter is Ibsen, who still is a case in point regarding the nature of his dramatic method, as to whether it is symbolic rather than naturalistic. The science of the day consistently re-insinuates itself in descriptions of Realism as “true to nature,” which was congenial to Nordau. The link that Nordau makes between the modern and degeneracy is an instructive inversion for the consideration of certain modernist aims as “rearguard.” Picking up on Wyndham Lewis’s idea, Martin Puchner, making Lewis and even Pound his prime examples, defines rear-guardism as “seeming to correct and contain the avant-garde’s excess without falling behind and losing touch with it entirely.”12 Nordau becomes caught in the double bind of wishing to project beyond a diseased image, identified by him in the “egomaniacal” likes of writers such as Wilde, Nietzsche, and Ibsen, and yet uphold himself as an isolated (even persecuted) hero, a superman, or enemy of the people (The Malady of the Century—Die Krankheit des Jahrhunderts, 1887): in fact, as a kind of modernist hero. Further, his later claim that the increase in anti-Semitism derived from moral degeneration would backfire, and accrue to the work itself in that degenerate art would become Jewish art. The rear-guard “engages in endless and often disoriented back and forth, sideways maneuvers and feints, and often breaks off from the main corps to find itself alone and surrounded by enemies everywhere.” Nordau’s impulse to look back to writing of traditional values, against the modernist assault becomes in these terms a “defensive formation that places itself in the field of advancement.”13 Rear-guardism accommodates the contradictions that would enable Nordau, ironically in terms of both Lewis’s and Nordau’s projects, to become modern while remaining Jewish. In The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense About Artists Being Degenerate (1908), George Bernard Shaw characterizes Nordau’s assertions as not only inaccurate but hysterical, one of the typifying qualities Nordau claims for the degenerates, which is also part of the discourse of anti-Semitism; hysteria

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is the symptom of the “Jewish” diseases such as neurasthenia (that certainly Freud and perhaps here Nordau, too, however unconsciously, dissociate from as Jews).14 Shaw describes Nordau as “one of those remarkable cosmopolitan Jews who go forth against modern civilization as David went against the Philistines,” a description Nordau would later contest in print as anti-Semitic.15 Shaw is of course tweaking both the idea of philistinism as common parlance in the period for middle-class vacuity and Nordau’s incessant use of the term to suggest dilettantism. Shaw’s barb interestingly casts Jewish cosmopolitanism as antiModern, inverting the terms seemingly as a paean to Nordau’s illogic, just as he inverts his own title (from A Degenerate’s View of Max Nordau), to eliminate the stigma of “degenerationism” from his ideas.16 Nordau did situate the proletariat or the peasant as natural against the modern, in keeping with the nativism movement in the period; this situation is mocked here by Shaw in his equation of philistine with modern and in his belief, contrary to Marxist teaching, that the proletariat was conservative, not a radical force.17 Shaw would have us read Nordau in this as pretentious, petit bourgeois, self-righteous, and defensive and renders him inescapably Jewish, despite Nordau’s wish to extract himself from the primitivity, the philistinism of religion (and despite what might seem a socialist complementarity between Shaw and Nordau). In hindsight, Shaw’s critical formulation invoking David and Goliath seems prescient when one considers the figure of David as the iconic underdog defender of the Jews (we shall come to the figure of David in Barker). Shaw’s casting and Nordau’s response are particularly ironic in light of Nordau’s imminent Zionist profile, if nationalism is viewed (as it was by many, Jews alike) as a bulwark against modernity or cosmopolitanism. Nationhood or nationalism in Shaw’s mocking formulation, is, after all, in keeping with the geopolitics of that historical moment, definitively modern. However much Shaw might seem to have retreated from his attack by later praising Nordau for his conviction and passionate expression, and then half-heartedly apologizing, his comparison of Nordau’s critical abilities to that of Gulliver’s nautical skill seems most illustrative of his assessment of Nordau as madly misguided. In fact, Shaw argued Nordau was a dupe of his own logic in that he condemns what he at once practices. He brings, as one playful example, the way in which the “stigmata of degeneration” that Nordau critically doles out are present in all humans. Shaw lights particularly on Nordau’s condemnation of the “empty” rhyming habits of certain poets (Baudelaire is Nordau’s main target), and mocks Nordau by suggesting that he himself suffers from this “echolalia,” in his repetitive insistence on degenerative traits: “why should I not ask Max Nordau himself to

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step before the looking-glass and tell us frankly whether, even in the ranks of “psychiatrists” and lunacy doctors, he can pick out a crank more hopelessly obsessed with one idea than himself?”18 With characteristic mordancy, Shaw claims he could prove Nordau to be an “elephant on more evidence than he has brought to prove that our greatest men are lunatics,” implying an elephantine ego at work, but also alluding to the physiognomical taxonomies that underlie Nordau’s cultural formations.19 Echolalia, which is identified as a speech disorder, as well as a rhetorical device, is pertinent to both Barker and Joyce, as it relates to traumatic stammering, an irregular, non-metronomic poetics, and an echoing device. The imitative dimension bespeaks a deviation from originality, and an incapacity of mind (presenting as another form of vernacular modernism). “Degenerates lisp and stammer, instead of speaking,” writes Nordau.20 These interwoven elements of the unfit body and text dovetail nicely with Nordau’s indictment of categorical instability. Shaw tellingly brings as his own example of echolalia in literature that of Mr. Jaggers’ Jewish client in Great Expectations, of all things, as if to make the tacit connection between him and the Jewish Nordau in an overdetermined indictment of his Jew-ish ideas.21 In work written after “Muscular Judaism,” Von Kunst und Kunstlern (1905) (On Art and Artists), mostly a diatribe against the “decadent” construct of “art for art’s sake,” Nordau examines the New Sculpture Movement through Rodin’s artistic method and berates him for “invent[ing] muscles which do not exist, and never did exist.”22 George Mosse cites this observation as an example of Nordau’s critique of excessive imagination and Rodin’s flouting thereby of the empirical. Certainly this and other observations in Nordau’s chapter on “Auguste Rodin” represent yet more examples of a reflexive contradictory logic, particularly pronounced in this critique of Rodin’s method. Nordau articulates “discomfort” with the very revelation of the body (despite his insistence on such material proofs and means of quality or success), which points to, as we see in Barker and Joyce and throughout modernist expression, an idealization of the body in contest with its baser functions. In Nordau’s terms,“No American or Scandinavian who wants to frighten the Philistines with ‘modernism’ neglects to exhibit a piece of, for the most part, wretched sculpture as tiny as possible on the clump of unworked rock as Cylopean as possible”23 (a resonant reference for Joyce, as we shall see). Nordau continues: “The Thinker” excites in a spectator of uninitiated taste [here the Philistines, in yet another Nordauean iteration], not cheerfulness, but discomfort, which may give rise to loathing. “The Thinker” is not only naked, but also flayed. Its anatomy is executed with obtrusive importance, without the covering epidermis with its

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vital warmth. The enormous exaggeration of the muscles, the impossible assertion of strength which is expressed by the extreme contraction of all the muscles, therefore also of the counteracting muscles, are well-known features of sculpture in its worst period of decline.

If we compare this address to his construction of muscle in “Muscle Jewry” (“Muskeljudentum”), we see a similar uneasiness or at least some confusion about the place or the meaning of the new Jew, or “Jewish muscle.” On the one hand, Nordau places the historical rejection of body or bodily dissociation firmly in the Christian camp, by citing corporal mortification as a Christian virtue. He rather ironically suggests that Jews were also engaged in such bodily mortification, “or rather, to put it more precisely—others did the killing of our flesh for us . . . We would have preferred to develop our bodies rather than to kill them or to have them—figuratively and actually—killed by others.”24 In the next breath, however, he seems to rationalize a rejection or disavowal of the body—“if, unlike most other peoples, we do not conceive of [physical] life as our highest possession, it is nevertheless very valuable to us and thus worthy of careful treatment.” He argues that an appreciation of the bodily was an ancient and now suppressed value among Jews: Our new muscle-Jews have not yet regained the heroism of our forefathers who in large numbers eagerly entered the sports arenas in order to take part in competition and pit themselves against the highly trained Hellenistic athletes and the powerful Nordic barbarians. But morally now the new muscle-Jews surpass their ancestors, for the ancient Jewish gladiators were ashamed of their Judaism and tried to conceal the sign of the covenant by means of a surgical operation.

Nordau here makes a quick turn to another sense of the “Jewish muscle” as the circumcised penis, the covenantal metonymy of “their Judaism,” which historically has come to represent a lack, conflating the loss of virility or personhood with Jewish heresy. In Nordau’s recuperative gesture, we have an example of an inversion of the inversion (if sexual inversion, i.e., effeminate homosexuality, might be signaled by a lack of muscularity, sexual and otherwise), wherein the circumcised penis is the pure and healthy muscle, no longer a signifier of disease.25 In the critical assessments of Nordau’s foundational Zionist ideas, Daniel Boyarin has written about the historical basis for this confusion about the Jewish body, in his Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man.26 In Chapter 2, “Goyim Nachez, or Modernity and the Manliness

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of the Mentsch,” Boyarin explains how the wishful image of martial knightliness for Jews is cast as the wicked son in the Passover Haggadah (narrative) as against the scroll or book-toting scholar who iconically comes to represent the righteous son. In other words, the muscle Jew and the learned Jew are pitted against one another in a foundational liturgical text. It is also important to note in Boyarin’s analysis that antique Christian and Jewish males exchange places within this paradoxical spectrum of masculinity, religion defining itself against imperial power. There arises a double edge of toughness: the demand that Jews be gentle to prove their ethical superiority over aggressive, savage gentiles, then redounded upon them as cowardice—right up to the image of Jews as lambs led to slaughter in the Holocaust, and then to the current ignominy of the Israeli soldier, which doubly inverts the image (looking forward to Adi Nes’s work in the next chapter).27 It is useful to see Nordau’s turn toward bodily fitness as part of a larger transnational movement of physical culture that arose coincident with and in response to degeneration theory. George Mosse describes a contradictory premise of the culture: “manliness was supposed to safeguard the existing order against the perils of modernity, but it was also regarded as an indispensable attribute of those who wanted to change.”28 Though physical fitness movements as in youth groups, etc. may often be associated with the rise of fascism, they drew on the already existent culture which began in the late nineteenth century; these movements were especially in evidence during and in the immediate aftermath of the First World War as a way of cementing the link between manliness, physical fitness, and patriotism, in order to regenerate the depleted nation. Physical culture also bolstered nascent nationalist movements, such as Zionism or the Gaelic Athletic League in Ireland, whose mettle would be proven through such links, forestalling or rewriting the raced and sexed taxonomies of the degenerate body. In the early twentieth century, famous strongmen often represented such “degenerate bodies”, such as Italian-American Charles Atlas, Apollo, the Scottish Hercules, and Prussian/Belgian Eugen Sandow, purportedly of Jewish background. Sandow had great international renown, was on Joyce’s radar and appears in Ulysses, to be later discussed in this chapter. Sandow has sometimes been identified as a trace to the connection between gay and physical culture. The lore renders him both Jewish and queer. Nordau taps into this historical paradox of moral vs. physical rectitude; on the one hand, he wants to defend the Jewish body by privileging the Jewish brain—the rational—but on the other, he wishes to establish a tradition of bodily strength and beauty, Nordic and Greek more than biblical. In other words, he

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acts like his own version of Rodin, amplifying the body, putting muscles where they perhaps do not and never did exist, just as, conversely, he wishes new muscle Jews to demonstrate moral mettle by showing what has been or is historically/ stereotypically seen as the sign of their lack—their circumcised penises. As he insists, euphemistically, it would seem, “The Zionist regards it as contemptible to conceal his nationality.”29 He wishes theoretically and performatively to undo what historically or physically cannot be repaired—re-turning the foreskin and returning to the “promised land.” The question is, of course, whether these moves are compatible. After all, the circumcised penis was the demarcator of unmanliness or effeminacy. When Nordau refers to the prototype of ancient Jewish athletes as Zirkuskämpfer (gladiators), he seems to refer to this spectacle, and reveal his anxiety about the freak status circumcision confers upon “the Jew” or the Jewish male body, which the German word for gladiator emits (literally, circus warriors). Furthermore, Nordau’s definition of civilization is unrealizable in these terms, or at least paradoxical, since arguably restraint (or gentlemanliness) and manliness are mutually exclusive, as the British, of particular relevance in what follows, would so amply demonstrate.30

Pat Barker and Regeneration This body–mind split, key to Nordau’s bifurcated figures, Boyarin’s analysis of them, and Rodin’s radical figures, is dramatized by the novels herein examined, and pervasive throughout modernism, as constitutive of its aesthetics. Robert Graves in Regeneration berates Sassoon for “bad form” in articulating his objection to the war: “not behaving like a gentleman—that’s the worst thing they can say about anybody.” Sassoon replies by equating rhetorical and muscular restraint: “as for ‘bad form’ and ‘gentlemanly behavior’—that’s just suicidal stupidity.”31 “Bad form,” is, of course a double entendre here for Sassoon’s writing. And just after this exchange, Robert Graves demurs on the question of his own sexual orientation, returning us to the spectacle of sexual difference, now in accordance with the new science, marked bodily. But I will come to more of that later. Split perceptions of Sassoon as bloodthirsty soldier and sensitive poet are wrestling for compatibility in him and they are emblematic of a schism that pervades the trilogy. We may be reminded of Sassoon’s “The Kiss” (1918) (which invokes Rodin’s (1882–7), perhaps), whose spectacle of the homoerotic needs be

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transmuted into violence, mirroring the apotheosis of Nordau’s revulsion of one kind of muscle into an idealization of another.32 To these I turn, in these I trust— Brother Lead and Sister Steel. To his blind power I make appeal, I guard her beauty clean from rust. He spins and burns and loves the air, And splits a skull to win my praise; But up the nobly marching days She glitters naked, cold and fair. Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this: That in good fury he may feel The body where he sets his heel Quail from your downward darting kiss. (Copyright Siegfried Sassoon by kind permission of the Estate of George Sassoon)

Degeneration’s final chapter is called “The Twentieth Century” and begins: “Our long and sorrowful wandering through the hospital . . .—is ended.” Our “Zeitkrankheit.”33 Nordau suggests in conclusion that there is a salutary, “fit” modernity—it need not be abandoned to or determined by the degenerates— and that his work presents the necessary “therapeutics,” which is the subheading of the second part of this last chapter. Nordau’s language reminds us of his medical background and his penchant for pathologization is often expressed in psychiatric terms. These ideas of wandering through the hospital, which entail literary prevarication, and the metaphor of Jewish wandering or the wandering Jew per se, are resonant for a discussion of Barker’s trilogy, in particular the first novel, Regeneration, mostly set in Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland during the period of the First World War. Its featured historical residents are Sassoon, Graves, and Wilfred Owen. The neurologist W.H.R. Rivers was a pioneer in trauma therapy and worked at Craiglockhart during the period of the war to aid soldiers with neurasthenia, the psychiatric term for shell shock, or what was called a “wandering mind.” In the second novel of the Regeneration trilogy (1991–5), The Eye in the Door, dedicated to the intersections between decadent and pacifist movements during the period of the Great War, Barker employs Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to dramatize the early twentieth-century vanguard psychoanalytic concept of the split self, which in the context of all three novels is

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at play in myriad ways. The inner/outer states that incarnate into the monster and the stable self were familiar from the literary doppelgänger prevalent in the period, but these were reshaded in light of the new science: “where unknown,” says Rivers, when looking at medieval maps, “there place monsters” (350).34 Barker holds up these split states against the ethos produced by the First World War in ways that invoke Nordau. She writes about the trilogy: “All the major ideas of war, wounds, impeded communication and silence . . . all became entwined in my mind with masculinity.”35 Nordau is particularly present in the intersection between literary and physical degeneration, reflected in what has come to be understood as the symbolic nature of loss in the Great War in terms of national and political muscle. Treason is a major theme—political, sexual, and literary—and many of the major events of the period are logged: Pemberton Billing (his “Black Book” naming names is resonant with Roger Casement’s “Black Diary”); Maud Allan with the cult of the clitoris; and the Wilde trials. Though ostensibly worlds apart, the three major characters that bind together the novels—Rivers, Sassoon, and the fictional Billy Prior—are doubled by their divided, bisexual, stuttering, displaced selves. And though, as I have already suggested, one might assign each character to one novel centrally, the themes and figures recur and combine, to suggest that the first, set in the hospital, is focused on the poetry and psychoanalysis; the second, set in the city of London, on the literary and social movements; and the third, taking place in the last part in Melanesia, on anthropology in its search to align and reconcile with modern psychology in the period. Prolific though Barker has been, one might say that the Regeneration trilogy is the most successful novel of her career, if only for being the most widely read. In a Guardian survey of the ten best historical novels of all time, it was voted number ten, with Tolstoy’s War and Peace coming in first.36 Barker’s early fiction is focused on modern Britain, often in the north and on working-class women. Criticized for the narrowness of that focus, she produced the trilogy, which, though ostensibly about male culture, brings the gender concerns of her early novels into mirroring relation with the war ethos of heroism. Generically, she is considered a historical realist, “quite happily unencumbered by postmodernist prejudices.”37 Yet, the radical potential of formal experiment is mapped out, both in the poetics of Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and in the clinical approaches to psychic repair of Rivers and others. Regeneration’s multifocal narrative dramatizes the exchange between the historical and fictional, and the literary and scientific, which mirrors the dynamics of transgenerational trauma. Conceived as such, the latter is one of several anachronisms that explode in the novels. In another anachronism, Barker

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challenges the recovery process of conventional historical fiction in seeking, unlike Rivers, to reclaim the men from the war in a way that is modeled after late twentieth-century ideas of medical ethics.38 One of the major questions of Regeneration turns on the matter of degeneration: whether the mental breakdown of soldiers was owing to their innate weakness or to the war itself. The hypocrisy at the heart of the psychiatrist’s therapeutic process, then, derives from the analysis of the trauma. On the one hand, degeneracy is irremediable; yet, if the war is to blame, the imperative to rehabilitate men to return them to it, ostensibly to prove their mettle as a cover for political necessity, is both paradoxical and unethical.39 Rivers at one point observes that the instability of inner division is perhaps the normal state, and that trying to balance or eradicate “a darker side,” an aim that might be seen as medical in Craiglockhart, cynically convenient for the war effort, was in fact counterproductive, or even productive of madness.40 Rivers actively employs the doubleness in the Freudian theory of repression, wherein the soldier’s talking cure is used to create a vacancy;41 the monster must be rehabilitated, mirrored in the irreconcilability of wishing both to reveal and protect the self.42 But in the same way that the talking cure is productive of a contradictory or counterindicated therapy, literary utterance, which the doctor feels ill-suited to address, resists such rehabilitation. Though Barker may highlight the shift in this period into psychoanalytic reading, the novel is not committed to an idea of poetry as therapy. Barker is not shy of proclaiming the novelist the “place to go when you want perception, not the psychiatrist,”43 redoubling the sentiment by putting that statement in the mouth of the novelist wife of Rivers’ research partner, Ruth Head.44 In an exchange between Rivers and Sassoon regarding the convalescent soldiers who remain unfit to return to the front, Sassoon bridles at the suggestion that he might be in their company, described as “degenerates, loonies, leadswingers [i.e., slackers], cowards.”45 This idea of bodily fitness as a double entendre for manly and artistic capacity that is central to Barker’s trilogy becomes a double bind for Sassoon, since he is saved from court martial for his declaration against the war (which appears on the first page of Regeneration) by Robert Graves, who declares him to be suffering from war shock, i.e., mental disorder. (Rivers will consider both Sassoon’s poetry and the declaration as therapeutic.) Though “lead swinger” seems to be slang for someone who heaves rather than lands the instrument, it also conjures the image of the writer with his lead pencil, whose efforts may appear just as wasteful in the context of the war (unless they contribute to its glorification, as in the case of Rupert Brooke).

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I will be focusing on Regeneration in my discussion because of Sassoon’s dominant role there. Sassoon’s poetry, along with that of Wilfred Owen, becomes part of the texture of Regeneration, and, through the processes of poetic revision that are explored on the page, complements and overwrites the biological idea of experiment and recovery presented by the novel. His poetry’s increasingly radical nature makes Sassoon just as suspect, politically, mentally, and bodily, as his anti-war screed. John Middleton Murray wrote of Sassoon’s poetry that “it had a lack of finished artistry.”46 The term “finished” is telling in its double meaning of aesthetic and sexual capacity, invoking Freud’s telos of sexual normalcy. As a “mixed middling” (to borrow from Joyce)47—whose father was of Sephardic Jewish background, and mother an English Protestant from a distinguished family of artists—Siegfried Sassoon cuts a confusing and disturbing figure, right down to his name: he tells Wilfred Owen in the novel that he was named Siegfried because his mother liked Wagner.48 This revelation, with the hindsight of the Second World War that Barker’s novel has firmly in view, emerges as particularly ironic. One of the self-conscious ironies of the novel is that, despite or maybe because of its setting in a psychiatric context/hospital, the modus vivendi of the men within it and even the narrative that governs them is denial— denial most emphatically of what Sassoon represents and of the homosociality and homosexuality of this world (there are discussions of Edward Carpenter, Pemberton Billing, Robert Ross, etc.). A case in point is Sassoon’s 1918 “Repression of War Experience,” which is the title, too, of Rivers’ famous essay on that topic. In Barker’s trilogy, while Sassoon embodies the themes of degeneracy and treason, yet his body itself would seem to belie these. In Regeneration, he is described by the establishment members of the board judging his fitness to return to the front as having a physique you rarely see “even in the so-called upper classes,” which is then quickly assessed or maybe dismissed as the product of “hybrid vigour.” “Vigour” was a term used often to both characterize or even euphemize excess, and to describe a needed quality for the regeneration of the race, a kind of positive atavism.49 When Sassoon is discussed in these terms, Rivers thinks “they were back to eugenics again”;50 Barker clearly places these ideas firmly in their historical context of degeneration theories.51 This image of the vigorous Sassoon would counter that conjured by his declaration of conscientious objection to the war, tantamount to a declaration of his unmanliness which is fortified by the “hint” throughout the novel of his homosexuality. It is confirmed only by omission of admission, as it were, such as in Graves’ demurral on the subject of his own homosexuality or through a necessary rhetorical crypticality. In a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” moment, Sassoon tells Rivers that “my intimate details

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would disqualify me from military duty,” to which Rivers responds, “I know.”52 There is pleasure in or fear of Sassoon’s excess display of muscle, which, as in the case of Rodin’s sculpture for Nordau, and like Nordau’s later prescription of Jewish display of the circumcised penis, may signify a lack or deviance in its hypermasculinity. His body, then, is a source of his treason, and that which betrays him (Sassoon seems not to have been circumcised, but baptized).As a consideration of Sassoon’s poetry on the pages of the novel reveals, what the body of the poet may belie is reflected in the aesthetic object. Not much is made of Sassoon’s Jewishness in the novel by Barker or her critics; nor it seems within Sassoon’s immediate family. His father was excommunicated by the family on his side for marrying outside the faith. Nevertheless, the fact of it is established within the novel through Sassoon’s reference to it, even if cryptically, in the same way his homosexuality is treated. In fact, they are placed in tandem. His first mention of being Jewish is in a session with Rivers, where the Freudian narrative is rehearsed of errant fathers and parricidal impulses. Sassoon reveals that his father left when he was five years old and died when he was eight. When asked if he remembers him, he says he does “a bit. I remember I liked being kissed by him because his moustache tickled.” His brothers went to the funeral and came back “terrified. It was a Jewish funeral, you see, and they couldn’t understand what was going on. My elder brother said it was two old men in funny hats walking up and down saying jabber-jabber-jabber.”53 Sassoon’s memory of his father is endearing and is meant to be telling about his sexuality (calling up that other poetic kiss); the point of the funeral anecdote, more than to reveal the background, is to expose the necessity for making his Jewishness and that memory illegible. The description of the Hebrew as “jabber” invokes Lewis Carroll’s illegibility, too, and the way, in that case, sexuality was overwritten by the new nonsense language. But it also recalls the trope of stammer, so central to the novel, an incapacity for speech that does not affect Sassoon physiologically but touches him otherwise, as in the case of his hypervirulence, where the display of speech becomes recoded as first, excessive, dangerous and then nonsense. Speaking badly or improperly, of course, is a degenerative trait—as Lombroso claimed and as Shaw seems to be signaling when remembering Dickens’ echolalic subject. Carroll, as explored in the novel, is Rivers’ alter ego and father figure, having been treated for stammering by Rivers’ own father, a condition from which Rivers, ironically, also suffered; Carroll’s forbidden but articulated sexuality arguably stands in for Rivers’. Toward the end of one of their early conversations, Sassoon observes the split in his own background and training as

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having produced in him “three different people, and they all wanted to go different ways.” But when questioned by Rivers about the third, Sassoon can identify only two—the idle aristocrat and the committed poet—these perhaps representing the mother in the first instance and the father in the second, whose status is romantic in the sense that all his wealth and cultural sophistication would never admit him entirely to the English upper classes. It seems Sassoon has left out his sexual direction, for which the Jewish becomes a metonymy. Or, put in another way, the habit of omission moves easily from one subject to the other. The other more direct address to Sassoon’s Jewishness comes toward the end of the novel in a scene with Wilfred Owen, not long before Sassoon will appear before the tribunal. Sassoon reveals himself as Jewish to Owen when showing him a dedication written to him by the minor poet Aylmer Strong: “Siegfried, thy fathers warr’d / With many a kestrel mimicking the dove.” When Owen questions its meaning, Sassoon responds defensively: “What a philistine question. I hope this isn’t the future pig-keeper speaking. I believe it’s a reference to the persecution of the Jews.” Sassoon’s response recalls the prevalence of the use of the term “philistine” in this period as in Nordau and Shaw’s inverted barb about Jews and Philistines, and the values assigned this term and its binary; but the particular offense to Sassoon comes in the form of double entendre, going both to Owen’s own more humble background, while signaling the tacit affront to Jews through a reference to the “non-kosher” occupation of “pig-keeping,” which Owen has stated as a goal. By the end of this exchange, Owen, who has been struggling to absorb the information, struggles similarly with his feelings for Sassoon, as though in a displacement from one to the other. He chides Sassoon for being cryptic—in fact, Sassoon’s inscription of the Strong book for Owens is jabberwocky for sexual suggestion: “When Captain Cook first sniffed the wattle, / And Love columbus’d Aristotle” (referring to Aristotle’s masterpiece)—complaining, “the only slightly demonstrative thing you’ve ever done and you do it in a way that makes it impossible to take it seriously.”54 Yet, this matches his own giddy fear of evincing his serious affection for Sassoon. The revelation of Sassoon’s Jewishness seems to level the ground between them; literally, in this case, to put them on the same page. Barker has Sassoon acknowledge the split in his sensibilities between the soldier and the poet through the poetry (the dulling and feeling of the protopathic and epicritic, the terms of Rivers’ scientific experiment on the nerves that I shall come to later). The “new artist,” by implication in Barker’s novel, may be seen to derive from this combination of homosexuality and Jewishness, in line with

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Nordau’s prescription for the “new Jew” or new man, ironically a product of the merger between degeneration and Zionism. Sassoon’s poems are presented early in the novel, though the realization of what they signal evolves along with the process of poetic revision that occurs throughout, reflected, too, in Barker’s own method and aim in revisiting the past. The internal debate within the poems over the question of affect and import has been a matter of general discussion about Sassoon’s work, to determine his modernist roots. Tonal dissonance and imagistic harshness are prominent, prompting the view that, as Pericles Lewis has suggested, the poetry constitutes a “modernist rejection of conventional poetic diction.”55 Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, as Barker shows, Sassoon refuses to make poetry a refuge; what she dramatizes as his commitment to and honor of his troops is registered poetically in his perception of the savagery of war. At the same time, this was not a rejection of aesthetics in favor of the anti-war political poem; Sassoon seeks to make the aesthetic “fit” the topic, in contrast with Owen, who initially thinks that poetry should be the “opposite of ugliness” (the aesthetic experience/formalism split).56 These debates around the new aesthetics, however, importantly circle back to the biographical fitness of the author. As in Wilde’s Dorian Gray, the ugliness in the aesthetic object is a reflection of the body that belies it, and as much a projection from without as from within. The critical reception of Sassoon’s physical beauty and his poetry were punctuated by his “flaw.” His wish to return to the front, with the likelihood that he will die, even if it doubles with his honorable stand, is hard to understand, except, like Dorian, in terms of his discomfort in his body. The first Sassoon poem Rivers takes out of an envelope conveyed to him by Robert Graves is “Rear-Guard,” as yet untitled and in draft mode. The other two in the packet are titled, signaling, it would seem, that they are completed—“The General” and “To the Warmongers.”57 The first is perhaps the hardest to register or complete, involving a characterization of the soldiers who are dead by virtue of performing their duty to protect, whereas in the others, the guilty subject is clear. There is no check on the condemnation. Without the title, the poem begins with the word “groping,” which Barker reproduces in Rivers’ search for his blameworthy object of desire, linking Rivers to his own repression of war and sexual experience, and to his gradual realization of his culpability.58 The title that eventually emerges outwith the temporal confines of the novels suggests the soldiers’ position as finally antithetical to both the formal and political imperatives of their historical moment, reflected in the avant-garde of an aesthetic revolution.

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The Rear-Guard Groping along the tunnel, step by step, He winked his prying torch with patching glare From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air. Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know, A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed; And he, exploring fifty feet below The rosy gloom of battle overhead. Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw someone lie Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug, And stooped to give the sleeper’s arm a tug. “I’m looking for headquarters.” No reply. “God blast your neck!” (For days he’d had no sleep.) “Get up and guide me through this stinking place.” Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap, And flashed his beam across the livid face Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore Agony dying hard ten days before; And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound. Alone he staggered on until he found Dawn’s ghost that filtered down a shafted stair To the dazed, muttering creatures underground Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound. At last, with sweat of horror in his hair, He climbed through darkness to the twilight air, Unloading hell behind him step by step. (Copyright Siegfried Sassoon by kind permission of the Estate of George Sassoon)

Sassoon struggles to both capture these contradictory postures and at once honor them. The poem is suggestive about the trenches as an ironic location of treason—soldiers were appointed to shoot those who did not ascend into the battle: the lost officer, “exploring fifty feet below / The rosy gloom of battle overhead,” projects retreat onto the dead soldier, whom he mistakes for a lazy non-com. In the end, he finds his own way, shuffling off the horror of war through the double entendre of “unloading.” While the poem seems to enact a reverse infernal trek, the circularity of the poem establishes the inescapability of the battle overhead, into which he will emerge at the top of the shafted stair. Sassoon’s

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refusal to stay behind, lie low, and his insistence on returning to the war are reflected in this poetic move of non-retreat. His poetry insists on images of deformity as in the depiction of the corpse and the cascading slant rhymes that lead back to the top, to the first “step” of the poem. He departs from the officer who may represent a kind of literary rear-guardism as well, removed while appearing to take part. Rivers absolves himself from any understanding by consoling himself that he is not a literary critic and no judge of the literary merit of this volatile work that has been especially given him. If we think of the critical sins of cultural arbiters such as Nordau, for instance, one can hardly blame Rivers for demurring, except that in the context of his relationship with his patient, he shirks his duty toward him to receive what he has written. Sassoon’s role as the emblem of fitness, or degeneracy, and novelistic nexus is nicely displayed in the sequence of Chapters 13 and 14 of Regeneration, which bridge Parts Two and Three of the novel. The chapters are generally episodic, reflecting in part the hospital and therapeutic structure. Narrative control shifts, too, among the characters.59 The last section of Chapter 13 belongs to Sassoon, after firmly being in the hands of Rivers, who at this point will forcibly go on leave for three weeks. While we have already been introduced to Sassoon’s poetry in Chapter 3, this is the first instance of actual textual revision we see. In this section, Sassoon and Owen are working on an incipient “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” Even more than writing, revision appears as analogue to therapy. But in terms of its effects, as depicted by Barker, it is an inverted process: it reveals what the therapeutic process in this setting is proscribed from effecting. “Monstrous” depicts an anger of guns, a metonymy for soldiers that is inclusive of all here (there is a shift from the possessive pronoun “our” when referring to guns, to the definite article in the final version, not arrived at or shown here), which, to return to the idea of the inner, unknown place, suggests a fully human capacity for “barbaric” acts. Sassoon whittles away at the poem’s initial patriotism, its potential to serve as war propaganda, he says, though by the end, what he deems a contradictory impulse is preserved, to deliver both horror and consolation. The argument between Owen and Sassoon is illustrative perhaps of the difference between the original acclaim accorded the two poets, wherein the more balanced approach in Owen was preferred. The contradictory impulse returns us to the split that prevails in the trilogy—the Jekyll and Hyde of it—both the social order in the pride of sacrifice that Owen feels is legitimate and the disorder of the monster, the degenerate, that Sassoon privileges. The poetry discussion is framed in this chapter and the next by several specters of unfit, misfit, or “doomed” bodies: Sassoon’s memory of his platoon,

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whose physical inadequacy is suspiciously horrifying to him; Sarah’s (Billy Prior’s girlfriend) fury at seeing maimed soldiers at the hospital shunted out of sight; stammering subjects of various kinds appear, including the other patients and Rivers’ memory of his own and that of Charles Dodgson’s stammer; a fear and repression of desiring bodies, with the suggestion of sexual interplay between Sassoon and Owen, Rivers and Sassoon, Dodgson and Rivers’ sister Katherine, all thrown into relief as forbidden by the articulated heteronormative relationship of Sarah and Prior; finally the health of the poem, whose aesthetic merit is weighed against contradictory values of displaying or transmuting the “horror”.60 All are connected with a kind of echolalic language, through repeated phrases and images regarding loss, horror and oedipality. At the end of Chapter  13, Sassoon—who has gone to Owen seeking poetry and/or Owen as refuge, ostensibly from the stammering patients in the dining room but more likely at the thought of Rivers’ departure—finds himself unable to “account for his loss,” having displaced his feelings for Rivers into one of a psychoanalytic transference between father and son: “The day his father left home. Or the day he died? No, the day he left. Sassoon smiled, amused at the link he discovered, and then stopped smiling.”61 One such instance of echolalia comes with the search for the “precise word for the sound of shells.”62 Owen’s “wails” and Sassoon’s “hisses” reproduce the difference between them that is more interior than onomatopoeic, the first signaling consolation, the latter “horror” (to be unfolded in the next chapter). The sound that distracts and persists for Sassoon, however, is a “tapping,” which, along with the broken speech, becomes a mnemonic for the “stuttering rifles of rapid fire,” a line not yet produced in Owen’s evolving text; the ominous sense of the tapping is repeated throughout this section and throughout the novels as a signal of loss and affective violence, concomitant with the interpretation of stuttering as weakness or sign of degeneracy. When Sassoon goes to find Rivers to tell him about his disturbing dream, he repeatedly “taps” on his door, only to find that he has left. (Rivers later “taps” on Sassoon’s door as he is about to go to his tribunal and ultimately leave the hospital; also, he thinks about Sassoon’s recurring aural vision of ominous tapping as having a material rather than psychological source.) The association made between Rivers and Sassoon’s father is latent, for lost love, the very phrase he uses when thinking of Rivers’ leaving, and the very phrase Owen will later use when thinking of Sassoon’s return to the front, like Sassoon, “fearing to measure the sense of his loss.”63 But the sound is also a measure of his unfitness, the repeated syllables of his sexual deviance, poetically and affectively; it is reminiscent of

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Edgar Allen Poe’s tapping and rapping Raven, menacing symbol of love lost. His is a stuttering poetics.64 The demanded “price” of the soldiers and the shame associated with the failure of the war effort, made visible in shattered bodies, are reproduced in the debates over the poetry. Sassoon and Owen meet minds on “pride in sacrifice” in the final analysis of the poem, but the novel walks a careful line on the question of the difference between poetic representation and the physical horror of war— between representation and materiality. Rivers’ term for such sacrifice or price is “bargain,” corresponding to the binding of Isaac (Akedah, in Hebrew), the enigmatic crucible of the Hebrew Bible, which is addressed in both the first and last of the trilogy (repeated in Chapter  7 of The Ghost Road). Chapter  14 of Regeneration begins with Rivers at home and in church, in one way a primal scene, given his father’s ministerial role. The section opens with “Hymn No. 373”—“God moves in a mysterious way / His wonders to perform,” which since the Somme, Rivers observes, “had become the nation’s most popular.”65 Yet another suggestion of “blind faith” is noted by Rivers in the stained glass depiction of the crucifixion and “beneath it, and much smaller, Abraham’s sacrifice of his son. Behind Abraham was the ram caught in a thicket”; Rivers comments on the artistry, the displacement of fear onto the ram, the symbolic scapegoat. The suggestion is, as in Rivers’ reference to them as the “two blood bargains,” that the Akedah and the crucifixion are the same story, or at least bound, however typologically rendered; further, their symbolic import turns on the problem of the relationship between, as Rivers observes in The Ghost Road, “savagery and civilization,” which are entwined, though positioned ideologically as oppositional, as in the case of the war. The moral, however, is to use the first to produce the other, which the scapegoat ram both performs and exposes. Here again is the dilemma/contradiction of the relationship between philistine and civilized. The supersessionist shift from the Hebrew to the Christian, as we shall see, is seemingly reversed by Nordau in his move toward Zionism but, in fact, mirrored in his move to rehabilitate, first, the ravaged body of literature and then the body of the Jewish-cum-Christian martyr/scapegoat. (It is important to note that though Isaac does not die, the sacrifice is made, since the restoration of faith is dependent on the seeming breach of it—the psychological damage is done.)66 In Rivers’ reverie, he recollects another “price” or bargain from the “naughty bits” of the Old Testament which he searches out during his father’s sermons in his childhood: Michal’s bride-price of one hundred Philistine foreskins. Barker’s inclusion of this detail seems curious, except inasmuch as the biblical price transacts a kind of symbolic manhood, as well as betraying the sexual motive for

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war, in disguise as something more noble. King Saul, who is threatened by David, sets him a seemingly impossible task designed to kill him, resonant of another sacrifice of the son by a jealous father. It, too, recalls Nordau in that what is tantamount to the violence of circumcision—the collection of one hundred Philistine foreskins—is in effect a gladiatorial act of conversion, bestowing ipso facto Jewish “civilization” upon the Philistines and underscoring the barbaric heroism of David in this later version of the feisty boy (who earlier slew Goliath).67 We are reminded, too, of Shaw’s invocation of the Philistines in relation to Nordau and imagine perhaps this intention on his part, to make the case that Nordau’s anti-modernism is reflected in Jewish atavism—the conversion narrative—where Jewish cosmopolitanism is only a cover for that ineradicable mark of Jewishness.68 These competing visions of David, and of the Akedah for that matter, also bring to mind Robert Graves’ poem “Goliath and David” (1918), written in memoriam to a friend who died in the war, wherein the switch of the character sequencing in the title tells the true story, rewritten in the service of a false heroism: “But . . . the historian of that fight / had not the heart to tell it right.” The Philistine slays the Jew, naturally. In Rivers’ address to the “naughty bits” of the Old Testament, especially in the allusion to David and the Philistines, he seems subconsciously to reach for this instance of homosexual love in the Hebrew Bible, that between David and Jonathan, which is explained as the source for Saul’s revulsion. We see this submerged context acted out in his dreams as well, which importantly frame the novel. While Rivers is very aware of the activity of repression—i.e. accessing forbidden desire symbolically—in his dream world/work, he remarkably always denies the sexual reading in his interpretations.69 Rivers, who struggles with his role as doctor, a displacement in a sense from his repressed sexuality, makes the connection between these realms in a number of ways throughout the novel, particularly in his dreams. He feels complicit in the men’s deaths by helping to recover their fitness, and fears Sassoon’s conscientious objection, his identification with him, and his own lack of fitness. That explains why he wishes Sassoon to return to the front and why in the end he needs to see that return as a death wish on Sassoon’s part. But the subject and object exchange places, I believe, or, at the very least, merge. Just before his first major dream, Rivers muses on what becomes its catalyst: “His irritation, groping for an object, fastened on Sassoon. Sassoon made no secret of his belief that anybody who supported the continuation of the war must be actuated by selfish motives, and yet if Rivers had allowed such motives

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to dominate, he’d have wanted the war to end tonight.”70 Rivers disguises the true meaning of his fixation—his groping and fastening on the object Sassoon—with his distress over the inadequacy of the hospital, and his own. Sassoon’s comment exposes Rivers’ “selfish” motives in sending the men back, in that the success of his method is what makes them fit for redeployment. He may find his way to faulting his hypocrisy in medical practice, but not in his affective life. His wish to escape becomes his nightmare scenario in this first dream of the novel; all his dreams chart the modus vivendi of denial and the underbelly impotence of the war effort. In the dream, Rivers recalls an experiment done with Henry Head on the regeneration of nerves after injury. The experiment and the dream center on the radial nerve of the forearm, and make Rivers the recipient of such an injury in what he believes is a symbolic act of reciprocity, since the colleague had been the actual guinea pig. He understands it as an act of self-punishment, a “wish” to practice upon himself what he is practicing upon his patients. But he refuses to see the real meaning and even tells us so through a statement of rationalization. He didn’t believe such a dream could be convincingly explained as wish fulfillment, unless, of course, he wished to torture one of his closest friends. No doubt some of Freud’s more doctrinaire supporters would have little difficulty with that idea, particularly since the form of torture took the form of pricking him, but Rivers couldn’t accept it. He was more inclined to seek the meaning of the dream in the conflict his dream-self had experienced between the duty to continue the experiment and the reluctance to cause further pain.71

He enables his misidentification of the wish by displacing it, but also, importantly for the vigilant psychiatrist, by mentioning it at all. As with later dreams, the physical site of torture or pain or regenerative experiment is displaced from the symbolic site, mentioned here in a seeming throwaway remark at the end of the passage: In a moment or two an orderly would tap on the door and bring in his tea. He put the notebook and pencil back on the bedside table. Henry would be amused by that dream, he thought. If wish fulfillment had been involved at all, it was surely one of Henry’s wishes that had been fulfilled. At the time of the nerve generation experiments, they’d done a series of control experiments on the glans penis, and Henry had frequently expressed the desire for reciprocal application of ice cubes, bristles, near-boiling water and pins.72

When Rivers dreams about the epicritic and protopathic nerve sensations of the forearm, that would, in retrospect, seem to be dream language for the glans

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penis. His interpretive approach reflects these experimental terms, in seeking to sort out the relationship between immediate and deferred, as in the capacity for rationalization or, as he differentiates them, between the primitive (protopathic) and the finely discriminating nerves (epicritic). The language reflects the true subject of his dream—the “object” he groped for in his thoughts just before sleep is reproduced in the dream through Head’s offer: “Head opened his eyes and said something I didn’t catch. It sounded like, ‘Why don’t you try it?’ He was holding an object toward me. I looked down to see what it was, and saw that my own left arm was bare, though I couldn’t recall rolling up my sleeve.”73 This reading is later borne out in The Eye in the Door, when Rivers recalls the dream and Sassoon’s forearm is the trigger.74 The object/penis conflation becomes the signifier for Sassoon—a double displacement, the actual or latent symbolic site—whose relevance for the dream Rivers considers momentarily: “Recently almost all his dreams had centred on conflicts arising from his treatment of particular patients,” but he quickly pushes that reading away, repeating such demurral consistently throughout the passage, even if by implicating himself in ways that distance him from recognition; after all, he knows the drill. One might further extrapolate from Rivers’ memory association between the dream and the experiment on the glans penis another clue for Sassoon in that such an operation is suggestive of a circumcision, which, regardless of Sassoon’s actual state, would be an automatic sign of the Jew-ish. Rivers is working toward an understanding—part of Barker’s narrative method, which is therapeutic—that the methods of dream analysis and therapy are restorative of an order he increasingly eschews or troubles him and that its promise of regeneration, as with the experiment, are productive of a politics of savagery and violence. By making the men fit—healing their nerves—he is teaching them to suppress their emotions again: Not that Rivers’ treatment involved any encouragement of weakness or effeminacy. His patients might be encouraged to acknowledge their fears, their horror of war—but they were still expected to do their duty and return to France. It was Rivers’ conviction that those who learned to know themselves, and to accept their emotions, were less likely to break down again.

But we see how carefully Rivers himself guards against such knowledge, and refuses the interpretation that would implicate his feelings, for Sassoon, for men. He has a different “wish”:75 “Rivers saw that he had reached Sassoon’s file. He read through the admission report and notes that followed it. There was nothing more he wanted to say that he could say. He drew the final page towards

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him and wrote: Nov. 26, 1917. Discharged to duty.” By discharging Sassoon, Rivers expresses the split in his duty and his desire to save both Sassoon and himself from ignominy. “Discharged” carries so many meanings related to this moment—to a patient, to a gun, even euphemistically, or to a burden; and it may mean the release rather than the deployment of the soldier. Rivers’ need to return Sassoon to the war, and the import of Sassoon’s wish to return and de facto willingness to die, might be examined in terms of the novel’s and the period’s sexual politics. It is important to see the covert homosexuality of Rivers’ dreams as another binding element of the novels, made overt by Barker’s ample address to the subject, which, remarkably, has been critically undertreated. When placed next to the contention that Sassoon is another such binding force, homosexuality and his submerged Jewishness entwine (homosexuality is referred to as a monster and as a scapegoat for the war).76 One grapples with Sassoon’s insistence to return to the front, which may be interpreted as a willingness, more than a wish, to die, equated by the war effort with manliness. But the suggestion that it is a wish evokes the statistics about Jew-ish neurasthenia.77 Nordau would say about Jewish efforts at cultural assimilation that it contained the “seed” of its own decline, a paradoxical formulation for assimilation’s role in erasing Jewry, and, in Nordau’s estimation, similar to the paradox that attends the need to comply with the war effort. Hirschfeld would make the same claim about homosexuality—that it was selfannihilating—in an effort perhaps to assuage its criminalizers, again ironic in its import (sexual degeneracy as Jew-ish will be further developed in Chapter 4). The members of the board who approve Sassoon’s redeployment are caught in this double bind, or “bargain,” in Rivers’ formulation: to deem Sassoon unfit to return to war would be to acknowledge his objection, their complicity, and, by proxy, his sexuality (signaled by their admiration of him); instead, in acknowledging his “race,” they condemn him to their death wish for him—his hybrid vigor must be tapped into and then expunged. The persistence of the war effort in the service of national reinvigoration is registered in Sassoon’s masculine vigor, a perverse and brilliant commentary on the loss or degeneration of national “face.” That homosexuality and manliness should be equated disturbs the concept of generation, which then technically (if not ideologically) becomes degeneration. These equations and their implications stir up much. “Fitness” thereby would, in the context of the war, forecast the end of race and the human race. Whereas that is the role typically assigned to homosexuality, to its biological degenerative effect in the heterosexual narrative, admission of homosexual desire is line-generating

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in Barker’s and Rivers’ formulations. Sarah Trimble has discussed the question of futurity in the Regeneration trilogy with regard to “heterosexual impotency in the face of the demands to repair and regenerate a nation scarred by war,”78 but she does not address, and few others have taken substantively into account, the implications of queer futurity put forward by the novel. Sean Francis Ward draws on Elizabeth Freeman’s idea of “ ‘erotohistoriography,’ a mode of narrative encounter with past life that uses ‘the body as a tool to effect, figure, or perform that encounter,’ ” as a means of discussing the queer as differently generative in the trilogy, with implications for Barker’s formal choices: By practicing a distinct version of erotohistoriography—one that melancholically lingers on loss rather than working through it in mourning—and imagining queer sociality in an interhistorical sense, Barker’s novels articulate a subtle but indispensable point: writing about or commemorating the war, and thus choosing what and whom to remember and how to remember it, replays the war’s primary political maneuver, the constituting of enemies within and outside the state . . . Her novels expose, while also subtly participating in, the continuing struggle surrounding the cultural-political significance of World War I and its influence on martial politics—the reproductive futurism—that has followed in the war’s wake.79

It would seem that both Sassoon’s and Prior’s wish to return to the front hinges on their sexuality; it is not just that homosexuality is degenerate, but that such degeneracy constitutes a threat to the nation, as the Pemberton Billing case makes clear. Sassoon’s fitness, mental and national, depends on it. Less veiled with Prior, his queer sexual desire on the home front is no less than a matter of national security. There is no “home front” and no future in their terms as shown in Barker’s trilogy, which seeks to rewrite a vaunted past and not regenerate, as it were, a future, except in as much that the novels subscribe to the Žižekian idea of the past as symptom or sign from the future.80 The paradox that their manliness or fitness to serve turns on their willingness to die, an idea as old as the binding of Isaac, not to mention Horace’s ode, a First World War anthem adapted famously by Owen (“dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”), not only puts the future in check—the war casualty figures are a Western cultural runner— but corresponds to the charge that homosexuality is the same as national threat for the death of a reproductive future. I think, with Barker, one can see a symptom from the future in the rhetoric of betrayal and death that is and will continue to be extended to the art form itself, which, inasmuch as the Great War is an anticipation of the next great war, will dovetail with Adornoesque

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formulations of a corrosive aesthetics of the “civilization” that produced the Holocaust.81 This future hovers over the novels. Nordau’s projection of the muscular Jew will become an iconic imperative and, like the ravaged/discharged First World War body, a symptom from the future of the Jewish state, as we shall examine in Ulysses.

Generation and James Joyce’s Ulysses When Robert Graves gives Rivers Sassoon’s poetry at Craiglockhart early in Regeneration, Rivers asks Graves whether he will be returning to the war, to which he somewhat ironically responds that he is hoping for Palestine. Ironic, because he has just been expostulating on the difference between conviction and duty, which has a register not only for Sassoon’s decision to be a “conchie” but also the larger subject of the novels—the split between politics and poetry, fitness and decadence. Palestine would be a respite for him from toughness (his doctor recommends it for his lungs). The role of Palestine for the British in this period is historically and also literarily salient. In fact, Sassoon went to Palestine for a short period in 1918, despite wanting to return to France and eventually doing so. According to his biographer Max Egremont, Sassoon records coming into contact with his Jewish self while there.82 That year marked the preamble to the British Mandate in Palestine, which endured up to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Barker does not take up Zionism, but Joyce does very directly, in a way informed by Theodor Herzl—he had The Jewish State in his Trieste library—and by Nordau, whose name would certainly have emerged in the Zionist literature he read.83 In Barker’s Regeneration, she invokes the science and politics of the time, using Rivers’ medical experiments on the nerves in conjunction with the political imperative to restore national muscle. Ulysses, too, whose very title invokes epic muscle, teases out the concept of restoration. Both novels are arguably about modernist homecomings, where openendedness constitutes arrival. Both end on a note of departure, just as Homer’s Odyssey does. As with the discussion of Barker, questions about national revival, speech acts, and impediments, such as echolalia and stammering, viewing history through art and vice versa will prevail, while the dominant lens in Ulysses is Zionism, which conjoins and refracts all the rest. Moving between these novels manifests the split in Nordau’s career, and the conceptual continuity between de- and re-generation.

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Nordau’s prescriptions regarding fitness, both earnest and untenable, help to qualify the Zionism Joyce brings to his novel and becomes Joyce’s way of obliquely commenting on the Irish landscape. Arguably, the Jew is always, at the very least, Joyce’s proxy, a conduit for ideas that concern both the Irish and large European theater. The central idea of the promise of home is the hinge of so many ideas that swirl through the novel and come to characterize a range of aesthetic matters that finally dominate that landscape. The untenability of Nordau’s vision, though it has its immediate and practical application, is congenial to a novel for which the concept of futurity hangs in the balance.84 I want to borrow from Paul Saint-Amour’s fabulous formulation of “traumatic earliness” for Ulysses, which he ties to the nuclear uncanny, and bring that to the idea of nationalism, integral after all to the ideas of total destruction that he and others address in modern literature’s response to the nuclear age. Despite being set in 1904 and sharing none of science fiction’s interest in extrapolating possible futures from present technological forecasts, Joyce’s book bears traces diegetically of certain future events that marked the years of its writing. Ulysses might be said, then, to embody a kind of traumatic earliness with respect to the events of 1914–18, exhibiting an array of pretraumatic symptoms thanks to its anxious depictions and expectations of disaster and, above all, to the privileged retrospective of its author.

Saint-Amour goes on to explain that Ulysses anticipates beyond the first World War into the Second and that this explains the novel’s seeming obsession with archiving Dublin, as Saint-Amour puts it, “against the growing likelihood of its erasure.” After all, as Saint-Amour points out, it was already partially destroyed with the events of Easter 1916 while Joyce was writing the novel. Many have addressed what they take to be that Ulyssean sensibility of archiving, but I want to lift out the dynamic of anticipation described here to qualify the preservationist impulses against Jewish erasure that the novel dramatizes—e.g., the interplay between assimilation and Zionism—in analogue with the potential for novelistic erasure through the annihilative critical apparatus of Nordau’s anti-modernism. Thinking about Ulysses in these terms goes some way toward accounting for the frequent charge of historical obliquity on the part of the novel and assessing the value Joyce assigns nationalist movements. Taking off on Saint-Amour’s suggestion about the Cold War as the catastrophic event that constitutes the hysteron proteron (nuclear condition productive of traumatic symptoms “that exist not in the wake of a past event but in the shadow of a future one”), one might see the establishment of the state of Israel, created at the periphery of the

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Cold War, as the future from which the symptom Ulysses returned to the “wartime and inter war period of its writing . . . The nuclear epoch, in other words, was the future in which certain elements of Joyce’s novel would cease to be meaningless traces and enter into the fullness of a condition they had variously forecast, courted, dreaded, safeguarded against, and warded off all along.” One might wonder if the eternal city, Jerusalem, might join the gallery of other cities he lists—Guernica, Hiroshima—as, paradoxically, a “metonym for its annihilation.”85 Of course, the difference is that Zionism as such in the novel is not without a meaningful trace in that the realization of the state was imaginable, predicated on an extant ideology. But this element’s function in the novel comes into the fullness of its condition only with the foundation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, or the state of Israel, with the end of the British mandate in 1949—and with the realization of Nordau’s prescriptions. Further, given that Israel’s actual creation was, arguably, predicated on the Holocaust and its aftermath, not to mention that its conception drew on a biblical or messianic idea of restoration, the condition of its creation rests upon the possibility of its own destruction, and symbolically (or literally) Jewish annihilation. I will discuss three aspects of Joyce’s novel that are illuminated by Nordau’s turn to Zionism: the trope of homecoming that conjoins (Jewish) history and modernist aesthetics; the trope of fitness, which plays out here, too, in aesthetic and political/national terms; key historical/political/national/epic figures who work together to inform Joyce’s homecoming and fitness tropes—Nordau and Arthur Balfour, Charles Stewart Parnell, Roger Casement, and Moses—whose mythic status depends on their unfulfilled promise. Certainly part of Ulysses’ mythic status might be seen in these terms: the size of its reputation for what it delivers for modernism and its actual physical size hold out a promise that many argue falls short. The complaint is often that it is inaccessible, or, one might say, unreachable. Despite or perhaps because of that, its mystique is often characterized in terms of literary muscle. In these very terms and considering its subjects, one might say Ulysses is a novel about fitness. Its staging of certain social and historical concerns becomes a gateway to matters of form and literary value. The Irish and the Jewish questions, interrelated, as Joyce understood them, provide a lens for, among other things, the novel’s urgent questions about itself—its formal aims and the worthiness of its subjects, its “proper stuff,” to recall Virginia Woolf on these matters. Given the novel’s expansiveness and unruliness, some might say that Ulysses is more flabby than fit. That is, its difficulty is, in part, to do with its unwieldiness. But while it might conform to Nordau’s indices for degeneracy, it does so as a bogey- rather

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than “baggy monster.” It methodically defies novelistic convention, fulfilling its modernist promise perhaps too well.86 The Jewish subject as a flashpoint for Joyce and for Ireland in 1904 still seems a surprise, in part because that figure played a much smaller part in the local Ireland of Joyce’s youth than its prominence in the novel might suggest. And somehow regardless of all the explanations, for example, of the Jew as an agent of Joyce’s stylistic strategies of indirection or redirection, the question persists. The question is amplified if not fully answered by bringing Nordau to bear on Joyce’s choice. By considering Arthur Balfour, a key historical figure who makes an actual appearance, and placing him alongside Nordau, with whom he historically aligns, I can both expand upon the Irish–Jewish connection the novel makes and demonstrate this crucial alignment between national, physical, even literary fitness therein. The matter of Leopold Bloom’s heroic muscle has a number of registers, including sexual, social, and textual: his worthiness in every role he occupies is examined within the novel, even, as I have been suggesting, his role as protagonist, and is inflected in each case by his dubious Jewishness. “The Jewish question” is deeply embedded in Joyce’s writing as in modernism per se. Zionism’s response to “the question,” as Joyce demonstrates, was itself a volatile idea, more than heroic. Arthur Balfour was prime minister on June 16, 1904, famously the day on which Ulysses is set. Balfour was Scottish and a Conservative, and had one of the most extensive and influential careers in modern British politics. He was secretary of state for Scottish affairs for a year in 1867, notoriously chief secretary of Ireland from 1887 to 1891, and Conservative leader of the House of Commons until he became prime minister in 1902. His policies probably concretized partition in Ireland and then in Palestine.87 He was the underwriter, one might say, of modern Zionism, with the document famously named after him in 1917, the Balfour Declaration, in which the establishment of a homeland for Jews in the Palestine of the day was legitimized: “without prejudice against the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the right and political status of Jews living in any other country” (Arthur Koestler observed David Lloyd George’s characterization of the document as “one nation promising another nation the land of a third nation”).88 That document has been and continues to be reassessed with respect to British motives and its romanticization by Zionist historians. However cynical the British motives have been deemed to be, it appears that Balfour himself was an avid supporter of a Jewish homeland. Balfour’s and Nordau’s careers intertwine in compelling ways. Nordau was Herzl’s right-hand man and though he refused to officially take over the mantle

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in 1904, when Herzl unexpectedly died, he stayed on as close advisor to Herzl’s successor, David Wolffsohn, and continued to participate and agitate for the realization of Herzl’s project to establish a Jewish homeland.89 The year 1904 is a pivotal date in the web of relations around this matter. Nordau’s dire predictions, first regarding the ruination of art and later in his admonitions against certain brands of Zionism that departed from Herzl’s political vision, dovetail with a number of relevant matters concerning Balfour’s historical and novelistic roles.90 The epithets assigned to Balfour as either “benevolent,” a soft touch, as toward Jews, or “bloody,” when it came to the Irish, expressed contradictory affinities, as did the shift in perceptions of him from before and after he became the chief of Irish Office, a job for which his fitness was questioned. He went from being the ineffectual “niminy piminy Balfour,” as he was dubbed just before assuming the position (by Charles Stewart Parnell among others), into the strongman he projected thereby and thereafter; he achieved this stature primarily through a policy of land reform in Ireland, a euphemism for eviction and appropriation (ironic and in ways fitting for his endorsement of a Jewish state in Palestine). As we shall see, Joyce’s brings Balfour’s Scottishness to bear on his role, which was an issue for Balfour’s political career.91 Split national affinities are key. Balfour’s need to prove himself in his dealings with the Irish, in whom one might argue he was mirrored as British subject, was no longer necessary with the Jewish subject, whose type he could rationalize and estrange, extending the possibility for sovereignty that England refused Scotland. (Or alternatively, the same qualified state that Scots “enjoyed” within the British Isles.) The seemingly unremarkable fact of Balfour’s occupancy of the office of head of state is obliquely addressed in Ulysses. The novel is often accused of regarding major historical events in this oblique manner, at the same time foregrounding those that might be sidelined in primary historical accounts. Zionism (as with the Jewish subject) certainly qualifies as the latter in the annals of modern Irish history. Some critics have wondered about this disproportion by citing Joyce’s seemingly contradictory views about his Jewish subject, Bloom. Bloom’s lack of definition is, as I have argued, aesthetically efficacious and also politically so.92 This quality of his lack, in any conventionally political or aesthetic terms, is in keeping with the strains of the Irish–Jewish interface Joyce draws upon when he places Zionism in relation to the Celtic revivalism or Home Rule movements, for example. That is, they ill-define or cannot be definitive. Picking up on a critical idea that Bloom helps to articulate or navigate among political ideas or ideals that are unpalatable or unsatisfying, I would like to suggest that, in the same way

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Paul Saint-Amour has argued for the novel’s proleptic view on the potential for catastrophic erasure, Ulysses foresees a bad end in the nationalisms purveyed. Balfour’s placement in the novel is crucially always to do with dire ends and not only, I contend, because of his role in Ireland. The ubiquitous “two imperial masters” (Church and State/colonial rule) is one such idea that the Jewish Bloom may circumvent or circumnavigate, having several possible incarnations in the novel: masters and rebel leaders are on display throughout, set in relation to one another, as are tyrants and messiahs, alternately deflated. One example, invoking Balfour, comes in a reference to a two-headed octopus that appears once each in the Lestrygonians and Circe chapters. Here is the first instance in Chapter  8 in which Bloom is walking through the city, attempting to avoid his rival, Blazes Boylan, who is headed toward Bloom’s house and wife: — Of the twoheaded octopus, one of whose heads is the head upon which the ends of the world have forgotten to come while the other speaks with a Scotch accent. The tentacles . . . They passed from behind Mr Bloom along the curbstone. Beard and bicycle. Young woman. And there he is too. Now that’s really a coincidence: second time. Coming events cast their shadows before. With the approval of the eminent poet, Mr Geo. Russell. That might be Lizzie Twigg with him. A. E.: what does that mean? Initials perhaps. Albert Edward, Arthur Edmund, Alphonsus Eb Ed El Esquire. What was he saying? The ends of the world with a Scotch accent. Tentacles: octopus. Something occult: symbolism. Holding forth. She’s taking it all in. Not saying a word. To aid gentleman in literary work.93

The two-headed octopus is produced in this passage in the form of a scathing charge, but the tentacles of this unidentified monster are left grammatically dangling. What “of ” the two-headed octopus? This snippet of conversation is overheard by Bloom, made by A.E. (George) Russell: the two letters stand for Aeon, but by some accounts “agricultural economist,” fittingly.94 The well-known man of letters is here conflated by Bloom with John Howard Parnell (brother of the late Charles), who has just before this passed by, and also associatively with Blazes Boylan (Bloom’s rival and current source of his cuckoldry). This is a chapter about hunger of all kinds, but the major threads are those of food, sex, and religion or spiritualism. The chapter opens with a reference to Elijah, in the form of Alexander J. Dowie, from Zion, Illinois, who is coming, in the phrasing of biblical prophecy, to save the Irish—from Catholicism. The note of falseness as in false messiah pervades, as does the idea of coincidence, set in

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contradistinction to the purposefulness of coming or arriving of a prophet or prophesied end. “And there he is too. Now that’s really a coincidence: second time. Coming events cast their shadows before.” Bloom thinks proleptically. It might seem that Bloom is assigning epic proportion to the events that are soon famously to transpire in Eccles Street (the adulterous liaison between Molly and Boylan, which he is both anticipating with dread and tracking all day). But the conflations suggest a round of liaisons and betrayals, political and personal treachery that are salient for any reading of the novel’s address to a narrative as well as political idea of utopian “ends.” This figure of the two-headed octopus has been speculated upon by several Joyce critics, but has remained quite opaque. Willy Maley, who insists that Joyce’s work is by no means “Scot-free,” concurs with Hugh Kenner’s reading that these two heads may refer to London and Edinburgh: “The notion of an apocalyptic Scottish dimension to Irish politics, he argues, would fit well with the turbulent history of the Ulster Plantation (17th c.), one instance of Scotland serving to extend English colonial power.” Maley goes on to lament Joyce’s seeming derogation of the Scot as colonial helpmate, wondering, “How could someone [he means Joyce] all too aware of double-yokes—the Roman and the British ones being the most obvious—appear unaware of the double bind of the AngloScottish legacy? These are questions that remain for the future.”95 Arguably, Joyce is aware—there are lots of references to “Scotch” things in the surrounding pages, an anglified categorization, that make the historical double bind apparent.96 Joyce does not get off “Scot-free.” But also, more and less grandly, there is a punning reference to the Scotch House, which is a pub, despite sounding like a government office. London and Edinburgh also invoke the one-two punch in Ireland of Joseph Chamberlain and Arthur “Bloody” Balfour, caricatured in a political cartoon (Figure 6).97 Chamberlain, head of the Liberal Unionist party, secretary of the colonies for the British government between 1895 and 1903, a staunch imperialist, and opponent of home rule in Ireland, has come up just before this passage in conjunction with the Boer war, of which he was an architect, and is another site of contradictory affinities for the Irish. Balfour’s notorious land reform policies were a strategy for dispossessing and displacing the Irish (reminiscent of the clearances of the Scottish Highlands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with which Balfour would have been very familiar). Again, like Nordau and Bloom, Balfour’s circumnavigation of certain ends points always back to his beginnings, which he cannot contravene.

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Figure 6 Thomas Fitzpatrick, “The Modern ‘Frankenstein’,” from the Weekly Freeman, August 17, 1895. http://irishcomics.wikia.com/wiki/File:1895-08-17_Fitzpatrick_the_modern_frankenstein. jpg, Public domain.

Bloom is thinking quite a lot about such contradictory national affinities in this chapter—“never know who you’re talking to”98—when for example thinking about the Irish support for the Boers. The irony that attended the Irish identification with the Boers because of their stance against the English, was reproduced in other political positions determined on the basis of such opposition (such as Irish neutrality in the Second World War).99 Chamberlain and Balfour together deliver doom to the Irish; but Chamberlain, like Balfour,

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was sympathetic to Zionism, famously offering Herzl the Uganda plan in 1903, a slice of an East Africa British protectorate or, as we know it, Kenya, for a new Jewish homeland (to which Herzl was responsive, Nordau resistant); this historical underpinning makes the idea of “the ends of the world forgetting to come” as much a reference to the refusal or unrealization of such resettlement as it is to occultish remedies or apocalyptic millenarianism, also signaled here. Their sympathies might be used to further substantiate the views of such heavyweights as Arthur Griffith, that the Jews were aligned with the English as their bankers during the Boer War.100 All of this demonstrates Joyce’s intense interest in the matters of Jews in Ireland and Jewish nationalism; the only question is his position, just as difficult to pin down as was his attitude to Irish nationalism and iconic figures like Charles Stuart Parnell, himself dubiously Irish in the terms laid out by Griffith.101 Despite the sentiment that attaches to the appearance of Parnell in Joyce’s work, the upshot for his own and the work’s overall sympathies may be assessed, in F.S.L. Lyons’ characterization, as “arrested Parnellism.”102 Joyce’s recording in the Aeolus chapter of the 1901 John F. Taylor speech, which makes the analogy between the ancient Israelites and the contemporary Irish, is a crucial site for assessing such positions on both Irish and Jewish nationalisms, which are not uncomplicated in Joyce’s presentation. I will return to the speech below. In the moment just before Bloom overhears the comment about the two-headed octopus in Lestrygonians, he has seen Parnell’s brother emerge onto the street, looking haunted and defeated, in every sense (he had just lost an election for a seat in Parliament). He brings home the point of his remove from the luster of Parnell (grammatically and semantically) by referring to him as “his brother’s brother.” Bloom’s thoughts about their relationship reveal a less than rosy view of the fallen hero, or at least one that is less heroic and more Machiavellian: “His brother used men as pawns. Let them all go to pot. Afraid to pass a remark on him.” There is no doubt that Joyce embraced Parnell, both as a romantic hero of his youth, of memory, and as victim of the same two masters. But this does not mean that he supported the romanticization or sanctification of him, observing the way he became pawn to political maneuvers by the Irish themselves. Short of conflating Joyce’s opinion with Bloom’s, the qualification is significant to a viewing of the “fallen hero,” which has been present in Joyce’s work from Dubliners on.103 Parnell’s heroism or his degeneracy, depending on one’s point of view, stems in part from the conflation of sexual and political betrayal—especially given his adulterous relationship with Kitty O’Shea, who ultimately sought a divorce from

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her Catholic Nationalist MP husband.104 The irony is that the adulterous act might establish his virility for an English audience, considering his advocacy of a flaccid Irish. As Joe Valente observes in The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, the split view of the acutely scrutinized Parnell was multiply refracted: Where Nationalist and Unionist accounts do concur is in treating Parnell’s bodily deportment and social mien as both a moral signifier, the index of a selfpossession that never failed, and an element of ethnonational gender allegory, a display of manliness attaching not just to the individual but to the people, Anglo or Irish, who could claim him. However dubious in their own right, the racial judgments on both sides provide compelling testimony to the efficacy of Parnell’s political performance, which was, as James Loughlin has it, “designed to contrast with the perception of Irish-Celtic characteristics, especially verbosity, emotionalism, and gesticulation”—the very traits, I would observe, that were used to impugn the manly character of the Irish.105

Inasmuch as the deliverance to a promised end of liberation attached to that manly capacity, one might conclude that Parnell fell short, dying abruptly and mysteriously, very much like Herzl.106 Part of Parnell’s charisma resided, again ironically, in his oratorical deficits, interpreted as a steely reserve that imparted a few well-placed rhetorical gems. Though a speech impediment was the likely cause for his minimalist public speaking, Valente shows how this lack was turned to a political advantage, in that it proved counter to the stereotypical voluble Irishman. The speech defect, either mutism or the echolalia effect, is a factor in Joyce’s novel that interacts with the trope of the inhibited deliverer. As we know, Nordau deemed a kind of modern rhyming or repetition as evidence of physical or mental degeneracy in the author. The Aeolus chapter of Ulysses, which takes place in the newspaper room, and is associated in Joyce’s symbolic schema for the chapter with a windiness of speech (in both senses) or hot air, brings together several related elements of degeneracy, deliverance, fitness, and Jewishness, through the rhetorical devices of speech and speech acts. The chapter literally reproduces John F. Taylor’s famous speech made in 1901, in which he establishes an analogue between the Israelites and the Irish, and the Egyptians with the British, within the liberation allegory. The speech is recalled as the men in the office rehearse the debates of the day around home rule, political allegiances, and revivalism of the Irish language, in particular. Taylor is remembered as a great orator for the nationalist position, but his speech is misremembered by these pundits.107 For example, Taylor’s paraphrase of Moses’s act in Exodus, who comes down from Sinai

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bearing in his arms “the writing of god graven upon the tables,” here becomes the “table of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw.” As such, it makes the revivalist case, but it originates neither with Taylor nor the Bible. As Abby Bender has discovered, it is Roger Casement’s rendering of Taylor’s speech that Joyce seems to include and, in doing so, he adds another element to the atmosphere of betrayal performed by words or blurring of context/taken out of context:108 A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. He lifted his voice above it boldly: — But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai’s mountaintop nor ever have come down with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw. He ceased and looked at them, enjoying silence. OMINOUS—FOR HIM J.J. O’Molloy said not without regret: — And yet he died without having entered the land of promise. — A sudden – at – the – moment – though – from – lingering – illness – often – previously – expectorated – demise, Lenehan said. And with a great future behind him.109

Casement’s transcription of Taylor’s speech in a pamphlet called “The Language of the Outlaw” was never officially published. It is unclear whether Joyce knew the difference between Taylor’s and Casement’s versions, though it is likely he knew both. Regardless, the difference here, and even Joyce’s subject for the chapter, is the one of context. For one thing, an oral version will always be susceptible of mistranscription. In this regard, one might consider Joyce’s choice to record only this speech out of Ulysses. Having words taken out of context as a means of indictment is the case in point for Casement, British colonial officer and eventually Irish martyr, whose diaries’ record of homosexual liaison, perhaps trumped up, was used to impugn his character; the ostensible charge was treason, which was harder to prove. More importantly for Joyce’s use of it here, it would be Casement’s words more than his actions that would indict him. At the dock he reportedly said that he would have to endure the “old ordeal of

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dying for Ireland.” I have argued that he is an exemplar of mixed and even conflicting affinities—he became an Irish patriot because of the stand he took against British imperialism and colonial policies/practices; but the homoerotic subtext, which was used to make the case against him, would have to be erased in order to salvage him as a hero for the Irish, which, as in the case of Parnell and others, pointed to by Joyce, would make the “old ordeal of dying for Ireland” refer to sexual deviance.110 Of course, all of this is very resonant in a chapter about the press, whose tenets and reliability are examined and parodied, hammering home, as Joyce does throughout the novel, the power of the word and its susceptibility of error. Joyce’s cooptation of the English language, rehearsed as legend, as well as his linguistic transgressiveness, both his flaunting of convention and his sexually frank subjects and language, his “obscenity,” are reflective of Casement’s outlaw language, here celebrated for its non serviam stance. Finally, one can also understand from this Joyce’s resistance to the revival of a national language as such in opposition to Moses and to Taylor. His choice of this speech to record is his parodic reckoning with nationalist speech. Perhaps Casement meant to make the analogue between the suppression of the Irish language and his own, but it is also clear that he was referring by analogue to another outlawed orality. The invocation of Moses is also crucial here, both in his role as deliverer, and, as the passage makes clear, as a conduit of “political” speech (God speaks through him to deliver the ten commandments in Exodus 20); he is in a sense ventriloquized by Taylor and moreover by Professor MacHugh, who is recounting the speech in the Aeolus passage at yet another remove from Taylor’s speech since it is Casement’s words he speaks. The only figure in the allegory who has possession of speech or speaks for himself is the Egyptian high priest, homologous with the British who have the final word in both Parnell’s and Casement’s histories. Moses’s fate is recalled in this echo chamber of heroic leaders that has included Parnell: “And yet he died without having entered the land of promise.”111 Necessarily on display here are the imperfections that qualified both Parnell and Moses, and the error of their ways. Moses was punished with exclusion for having hit the rock for water, disobeying God’s command to speak to it. Regardless of the extensive exegesis of the act, what might have appealed to Joyce is the suggestion that, like Parnell, Moses had a speech impediment.112 Speaking always occasioned difficulty for him: he resisted being God’s messenger and in the rock incident, the repeated hitting mimics a kind of stutter, a parody of rote speech, a mockery of the command.113 Such mockery is akin to performance of the Taylor speech in all of its variegated form. As Freud suggests regarding

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Moses’s imputed speech impediment, “Moses spoke another language and was not able to communicate with his Semitic Neo-Egyptians without the help of an interpreter,” famously concluding that “Moses was an Egyptian.”114 As with Parnell, Moses’s lack of speech might be misinterpreted, for better or worse, as unbefitting a leader: neither was Irish or Jewish enough. As though in a corrective to Nordau here, for whom Moses’ role should be key (even as a countertype for Herzl who would be his modern incarnation), laying down the law becomes an imperfect act, made, importantly, by physically flawed heroes. In response to the voicing of Moses’ fate of not making it to the promised land in the passage above, the deadbeat, somewhat droll Lenehan remarks with a certain self-reflexivity, “and with a great future behind him.” This tense construction—a backshadowing or reverse prolepsis—sets such visions or eschatology in a perpetual future anterior by virtue of the very nature of projection, and is a shadow of the coming event of Bloom’s remark regarding Parnell and his brother in the next chapter (Lestrygonians). This conflation of Moses and Parnell, in combination with an attenuated nationalist vision and displaced speech, invokes Theodor Herzl and his Zionist motto: “It is no dream” (“Ayn zo agadah”), which became the Hebrew catchphrase of Herzl’s manifesto Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 1896), and is a literal translation of the German phrase “kein Märchen,” part of “Das ist es, Juden, kein Märchen, kein Betrug” (“This is it, Jews, no fable, no deception”). Though it came to represent Herzl’s political vision, and is associated with his manifesto, the full phrase, “If you wish it, it is no dream” (“Wenn ihr wollt, ist es kein Märchen”), derives in this variant form from an epigraph to Herzl’s novelistic rendering of the Zionist vision, the fanciful Altneuland (1902). Ironically, it is a fiction or a “legend” (which is an alternate definition for the word Märchen) that provides the grounding slogan, one that requires active willing or wishing.115 The phrase and Herzl’s vision became legend, and for him was never more than that; like Moses, he would not live to see Israel, the fulfillment of a state that was for him always dream-like. “Legend” is also a punningly apt word for the Aeolus chapter that is graphically organized by headings that are often misleading, non-representative, or romantically inclined: “LET US HOPE.”116 These attenuated deliveries dominate nationalist reveries in the novel. In the echo chamber of such heroes, one might add Robert Emmet. Though he is not recalled specifically in this chapter, he presents yet another running tag of Irish heroism in the novel whose famous last words became legend and are a refrain throughout. (It is worth reminding ourselves that all of these great Irish heroes were religiously compromised, i.e., products of an Irish Protestant ascendancy

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or mixed marriage, and therefore unholy for those who had conflated Irish nationalism with Catholicism—just as the relationship between Zionism and Jewish religious practice was debated among early proponents.) Emmet’s famous speech at the dock before he was hanged and beheaded registers in the pantheon of patriotic sound bites—“When my country has taken her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.” It is a speech act, indeed, becoming Emmet’s epitaph by its occasion and by its import, effectively rendering Ireland in a state of animated suspension. Though both Taylor’s and Emmet’s speeches have highly dramatic import for Irish nationalism, they are recalled in the novel irreverently, which serves to underscore this attenuation: in the case of the first, in a chapter whose oratorical themes are playfully sent up by the associations with hot air—letting the air out of the bag—and in the case of the second, intoned through a fart at the fugal end of the Sirens chapter. The promise of Palestine or a Jewish national homeland is the touchstone of these “Israelite–Irish” parallel legends. Our first encounter with the Zionist motif in the Calypso chapter of Ulysses has been much discussed.117 It coincides with Bloom’s apparent discovery of Molly’s imminent adulterous affair, which sends him into a frenzy of projection and displacement. Looking at the meats at the counter of Dlugacz’s butcher shop, Bloom’s eyes wander to the “nextdoor girl” at the counter, who is identified in geographical terms and then objectified unapologetically as meat, which soon merges with the ad for buying “a model farm at Kinnereth on the lake shore of Tiberias.”118 These were widely distributed in the period in the Jewish press and it is therefore speculated that the butcher, though selling pork kidney, is an immigrant Jew assimilated into Irish society, Jew-ish in some variation of Bloom. “He held the page aslant patiently, bending his senses and his will, his soft subject gaze at rest.”119 The connecting device for all is Molly’s body, metaphorized here and throughout, however crassly, as a kind of promised land, that Bloom struggles to reach. In this case, a toujours déjà— not just a crass association, but a way of bringing the erotic subtext into play. As he moves through the mirage of associations with this promised land, the vision sours, or grays with the weather overhead.120 The idyllic Levant converges yet again in his mind’s eye with another series of associations, a dead sea, whose desiccation conjures up a bent hag, a suggestion of the emblematic old woman of Ireland, which in this particular sequence reverses the legend wherein the emblematic hag transmogrifies into the beautiful ideal. This is a different view of the national promise, a symbol of barrenness and symbolic submission—or, conversely, a submission to the symbolic.

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A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy’s, clutching a naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more.121

“Desolation,” Bloom thinks. Key in this passage is the association of barrenness and his wife, with obsolescence, but also the phrase, which is repeated again in Aeolus, “from captivity to captivity,” again a seeming perversion of the promise of national liberation, a trajectory of return rather than arrival. These competing images of the “holy land” in this period were propagated for the Zionist cause, as we see in Nordau’s treatises: What gives Zionists the courage to begin this labor of Hercules is the conviction that they are doing a necessary and useful work, a work of love and civilization, a work of justice and wisdom . . . They wish to make unquestionable producers out of the Jews at present reproached with being parasites. They desire to fertilize with their sweat and till with their hand a country that today is a desert, until it is again the flowering garden it has once been.

In the very same breath, as he has done over a lifetime in less melded ways, Nordau proposes to transform Jews from “physically degenerate proletarians” and “townbred hucksters,” into those “racy of the soil,” to borrow from Joyce, again (in Cyclops), who borrowed the phrase from Thomas Davis (in “Prospectus of the Nation,” 1908, meaning national vigor/potency), and to bring them “to the plough and into contact with mother earth” in the agrarian model.122 These tandem images, one actual and one ideal, are those Bloom moves between uneasily. He opts for his local geography, not exactly complacently, but with a bit of a shrug and an emphatic “yes,” when thinking of Molly, echoing the final, much debated ending of affirmation. He says “nothing doing” to Zionism, but with an acknowledgment of the “idea behind it,” which, like other Jewish references in the passage, recur to him throughout the day and are fairly elaborated by Joyce.123 Bloom is affected by the interchange of images and he seems impelled by the idea that his rejection of this option might indicate some, or nevertheless condemn him to, degeneracy. Shaking himself out of the gray horror of this latter image of Zion, with its own promise of decay, Bloom finds an array of rationalizations and ways of warding off the specter, among them—“Well I am here now. Yes, I am here now. Morning mouth bad images. Got up on the wrong side of the bed. Must begin again those Sandow’s exercises. On the hands down.”124

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This seeming throwaway line about shaping up with its posture of supplication to a body ideal is very much related to the images of a remote homeland that precede it. The Dublin papers between 1888 and 1904 reveal an incipient physical culture, a correlative of the furious discussion of nation building. Eugen Sandow was in that period a popular bodybuilder whose worldwide renown for physical exhibition and physical culture writings Joyce tapped into for Ulysses. Vike Martina Plock writes about Sandow, physical culture and pseudomedical discourse in Ulysses in Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity, claiming “Zionism as the intertext that connects all aspects that inform the ‘Ithaca’ chapter.”125 Ithaca is otherwise known as the “homecoming chapter,” in keeping with the Homeric analogue in which Odysseus returns to Ithaca, and by virtue of Bloom’s return to his home on Eccles Street with a surrogate son, Stephen Dedalus, in tow. Plock engages the motif of flabbiness–fitness, both in terms of the chapter’s structure and the image of the strongman, Bloom, in particular, concurring that “Sandow’s exercise regime appears as a promising remedy whenever Bloom faces self doubt or failure during the day.”126 She brings in Nordau in her discussion of the Zionist intertext, further making the connection between the apotheosis of Bloom of “Flowerville” in Ithaca and the Zionist vision of Palestine as “blooming,” and muscle building.127 There is something ominous about the connection and the remedy.128 Several critics have noted the appearance of Sandow in Joyce’s novel, but Plock is really the first to develop a Jewish connection, as it were.129 He was himself a foreigner in Britain; born in Germany as Wilhelm Müller, his name change has been the matter of some speculation but here is resonant of Nordau’s name change to guard against discrimination. His adopted first name is apparently a tribute to Francis Galton and eugenics, though that seems odd for someone who eschewed biological determinism. He is credited with originating the art of muscle building, ancestor of the celebrity of Arnold Schwarzenegger.130 Bloom has Sandow’s book in his library. In her discussion of the function of Sandow in Ulysses, Plock references a rival bodybuilder of the day, a Scot whose stage name was Apollo, who took the party line on the question of endowment, pillorying Sandow for his German descent and attendant physical flaws: “The specific racial aspect of Apollo’s argument is further accentuated when the Scotsman declares that ‘no nation in the world can excel in bone and muscle our own countrymen, and that there are better athletes in Britain than ever came from Germany.’ ”131 This in response to Sandow’s regimens for physical improvement aimed at his British now compatriots. Plock does not mention Balfour, nor the potential irony in the Scot’s position for a kind of absurd passing,

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or perverse Presbyterianism, showing muscle where there should be none; unless he was becoming, like the future Eric Liddell of 1924 Olympics fame, a muscular Christian.132 Notably, Plock tells us that Sandow often portrayed Rodin’s thinker in his bodybuilding tableaux, more interested in the body as art than as politics. We may be reminded of the one-two punch of the two-headed monster (Chamberlain and Balfour; coercion and eviction), in considering that the novel extends the trope of bodybuilding, under the general category of sport, to boxing, typically an underclass occupation.133 The match that is enacted by the ruling force is reproduced, in typically mimetic terms, as a kind of shadow boxing, wherein the fight between the over- and underdog takes place within a lateral arena. In so many instances the metaphorical extension of this arena contains references to Zionism, home rule, or homecoming, with a resort to a muscular figure, boxing his corner: Nordau’s alignment of the “new Jew” with the ancient gladiator (in “Muscular Judaism”); the contest between a democratic idea of strength or muscularity, as advocated by Sandow; and a national ideal, as in the match between the Dublin pet lamb, Myler Keogh, the celebrated Irish boxer, also known as the “Irish gladiator,” and an English soldier, which is rehearsed in Ulysses.134 The recounting of the Keogh–Percy match appears in Cyclops, the chapter of proliferative parodies (12.960–88—Casement and Emmet make appearances), in the context of a discussion about Irish sport (is it possible that Joyce knew about an 1889 competition between Sandow and another strongman named Cyclops?!). The match or “hefty battle,” as it is called, is the central trope of the chapter, which anticipates the showdown between the Citizen—the nationalist one-eyed bully—and Bloom the dubious Irishman; despite Bloom’s protestations that he is natively Irish, the men in the pub adjust his national affiliation to that of “a perverted jew, says Martin, from a place in Hungary.”135 Even the Orangeman Crofter disowns him. The mythic analogue to such matches, which marks the first parodic interpolation and also playfully introduces the “technique” of the chapter—gigantism, dictated by the schema136—is a poem about an ancient Irish legend of dynasties, warriors and giants of men. These and the voyaging heroes recounted there correspond to the larger trope of the Odyssean epic and the ensuing epic battle with the suitors, which Bloom roughly follows, though it is worth mentioning that the “battle” between the actual giant and Odysseus is one of strategy rather than physical force. Of course, such matches of underdog and oppressor recall David and Goliath, David appearing at this juncture also in his role as king: regarding the deaths of Saul and Jonathan, the narrator remarks “how the mighty have fallen,” a sentiment that seems to hang over

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the chapter.137 The Irish legend presents a pleasant and peaceful ancient view, disrupted throughout the chapter by the scrappy fights among the locals. The description of the Keogh boxing match follows an interpellation of the minutes of parliamentary procedure, which here parodically presents a conflation of complaints about disallowing Irish games in public parks (as a matter of colonial control) with the killing of animals who are diagnosed with foot-andmouth disease, another recurring motif of the unfit in the novel. (This historical fact is presented anachronistically in the novel. In the Nestor chapter, Mr. Deasy, the Protestant schoolmaster, conflates the embargo on diseased cattle with a need to keep immigrant Jews at bay.) Both topics are about the display and remedy of disease, of maintaining the physical and racial health of the country; and they are euphemistically about the show of force, “games” being another word for political murders, those that famously took place in Phoenix Park in 1882, in response to the coercion policies adopted by the installed government.138 As Peter Nohrnberg puts it in his essay on the cultural politics of sport in Ulysses, “a game is ‘always more than just a game,’ because to acknowledge that it is no more than just a game is to concede that it has no greater meaning outside of the circumscribed field of play.”139 —Nannan’s going too, says Joe. The league told him to ask a question tomorrow about the commissioner of police forbidding Irish games in the park. What do you think of that, citizen? The Sluagh na h-Eireann. Mr Cowe Conacre (Multifarnham. Nat.): Arising out of the question of my honourable friend, the member of Shillelagh, may I ask the right honourable gentleman whether the government has issued orders that these animals shall be slaughtered though no medical evidence is forthcoming as to their pathological condition? Mr Allfours (Tamoshant. Con.): Honourable members are already in possession of the evidence produced before a committee of the whole house. I feel I cannot usefully add anything to that. The answer to the honourable member’s question is in the affirmative. Mr Orelli O’Reilly (Montenotte. Nat.): Have similar orders been issued for the slaughter of human animals who dare to play Irish games in the Phoenix park? Mr Allfours: The answer is in the negative. Mr Cowe Conacre: Has the right honourable gentleman’s famous Mitcheltown telegram inspired the policy of gentlemen on the Treasury bench? (O!O!) Mr Allfours: I must have notice of that question. Mr Staylewit (Buncombe. Ind.): Don’t hesitate to shoot. (Ironical opposition cheers.) The speaker: Order! Order! (The house rises. Cheers)140

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Balfour is invoked because of his response to the query about the prohibition of Irish games, wherein he cites the “disfigurement of the turf and annoyance to the general public” and disabuses those bringing the appeal of the idea that the park belongs to the Irish public, rather than to the Crown;141 in the guise of “allfours,” who is identified in this parody absurdly as a “con”—conservative—from Tamashant, he is the Scottish top. Willy Maley has suggested, returning again to the two-headed octopus, that one may read this parody of his name as “all force,” or as all four parts of Britain (also four Irish provinces), he being at this moment the nominal head. But through this appellation—the top on the bottom—it is hard to miss the suggestion of Balfour’s very own transmogrification into the animals he is about to condemn, being an/on all fours, and his submissive posture. This presentation may in fact respond to Maley’s question regarding the double bind of the Anglo-Scottish legacy; why else remind of his Scottishness through the kitschy synecdoche of the tam-o’-shanter, except to implicate him in this double bind in which, as “bloody Balfour,” he brought the Irish to heel and, as niminy piminy, he was in servitude to the English master?142 As with all of these Cyclopsian interpolations, the framing is everything. Sluagh na h-Eiraenn (Army of Ireland, a patriotic organization of the time), which is invoked just ahead of the parody, references the Gaelic Athletic League, the fitness movement in Ireland attempting to follow Sandow’s regimen for building muscle. Of course, the exercise of Irish muscle, as in the parks, must be prevented by a strong arm that is itself suspect in the case of Balfour, and will become increasingly strained in the case of the empire he represents; instead, the Irish body must be rendered in light of the eugenics of the day, conflated again with the body politic, as degenerate. On the other side of the parody, the men in the pub debate the merits of various muscular sports according to their quotient of being “racy of the soil.” The narrator singles out the suspect Bloom for his inclination toward “shoneen” games like tennis—English and gentlemanly—and he mocks him for his chattiness. The irony in the charge of Jewish blab is that this is the very charge that was made against the Irish (“gab”) as evidence of their lack of restraint and reason, and their unfitness to govern.143 (To wit, Parnell’s silence and adulterous behavior as a double-edged virtue.) Of course, Bloom is seen to be wanting in other areas denoting manliness: his sexual prowess is questioned and mocked; his parsimony—ironic, in that he enters the pub en route to doing a good financial deed; his prudence, articulated through the lovely double entendre of standing a round, which Bloom is accused of shirking, in both senses of drink and physical resistance (“stand up to it then with force like men”).144 Despite the scapegoating of Bloom, the groups are steadily mirrored in one another.145

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The internal conflict of the pub suggests one way the 1922 Civil War would be in Joyce’s sights as he was completing the novel. Ulysses appears to forecast the enlistment of such nationalist models to the cause of fascism. Physical culture would likewise serve fascism, which shall or will be addressed in the next chapter on Magnus Hirschfeld (with Der Wandervogel, the German youth movement that preceded the Hitler Youth). The predictive and “catastrophic” nature of Rudy’s death for Bloom, more than its explanatory force for understanding the past, or projection of a sad end, constitutes a radical novelistic act. In line with Lee Edelman’s concept of reproductive futurity, generation in Ulysses is not achieved through the narrative of the child.146 Yet, however skeptical about the form of the child, Zionism, and endings, the novel does not foreclose on the future nor is conclusion endlessly deferred, except perhaps in the structure of language itself.147 The end of Ulysses has been vociferously debated as either utopic or dystopic. It is neither, I would say. “It recedes into memory, into some ecstatic space that might be characterized as Flowerville”148 or “where have all the flowers gone” (Pete Seeger, 1955–2014), to recall Barker’s novel: “I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses . . . where I was a Flower of the mountain yes . . .”149 With these famous lines the novel draws to a close, but not to a conclusion. Further, given Bloom’s lynchpin role in presenting these matters in the novel (and even Molly’s role—her debatable status as Jewish is irrelevant to this final reverie, where, Jewish or not, she returns to the Levantine landscape of her youth in Gibraltar), Joyce seems to have understood something about Nordau’s contradictory case that Nordau himself did not. Nordau’s morbid dread of instability, articulated everywhere in his oeuvre, is reflected in the fear of those in the pub who wish to lock in the Irish traits. On the other hand, Bloom’s laying claim to his Jewishness in the battle royal, often adduced to establish his ethnic identification and pride, is attenuated by the Jews he chooses to hold up as models—Marx, Spinoza, and the coup de grâce, Jesus—and like the novelistic transmission of Emmets’ and Taylors’ sacred, patriotic speeches, is made comic.150 Here is another instance where Joyce’s direct knowledge of Nordau appears certain, since in Nordau’s eulogy for Herzl, delivered at the Seventh Zionist Congress in Basle in 1905, he produced a roll call of Jewish heroes whom Herzl supposedly admired and would be muscular proto-Zionists, despite their apostate or confrontational relation to the Judaism: Baruch Spinoza—who appears in Bloom’s list—excommunicated from Judaism for his philosophical positions; Heinrich Heine, whose dubious Jewish status was disputed by Nordau, who contributed personally to the financing of Heine’s memorial; Judah Halevy,

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the twelfth-century Spanish religious and secular poet; and two Jewish rebels, second-century Bar Kochba and Judas Makkabäus (Nordau’s spelling), the latter of Chanukah fame, both of whom are Kirkuskämpfer (gladiators).151 Beyond the ostensible interface between the degenerate and muscleman Jew—however muscular Bloom is in speech, Joyce clearly did not render him so physiologically—Joyce conveys something about Nordau’s method, particularly visible in the Cyclops chapter where writing modes and genres, high and low, themselves interface to demonstrate their collective effect on forging an idea. The charges hurled at Bloom by the men might be (have been and continue to be) lodged at Joyce’s novel, given its performance of narrative largesse and difficulty. Nordau died in 1923, having increasingly pulled his Zionist punch because of the path it was taking away from Herzl’s and his original political vision. Looking around him in the Europe of the early 1920s, his idea of a Jewish homeland had turned into a vision of desolation about the fate of European Jewry and he became urgent about a need for a place of refuge. His plea was roundly rejected at a meeting of Zionists and British politicians in London in 1920. Chaim Weizmann, also there, the then president of the World Zionist organization and the future first president of the state of Israel, and the person who worked most closely with Balfour for Zionist ends, was particularly disturbed by Nordau’s indelicate push. Balfour died in 1930, having visited Palestine in 1925 at the behest of Weizmann, and with a clear resolve about the homeland for which he had been the signatory of promise. In an introduction to Nahum Sokolow’s History of Zionism (Sokolow translated Herzl’s Altneuland into Hebrew), Balfour writes that it is “this people of all others, which retaining to its full, its racial selfconsciousness, has been severed from its home, has wandered into all lands, and has nowhere been able to create for itself an organized social commonwealth, and that only Zionism could mitigate this great tragedy”; one might wonder how he felt about Weizmann’s analogizing of the Jews with the Irish in these very terms in his introduction to Zionism and the Jewish Future, which Joyce had in his possession.152 In fact, the fruits of Balfour’s labor in Ireland, to divide or evict and conquer, are a kind of mirroring image of Levantine spoils or Levantine spoiled—of the partition of Israel/Palestine, a perfect reflection of the fitness regimes that animated both, in that all the parties conspired in the flexion of muscle. Joyce’s representation of these ideas remains fitful, as was modernism’s overall. Barker’s achievement in large part is to recalibrate the cultural engine that drove the Great War and also to de-nostalgize a period contending with a split between

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a ravaged post-war sensibility—which sought in Eliotic/Nordauean terms to stabilize the culture—and an explosion of cultural and social innovation. The Ghost Road ends on a foreign field that, unsadly, will never more be “England” (Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier”). The importance of the Jewish subject for Joyce is hard to overstate, for Barker perhaps less so. As this analysis of their work demonstrates, they tapped into a force governed by the significant role the “Jewish question” played in science and art in the period in which modernism, so contentious a movement for both arenas, was unfolding. Joyce’s novel is content to operate in a conditional space and continue to wander, in a way that Nordau declares and keeps declaring he has put to an end.153 Joyce, I believe, would have been glad to be in the company of Nordau’s honor roll of degenerates and decadents, who emerged for the most part as the great European writers of the modern period.154 He fits perfectly in Nordau’s definition of literary fashionability as “above all obscure.”155 So many of them—Zola, Wilde, Nietzsche, etc.—would necessarily engage the Jew-ish subject. Nordau’s anxieties about and prescriptions for the twentieth century, and the conflicts and continuities between them, do more than unlock the Jewish question; they render that question a staging ground for the issues that have characterized the era.

Notes 1 Max Nordau, Degeneration, trans. and intro. George L. Mosse (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), Dedication. 2 Sharon Ouditt, “Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 249. 3 Brazilian author Paul Coelho, in a more recent round of Ulysses bashing, excoriated the novel for doing “great harm,” because it is “pure style.” “There is nothing there. Stripped down, Ulysses is a twit” (The Guardian, August, 7, 2012, online). 4 There are many worthy works that explore the critical ramifications of this idea of manliness and physical fitness. For examples: Emancipation Through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe, eds. Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Michael Hau, The Cult and Health of Beauty in Germany (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003); Tracey Loughran, “A Crisis in Masculinity? Re-writing the History of Shell-Shock and Gender in First World War Britain,” History Compass, vol. 11 (2013): 727–38. Also Todd Samuel Presner’s work.

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5 Stephen D. Arata interestingly characterizes Nordau’s determination of the unfit text as that which signifies “promiscuously,” that generates meaning with “scandalous abandon.” In “Strange Cases, Common Fates: Degeneration and the Pleasures of Professional Reading,” in Robert Newman, ed., Centuries Ends, Narrative Means (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 187. 6 Hans-Peter Söder, “Disease and Health as Contexts of Modernity,” German Studies Review, vol. 14, no. 3 (1991): 474. 7 Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin-de Siècle: Identity and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 54–5. 8 Nordau, Degeneration, 319. 9 Ibid., 322. 10 Janet E. Hogarth, “Literary Degenerates,” Fortnightly Review, n.s. 57 (1895): 586–92. Also see Michael Stanislawski, who attributes Nordau’s views to social Darwinism— Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 22. 11 Nordau, Degeneration, 547. 12 Martin Puchner, “The Aftershocks of Blast: Manifestos, Satire, and the RearGuardism of Modernism,” in Douglas Moa and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds., Bad Modernisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 45. 13 More than Eliotic nostalgia, Puchner would underscore, in Poetry of Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 108. 14 See Egmont Hake’s Regeneration: A Reply to Max Nordau (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896), where he disputes Nordau’s characterization of Wagner’s anti-Semitism as degeneracy by justifying anti-Semitism. 15 The Maccabean rehearses Nordau’s open letter to Shaw, which appeared in the Neue Freie Press, in which he dismisses Shaw’s critique of Degeneration as anti-Semitic. 16 Elsie B. Adams discusses Shaw’s address to Nordau in Bernard Shaw and the Aesthetes (Columbus, OH: Ohio State Press, 1971), 47. 17 Charles Kingsley is an exemplary advocate of nativism, in such novels as Alton Locke and Westward Ho! (1850). The idea of “vigor” is prevalent in this work—one which appears in both Ulysses and in Barker’s Regeneration trilogy—deriving from the “primitive,” the “noble savage,” which would, so many colonial philosophies imagined or rationalized, rejuvenate the nation. 18 George Bernard Shaw, The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense About Artists Being Degenerate (New York: B.R. Tucker), 87–8. 19 Ibid., 92. 20 Nordau, Degeneration, 55. In his discussion of Nordau, Arata observes these pathologized aspects of the writer and his writing—“The very desire to write becomes entangled with degenerative impulses of varyingly exotic nature: echolalia,

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logorrhea, graphomania, impulsivism, rabachage, onomtomania.” In Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin-de- Siècle, 28. Shaw, The Sanity of Art, 83. Speech impediments in the period typified foreignness along with disease. Max Nordau, On Art and Artists, trans. W.F. Harvey (Philadelphia, PA: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1907), 289. Ibid., 281. Nordau, “Muscle Jewry,” in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, eds. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 434. In Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 96. See also Daniel Boyarin’s discussion of the reflexivity of the “castration complex” for Freud, wherein he makes a connection between the anxiety associated with the mother’s lack for Little Hans, and Freud’s own anxiety about his image as an uncanny site of trauma, that is Jewish circumcision. Apart from the “universalizing of a symptom,” as Boyarin puts it, this conflation speaks to the projection of Nordau’s anxieties onto his theories of the “new Jew.” In “Homophobia and the Postcoloniality of the ‘Jewish Science,’ ” in Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pelligrini, eds., Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 166–98. Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1997). “Muscular Christianity” was a movement of the second half of the nineteenth century thus dubbed by a reviewer of Charles Kingsley’s novel, Two Years Ago. Kingsley, who did not like to have the term applied to him (he preferred “manly Christian”), was fixated on the degraded body and its symbolic import for Englishness. The notion of muscular Christianity that he espoused and was widely accepted was resonant of, let’s say, the doctrine of the elect, in that an outward display of “vigor” became the sign of spiritual and moral and eventually national fitness. The rhetoric of such regeneration of the nation included the necessary combination of “Godliness and manliness,” the formula for moral regeneration and spiritual nationhood. C.J.W.L. Wee tells us in his excellent essay on this general topic that the “original English vigor” is recuperated or “resuscitated as Teutonic”— “Christian Manliness and National Identity: The Problematic Construction of Racially ‘Pure’ Nation,” in Donald E. Hall, ed., Embodying Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 66–88. See also Joseph Valente’s discussion of this subject in relation to Joyce, in “ ‘Neither Fish Nor Flesh’; or how ‘Cyclops’ Stages the Double-Bind of Irish Manhood,” in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes, eds., Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96–127.

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28 George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3. There has been a wealth of critical literature on this topic. In the British context, see Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “Physical Culture in Interwar Britain,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 41, no. 4 (2006): 595–610. 29 Max Nordau, Zionism and Anti-Semitism, trans. Gustav Gottheil (New York: Scott-Thaw, 1904), 33. 30 See Jonathan Rutherford, Forever England: Reflections on Race, Masculinity and Empire (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997). 31 Pat Barker, Regeneration (first published 1991), here from The Regeneration Trilogy (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1998), 176. 32 The poem is referenced in Barker, The Eye in the Door (Regeneration Trilogy), 338–9. 33 Hans-Peter Söder, “A Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Max Nordau and the Problem of Degeneracy,” in Rudolf Käser and Vera Pohland, eds., Disease and Medicine in Modern German Cultures (Ithaca, NY: Center for International Studies, Cornell University, 1990), 61. 34 In Chapter 12 of The Eye in the Door, lesbians and homosexuals are referred to as “monsters.” 35 Sheryl Stevenson, “With the Listener in Mind: Talking About the Regeneration Trilogy with Pat Barker,” in Sharon Monteith, Margaretta Jolly, Nahme Yousaf, and Ronald Paul, eds., Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 175. 36 William Skidelsky, “The 10 best historical novels,” Observer, May 12, 2012, https:// www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2012/may/13/ten-best-historical-novels. 37 Richard Locke, “Chums of War: Pat Barker revisits the trauma of World War I,” Bookforum, February/March 2008. 38 See Meera Atkinson, The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 121–8. See also Sean Francis Ward’s reading of “Barker’s texts as a reimagining of erotohistoriography avant la lettre . . . to show how an intimate engagement with past, irrevocably queer sociality impedes the British state’s ongoing attempts to commemorate World War I,” in “Erotohistoriography and War’s Waste in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy,” Contemporary Literature, vol. 57, no. 3 (2016): 323. 39 Barker, Regeneration, 104. 40 Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door, 390. See Michèle Barrett’s essay, “Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy and the Freudianization of Shell Shock,” Contemporary Literature, vol. 53 (2012): 237–60, for a discussion of the anachronism of Freudian psychoanalysis for understanding and treating war shock in the First World War. 41 Barker, The Ghost Road, 440. 42 Barker, Regeneration, 190–1.

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43 Ibid., 147. 44 For a discussion of the involvement of Ruth Head and her husband Henry in the arts, see L.S. Jacyna, Medicine and Modernism (Abingdon: Pickering and Chatto, 2008). 45 Barker, The Eye in the Door, 367, 415. 46 John Middleton Murray, discussing “Counter-attack,” in The Nation (July 13, 1918). 47 Stephen Dedalus refers to himself as a “most finished artist,” in the Circe chapter of Ulysses. “Finished” serves as a double entendre of impotence, creative and sexual. Leopold Bloom is described as “mixed middling” in Cyclops, in another double entendre of racial and sexual lack, which also references literary quality (Ulysses: The Corrected Text (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 15.2508; 12.1658–9. 48 Barker, Regeneration, 192. 49 See note 17 above. 50 Barker, Regeneration, 217. 51 E.g., ibid., 186–7. 52 Ibid., 64. 53 Ibid., 33. 54 Ibid., 193. 55 Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 110. Modernism Lab, online. 56 Barker, Regeneration, 78. 57 Ibid., 22–3. An early Sassoon poem—“The Victory”—was a glorification of war. 58 Barker, Regeneration, 42. 59 Barker’s discussion of “compound eye” in an interview with John Brannigan, in Contemporary Literature, vol. 46, no. 3 (2005): 379. Online. 60 Barker, Regeneration, 140. 61 Ibid., 129. 62 Ibid., 126. 63 Ibid., 192. 64 Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” (1845) features the tapping and rapping double entendre of repressed desire. Joyce also uses “tapping” in Ulysses, as the mnemonic of the blind man. Walt Whitman’s civil war sequence Drum-Taps (1865) also comes to mind. Whitman makes a brief appearance in The Eye in the Door as a representative of songs and poems in praise of “homogenics.” 65 Barker, Regeneration, 133. 66 One should remember here Owen’s poem “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” which makes the Akedah its symbolic subject, though the focus there is on the father’s betrayal of his son, as with the state’s betrayal of its soldiers. The Akedah and the figure of David were prime biblical figures for aestheticization in the fin de siècle, often as a way of showcasing the barbarity displayed by Jews.

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67 Samuel 7 and 18; Goliath vs. Michal. 68 When Shaw defended himself against Nordau’s charge of anti-Semitism, he aligned Nordau with other cosmopolitan Jews whom he deemed anti-modern, Marx and Lassalle, ironic because what aligns them is their wish to evade Jewish identification, more than that as Marxists they were anti-modernists. For a discussion of cosmopolitanism in Shaw’s response to Nordau within an Irish-Jewish context, see Stephen Watt’s “The Discourses of Irish Jewish Studies: Bernard Shaw, Max Nordau, and Evocations of the Cosmopolitan,” in Aidan Beatty and Dan O’Brien, eds., Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2018), 161–75. 69 Barker, Regeneration, 208. 70 Ibid., 42. 71 Ibid., 47 72 Ibid, 45. My italics. 73 Ibid, 42, my italicization of “object”. 74 Ibid., 42; The Eye in the Door, 390. Toward the end of The Eye in the Door, Rivers returns to the manifest content of his above dream and gets a bit closer to his sexual desire for Sassoon by recalling the intersecting symbols lodged there. He has been calming Sassoon, who has been sent with a head wound to a hospital in London, and asks for Rivers. Sassoon is hysterical, to use a word that he has resisted and all have resisted for him, not having died and no longer able to maintain the split between his poet and warrior selves. By the end of the chapter and the trilogy, Rivers concludes that “duality was the stable state, the attempt at integration dangerous.” This insight is occasioned by a flood of nostalgia for what is suggested was a more primitive, more welcome self in Melanesia. 75 Barker, Regeneration, 41–5. Barker adds a lovely detail by telling us that Rivers’ current issue of Man is next to his bed, still in its envelope. Man: A Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, has been extant in one incarnation or another since the eighteenth century, then officially described as “a paper ennobling the species.” 76 Barker, The Eye in the Door, 340. 77 Nordau’s pathologization of artistic instability, madness, or neurasthenia, is invoked in Sassoon. Nordau predicted that the state of the artist spelled the eventual demise of the art. 78 Sarah Trimble, “ ‘The Unreturning Army that was Youth’: Social Reproduction and Apocalypse in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy,” Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 7, no. 1 (2013): 11. 79 Sean Francis Ward, “Erotoshistoriography and the War’s Waste,” 321–3. Ward references Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Bands: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 80 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989).

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81 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum International Publishing Company, 1973). Translation from the original German edition, 1966. 82 Max Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 190. Sassoon’s published diaries present no such sense of connection to Palestine. 83 See my James Joyce’s Judaic Other (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 84 Nordau too did not believe in the immanence of Zionism, despite his appreciation of the Marxist telos. 85 Paul K. Saint-Amour, “Bombing and the Symptom: Traumatic Earliness and the Nuclear Uncanny,” Diacritics, vol. 30, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 71, 61, 69. 86 See Nordau’s discussion of the impassive and impassibility—Degeneration, 271–2. I am indebted to Joe Valente for suggesting the dis-association here with James’s characterization of certain nineteenth-century novels as “large, loose, baggy monsters,” in the Preface to The Tragic Muse (1890). Laura Frost’s discussion of the un-pleasure in modernism’s difficulty is also salient here: The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 87 See Jacqueline Rose, regarding the prominence of the Jewish question in European affairs, literary and otherwise, and her contention that “partition is the offspring of the Jewish question, in that it is the repetition of the mode of thought that produced Dreyfus.” This is a variation on the paradox that attends the thinkers of this project. In Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 71–2. 88 Arthur Koestler in Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917–1949 (London: Macmillan, 1983), 4, in Eitan Bar Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture, 1799–1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 182. 89 Herzl’s original concept of a Jewish homeland was political, but not state-based. 90 Ways of thinking about what has been dubbed “The Jewish Question”: Judenot vs. Not des Judentum: the Judenot (the problem of anti-Semitism) to which the Judenstaat (1896) was the answer by Herzl, or the Not des Judentums (the problem of Jewish religious and cultural life in the aftermath of Enlightenment and in the face of modernity); these are the differences between political vs. cultural Zionism, the first of which was advocated by Nordau, along with Herzl. 91 Paul Ward references Balfour’s Nationality and Home Rule (1913), in which he tries to square the question of national affinities within British empire. In Britishness Since 1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 151. 92 I have argued for the Jew-ishness of Bloom that is not-fixed, in either sense (James Joyce’s Judaic Other, e.g., p. 8). 93 James Joyce, Ulysses, 8.499–532. 94 Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 173. In a note to this section (8.527–8), the editors observe that although AE stood for Aeon, “according to one witty Dublin version, it meant ‘agricultural economist.’ ” Russell worked for agrarian reform.

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95 Willy Maley, “ ‘Kilt by kelt shell kithagain with kinagain’: Joyce and Scotland,” in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes, eds., Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 216; Hugh Kenner, “Taxonomy of an Octopus,” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2 (Winter 1981): 204–5. 96 The phrase “coming events cast their shadows before” comes from a ballad by Thomas Campbell about the defeat at Culloden—the site of the 1745 Jacobite Rising. 97 The two-headed figure, one being “coercion,” the other “eviction,” are epithets descriptive of the policies undertaken by Chamberlain (dressed as Cromwell, with sword) and Balfour (Royal Irish Constabulary uniform, with baton), but the figure also indicts the Irish Parnellite John Redmond, for creating the two-headed monster through an unyielding refusal to ally with anyone who might diverge from the Parnell party line, and ultimately implicates the Irish themselves in their division and ultimate partition. 98 Ulysses, 8.441. 99 While the Irish identified with the Boers against the English, however perversely, Nordau identified the Boers with the Maccabean revolution, i.e., the Jews (“On the Maccabean War the Boer War,” in Zionistische Schriften). 100 In Circe the “end of the world” has a Scotch accent; Duke of Atholl, governor in chief, Isle of Man. Also, see my James Joyce’s Judaic Other for a discussion of Griffith. 101 See The United Irishman debates about who is an Irishman: Reizbaum, James Joyce’s Jewish Other, 36, 38, 39, 42; also Joseph Valente, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 73. Parnell had a tightrope to walk between proving and disproving that depending on his audience. Also, “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages” (1907) (in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, eds. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 153–72) and Joyce’s other essays. 102 F.S.L Lyons, “James Joyce’s Dublin,” Twentieth Century Studies, vol. 4 (November 1970): 20. Joe Valente observes this point in his chapter “ ‘Mixed Middling’: James Joyce and Metrocolonial Manliness,” in The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 188. 103 See Anne Fogarty’s essay, “Parnellism and the Politics of Memory,” in Andrew Gibson and Len Platt, eds.,“Our Mixed Racings”: Joyce, Ireland and Britain, eds. (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2006). 104 This is the generic subject of Nordau’s Right to Love (New York: F.T. Neely, 1895). 105 In Valente, The Myth of Manliness, 40. As for Joyce being described as in a state of “arrested Parnellism,” Valente argues, “for Joyce, the attachment to a ghost, be it Parnell, ‘the beautiful May Goulding,’ Shakespeare, or one’s own self past—is always an occasion for critiquing the self-evidence of present things. Thus, as the ghost of

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Unfit the compelling yet internecine construct of manhood, Parnell ultimately helped to make the call to that honored estate . . . the subject of endlessly skeptical interrogation in Joyce’s prose” (194). In Bloom’s assessment, “Poached eyes on ghost.” Valente goes on to talk about the precariousness of Parnell’s image with respect to his fitness to lead: “They took the exception the English made for Parnell [on the wrong side but with the right stuff ] as a concession to the Irish nation as a whole” (ibid., 31). The point is that Parnell’s fitness to lead would turn on the precarious state of his manliness and gentlemanliness. Such mismemory is a Joycean tick one might say, dating from “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” and “Grace” in Dubliners (1915), where political and religious doctrine are muddled. Abby Bender, “ ‘The Language of the Outlaw: A Clarification,’ a note relating to Roger Casement and Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 44: (Summer 2007): 4. Joyce, Ulysses, 7.860–75. Marilyn Reizbaum, “An Empire of Good Sports: Roger Casement, the Boer War, and James Joyce’s Ulysses,” Kunapipi, vol. 23, no. 1 (2001): 83–113. Joyce, Ulysses, 7.872. Exodus 4. Some interpretations suggest that Moses could not withstand God’s voice and died. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans., Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 37–8. Herzl said since his life was “no novel, his novel had become his life”—from the introduction to The Jewish State (New York: Dover Publications, 1988). Joyce, Ulysses, 7.905. See Neil Davison, Ira Nadel, Margot Norris, Erwin Steinberg, Harry Levin, etc. Joyce, Ulysses, 4.154–5. Ibid., 4.163–4. There is a grey cloud seeming to follow him, the same one, it seems, that will appear just before the Lestrygonians passage with the two-headed octopus. There, too, it follows a rosier image of national liberation—in that case, “Home rule sun rising up in the northwest,” a headpiece over bank of Ireland that once been the Irish parliament, now a motto of the home rule movement. The reference to this tag first appears in Calypso (Ulysses, 4.218; 8.473–50). Ibid., 4. 223–7. Max Nordau, “Zionism,” in Zionism and Anti-Semitism, 42–4. Nordau castigated Rodin for sculptures that produce the effect of emerging from natural stone—“the work of art is revealed, blooming, as it were, in the wilderness,” in On Art and Artists, 280. See Reizbaum, James Joyce’s Judaic Other, 42–3. Here I present a fuller discussion of Bloom’s presentation in tropes of Jewish degeneracy.

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124 Joyce, Ulysses, 4.232–4. 125 Vike Martina Plock, Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity (Miami, FL: University of Florida Press, 2010), 128. 126 Ibid., 111. 127 Plock cites James Joyce’s Judaic Other, but not my article on Nordau that makes these connections—Marilyn Reizbaum, “Max Nordau and the Generation of Jewish Muscle,” Jewish Culture and History, vol. 6, no. 1 (Summer 2003): 130–51. 128 In “Bombing and the Symptom,” Paul Saint-Amour discusses the Ithaca chapter in terms of traumatic earliness, as conveying a “cataclysmic finality,” ominous about catastrophic events which have yet to occur (76–8). 129 See, for example, R. Brandon Kershner, The Culture of Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 130 Plock recalls that Robert Martin Adams in Surface and Symbol (1967) pointed out the absurdity of Bloom’s proportions—Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity, 164. This is reminiscent of Nordau’s critique of Rodin and his own application of that absurd measure further on. See also, David Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 131 Plock, Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity, 120–1. 132 Relevant to this discussion is Hugh Hudson’s 1981 movie Chariots of Fire, ostensibly about the 1924 Olympics, hugely popular when it was released, functioning as antidote to all the post- Empire English bashing role of fitness as a literary property, but also a racial one. See my “Max Nordau and the Generation of Jewish Muscle” for a discussion of the film. 133 See Neil Davison’s discussion of the Jewish boxer Daniel Mendoza in “Pugilism in Ulysses: Round Two,” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 32. no. 3/4 (Spring–Summer 1995): 722–8. 134 Though this was an actual match, it seems Joyce adjusts the affiliations just a bit to reify the national differences, in that Keogh’s opponent is transformed from the Dragoon Irishman in the service of the empire to an Englishman in the service of the king (Ulysses, 12.960–88). And there are other ways to read Joyce’s purpose here, e.g., J. Lawrence Mitchell’s characterization of this as a grudge match for Joyce—in “Joyce and Boxing: Famous Fighters in Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 2 (1994): 22, another instance of Joyce settling scores on the page. 135 Joyce, Ulysses, 12.1635. 136 Joyce produced two schemata for the novel—one for Carlo Linati in 1920 and one in conversations with Stuart Gilbert in 1921, including such categories as “Colour,” “Organ,” and “Technic.” The organ listed for Cyclops is the “muscle.” 137 Joyce, Ulysses, 12.24. 138 The Coercion Acts, beginning in 1881, included a prohibition against unlawful assembly, including for sports events. Thomas Burke, the Permanent Under

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Unfit Secretary at the Irish Office, was seen to be in collusion with the English and was the target of the notorious Phoenix Park murders. Peter C. L. Nohrnberg, “ ‘Building Up a Nation Once Again’: Irish Masculinity, Violence, and the Cultural Politics of Sports in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses,” Joyce Studies Annual, vol. 2010 (2010): 100. Joyce, Ulysses, 12, 857–79. See Nohrnberg, “ ‘Building Up a Nation Once Again,’ ” 129. Benjamin Disraeli as a Jew suffered from similar splits. Many Irish studies and Joyce scholars have referenced J.A. Froude’s work on the incapacity of certain races to govern due to their degenerate or inferior qualities; he ascribed and reinforced the Irish types that prevailed, such as “wild,” “simian,” “unmanly,” etc. (The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, 1873). For such reference, see, for example, Marion Quirici’s excellent essay “Degeneration, Decadence, and Joyce’s Modern Disability Aesthetics,” Joyce Studies Annual (2016): 84–109. Joyce, Ulysses, 12.1475. Valente, in “‘Neither Fish Nor Flesh,’” discusses this offloading of Irish stereotypes onto Bloom and the double bind of hypermasculinity and the unmanly in the Citizen. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). I would argue this, regardless of the degree to which Bloom’s narrative is driven by the reverie of his dead son. See, in particular, Edelman’s discussion of futurity as linguistic figuration rather than temporality, citing Paul de Man and Walter Benjamin (134–5). Such radicality about narrative teleology is present in Regeneration, too, though there the symbolic order is figured in the idea of reproductive futurity rather than the presence of the child representing the order. See Hugh Kenner on open endings in Ulysses (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Joyce, Ulysses, 17.1580. Ibid., 18.1556. See my “Re-deeming Cyclops: Or When the Saints Come Marching In,” in Kimberly Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum, eds., Ulysses: En-Gendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999). Max Nordau, “Trauerrede auf Herzl” in Zionistische Schriften, 161. See also Michael Stanislawski’s discussion of the eulogy and Nordau’s affinities, in Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 74–85. Nahum Sokolow, History of Zionism, 1600–1918, with an introduction by the Rt. Hon. A.J. Balfour (London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1919).

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153 The first paragraph of last chapter of Degeneration begins, “Our long and sorrowful wandering through the hospital—for as such we have recognized, if not all civilized humanity, at all events the upper stratum of the population of large towns to be—is ended.” 154 Marion Quirici examines the reception of Joyce’s writing as “degenerate art” and the historical discrediting of Joyce through “negative disability metaphors” (“Degeneration, Decadence, and Joyce’s Modern Disability Aesthetics,” 84). 155 Nordau, Degeneration, 14.

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Sexology’s Photoshop

Bilder sollen bilden1 Today at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which catalogs four hundred years of Jewish life in Germany, Magnus Hirschfeld is paired with Albert Einstein in a single video installation. The visitor puts on earphones to hear Einstein presenting one of his theories, but does not hear Hirschfeld, who appears there in an excerpt from his controversial silent film about sexuality, Anders als die Anderen (Different from the Others), made in 1919. One is struck by the pairing of the “real” scientist who has something to say with the sexual scientist who is muted. In fact, the two have been inextricably linked by the epithet assigned to Hirschfeld in the 1930s, “The Einstein of Sex,” and also by the attribution of “Jewish” to their science in that same period. Hirschfeld is purported to have responded to queries about this dubbing by saying he wished instead that Einstein would be called “the Hirschfeld of physics.”2 While seeming like a throwaway remark, the implication is also serious—that Hirschfeld sought legitimization for his work and his self, as “Hirschfeld” had become synonymous with his “science” of sexology. Yet the “Einstein of Sex” also reconfirms their other connection, which literally pairs Einstein and Hirschfeld in the archive that is the Berlin Jewish museum. Hirschfeld’s response is funny not only because of what now seems like hubris, but also because the inversion neutralizes, even sanitizes the salient and at once unsavory connection with sex, while at once, by inversion, shadowing it through the Jewish referent: the Jewish subject was interchangeable with “unsavory sex” in his milieu, often represented by the very term “invert.” To track Hirschfeld’s impact then is to consider the “en-Jewment” of his contribution, that is to say, an “intolerable enjoyment” of sexual difference in his milieu, and, in that connection, an important underpinning of queer studies.3 Of all the figures in this study, Hirschfeld is perhaps singular in his continuing relevance for the discourses he helped to create. In considering Magnus 169

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Hirschfeld and what has obscured him, the chapter may expand the discussion of the work to place it in conjunction with the recent research on alignments between queer and Jewish.4 Hirschfeld’s work is thereby brought to bear on an understanding of the development of modernist arts in their presentation of sex and character, in ways that elude readers in Freud, the most common source for such inquiry; Freud made Jewishness a feature of his own work that likewise has been elided.5 If, as I argue here, Nordau was the most logical figure in this connection between Jewishness and modern arts, Hirschfeld’s major sexological theories and methods make him the most obvious. What distinguishes him from those like Freud and Havelock Ellis, with whom he collaborated, was, first, his laser focus on homosexuality, and then, importantly, his particular use of the photo for evidentiary purposes—to visually objectify sexual identity, or, as he might say, to make biology visible. While his motto was “Through science to justice,” he participates in a culture of visual signification that marks the interface between science and art through the photographic process, which as a medium of modern science became also a modernist medium. In his study of Race and Photography, Amos Morris-Reich considers whether photography was indispensable to the emergence of racial sciences.6 The Jewish subject became entwined with the medicalization of the body in Hirschfeld’s milieu through the art of its representation—one thinks of ethnographic surrealism, for example— and Hirschfeld is an important key to understanding this fold. Photography with its vagaries became the perfect medium for the spectrum of sexuality that Hirschfeld sought to present. The idea that sexology is “raced” is historically true, though it is rarely observed in discussions of Hirschfeld’s work. In Matti Bunzl’s 2000 review of the intersections of queer and Jewish cultural studies he considers “to what degree was the codification of the modern homosexual inflected by images of racialized Jewish difference.”7 (He wonders, too, whether the future of queer studies requires getting beyond this inflection.) It is demonstrable that homosexuality and Jewishness were effectively equated in Hirschfeld’s milieu;8 and as to the question of whether the pernicious historical equation may give way to an analogic relation that does not evacuate either their historical specificity or difference, the visual aesthetic that will be examined here seems to reply in Joseph Litvak’s formulation, that the Jew is “another kind of queer.”9 Hirschfeld’s legacy is here demonstrated in the work of two important photographers who make an art of Hirschfeld’s science: one from the first part of the twentieth century who has been rediscovered to great acclaim, Claude Cahun; and the other, Adi Nes, a current Israeli photographer who has gained

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international recognition. In them, one can see both Hirschfeld’s reach and the intersection of Jewishness and queerness that amplifies his method, and their own.10 It is crucial to note that while the photograph was an indispensable part of Hirschfeld’s work, he was not a particular practitioner of the medium. MorrisReich makes the distinction between writers who theorized about photography but hardly used photographs in their work, such as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, versus those who used photos as evidentiary without discussing the medium—like Hirschfeld, though he is not among those MorrisReich discusses.11 Like a photographer, Hirschfeld placed the subjects of the photographs he acquired into sexological categories. Cahun and Nes tap into the interface between major scientific and historical discourses, along with the art image through the heurism of photographic technique, such as anamorphism and hypertextuality. Both are interested in costume, precisely in the fashioning of gender—how the clothes “make the man” (or the woman), echoing Hirschfeld’s credo that dress creates a sexual identity rather than making sexuality apparent.12 They extend from these ideas of representation to the analogue that the photograph presents as productive, rather than revelatory, of gendered and sexual identities. Their work foregrounds the paradox of visuality. While Cahun was forged within surrealism, she departed from it in numerous ways, significantly, as Rosalind Krauss points out, in the centrality of a form of self-portraiture to her work that surrealism for the most part eschewed. Krauss points to Marcel Duchamp as yet another example—I will later turn to Duchamp, along with Virginia Woolf, whose redress of the biographical form and analogous use of the photograph in Orlando dovetails with Cahun’s work.13 Self-portraiture is also an important tool for Hirschfeld, for his subjects, and more tacitly for himself; he uses it in part, to defamiliarize ideal forms, and in part, to locate the position of the viewer in relation to the subject (“Mann order Weib?” [Man or Woman?]).14 Both Cahun and Nes engage in portraiture as performative, taking up the trope of bodybuilding in historically and aesthetically playful ways, but always with a focus on the erotic. Nes deconstructs sexual and national myths through a rehabilitation of the historical equation between homosexuality and Jewishness. The logic of connection between these artists comes from the bookends they present on the evolution of the art photo’s focus on the body, and the place of the Jewish within the science and the art. Within the broader context of Hirschfeld’s work, they form a particular queer genealogy. In one way, it is the coincidence of their backgrounds that brings the Jewish element to their work, but here, as throughout this book, I contend the figure of the Jew is constitutive of modernism and its legacies. In particular, the queering of the dominant

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culture that the Jew-ish provides is consistent with the premium so many modernist authors, and especially visual artists, placed on gender and sexual mobility, on “transvestism” and “transexuality” per se. The contradiction provided by the photographic lens to the question of the reliability of the image is commensurate with the modernist refocusing of the subject that resists or is prohibited from coming into focus.

Claude Cahun Claude Cahun is increasingly seen as an important precursor to queer theory, especially having to do with the performativity of gender, anticipating Judith Butler by decades. Her writing is formally experimental, characterized by aphorism and automatism, reminiscent at times of Gertrude Stein. Emily Apter has brought the term “geometric modernism” to Cahun’s photography, which she argues is unisex and therefore particularly apt for a feminist modernist like Cahun, who enables “the geometry of femininity to be, quite literally redrawn”; Cahun practiced an aesthetic of inversion that turned the tables on surrealism’s “thingification” of the female body.15 Cahun was also particularly attuned to sexology and one can see its imprint everywhere in her work. She was an admirer and translator of Havelock Ellis, strongly advocating for his theories on sexual inversion, though she departed from any vestige of eugenics in his work.16 In fact, her series of photographic self-portraits are startling for their depictions of a sexual spectrum—androgyny, male and female stereotypes and types, and hermaphroditism; she might have been Hirschfeld’s photographer.17 Cahun was born in France in 1896 as Lucie Schwob. Her father came from a prominent Jewish family of publishers; her uncle was the symbolist Marcel Schwob. Her mother was not Jewish and was institutionalized when Cahun was very young. She was raised by her paternal grandmother. Cahun studied at Oxford and lived in Paris for much of the time she was working as a writer and photographer. She was woven into the surrealist school, having close ties to André Breton, Robert Desnos, and Henri Michaux, though she did most of her work outside of that circle. She retreated to the island of Jersey in 1937 (where she had vacationed with family), where she was held prisoner by the Nazis from 1944 to 1945, and her work and papers are now collected in the Jersey Heritage Foundation. She died there in 1954. Many have rehearsed the details of her life, either to underscore the integral autobiographical dimension or sometimes to pathologize her. Though her work

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was done mostly between the years 1911 and 1945, it was newly discovered only in the 1980s and met with renewed interest especially from within the art and gender studies communities. The photos were mostly done with her lover and stepsister Suzanne Malherbe (Marcel Moore); there is some debate about to what degree these portraits, mostly of Cahun herself, were collaborations and therefore in line with early discussion about photography, to what extent the subject or the method constitutes the body of the work.18 Her critics have focused mainly on her lesbianism, in her life and her work, and on her participation in the surrealist group. Her Jewishness, while almost always mentioned as a biographical detail, is rarely examined or considered in relation to her work. This, despite her family background, her choice of pseudonym—which she took from a paternal great uncle, Léon Cahun, an eminent Orientalist historian (also her grandmother’s maiden name)—and the infusion into her work of Jewish subjects in a number of ways (Cahun would appear to be a French rendering of Cohen).19 In work like Cahun’s, which is instructively self-reflexive in every aspect (self-portraiture, photomontage of selves and body parts, etc.), her ethnicity or racial identification becomes a necessary feature.20 Rosalind Krauss has observed the salience of the photograph for surrealism: Given this special status with regard to the real, being, that is, a kind of deposit of the real itself, the manipulation wrought by the surrealist photographers—the spacings and doublings—are intended to register the spacings and doublings of that very reality of which this photograph is merely the faithful trace. In this way the photographic medium is exploited to produce a paradox of reality constituted as sign or presence transformed into absence, into representation, into spacing, into writing. Now this is the move that lies at the heart of surrealist thinking for it is precisely this experience of reality as representation that constitutes the notion of the Marvelous or of Convulsive Beauty, the key concepts of surrealism.

Krauss goes on to quote Louis Aragon’s 1925 definition of the “Marvelous”: “Le merveilleux, c’est la contradiction qui apparaît dans la réel.”21 In the history of such representation, Cahun’s achievement is extraordinary. She preserves the material definition of the body without either scientizing it, as with Hirschfeld’s displays of “deformed” or abnormal genitalia, or reifying its gender or sex identifications; its aesthetic formations or often de-formations render a different effect, for the most part, from the distortions or disfigurations produced in the scientists or surrealist’s archive—the hysteria of “convulsive beauty”—and even from those more recent photographers that might seem

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disciples, such as Cindy Sherman or Nan Goldin with their grim aesthetic.22 Cahun’s images’ insistence on play and masquerade is in line with her apprehension of the rubric of the third sex; the term’s original sense of openness and range drew Cahun, over the idea of the invert, which increasingly designated sexual orientation. She has, along those lines, been recently identified as transgendered female to male, though such designation does not reflect Cahun’s choice and seems a constriction of her performance. While trans-identity may be perceived in non-binary terms, as instead a transformational act, Cahun’s spectrum of gender performance departs from the trans-formational rubric, per se. At the conclusion of her Aveux non Avenus (1930, translated as Disavowals: or Cancelled Confessions, by Susan de Muth, 2007), Cahun proclaims—“beneath this mask another mask. I will never be done lifting off all these visages.”23 This major work includes nine chapters, each titled with enigmatic acronyms (except in the one instance of Chapter II, “MYSELF,” not an acronym but synonymous with enigma) and parenthetical cryptic descriptions—e.g, “(fear)”—in the table of contents, which appears at the end. Each chapter is prefaced with a photomontage. The formal play of this ostensibly confessional, autobiographical work is reminiscent of Woolf ’s “romping” Orlando. In the original preface to the work, Pierre Mac Orlan writes, “This book is virtually entirely dedicated to the word adventure.”24 The title Aveux non Avenus acts as caption, snaking around a pack of faces in a frontispiece photomontage for the last chapter (Figure 7). This image registers spectrum in a number of aspects. While it suggests that biology is determinative of human form generally, it does so by differentiating between human physical attributes and organs—which appear individually on branches of a tree and as singled out on the face—and the expressions-cummasks they may “produce” in different combinations and articulations. At the same time, biology as destiny, the sanctity of the family, and the process of reproduction are mocked. The embryos receding off the page at the top appear as a process of inverse gestation, in the form of Russian stacking dolls. The caption suggests that God is removed from this “natural” production. In the bottom right is a section from a 1927 photo, in which Cahun appears in the guise of a boxer or weightlifter, adorned like a kewpie doll with the caption “I AM IN TRAINING DON’T KISS ME” lodged between prominent drawn-on nipples. The overall effect, related to the rest of the montage, resides in the theater of gender, but here particularly signals the fitness movements of the period and their underwriting of the performance of manliness, inflected by both race and gender.25 The application of make-up as both physical cosmetic and conceptual

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Figure 7 Claude Cahun collage, from Disavowals (Aveux non Avenus, 1930). Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections.

masquerade yields the impression of mixed media, like something by Charles Sheeler, who blends painting with photography as aesthetic commentary on realistic form. The multiplicity of images or type so characteristic of this work, in keeping, too, with a certain surrealist principle, is a way of explicitly refusing the tenet of degenerationism—that is, a “morbid deviation from an original type”26—by refusing the original type itself. It acts as a voided false note, or, to put it another way, “the performance of falsehood is a premise of coming into visibility.”27 The refusal extends to the human subject in general, as Kate Conley has suggested in her discussion of this one Cahun photo published in her lifetime and one of the few that is titled, “Frontière humaine” (Figure 8).28

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Figure 8 Claude Cahun, self-portrait, cover of Bifur (5), 1929. http://asapjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Claude-self-portrait-Bifur.jpg

In Conley’s description, “the bust seems to float in the center of the image, as though unattached to a human body—at the ‘frontier’ between humanity and sculptural representation.” As she points out, through Cahun’s use of anamorphism, a photographic technique of blurring, and unequal magnification, the very medium of the photo eschews (à la Walter Benjamin) the aura of the original.29 The forms of the body and the photograph merge. Cahun’s insistence on her Jewish persona is an integral part of her radical aesthetic. Not only, as has been observed by several critics, does she choose a Jewish name (Cohen), which at once allows her to cross-dress nominally, but, as has gone mostly unnoticed, she defiantly announces her self in both respects, as lesbian and Jew, to her Nazi captors on Jersey (though she did switch her name

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back to Schwob during that period for reasons unknown—perhaps, as Rosalind Krauss has argued in Bachelors, because that name among the literati had been ethnically neutralized to some degree, or perhaps alternatively because it was more obviously Jewish to a German). In profiling herself, as she definitely does, it becomes actually and tropically a radical affiliation. And she is literally profiling herself (Figures 9 and 10).30 Whereas in the montage, the facial features were given separate but equal play, in these images she seems to be highlighting the nose—the most prominent feature of the profile and, of course, the most racially signifying. Sander Gilman and others discuss the Jewish nose as a double signifier, associated with sex—as

Figure 9 Claude Cahun, self-portrait, monochrome print, c. 1920. Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collection.

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Figure 10 Claude Cahun, “Que Me Veux-Tu?” (“What do you want of me?”), 1928. http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/wm/live/1600_900/images/live/p0/3z/vr/p03zvrft.jpg

circumcised penis or phallus—and thereby with deviance or lack.31 These draw on Freud, in his theory of the fetish.32 In discussing the fetish and castrative in surrealist art, Hal Foster draws on the Lacanian notion of phallus as signifier, wherein “the phallus can only play its role as veiled . . . in itself a sign of latency with which everything signifiable is struck as soon as it is raised to the function of signifier.”33 Foster’s formulation is useful for Cahun’s specular images of Jewish latency. On the other hand, the signifier is volatile in its visual materiality. Emily Apter considers this photographic image (Figure 10) and its elaboration in Disavowals (III), where the double heads are “flipped in a mimicry of a playing card” in terms of an aesthetics of inversion, exemplary of what she calls “geometric modernism”: it is in the form of an inverted narcissism complex, or of twins modeling a “perverse,” disrupted kinship . . . The use of symmetrical inversion and serial iteration suggests a kind of parametric operating system translating the one into the multiple, difference into the self-same, inside into outside, odd into even, pair into couple, integer into set, recto into verso and their reverse permutations ad infinitum.34

This is not the optical illusion of Man Ray’s “Anatomies” (which Foster references) or even Cahun’s playful montages. Her lesbianism and Jewishness merge and are un-submerged, except among her viewers and critics who, in a version but also strange inversion of the Hirschfeldian example, rarely acknowledge the Jew-ish

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in her. Perhaps their response is an unwitting act of identification, in line with Foster’s view.35 These images are uncannily prescient, of course; Žižekian, in the sense of being a symptom from the future, personally and representationally (and also like Foster’s assessment of Breton’s idea of the screen of desire). Figure 9 is meant in some part to mirror Cahun’s father, while Figure 10 provides a mirror image of mixing genders and races, an enhanced Mischling, to use the term used for mixed-race Jews in Germany, which became standard in race science predating, but was codified by the Nuremburg Laws.36 Both (and there are more like these) envision an abject, imprisoned self and seem a departure in form, hue, and tone from her more playful transvestitic masquerades.37 Conley says that, for Cahun, all dressing was performative, including the undressing involved in shaving one’s head and in cross-dressing femininity with masculinity.38 This seems the inverse insinuation of the mustache in Hirschfeld’s metatropic model, so reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s moves and countermoves along these lines.39 Conley also raises Cahun’s own insistence on rendering herself difficult to classify—“Ainsi je me déclassé exprès. Tant pis pour moi” and on breaking the rules—“J’ai la manie de l’exception” (“Thus I downgrade, declassify myself on purpose. Tough for me”; “I’m mad for exceptions”).40 This last expression of difficulty may be read as ironic for one who revels in declassification, but, in fact, these images do suggest something “tough.” One might identify the projection as bravado, like her defiantly subversive activities on Jersey that led to her arrest by the Nazis: an “inyour-face” aesthetic, which calls upon the various acts of profiling of the era. In one way, assuming Jewishness seems to provide Cahun with no less a queering capacity than her gender play. But these images also seem to convey a ravaging struggle in the self that cross dresses masculinity with Jew-ishness, paternal love with the cultural marker of loathing and/or self-loathing or dying. There is a plaintive expression in the image and in the tone of the caption that demands, “what do you want of me?” rather than “ don’t kiss me,” for instance. But the caption also expresses loss or regret, as expressed in the title of Aveux non Avenus, of some filial line. This is the same kind of plaintive cross-dressing Hirschfeld seems to perform unwittingly in the depictions of himself in relation to his subjects: his paternalism stands in for his distance; his need to convey remedy, for his need to receive it. His very image as fashioned and presented is remedial, but it is hard to tell whether it is part of the play of identification or a foreclosure on it. While there is ambiguity in Cahun’s images, they are clearly self-conscious. Hirschfeld’s spectrum is invoked and, in Cahun’s dressing room, the doctor has come out.

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Mostly recognized for her photography, Cahun’s series of written vignettes called Heroines (1925) is worth considering briefly in this context.41 It was not published in full in her lifetime—parts appeared in journals. Her subjects include Mary, Delilah, the Sadistic Judith, Helen, the Rebel, the Tease (Penelope the Irresolute), and Salome the skeptic, as she calls them—the usual suspects, one might say, for such a category. Her treatment is anything but usual. The epigraph to the work,“Andromeda to the Monster: in Memory of the Legendary Moralities” (1897)—references Jules Laforgue’s work, itself a parody of famous literary works or figures, which here is posited as Andromeda’s retort to Cetus, the sea monster to whom she is sacrificed in the Greek myth for the affront of her beauty or a claim to it. Andromeda’s “condition” is exposed—in the myth she is naked and chained to a rock—as inverted. The exposure is the affront. Though Cahun includes none of her photography in Heroines, there are a few graphics composed entirely with the typewriter, such as the slipper at the end of the section, “Cinderella, Humble, Haughty Child,” made with colons and periods.42 Cahun was a great fan of Wilde, wrote to and about him, and sometimes assumed the name Lord Alfred. She was particularly fond of his Salome—she dedicates this section of Heroines “for O.W.”—who is an incendiary figure in this period, invocative of the Wilde trials, and of the conflation of Jewishness, femininity, and sexual deviance, even though, in most readings or performances, the Jewish aspect of Salome’s heresy is recessed. Certainly, Wilde’s play showcases sexual performativity, and akin to Duchamp’s playful representations, Salome may be seen as a performance of queer desire. It is “a form of drag Wilde could comfortably inhabit,” S.I. Salamensky has suggested in her essay on Wilde’s “Jewish problem.”43 She reads Wilde’s Salome’s femme fatality as the other side of Jewish decadence, “more pure as more perverse, and under the aegis of passion.”44 Such dichotomies are typical of representations of Jews, particularly as they pertain to the Jewish actress/performer, such as Sarah Bernhardt or nineteenthcentury Rachel, on whom Wilde was certainly drawing. In Cahun’s version, the Jewish is not veiled. John the Baptist’s head becomes an aesthetic prop, a symbol of the castration of the Jews. He is compared to a pork kidney, which is “disgusting” and forbidden, not only as material but as symbol. This reclamation of the story for Salome (the woman as castrator/ed) is aesthetically accomplished through the trope of Jewish refusal or prohibition— she refers to the prophet as “Whatshisname.” It reads as both farce and fascination. But Salome, as with these other classical figures, is also key here in tapping into the cultural moment. Cahun, in fact, wrote a joint defense of Wilde and Maud Allan that appeared in Mercure de France in 1918 (Maud Allan, who performed

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the role of Salome in the play then banned in England, was famously defamed as lesbian in the press by Noel Pemberton Billing, whose homophobic theories were linked with Jews). Wilde and Allen are united both by the figure of Salome and for standing trial for the performance of homosexuality.45 Wilde has been variously condemned and defended for his construction of Jewish characters, such as Salome or, as another example, the theater manager Isaacs in Dorian Gray. Both are hyperbolic, in keeping with their theatrical roles, and both play to dichotomous type, mocked and internalized in Wilde’s dramas. Performative though Cahun’s Jewish figures are, they are more directly taunts. Cahun concludes the section with an uncanny rhetorical prefiguration of the 1960s: “If I vibrate with vibrations other than yours, must you conclude that my flesh is insensitive?” Others in Cahun’s group and around her were trying on Jew-ishness. Marcel Duchamp, for instance, who, looking for a Jewish identity/name to adopt and

Figure 11 Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp), photo by Man Ray 1921. The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY; Man Ray 2015 Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris 2018; Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/ Artist’s Rights Society (ARS), New York 2018.

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finding none that “tempted” him, opted instead for the transvestie, the gender switch, which he had tried on before in his cheeky portrait of the mustachioed Mona Lisa. He famously took the name Rrose Sélavy. In an interview with Pierre Cabanne in the 1960s, Duchamp discusses his choice of the image and name: In effect, I wanted to change my identity, and the first idea that came to me was to take a Jewish name. I was Catholic, and it was a change to go from one religion to another! I didn’t find a Jewish name I especially liked, or that tempted me, and suddenly I had an idea: why not change sex? It was much simpler. So the name Rrose Sélavy came from that . . . All of this was word play.46

There is, of course, the pun in the name that produces love as life, but, despite Duchamp’s playful demurral, the name also linguistically performs Jewishness, with its embedded “levi” (the second Israelite tribe of the remaining three of

Figure 12 Vita Sackville-West, photo by Howard Coster, 1934. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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Figure 13 Vita Sackville-West—“Orlando about the year 1840,” Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1929). Taken by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in 1927.

original twelve—the mercantile class, vs. the priestly “kohens”). Duchamp must be also be thinking of Shakespeare, and perhaps of Gertrude Stein (“Sacred Emily,” 1913); with this coinage, however, rrose is not just rrose. Conley writes about Duchamp that “his masculine self shows through his performance of womanliness,” which is interestingly placed alongside Duchamp’s own statement about this image: “My intention was to get away from myself. But I knew I would run into me.” Conley posits her observation about Duchamp as against Cahun, who, she argues, “performs masculinity not in order to pass, but to let femininity

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visibly shine through” [my emphasis]. Again, there are several turns here, regarding the use of photography to illuminate the material body or, what is physically immaterial. Much has been written about Duchamp’s drag, and Orlando is often referenced in discussions of Cahun’s aesthetic, but despite their contemporaneity, they have not been placed in relation to one another. One is struck by the uncanny resemblance between the portrait of Duchamp’s Sélavy and any number of photos of Vita Sackville-West, especially as imaged in the photographs Woolf uses to picture and playfully mock Orlando’s gender “transformation.”47 Similarly, in those photos, Sackville-West’s masculine self seems to show through or, more accurately, is staged as transvestism. So many photos of women in this era were posed with hat and hand in evidence, one being the gendered apparel, the other the biological signifier of sex (the hands, hat and fur-trimmed coat in the above

Figure 14 Claude Cahun, Hands (no date, c. 1939). Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections.

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photo of Rrose Sélavy are those of Germaine Everling, Francis Picabia’s’s model). There is not an identical pose in a photograph by Claude Cahun, though she has many disembodied photos of hands and heads in an array of hats. In his introductory essay (“The Age of Light”) to a collection of his photographs from 1920 to 1934, Man Ray refers to his images as“autobiographical,” and to what he perceived to be an optical unconscious at work in them.48 He seeks to remedy the “perpetuation of race and class, and the destruction of its enemies, [as] the all-absorbing motive of civilized society,” by promoting the creation of an image “whose strangeness and reality stirs our subconscious to its inmost depths, . . .awakening . . . desire.”49 In the same way that the Jew is a hidden figure in Rrose Sélavy, and also the figure who is behind the image (Man Ray as photographer/subject), in Woolf ’s texts, particularly in the case of Orlando, the Jew-ish is imaged through a pronounced ethnic or gypsy visage and manner, which represents a fraught catalyst for desire in the novel. Maggie Humm discusses the modernist sensibility that contextualizes Woolf ’s home photography. She observes the overlapping in Woolf ’s writing and photography as “capturing something of the prismatic quality of Vanessa Bell’s modernist work” and that the spatial arrangement was a testament to a “new visual aesthetics that was avant garde filmic technique.” Humm focuses on Woolf ’s sense of the capacity of the photo to restore or even reorder the past, as visualized in the palimpsest that the Monk’s House photo albums create (taken and collected over a number of years), and the synchronic placement of friends in the same “comfy chairs,” in different periods.50 (Woolf would also ask friends for photos of themselves to strategically place among those she took or had taken, both in a manner reminiscent of Hirschfeld.) Albums usually use chronology to order the photos within them, even when they are of place, such as a trip or a home. In Woolf ’s case, as Humm argues, she is “recathecting the traces of loss,” particularly, in Humm’s view, of the mother or the matrixial theme (à la Barthes’ Camera Lucida), so all recur to one spot, as it were: “Following Bergson, the photographic sequences could be a ‘chain’ of reflections in the present, reflecting the past.”51 Humm makes the compelling claim that “Woolf needed photographs in order to write,” and that they speak to her ideas about fiction and history, and while the photos included in Woolf ’s essays and fiction are mentioned, Humm’s emphases do not really take into account the way the photos, especially in Orlando, reflect on sexuality. Humm does address the photos taken of Sackville-West and the others included in Orlando as sexual in nature or context—acting as lures, for example, to bring West to Woolf; or as sexualized child, as in the case of Angelica

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Bell, who seductively poses as Sasha, Orlando’s Russian princess love interest. But she does not speak to the images themselves. To the extent that they are about revealing the hidden, they are personal “immemorial private configurations,” but in Orlando, the “unrepresentable” has precisely to do with the body as nonrepresentational, where the photos are “artful tableaux,” as Humm puts it, that create rather than reflect the desired and/or desirable image.52 In addition to friends, Woolf and Leonard photograph themselves in similar poses, which suggest an interchangeability not usually imaged between the sexes. The poses they strike are gendered—crossed legs (cats and dogs are posed in similar, Wegmanesque ways). Rebecca Walkowitz has suggested that the compilation of stories, “The Mark on the Wall” and “Three Jews” (in the pamphlet Two Stories, 1917), shows Woolf as married to a Jew, writing in a context of anti-Semitism in which the patriotism of English Jews was being questioned. Walkowitz also talks about exclusion being a quality of assimilation, reflected in an aesthetic of evasion that is characteristic of Woolf;53 in doing so, she reminds us of another expression of the cathexis to loss, of Man Ray’s entreaties regarding race and class, but also of a Hirschfeldian/Cahunesque ethic regarding the sexual body that Woolf comes closest to in Orlando. Neither Duchamp nor Woolf was “tempted” by the Jewish body, but it is a figure that underlies their playful inversions.

Adi Nes Jewish “heroes,” akin to Cahun’s heroines, are the subjects of Adi Nes’s work, both biblical and national. It is the Jew-ish aspect that presents a conundrum for Hirschfeld and perhaps Cahun, but not for Adi Nes, who fifty years on has assimilated the queerness of the Jew, importantly within the borders of a Jewish state that signifies punningly as both geography and body politic. Yet, the Jewish subject in the Jewish state is fraught by the political context in which Nes works, which features throughout his photography in its subjects but also its technique. Nes’s work may be seen as a legacy of modernism: its playful referentiality and highly staged images are derivative of the photographic canon (e.g., Dorothea Lange) and classical painting, complicating the idea of a classic, while drawing on the prototypes.54 Nes takes the paradox at the heart of the photograph regarding the reality of the subject, which Cahun works and Hirschfeld exploits, and uses a form of hypertextuality or painterliness that would seem to resolve the paradox of the evidentiary. His stagings, however, produce a different series of inversions between the mythic and the real. The novel in his work resides in

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re-vision and renewal, both with respect to histories of visual arts that he taps into and the photographic medium, which necessarily circumscribe the ideologies that undergird the work. Nes’s ethnic background as Arab Jew—Iranian and Kurdish—is a factor in much of his work, as is the almost exclusive use of Israelis of Mizrachi origin as subjects in his photographs. He will often talk about the question of belonging that pervades his sense of Jewish history, past and present, in and outside of Israel, where the Arab Jew has occupied outsider status among the Western European founders of the state. Nes comments on how he figures as an outsider, ethnically and professionally in the sense of being an observer with the camera. His liminality within the mainstream of Israeli culture is a factor in his depiction of the country, which he sees as having betrayed a dream and accounts for the surreal quality of some of his photographs.55 Much of his work engages national myths. His focus is the mirror image of Hirschfeld’s, in that what’s brought to light out of the shadows is the queer part of the historical equation between Jews and homosexuality. The equation continues to be complicated for the modern Israeli, regardless of the state’s deployment of homonationalism (Gay Pride has become an international phenomenon in Tel Aviv, for example.) Heteronormativity is a founding ideology with biblical roots and is produced as a weight against the image of the degenerate (depleted ghetto) Jew. The photographs in Figures  15 and 16 are perhaps the two best known of Nes’s works, both from his “Soldiers” series, produced from 1994 to 2000 (all of his photos in the series are untitled, though the first has been dubbed “The Last Supper Before Going Out to Battle,” the second, the “Muscle Guy.”56 They are representative of the kind of work he does—stagey, painterly, and exquisitely self-reflexive with respect to the Israeli national imaginary. Immediately apparent in these figures is an etch of Max Nordau’s theories of “Muskeljudentum” (“Muscle Jewry),” the underwriting tract of the new Zionist Jew (1903), in which the historical type of the weak and submissive Jewish figure is recast, in line with the fitness movements of the early twentieth century, as gladiatorial; there is a certain apt irony in the sacrificial underpinning of the historical gladiator. Nordau’s prescriptions are part of the national allegory governing Nes’s images, but Nes’s gay, homoerotic aesthetic—he cites Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Caravaggio, among others, as sources—recalls Hirschfeld as critical frame, as does the overt staging of Nes’s subjects. When asked why he chooses these painters, he matter-of-factly responds by saying they are homosexual, but, of course, this leaves the question unanswered as to whether the revelation of this link is internal to the photos themselves. Nes’s photographs produce a material

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Figure 15 Adi Nes, Soldier Series, Untitled (1999) (“The Last Supper Before Going Out to Battle”) (90 × 148 cm). © Adi Nes, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

Figure 16 Adi Nes, Soldier Series, Untitled (1996) (“Muscle Guy”) (90 × 90 cm). © Adi Nes, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

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as well as symbolic resonance in their large-sized, glossy resolution. They produce both the scale and the veneer of myth and the outcast/outsize, “impossible” bodily state. Consider the unbearable stance and disproportion of the “Muscle Guy” (Figure  16), which also provides a seeming nod to Rodin’s pronounced muscles (see Chapter 3).57 The imbalance produced by the soldier’s position at once pronounces the figure’s crotch, making the symbolic equation between sexual excess or deviance and impotence, inasmuch as the exaggeration signals something compensatory. What would be an automatic reference to the historical Nordau for the Israeli subject is overwritten by the contemporary referent of the gay bodybuilder. Contradictory elements abound: for example, the sexual subject or body and the kipah (skullcap), signal of the spiritual—this contradiction is reminiscent of Daniel Boyarin’s argument about the idealized effeminacy of the learned religious Jewish man at odds with Zionism’s tough “new Jew”; the desert and the urban bodybuilder type; the Arab Jew (dark) and the Israeli “new Jew” who needs to be both racially and sexually remediated.58 Nes’s photographic images produce an intimacy within daunting settings and almost always introduce vulnerability in his figures as counterpoint to the myth of invincibility. Recalling Leonardo’s composition, the “Last Supper” photograph (Figure  15) draws the viewer to the central soldier figure in Christ’s position at the table, as it were. Nes’s figure is isolated, staring dazedly or grimly out toward the camera, unlike his classical counterpart. Nes has said about the soldiers in the photo that he hoped this would not be their last meal; this is bluntly acute, characteristic of his general seemingly offhand remarks about his work. The borrowed trope images betrayal from the inside—Israelis betraying Israelis by their defining image of muscularity—troped onto the historical image of Jews betraying Jews, a crucible whereby they become Christian (i.e., Judas betraying Christ). Male camaraderie is betrayed as well as betraying. As Nes says, all of them are Jesus, all Judas. One can see this effect in the portrayal of the two soldiers sitting at the end of the table to the left. Instead of looking and pointing at Christ in horror at the news that one of them will betray him, they look and point at each other. Further, the soldiers, grouped in threes as in the original, except for the central figure and one standing, are non-differentiated, giving the impression of their interchangeability. No one looks at the central figure, except perhaps for the soldier in Judas’s place; his position is unclear, both in a hint of the original and a major departure from it. The palimpsest produced by Nes’s overlay is unholy inside and out, in what it suggests about the historical imposition, the evacuation, or even transgendering of the Jewish male body: from Jewish to Christian and, correspondingly, from

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deadly or vulnerable to invincible or (aesthetically) immortal. The excision of the Jew from the Christian body would rehabilitate Jesus as manly, in religious iconography and in a revivified Christianity, through the Muscular Christianity movement of the early twentieth century, reminiscent of needing to “get the Jew out,” in Adolf Brand’s terms. The patina resulting from the photographic technique also betrays the gloss of the myth. There is a vacancy in the photo that conveys the sense that something is missing, even though there are more disciples than there should be. Nes says that he did not want the allusion to be exact. But the effect of this is to be looking, counting the dead and the living, taking attendance, as it were, to see if everyone is present. This is an Israeli phenomenon as well—accounting for soldiers’ lives—which Nes gives epic proportion, unsentimentally. Nes’s figures are gnomonic images of omission; what is left out, whether missing bodies or missing parts, is suggestively or figurally replaced. In doing so, Nes makes visible what is hidden, not by putting the Jew into the text (what Hirschfeld leaves out), but by queering him, allowing for a spectrum of Jewishness, particularly through the homosexual Jew, what Hirschfeld could not finally re- or displace. Nes touches up, but does not reclaim the national allegory or its historical reactionary-ism: its aversion to the national shande (Yiddish for “disgrace”) that is the equation of the homosexual (effeminate) with the Jew (the circumcised). The invert figure in this remarkable photo (Figure 17) references much more than Nordau’s heroic Jews in its playfully appropriative gesture of military glory. In the context of Nes’s series, the historical figure of sexual inversion is here invoked and then also inverted, and dressed in this way is also resonant of the Wandervogel, the German scouts that Hans Blüher brought into close association with the Eigene and Männerbund movements.59 Hirschfeld noticed this connection on his trip to Palestine, noting that the halutzim (pioneers) were “strongly influenced by the modern movement of Wandervogel, and they seem so full of joy.” Of course, his comment is ironic, perhaps suggestive, and ironically portentous, given the Wandervogel’s eventual refusal of Jewish members, at the urging of Blüher, and their incubation of Nazi youth, who would eventually reject the Männerbund for their homoerotic ethos.60 Having claimed the designation of “invert” for manly man-loving men—homosexuality being too Jewish and therefore womanly—Blüher referred to Jews as the “inversion of the inversion.” Blüher’s term suggests a degenerative grammar, an atavistic reversal, the retro-place on the evolutionary scale that Jews and homosexuals occupy who are thereby scheduled for elimination; whereas the initial inversion, the turn

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Figure 17 Adi Nes, Soldier Series, Untitled (1994) (90 × 90 cm). © Adi Nes, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

away from women and from heterosexual love, is a righting. Todd Samuel Presner argues that, for Blüher, the homosexuality of the inverted type was about nation building, whereas heterosexuality was about family building and that Jews were doomed to be stateless because, as Blüher put it, they were not homosexual enough (too Jewish/womanly).61 This becomes an odd distinction within a nationalist discourse that has historically collapsed nation and family building, certainly in the Israeli ideology. Presner points to the distinction that Blüher draws between Zionism and Judaism: the nascent movement, which Blüher touts as a way of ridding Germany of Jews, will fail because it is being verjudet [jewified] by Jews who recur to their old racial instincts—a moneyoriented domesticity. By this logic, Presner continues, “Zionism is actually

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‘un-Jewish’ because it not only calls for the rootedness of a state but also awakens the homosocial ‘Männerbund.’ ”62 The characterization of Jewish domesticity or heteronormativity speaks to the contradictory logic that surrounds the Jewish subject given the charge, which Blüher full-throatedly endorsed, of the intrinsic connection of Jews with homosexuality. Nes goes to the historical root of Nordau’s iconic prototype, which, commensurate with Blüher’s logic, sought to de-Judaize and overturn Hirschfeld’s theoretical flabbiness. The gay soldier suggested by Nes’s series presents an affront to the Israeli mythos, yet here, by standing the ideal on its head, Nes makes it conform to all the resonant terminology of sexual difference: it is topsyturvy. In inverting the myth of the muscle Jew, Nes reunites the “old” and “new” Jew, wherein the mettle of the man-ly Jew is tested, while the image of the Jewish Israeli soldier is “righted,” as man-loving and perhaps Jew-loving too, in an ethnic rather than national sense. After all, punctuating the myth of the muscle Jew is a self-hating Jew, inasmuch as it demands a remedy through erasure of the diminished figure of the past. More precisely, the compulsory national myth is displayed in Nes’s photo as performative, doing a handstand, which is both a feat and a jest; it is an inverse righting of the image of the enfeebled Jew, but no less queer in his circus stance, à la Nordau’s Kirkuskämpfer (gladiators). Nes’s inverted soldier here is suggestive in all these ways. Further, the soldier performing the handstand is almost impossibly erect, reminiscent of the Muscle Guy’s improbable stance; the displayed chest and flat contour provide a come-on view from the left side, one we the viewers do not have but are left to imagine, and hints at what’s there—the phallus—or the metonymy of what’s missing—the circumcised penis. Nes is attentive to historical and pictorial legacies, exhibits the vulnerability of the subject, its signifying instability, and inverted as it is, its capacity for standing up. The “righted” soldier and its suggestion of sovereign rights are inevitably invoked by these images. In his Prisoner Series (2003), commissioned by Vogue Hommes International, Nes bumps up against another aspect of this same fraught landscape. Nes tweaks the historical relationship of photography to fashion, making prison the governing metaphor. I had the vision of using prison as a metaphor for daily life. Each of the pictures is a different kind of prison . . . A country where you have to learn to live with other people, otherwise it’s going to be hell. I decided that different groups from Israeli reality would be part of this prison altogether . . . I decided to downgrade them, to take the brand-name clothes and take them down into reality.63

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In the controversy surrounding this series due to the setting and the politics— Nes says he got the idea for it when he was a prison guard at a Palestinian detention camp—Nes felt that viewers are distracted from the point: “the clothes that make the man” gives way to the double entendre in the word “make,” both the liberatory and imprisoning nature of fashion to identify and create. There is also an erotic dimension to these images and the viewer is cast in an uncomfortable role of identification: “you see the musculature, the 5 o’clock beard. He’s attractive. The second thought is, ‘Is he a prisoner?’ ”64 One is struck, too, by Nes’ focus on hands, showcased and/or hidden by cuffs or bars. In Figure  18, the bars produce a verfremdungseffekt for the white cuffs, but the hands are posed in a way that also counter the gendered setting. (See Cahun’s photographs of hands, also Everling’s hands in Duchamp’s “Rrose Sélavy,” and Vita Sackville-West’s hands, all similarly physiognomically posed—Figures 14, 11, and 12, respectively.) The posed hands and prison bars make it hard to look away from the national politics that inflect this image. “ ‘They [the prisoners] offered a different image of the soldier,’ says Nes, who describes the Israeli army as the big melting pot of a nation made up of people from diverse cultures (perhaps Israelis are more tolerant of gay people, he suggests, because as Jews they’re all outsiders, or ‘other,’ in a way).”65 This view raises the question of another form of distraction, wherein the internal politics of Israeli culture (ethnic or queer) displaces the figure of extraterritorial occupation, however much these might coalesce on the ground. In his recent collection entitled “The Village,” Nes considers the ground by drawing on the ultimate Western creation myth that volcanically underpins the modern Israeli state: “Like the State of Israel, this village appears as a small place created in the wake of tragedy. It’s an idyllic valley with wide vistas, green fields and trees full of fruit yet with a charged atmosphere.”66 Nes identifies the referent of the image in Figure 19 as Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse (1906) (Figure 20). From Picasso’s Rose Period, this painting is often cited as a good example of Picasso’s idealization of the relationship between humans and nature. Nes’ homage is of the large scale of much of his work (3ʹ3ʺ × 4ʹ1ʺ). The central focus for discussion of Picasso’s painting is often the mystery of the boy’s clutch of a rein that is not there. Regardless of how the gesture is read, as testimony of the incapacity of humans to tame nature, or artists to represent it, it bespeaks a mythical quality that is insurmountable in human terms. The boy’s nudity is of course edenic and throws Nes’s image into relief. Nes explains: “The dark-skinned boy photographed with the horse doesn’t, in my eyes, only represent Sephardic Jews, but rather, he represents all those

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Figure 18 Adi Nes, Prisoner Series (2003) (90 × 123 cm). © Adi Nes, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

Figure 19 Adi Nes, The Village Series, 2008 (C-print mounted on aluminum, 100 × 125 cm). © Adi Nes, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

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Figure 20 Pablo Picasso, Boy Leading a Horse, 1906. 2018 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art.

viewed as an ‘other.’ He could be the Arab in Jewish society or Sephardic immigrants as opposed to native-born Israelis.”67 Viewing the boy as Arab, one reads the Eden in which he stands as already ruined. One familiar with the Israeli–Palestinian terrain knows that Arabs are often reduced to using horses and carts to farm or do other kinds of work, harkening back to a romanticized period at the beginnings of statehood for Israel, when such were the tools of pioneers, but which are now the outdated, hand-me-down apparatus of contemporary Arab production. The orange grove is of course the symbol of the success of Israeli production. Unlike the boy of Picasso’s painting, the boy’s gaze

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in “The Village” is not defiant and therefore undeluded. He is sad, resigned, perhaps a misfit; his masculinity is contextualized by this placement. Many see Picasso’s boy as self-portraiture, referring specifically to his short stature. As selfportraiture, it also avows what Picasso felt as the “great Masters standing behind him, watching”; such a gesture of humility is one that Nes also assumes in relation to his work, but the homology he draws between subjects cannot exactly assume the humiliation or, at least, discomfort, as that of the image of the Arab boy.68 Nes’s horse does have a rein, but the boy does not hold it, suggesting a localized insurmountability. Another context for reading Nes’s photograph through Picasso’s painting may be the “charged atmosphere” that was produced by the suit filed against the Museum of Modern Art for the recovery of the painting by the family of the Jewish banker and art collector Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who claimed he had sold it under duress in Germany in 1935. Regardless of the merits of the claim, the pursuit of reparation for crimes against Jews enacted through the art object contributes to the complexity of Nes’s vividly layered images. I began this chapter by claiming that Magnus Hirschfeld has not been given his critical due and made the case for the reader’s attention by positing Hirschfeld in relation to the undisputed genius Einstein, whose Jewishness would finally be eclipsed by his achievement. One might argue conversely, as I have to some extent done obliquely throughout this chapter, that the Jewish “Hirschfeld” instantiated and therefore dimmed his considerable contribution to sexual science and queer theory. Artists like Cahun and Nes may be traced back to Hirschfeld to reveal his important role in the development of queer theories—in particular, the way the Jew-ish helps to clarify that role as a figure of negation and insistence. One might posit that Hirschfeld was no Einstein when it came to sex, but the physics of his photographic method was genius.

Notes 1 “Pictures should educate”: Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde auf Grund dreissigjâhrer Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet, IV Bilderteil (Stuttgart: Julius Pütmann, 1930). See discussion of Hirschfeld in Chapter 1. 2 New York American, February 2, 1931. In his biography of Hirschfeld, Ralf Dose identifies George Sylvester Viereck as the source of this coinage: Magnus Hirschfeld: The Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement, trans. Edward H. Willis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 90–1. Viereck wrote Glimpses of Greatness (1930),

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where he discusses Hirschfeld’s work and his visit to Einstein in Pasadena (in the chapter “Magnus Hirschfeld: The Einstein of Sex”). See Joseph Litvak’s The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), for a discussion of this coinage (e.g., p. 5). In Litvak’s formulation of “en-Jewment,” the equation of Jewishness with sexual variety, what would be termed “deviant,” but which is in other terms is the subversive enjoyment of it, would be productive secretly of Jew envy. Here Litvak argues that the underpinning of such envy is the refiguration of “the desirable into the despicable” (51). There has been speculation, for example, that the Nazis destroyed Hirschfeld’s Institute so early on because of the records of “Nazi” clients. For example, Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) and Erin Carlston’s recent study Double Agents: Espionage, Literature, and Liminal Citizens (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), where she makes this connection in her discussion of the treasonous figure among the citizenry, bringing to bear degeneration theory on its construction as such. See particularly Chapter 1. Freud elided it and discussed its elision in, for example, “The Resistances to Psychoanalysis” (1925). See also Daniel Boyarin on Freud’s occlusion of his own circumcision, in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, 266–98. Amos Morris-Reich, Race and Photography: Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876–1890 (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 6; John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 5. Matti Bunzl, “Jews, Queers and Other Symptoms: Recent Work in Jewish Cultural Studies,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, vol. 6, no. 2 (2000): 338. See Heike Bauer’s discussion of Hirschfeld’s use of race to talk about sex, in Heike Bauer and Matthew Cook, Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). See Joseph Litvak, “Glad to be Unhappy,” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 106, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 523–31. This question recalls Eve Sedgwick’s argument about the dissemination of the trope of the closet and brings to mind Janet R. Jakobsen’s essay “Queers Are Like Jews, Aren’t They?” which speaks to the retrograde implications of the current use of such analogies. As Jakobsen argues, “What’s needed to actualize the radical possibilities of the queer-Jewish relation, then, is an analysis that recognizes multiple social relations, the norms of which form any particular social location along with strategic actions to subvert those norms in their multiplicity” (in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, 85). I want to thank Michal Heiman for first recommending Cahun for this project, along with an essay by Danielle Knafo on Cahun’s Jewishness (“Claude Cahun: The Third Sex,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality, vol. 2, no. 1 (2001): 29–61). Major exhibits of

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Cahun’s work have been traveling the world, recently in London at the Nunnery Gallery and at the Chicago Art Institute (2012) and before that at the Jeu de Paume in Paris and Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona. The work is housed at the Jersey Heritage Museum in St Helier. Morris-Reich, Race and Photography, 6. Kathrin Peters, Rätselbilder des Geschlechts: Körperwissen und Medialität um 1900 (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2010), 12. Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 42. Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtsübergänge. Mischungen männlicher und weiblicher Geschlechtscharaktere (Leipzig: Verlag der Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und sexuelle Hygiene, 1905): Tafel XXVIII, XXIX,XXX. This book contains many illustrations—reproductions of paintings and drawings, photographs, and collage. Emily Apter, “Towards a Unisex Erotics: Claude Cahun and Geometric Modernism,” in Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller, eds., Modernist Eroticisms: European Literature after Sexology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 142, 143. See Laura “Lou” Bailey and Lizzi Thynne, “Beyond Representation: Claude Cahun’s Monstrous Mischief-Making,” History of Photography, vol. 29, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 142. They refer to Siobhan B. Somerville’s discussion of this connection between Ellis and Cahun in “Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body,” in Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, eds, Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). Cahun’s translation of Ellis into The Task of Social Hygiene (1912) was part of the series “Studes de Psychologie Sociale”: L’Hygiène sociale I: La Femme dans la Société (Paris: Mercure de France, 1929). It appears as translated by Lucie Schwob. James Stevenson and Tirza Latimer have taken opposite positions on this matter, Stevenson determining Cahun as the primary artist and Latimer arguing that the neglect of Malherbe constitutes a kind of homophobia. Tirza True Latimer, “Acting Out: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore” and James Stevenson, “Claude Cahun: An Analysis of Her Photographic Technique,” in Louise Downie, ed., Don’t Kiss Me: The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore (Jersey: Jersey Heritage Trust and New York: Aperture Foundation, 2006). In a letter to Paul Levy (1950), Cahun discusses taking the name because she had more affinity with her obscure Jewish relatives, which was perhaps a rejection of patrimony, as some have suggested. Her father was not particularly Jewishly identified, but it is also seems relevant here that her aunt, Mathilde Cahun, cared for Cahun in her mother’s absence. See Danielle Knafo on the integral nature of Cahun’s Jewishness, in In her Own Image: Women’s Self-Representation in Twentieth Century Art (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009). Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Realism,” October, vol. 19 (Winter 1981): 27–8; note 31, 3–34.

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22 Katy Kline discusses Cahun in relation to others like Sherman, in “In or Out of the Picture,” in Whitney Chadwick, ed., Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and SelfRepresentation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 68–9. Many have discussed Cahun in terms of Breton’s idea of “convulsive beauty,” which taps into Charcot’s photographic analysis of patients at Salpêtrière (see, e.g., Hal Foster’s Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995)). 23 Claude Cahun, Disavowals, trans. Susan de Muth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 183. I believe that the title and text of Aveux non Avenus, originally published in 1930, allude to the Jewish prayer on the Day of Atonement, Kol Nidre, which translates as “all vows,” and implicates broken ones. Many of Cahun’s critics have addressed the problem of translating this title (see Susan de Muth’s “Translator’s Note” in the 2007 MIT Press edition, xviii). The prayer entreaties God to make null and void all false vows and is considered one of the holiest prayers in the Jewish liturgy; it is the prototype of confession (though Cahun rejected “confessions” for a translation of the title, which may be read as her rejection of guilt, in favor of regret). The French translation of the prayer, appearing in the prayerbook (Mahzor, E. Durlacher, SINAI, Tel Aviv, 1966) comes closest to Cahun’s curious title (“Tous les veux . . . nuls et comme non avenues”). Particularly in this penultimate section IX, entitled “I.O.U.,” but throughout, ideas about God and obeisance are often discussed. 24 Jennifer Mundy uses this phrase as an epigraph to her introduction to the 2007 translation. 25 Tirza True Latimer suggests that “theories emphasizing the role of social conditioning in the production of gender,” such as Joan Rivière’s 1929 “Womanliness as Masquerade,” provide the backdrop to this image (“Acting Out,” 63). Drawing on Rosalind Krauss’s argument that, in Surrealist practice, “woman and the photograph become figures for each other’s condition, where the ideological stakes of cultural deformation are made plain,” Latimer suggests that the same is true for “collage and the lesbian body” in Cahun’s work (ibid., 99). 26 B.A. Morel, Traité des Dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’Espèce humaine et des Causes qui produisent ces Variétés maladives (Paris: Balliere, 1857), 5. A reminder of this source. 27 Marsha Meskimmon, Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2003), 97. 28 This photo appeared on the cover of Bifur (5), 1929. 29 Kate Conley, “Claude Cahun’s Iconic Heads: From ‘The Sadistic Judith’ to Human Frontier,” Papers of Surrealism, vol. 2 (Summer 2004): 10. 30 Figure 9 is #198 in the Claude Cahun Archive, Jersey Heritage Foundation Trust; these images have been widely published. See Georgiana M. M. Colville’s “SelfRepresentation as Symptom: The Case of Claude Cahun,” where she places side by side photos of Cahun and her father, almost identical. In Sidonie Smith and Julia

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Watson, eds., Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 275. See, for example, Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991): 127–8; 188–90. In Freud’s 1927 essay on fetishism, in the case of the “Wolf Man,” fetish is represented by shine on the nose (Glanz auf der Nase, in German), which becomes a homonymic translingual pun, as in glance in English (he looks at the genitals of his English nurse), or occluded vision, both displacements from the fear of castration, in yet another punning association with the glans penis or circumcision (the Jew-ish). Hal Foster, “Violation and Veiling in Surrealist Photography: Woman as Fetish, as Shattered Object, as Phallus,” in Jennifer Mundy, Vincent Gille, and Dawn Ades, eds., Surrealism: Desire Unbound (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 222–3. Apter, “Towards a Unisex Erotics,” 138–9. See Chapter 1, note 84. See Martine Antle’s “Women Between the Wars: New Geographies of Cultural Diversity,” in Angela Kershaw and Angela Kimyongür, eds., Women in Europe Between the Wars: Politics, Culture, Society, (Hampshire, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2007), 147: “These self-portraits can be interpreted as precursors of the stigmatizing portrait of “the Jew” which later became part of anti-Semitic propaganda during the Second World War and the Holocaust. It is as if Cahun had foreseen the atrocities that were soon to follow.” She goes on to discuss the idea of Mischling with respect to Hannah Höch’s work. Laura “Lou” Bailey and Lizzie Thynne suggest that she presents herself in these images as “a sexual but also a racial ‘other’—‘third sex’, Jew, and vampire. The combination of different forms of the abject is provocative, parodic and a deliberate affront to sexological discourse” (“Claude Cahun’s Monstrous Mischief-Making,” 142). They argue that the sexology was ultimately repressive for its emphasis on visual categorization of the body. Thynne has made a film about Cahun—Playing a Part: The Story of Claude Cahun (2004). Another critic who has cursorily observed the presence of Cahun’s Jewishness in her work, especially in concert with the idea of the monstrous or abject, is Jennifer L. Shaw, Reading Claude Cahun’s Disavowals (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2013). Conley, “Claude Cahun’s Iconic Heads,” 10. Conley makes the case for the connection between their gendered performances (ibid.), but Duchamp was also interested in the ethnic performance, having settled on the pseudonym Rrose Sèlavy after finding no Jewish identity that tempted him. Arguably, the name is Jewishly encoded (Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (New York: Da Capo Press, 1987), 64). Rosalind Krauss also comments on “coupling of travestie and Jewishness in one defiant gesture” in relation to Cahun, in Bachelors (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 41–2.

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40 Aveux non Avenus, 366; Conley, “Iconic Heads,” 14. Conley suggests that Georges Bataille’s idea of the informe correlates with Cahun’s notions of declassification: “as ‘a term to declassify’ the ‘academic’ impulse to see ‘the universe take on a form’ ” (ibid.) 41 Heroines originally appeared in Mercure de France, vol. 177, no. 639 (1925). 42 Claude Cahun, Heroines, trans. Norman MacAfee, in Shelley Rice, ed., Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 43–94. One thinks of Djuna Barnes’s The Book of Repulsive Women (1915) and her practice of “decadent modernism,” in exposing culturally “repulsive” types and a culture of gendered surveillance, as Melissa Jane Hardie writes in “Repulsive Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s The Book of Repulsive Women,” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 29, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 129. 43 S.I. Salamensky, “Oscar Wilde’s ‘Jewish Problem’: Salomé, the Ancient Hebrew and the Modern Jewess,” Modern Drama, vol. 55, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 197–213; also significant is her discussion of Wilde’s interest in the “tropes of the modern Jewess” (in the form of Bernhardt), for whom, she argues the play was written (212). 44 Ibid. Salamensky also suggests that the elision of the Jewish aspect of the play, in critical readings such as that of Richard Ellmann, might stem from internalized shame, repression, or denial, on his part, which would conform nicely to the autobiographical dimension of all this work. “Wilde scholars may be inclined to protect the image of the otherwise grievously victimized ‘Saint Oscar’ as queer icon from any complicating ‘taint’ ” (213). On the other hand, I am not sure Wilde is seeking a “comfortable position.” To be a martyr for passion is his aim. 45 Latimer, “Acting Out,” 166, notes 15 and 16. Erin Carlston demonstrates that Pemberton Billing added the element of Jews to his accusations about “English sex perverts” who were a threat to the nation, compiled by the Germans in the “Black Book” (Double Agents, 34–5). 46 Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. 47 Figure 12 is a 1934 photo by Howard Coster, who usually specialized in portraits of male subjects. Figure 13 is a photo taken by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in their London studio, in 1927. In Orlando, ed. Maria DiBattista (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2006), 255–6. 48 Ray felt that self-representation was to a degree a reflection of the commodification of one’s art: Latimer, “Acting Out,” note 33. 49 Man Ray, Photographs by Man Ray: 105 Works, 1920–1934 (New York: Dover Press, 1979). 50 Maggie Humm, “Virginia Woolf ’s Photography and the Monk’s House Albums,” in Pamela L. Caughie, ed., Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000), 242. 51 André Green, On Private Matters (Madison, CT: International Universities, 1993), quoted in Humm, “Virginia Woolf ’s Photography,” 243; 242.

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52 Humm, “Virginia Woolf ’s Photography,” 221; 223. 53 Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “Virginia Woolf ’s Evasion: Critical Cosmopolitanism and British Modernism,” in Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds., Bad Modernisms (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 126. 54 Morris-Reich discusses early photography in Palestine by Arthur Ruppin, which offers a particular resonance for this idea of derivation, both colonial and documentary. Ruppin’s work (The Sociology of the Jews, 1930), was seen as a “soft form of racial determinism” (Race and Photography, 189–203). 55 Such a view might reinforce a reading of Nes in the framework of homonationalism, which would critique both the focus of the betrayal and the claim of marginality given his artistic success. This would be illustrated, for example, by the embrace of the Israeli soldier in Nes’s subtle acts of revisionism. Nes might reply with a view of conscription—that is, that everyone in Israeli society is a soldier—but I won’t presume to ventriloquize Nes. Such debate is part of the fraught environment of working in the Israeli landscape, where ethnic politics may be seen as a displacement in the context of the contemporary Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The role of the soldier is a doubly fraught factor of that debate. 56 I want to thank Adi Nes for his permission to reproduce his photographs here and elsewhere in my work. 57 Max Nordau, “Jewry of Muscle,” in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, eds. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 1995): 547. In Von Kunst und Künstlern [On Art and Artists] (1905), Nordau complains about Rodin’s “exaggerated” muscles, which he cites to attest to the quality of degeneration in his work. See Marilyn Reizbaum, “Max Nordau and the Generation of Jewish Muscle,” Jewish Culture and History, vol. 6, no. 1 (Summer 2003): 130–49. Hirschfeld was acquainted with Nordau’s ideas about the “new Jew,” which, in line with his views of Zionism, he rejected in favor of the cosmopolitan, wandering Jewish figure that he imbued with a secular messianism, in Racism. 58 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1997). Adi Nes recalls how the early reactions to this photo misread the contradictions, perceiving instead an uncritical heroism. 59 The Wandervogel movement was begun in 1896, and evolved into the Nazi Youth movement. Wandervogel translates as migrant birds—dare I suggest that the Yiddish slang for queer, feygel, might be derived from this source? 60 Magnus Hirschfeld, Women East and West: Impressions of a Sex Expert (London: Heinemann, 1935), 271. See also Robert Beachy for a fuller discussion of Blüher and Wandervogel and Hirschfeld’s connection: Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 146–59.

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61 Todd Samuel Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), xxii–xxiii; 137. 62 Ibid., 138. Otto Weininger subscribed to this view, in Sex and Character, in which he claims that “Zionism is the negation of Judaism . . . The concept of the citizen totally transcends the Jew”: Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, trans. Ladislaus Löb, eds. Daniel Steuer with Laura Marcus (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 277 (italics in original). 63 Jesse Hamlin, “His photos are lovely, erotic, even a bit disturbing. Adi Nes uses classical composition to portray Israeli soldiers,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 2004, https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/His-photos-are-lovely-eroticeven-a-bit-2789869.php. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Adi Nes, The Village, http://slash-paris.com/evenements/adi-nes-the-village. 67 “Israeli Artist Adi Nes’s ‘The Village’ Series at Jack Shaiman Gallery,” Huffington Post, May 22, 2012, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/israeli-artist-adi-nes_n_1499681. 68 Hélène Paremlin, Picasso Says . . ., trans. C. Trollope (New York: A.S. Barnes & Co., 1969), 40.

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Otto Weininger and the Jewish Joke as Terminus

Upon receiving his doctorate in 1902, Otto Weininger converted to Christianity; he was the only one of the four degenerationists included here to convert, however much the others were secularized or detached. Yet, none of his efforts, including his theory of a disembodied Judaism, could rescue him from his “Jewish state.” The shortest life had perhaps the longest reach, in that Weininger’s work was most translated, reprinted, and touted in the first half of the twentieth century. There are many startling propositions in his magnum opus, Sex and Character, including a seriously categorical statement that “the Jew, who has no sense of humor, is in fact the most productive target of any wit, and in this respect second only to sexuality.” He continues: “The most important thing about humor seems to me to be an excessive emphasis on the empirical, with the aim of making its unimportance more visible.”1 Lauding the capacity for humor, Weininger exposes his contradictory investment in a “transcendent empiricism,” which fuels his theories, and a divestiture in the importance of the empirical as a means of escape from them. The coda picks up on this contradiction and one of Weininger’s most enigmatic propositions—the Jewish subject that is the “spirit of modernity.” Twice in his oeuvre, once in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) and once in his essay on Otto Weininger (1994), Slavoj Žižek references a Jewish joke, as follows: At the beginning of this century, a Pole and a Jew were sitting on a train facing each other. The Pole was shifting nervously, watching the Jew all the time; something was irritating him; finally, unable to restrain himself any longer, he exploded, “Tell me, how do you Jews succeed in extracting from people the last small coin and in this way accumulate all your wealth?” The Jew replied: “OK, I will tell you, but not for nothing; first, you give me five zloty [Polish money].” After receiving the required amount, the Jew began: “First, you take a dead fish; you cut off its head and put the entrails in a glass of water. Then, around midnight, 205

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when the moon is full, you must bury this glass in a churchyard . . .” “And,” the Pole interrupted him greedily, “if I do all this will I become rich?” “Not too quickly,” replied the Jew; “this is not all you must do, but if you want to hear the rest, you must pay me another five zloty!” After receiving the money, the Jew continued his story: soon afterwards, he again demanded more money and so on, until finally the Pole exploded in fury: “You dirty rascal, do you really think I did not notice what you were aiming at? There is no secret at all, you simply want to extract the last small coin from me!” The Jew answered him calmly with resignation: “Well, now you see how we, the Jews . . .”

Through the joke, Žižek makes the case for the fissure or contradiction within Weininger’s theories about Jews and women—that woman was the negative human aspect and all Jews were womanly—which exposes for both the “insurmountable gap between its being and symbolic import.” Further, Žižek uses the joke to talk about the integrality of Weininger and his subject, yet another contradiction, a state from which Weininger is always theoretically trying to escape, but in which he is implicated by his very theories. Both the gap and circularity are integral to the joke, where, while it is ostensibly the Jew who is performing himself, it is the observer’s performance of anti-Semitism that is the subject of the joke.2 This stereotype of Jewish deception as the deception here is a conundrum of the joke Žižek relays and the joke would seem to be on the suicide Weininger since it is the practice of deception—the mechanics of the joke—that renders the survival of the subject. Those critics who have tried to rescue Weininger on the basis of his theories—Allan Janik most notably among them—are caught by the same irony and contradiction that attend the work: that the theories he created necessarily condemned him by conflating the Jew-ish with the Jew. Weininger’s pursuit of a science of sex and character turned on him, making him, as with the other figures in this study, both the author and the subject of his work. The proof of his degradation overwrites the work. His conversion to Protestantism could not make him an Aryan, who owes to the Jew, Weininger writes, his hypervigilance about “Judaism as a possibility in himself,” reminding us of Joe Litvak’s citation of the cultural admonition that “the Jew could be you.” Despite arguing that “in my estimation, Judaism is neither a nation nor a race, and neither a faith nor a body of writing, neither a specific persona nor a collective,” Weininger would not escape his conclusion that a Jewish self had more to do with an “absence of nobility” than a lack of identity, and that, finally, Jews preeminently inhabit Jew-ishness. He concludes Sex and Character’s penultimate chapter, “Judaism” by stating, “the spirit of modernity is Jewish” and “our age is not only the most Jewish but also the most

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effeminate in all ages: an age in which art only provides a sudarium for its moods and which has derived the artistic urge in humans from the games played by animals; an age of the most credulous anarchism.” Rehearsing the “degenerate” types that have undergirded modern Western culture—his work was reprinted and translated and widely disseminated between 1903 and 1932—he seems to propose himself as a new messiah offering a “new Christianity straining toward the light.” This might be one way to read his suicide: “Christ was a Jew but only in order to overcome Judaism in himself most completely, since the firmest believer is he who has overcome the most powerful doubt, and the most positive affirmer he who has risen above the most dreary negation.” The punch line of his death makes for a grim joke about a doubt he could not overcome.3 For his study of jokes, Freud amassed a large collection of Jewish jokes and he offers that these formed the basis for his general theories about humor, technique, and the unconscious. A large number of these jokes take place on a train. One in particular might be categorized as a Hegelian example of misrecognition, which, as Žižek observes about his joke, “illustrates perfectly the way truth arises from misrecognition—the way our path toward truth coincides with the truth itself ”:4 A Galician Jew was travelling in a train. He had made himself really comfortable, had unbuttoned his coat and put his feet up on the seat. Just then a Gentleman in modern dress entered the compartment. The Jew promptly pulled himself together and took up a proper pose. The stranger fingered through the pages of a notebook, made some calculations, reflected for a moment and then suddenly asked the Jew: “Excuse me, when is Yom Kippur [the Day of Atonement]?” “Oho!” said the Jew, and put his feet up on the seat again before answering.

Freud describes this joke as an example of allusion—a subspecies of “indirect representation.” This is representation of something small or very small—which performs the task of giving full expression to a whole characteristic by means of a tiny detail. This group can be brought under the classification of “allusion,” if we bear in mind that this smallness is related to what has to be represented, and can be seen to proceed from it.5

One might wonder what makes it funny? Is it the contempt of the first Jew for himself or for his Jewish compatriot who is calculatedly passing, and whom the first could not recognize without the verbal cue? Or is it their capacity to travel in the same carriage that is the location of misrecognition, the defamiliarizing modern scene? Freud’s explanation of the “tendency to economy” in the verbal

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exchange does not illuminate. It seems another obfuscatory calculation. But there is an economy here of the joke itself, a “subjective destitution” that is the core of Jewish jokes, a condition of being Jew-ish that is in Freud’s interest reflexively, it seems, and in Žižek’s interest philosophically (“tarrying with the negative”). Pointedly, Freud does not actually address the subject of representation here or mostly elsewhere with his Jewish jokes. “We make no enquiries about their origin, but only about their efficiency—whether they are capable of making us laugh and whether they deserve our theoretical interest. And both these two requirements are best fulfilled by Jewish jokes.”6 The conundrum of his example—refusing to comment on the Jewish nature of the Jewish material he upholds as exemplary of a universal condition—reminds us of the charge of his “Jewish science,” which might be described in the very same terms as this category of joke he analyzes: where indirection in relation to the subject of his Jewishness becomes the basis for a “whole characteristic”: “It is again a Jewish joke; but this time it is only the setting that is Jewish, the core belongs to humanity in general. No doubt this example, too, has its unwanted complications, but fortunately they are not the same ones that have so far prevented us from seeing clearly.” Neil Levi speaks to this idea of the structure that is revelatory of its subject when the subject is submerged, in considering Samuel Beckett’s use of a Jewish joke in Endgame. He rehearses a well-known Jewish joke about a tailor that appears in the play with the Jewish names of the characters excised. Levi argues: By preserving the structure of the joke Beckett makes visible what he has removed from it or, rather, makes visible that something has been removed from it, thus creating a space for the (justified assumption) that what has been removed are Jewish names. Such gestures—negations that point to what they are negating—are at least as important to Beckett as the negation itself.7

Levi’s point here, as throughout his book, has to do with the interface of certain Jewish types, anti-Semitism, and modernist forms. As Levi observes and was observed by Adorno, the Holocaust is a subject that haunts Beckett’s post-war plays with their ravaged landscapes and deracinated characters, but always only suggestively; its nominal non-existence formally dramatizes the historical excision of Jews from the landscape. We are reminded of Žižek’s charge regarding Weininger’s failure to see that the negation is productive of the subject he seeks to avoid and void.

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So what is the salience of trains—the scene of these jokes and countless novelistic and filmic scenes—for the subject of degeneration and modernism? The train is the figure par excellence of mobility, the quintessence of technology, locomotion, and crossings; but the train also became a resonant post-war symbol of Jewish destruction. In combination, then, the train is where the fantasy of motion or arrival may conceal or be overridden by a dead end or immobility. These Jewish jokes about mobility convey this double sense, one that has informed a modernist aesthetic whose new direction dictated getting somewhere and everywhere, but not anywhere in particular. According to Todd Presner, “The Jew on a train emerges as the exemplary figure of the hopes and catastrophes of mobile modernity.”8 The train scene in Virginia Woolf ’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924) is often attested to as a modernist founding moment. Woolf imagines a “little party in a railway carriage”: Mr. Wells, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Bennett are traveling to Waterloo with Mrs. Brown. Mrs. Brown, I have said, was poorly dressed and very small. She had an anxious, harassed look . . . There are no Mrs. Browns in Utopia . . . There was Mrs. Brown protesting that she is different, quite different, from what people made out, and luring the novelist to her rescue by the most fascinating if fleeting glimpse of her charms; there were the Edwardians handing out tools appropriate to house building and house breaking; and there was the British public asseverating that they must see the hot water bottle first. Meanwhile the train was rushing to the station were we must all get out . . . At whatever cost of life, limb and damage to valuable property Mrs. Brown must be rescued, expressed and set in her high relations to the world before the train stopped and she disappeared forever.9

Woolf exhorts the writers and the readers, “May I end by venturing to remind you of the duties and responsibilities that are yours as partners in this business of writing books, as companions in the railway carriage, as fellow travellers with Mrs. Brown. For she is just as visible to you who remain silent as to us who tell stories about her.” Woolf resolves that because of the literary inadequacies of that moment, “we must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments.” The great age she predicts will necessarily be full of the “spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.” The equalizer that is the train puts the writers and their as yet unnarratable subject in the same car, along with Freud’s Jews, even, perhaps, with Woolf ’s Jew, as she sometimes called Leonard, who could be for her something like Mr. Bennett’s Mrs. Brown, a kind of joke.

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The failure and the negativity as epitomized by the Jew-ish example—which in turn is instantiated by the joke, whose structure is determined by negation or displacement—signal a contradictory locomotion of pursuit and escape, central to Weininger’s premise about Jewishness. Another salient example of such a constellation occurs in a more recent work by W.G. Sebald—The Emigrants (1992), characterized by some as inhabiting the space of postmemory. The second section tells the story of the Jew-ish (by virtue of one grandparent) Paul Bereyter, who was removed from his teaching duties as a result of the Nuremberg Laws and eventually committed suicide by lying down on train tracks, which is revealed at the beginning of the narrative. He is an “only three quarters Aryan,” who felt, like Hirschfeld, “German to the marrow” and loathed his origins—a self-hating German mirrored in his hated Jewish part. We are told that he comes to identify with exiles, Jewish writers, and thinkers who had committed suicide in the face of the Holocaust, and that in his proleptic childhood passion for the railways, “Paul had found his fate already systematically laid out for him.” In response to this childhood fixation, his uncle predicts that he will “end up on the railways.” The joke, as it were, is here on the reader, who may invest in the subject of Jewish ignominy as the predictor or source of Paul’s fate. It is only by negation, in that the Jewish quotient renders the German part somehow unbearable. This section, as The Emigrants overall, brings a new vision to the overdetermined plot of the Holocaust terminus; here the track is circular, which reads back to an occluded vision of what is already in view. The ongoing joke. Paul’s aunt, whose voice merges with that of the retrospective narrator, has the last word: I suppose I did not immediately see the innocent meaning of Paul’s uncle’s expression, end up on the railways, and it struck me as darkly foreboding. The disquiet I experienced because of that momentary failure to see what was meant—I now sometimes feel that at that moment I beheld an image of death— lasted only a very short time, and passed over me like a shadow of a bird in flight.10

Does the aunt recollect through hindsight this moment as foresight, as a Žižekian symptom from the future? She seems to chastise herself for her incapacity to read the subject as anything but negative. For Sebald, a knowingness of this capacity for rewriting becomes crucial to the retelling of events that cannot be told as they were. I suppose this moment in The Emigrants, as is true of Sebald’s use of language throughout his work, might be characterized in Freud’s explanation of a

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“tendency to economy,” where something is revealed through misrecognition. Todd Presner writes in his assessments of Sebald’s presentation of war history, what he calls his modernist realism: Modernist war events no longer unfold—as events—according to stable unities of time, place and action and therefore they cannot be captured, communicated, or emplotted by the traditional structures and coherences of realistic narration . . . Sebald produces a realistic history of the present, which, through his use of modernist techniques of narration, unlinks history from the literal reproduction of the past.11

Such unlinking informs the Romanian–French film Train de vie (Radu Mihaileanu, 1998), with its Tarantino-esque absurdity, wherein the residents of a small village in 1930s Poland get wind of the Nazi project and determine to deport themselves to freedom. They dress like Nazis and some play the part of Jews to fool the real Nazis with their verve for deportation, which they see as a plan for escape. The conclusion of the film reveals their destination as a death camp, the trip itself as an hallucination, a dream, a bad joke; as with the Jew in Freud’s joke, the passing Jew is continuous with the one who cannot pass. Weininger, Žižek argues, should assume the Jew’s response to the Pole’s outburst: “Well, now you see how we the Jews extract money from people . . .”; namely, a gesture that would reinterpret, reinscribe the failure as success— something like, “See, this nothingness behind the mask is the very absolute negativity on account of which woman is the subject par excellence, not a limited object opposed to the force of subjectivity.”12 The Jewish subject, historically a lack, has been paradigmatic of modernism’s investment in unfit subjects and is here considered “the subject par excellence.” Žižek’s joke takes place at the beginning of the twentieth century, where this book more or less begins. In Unfit, I have sought to show the salutary nature of the contradictions within these major cultural critics, whose work has been profoundly integral to central tenets of modernist subjects. Weininger by this point is overdetermined, but his contribution is perhaps the most profound, in both its formulations and its bad odor. Ironically, given the apparatus he tried to construct for escape, he has mostly never fallen under the radar of scrutiny. In being exemplary of his theories, he makes the case, too, that I have been making here, that the Jewishness of these subjects, as problematic as the “nothing” that Weininger fails to realize as definitive of “something,” is a complex construction that also underwrites modernist work.

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Notes 1 Otto Weininger, Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, trans. Ladislaus Löb, eds. Daniel Steuer with Laura Marcus (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 287, 288 (italics in original). 2 Slavoj Žižek, The Žižek Reader (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1999): 129–47. 3 Weininger, Sex and Character, 276, 299, 298. 4 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 64. 5 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1960), 80–1 6 Ibid., 49. 7 Neil Levi, Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 172. Levi learns from Beckett’s drafts for Waiting For Godot that “Estragon” had originally been named “Levy.” 8 Todd Presner in an interview about his book Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 9 Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press, 1924). 10 W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1997), 62–3. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz returns to the trope of train through the main figure, who was rescued as infant on the Kindertransport. 11 Todd Samuel Presner, “ ‘What a Synoptic and Artificial View Reveals’: Extreme History and the Modernism of W.G. Sebald’s Realism,” Criticism, vol. 46, no. 3 (2004): 344–5. 12 Žižek, The Žižek Reader, 134–5.

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Italics are used in headings for names of artworks and publications. Abraham 129 Allan, Maud 180–1 American Civil War 83, 84–5 American values 87–8 anti-Semitism in America 89 degeneration, sign of 21 as a disease 33 and Dracula 54 ending of 34 in the film industry 68 Freud, responses to 27 of Friedländer 49 in jokes 206 Lombroso and 27, 28, 32 Nordau and 40, 41–2, 113–14 of Wagner 38, 112 of Weininger 52 Apter, Emily 172, 178 Arab Jews 187 Arata, Stephen 112 artists, degeneracy of 3, 10–11, 36–7, 42, 53, 109, 112–13, 115 assimilation of Jews 34, 36, 39, 40, 133 atavism 27–8, 31, 32, 33, 54, 95, 130 Auerbach, Erich 8–9 Bad Seed, The (film, d. LeRoy) 19, 66, 71, 81, 90–100 Bad Seed, The (March) 90–1, 93, 95 Balfour, Arthur 138, 139, 141, 142, 153, 155 Balfour Declaration 138 Barker, Pat background 7, 15, 19 work of 109–10, 120, 121 see also Regeneration trilogy Barnes, Djuna 53 Bauer, Heike 44

224

Bauer, J. Edgar 43, 44 Beckett, Samuel, 208 Bender, Abby 145 Benjamin, Walter 11, 46 Bernstein, Matthew 83 Bertillini, Giorgio 76 biological determinism 18, 69, 74, 92 Blackface 71, 76, 83, 86 blood libel 54, 86 Bloom, Leopold (character) betrayal of 140–1 and bodybuilding 150 heroic muscle of 138 lack of definition of 139 manliness, lack of 153 national affinities of 142 Parnellism of 143 and Zionism 149–50 Blüher, Hans 190, 191 bodybuilding 111, 117, 150–1, 188, 189 Boer War 142–3 book burning, Nazi 51–2, 51 boxing 151–2 Boyarin, Daniel 116–17 Brand, Adolf 50 Brenner, Frédéric 8 Bunzl, Matti 170 Burnett, R.G. 68, 76 Cagney, James 76–7 Cahun, Claude 172–86 background 172 costume, use of 171, 179 ethnicity of 173 Jewishness of 176–7, 178 photography of 172, 173–4 sexual orientation of 174, 178 writing of 172, 180–1

Index works Aveux non Avenus 174–5, 175 Hands 184 Heroines 180 self-portraits 176, 176–8, 177–9 cannibalism 65, 99 capital punishment 29 Carroll, Lewis (fictional) 123, 128 Casement, Roger 145–6 Caserio, Robert 4 Chamberlain, Joseph 141, 142–3, 142 Cheyette, Bryan 5 cinema criminal child films 90–100 as engine of degeneration 67–8 gangster films 72, 73–82 Jewishness of LeRoy 70–2 social justice films 82–90 cinematic vernacular 67 circumcision 116, 118, 130, 132, 178 Conley, Kate 175, 179, 183 crime bosses of 74 criminal brains 53–4 criminals, women as 30–1 detection of 29–30 Germans as criminals 95–6 ideas of 28–9 identification of criminals 35–6 and imitation 79–80 and Jews 32–3 mimicry and 78–80 speech of criminals 78 criminal child films 71, 90–100 cross-dressing 44, 47–9, 48, 179, 182, 184 Crouch, Stanley 89 Dahmer, Jeffrey 99 Danahay, Martin A. 42 David (Old Testament) 114, 130 Death in the Deep South (Greene) 69, 83–4, 85 death penalty 29 Degenerate Music Exhibition (1938), catalogue 2, 3 degeneration, definitions of 1, 11, 25–6 diasporic modernism 5 Dinshaw, Carolyn 14

disguise 30, 76 see also Jewface; passing doctors, degenerate 35 Dodgson, Charles see Carroll, Lewis (fictional) Doherty, Thomas 68, 73, 75, 76, 80 Dr. Jekyll and Hyde (Stevenson) 42 Dracula (Stoker) 35, 53, 54–5, 93 dreams, understanding of 130–2 Duchamp, Marcel 181–3, 181 echolalia 114, 115, 128 Egremont, Max 135 Ellis, Havelock 25, 43 Emigrants, The (Sebald) 210 Emmet, Robert 147–8 Endgame (Beckett) 208 erasure of Jews 34 see also assimilation of Jews erotohistoriography 134 ethnic representation in film 76 eugenics 3–4, 74, 92 evil child films 90–100 exculpation 73–4, 84, 90, 99 father figures 123, 128 FBI Story, The (film, d. LeRoy) 72 Ferri, Enrico 26 fitness and homosexuality 122–3 as manly and artistic capacity 121 movements 111, 117, 153 trope of 7, 11, 19 Foster, Hal 178 Frank, Leo 69, 70, 83–4, 87 Freud, Sigmund and degeneration theory 25 on Hirschfeld 51 identification theories of 65–6 and the Jewish science 51 Jewishness of 26–7 jokes, study of 207–8 on Moses 146–7 Friedländer, Benedict 49 Friedman, Susan 2, 5, 12 Fury (film, d. Lang) 87 Fuss, Diana 66, 67, 74, 99 futurity 134, 136, 154

225

226

Index

Gabler, Neal 76 Galton, Francis 3–4, 25 games, use of 152 gangster films 72, 73–82 genetic degeneration 92, 93, 97 Gentleman’s Agreement (film, d. Kazan) 85–6 German Criminal Code (para. 175), repeal of 50–1 Germans, criminality of 95–6 Gibson, Mary 28, 31, 32, 33 Gilman, Sander 177 Graves, Robert (fictional) 118 Greene, Ward 83, 85 Greenslade, William 9 Gurel, Perin 95 Hagin, Boaz 73 Halberstam, Jack/Judith 35, 54–5 Hale, Robert (character) 84 Halpern, Moishe Leyb 87 hands 181–2, 184–5, 184, 193, 194 handwriting analysis 93 Hansen, Miriam 19, 67, 70 Hayot, Eric 1 Hays Code see Production Code Administration (PCA) Herrn, Rainer 47, 49 Herzl, Theodor Zionism of 34, 39, 147 Hirschfeld, Magnus 43–52 as the Einstein of sex 169 Jewishness of 45 Nazi criminalization of 51 normative constructions of 45 photographs of 49, 50, 179 photography, use of 36, 46–9, 48, 170, 171 on race and Jews 44–5 sexology of 43–4, 170 on women, inequality of 45–6 work of 17, 19–20, 21 historical sin 89 Hollywood 19, 68, 73–4 see also cinema homoeroticism 75–6, 80, 187 homosexuality and fitness 122–3 of Hirschfeld 43

images of 187, 188, 189 inversion of 190–2, 191 and Jewishness in photography 171–2 and Jews, conflation of 49–51, 75–6, 133–4, 170 laws against 50–1 national future, threat to 134 in Regeneration trilogy (Barker) 122–3, 133–4 theories of 25 House I Live In, The (film, d. LeRoy) 82–3, 87–90 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 70, 82, 89 Humm, Maggie 184–5 humor see jokes hysteria 113–14 identification 65–6, 74, 99 Imitation of Life (films, d. Stahl, Sirk) 86–7 impersonation 30, 76 inversion, sexual 44, 75, 116, 169, 190–1 Ireland 138, 139 Irish characters in film 76–7 Isaac 129 Italian characters in film 76, 77 Italian unification 34, 85 Jackson, Chuck 100 Jacobs, Joseph 8, 25 James, William 40 Jazz Singer, The (film, d. Crosland) 76 Jew-ishness of Cahun 178–9 definition of 9 and deviance 49, 51 of Duchamp 181–2 in film 98, 100 of Hollywood 68 of jokes 208, 210 of Nordau’s characters 42 in Ulysses 132, 148 Jewface 18, 71, 76, 83, 86, 89 Jewish jokes 205–6, 207–8, 210–11 Jewish Question 26, 34 Jews crime and 32–3 definitions of 8 degeneration of 5, 53–5

Index and homosexuality, conflation of 49–51, 75–6, 133–4, 170 as a measure of goodness 4 as proxies for black 83, 86 roles of 9 self-hatred of 52–3 sexual deviation and 13–14 jokes 20, 205–11 Joyce, James on the anti-Jewish bias 35 background 15 connections with Max Nordau 6, 154–5 diasporic modernism of 5 language of 146 Parnellism of 143 position of Jews 143 work of 19, 109–10 see also Ulysses Judaization 3, 38 Klein, Melanie 99 Krafft-Ebing, Richard 25 Krauss, Rosalind 171, 173 Last Supper 188, 189–90 laws against homosexuality 50–1 LeRoy, Mervyn career of 68–9 criminal child films of 90–100 films of 18–19, 66, 71–2 gangster films of 73–82 Jewishness of 70–2 social justice films of 69–70, 82–90 Lessing, Theodor 52 Levi, Neil 38, 208 Levin, Yale 67 Levinson, Michael 12, 13 Lewis, Pericles 125 Lindesmith, Alfred 67 Lippmann, Walter 92 literature 35–6, 37, 53–5 see also Dracula; Regeneration trilogy; Ulysses Little Caesar (film, d. LeRoy) 73–5, 76, 77–9 Litvak, Joseph 70, 86, 99 Lombroso, Cesare 27–36 on artists 36

227

assimilation of Jews 34 on atavism 32, 75 children and crime 71, 91 criminal brain, discovery of 53–4 on criminal speech 78 criminality, ideas of 28–9, 30–1 criminals, excessive virtue of 94 definition of Jews 8, 98 on female criminals 31 identification theories of 65 on imitation 79 influence in America 66, 68, 69, 76 and Italian unification 34 Jewishness of 9, 27–8, 33 on Jews and crime 32–3 literature, appearances in 53 literature, use of 36 monsters in the work of 35 orality and deviant behavior 99 physiognomic typology 35 race, concept of 83, 85 on women 32, 95 work of 10, 16, 18 Londe, Albert 46, 47 Lorre, Peter 75 lynching, films about 69, 70, 87 Maley, Willy 141, 153 Malik, Linda L. 55 Maltz, Albert 89 Man Ray 185 Mao, Douglas 10 Marcus, Laura 52 Marx, Groucho 71 McCormack, Patty 92 Meeropol, Abel 88, 89, 90 Melnick, Jeffrey 86, 87 mercy, for criminals 81 metonymic displacement 85, 95, 124 Miller, D.A. 70 mimicry and crime 78–80 mirror scenes in films 80, 81, 82, 86, 87, 96, 97 modernism definitions of 1–2, 12–13 disability 10, 12, 13 fitness and purity in 7 and Jewishness 4–6 negativity attached to 10, 42

228 planetary 2, 5 vernacular 67–8 Moll, Albert 25 Morel, Bénédict 11, 25, 26, 94 Morris-Reich, Amos 170, 171 Morrison, Mark 10 Moses 145, 146–7 Mosse, George 115, 117 Muni, Paul 70, 76, 77 Murder in Harlem (film, d. Micheaux) 87 Murry, John Middleton 122 Muscular Christianity 190 Muscular Judaism 38, 42, 116–17, 118, 187, 192 music 3, 88–9 nationalism 114, 143, 148 Nazi among us, idea of 96 Nazism 3, 51, 53 Nes, Adi 186–96 costume, use of 171 Prisoner series 192–3, 194 Soldiers series 187, 188, 189–92, 191 Village series 193, 194, 195–6 work of 20 neurasthenia 25, 31, 114, 119, 133 New Sculpture Movement 115 Nohrnberg, Peter 152 Nordau, Max 36–42 and artists 3, 10–11, 36–7, 109, 112–13, 115 assimilation of Jews 36, 39, 40, 133 and the body 116–18 connections with James Joyce 6, 154–5 criticized by Shaw 113–15 Decadents, targeting of 112–13 dread of instability 154 fitness of modernity 119 literary work of 40–2 literature, appearances in 53 name, change of 41 on Rodin 115–16 on the “spirit of the age” 38–9 work of 16–17, 26 in work of Olaf Peters 3 Zionism of 34, 36, 38, 39–40, 138–9, 149, 155

Index North, Michael 11 nose as phallus 177–8 Nugent, Frank 69, 70, 85 original type 94, 175 Ouditt, Sharon 110 Owen, Wilfred (fictional) 124, 127, 129 Palestine 135, 138, 190 Parnell, Charles Stewart 143–4 Parnell, John Howard (fictional) 140, 143 passing 49, 70–1, 86, 99 Peck, Gregory 85–6 Penmark, Rhoda see Rhoda (criminal child character) Peters, Kathrin 47 Peters, Olaf 3 phallus, nose as 177–8 Philistines 129–30 philistinism 112, 114, 124, 129 photography of Cahun 172, 173, 173–9, 175–8, 184 of Duchamp 181–3, 181 homosexuality and Jewishness in 171–2 images of homosexuality 187, 188, 189 of Man Ray 185 of Nes 187, 188, 189, 191, 192–3, 194, 195–6 and surrealism 173 use of by Hirschfeld 46–9, 48, 170, 171 of Woolf 183, 184–5 photomontages 174–5, 175 phrenology 18 physical culture 117 physiognomy 18, 31, 35, 46, 115 Picasso, Pablo Boy Leading a Horse 194, 195 Pick, Daniel 11, 26, 33 Plock, Vike Martina 150–1 portrait photography 171 Pound, Ezra 10, 11 Presner, Todd Samuel 191, 209, 211 Prior, Billy (character) 134 Production Code Administration (PCA) 68, 70, 71, 76, 94, 96 progress, idea of 4 prostitutes 30–1, 95 psychology 10, 91, 92, 98

Index

229

Public Enemy, The (film, d. Wellman) 75, 76–7, 80 Puchner, Martin 113

Rossen, Robert 70 Roth, Philip 106 Ruth, David 74, 76

queer and Jewish culture 170–1, 172, 179, 187 queer flashes in gangster films 75 queer genealogy of sex 14 Quirici, Marion 22, 161, 167

Sackville-West, Vita 182–3, 184 sacrifices 129 Saint-Amour, Paul 12–13, 136 Salamensky, S.I. 180 Salome 180 Sandow, Eugen 117, 150–1 Sanity of Art, The (Shaw) 21, 113–14 Sassoon, Siegfried in Palestine 135 poetry of 118–19, 122, 125–6, 127 Sassoon, Siegfried (fictional) 110, 118, 121, 122–9, 130–1, 132–3, 134 scapegoats 129 Scarface (film, d. Hawks) 70, 75, 77 science and the arts 9–10 scientists, Jewishness of 26–7 sculpture 115–16 Sebald, W.G. 210–11 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 46 Sélavy, Rrose 181–3, 181 self-portraits 171 by Cahun 176, 176–8, 177–9 serial killers 99 sexology 43, 170 sexual deviation 13–14, 25, 75–6, 128 sexual spectrum 14, 17, 19–20, 43–4, 45, 47 Shaw, George Bernard 20–1, 113–15 Showalter, Elaine 95 Silence of the Lambs, The (film, d. Demme) 67 Simon, Art 88 Sinatra, Frank 88–9, 89–90 Smith, Zadie 5 social justice films 82–90 Söder, Hans-Peter 40, 41 Soloway, Jill 21 speech criminal 78 defects in Ulysses 144, 145 echolalia 114, 115, 128 stammering 115, 123, 128 splits in Nordau’s Degeneration 112–18 in Regeneration trilogy 118, 119–20 stammering 115, 123, 128

Rafter, Nicole Hahn 31, 32, 66, 74 Rains, Claude 84 rat, as stand-in for Jew 29 Rat-Catcher of Hamelin 35 Realism 113 rear-guardism 113 Regeneration trilogy (Barker) 19, 110, 118–35 assimilation of Jews 133 atavism 130 circumcision 130, 132 degeneration 121 dreams, understanding of 130–2 father figures 123 fitness 121, 122–3 homosexuality 122–3, 133–4 metonymic displacement 124 neurasthenia 133 Philistines 129–30 philistinism 124, 129 prices 129–30 sacrifices 129 scapegoats 129 speech 123, 128 splits 118, 119–20 tapping 128–9 Rhoda (criminal child character) 81, 90, 92–100 Richardson, Dorothy 53 Rico (gangster character) 77–82 Rivers, W.H.R. 119 Rivers, W.H.R. (fictional) 110, 121, 125, 127, 129–33 Robinson, Earl 88, 89 Robinson, Edward G. 70, 75, 76, 77–8 Rodin, Auguste 115–16 Rogin, Michael 71, 76 Rose, Jacqueline 53 Rosemond, Clinton 82–3

230 Steuer, Daniel 52 Stranger, The (film, d. Welles) 96 strongmen 117 see also bodybuilding Studlar, Gaylyn 75 suicide, of Weininger 52, 53, 206 surrealism 47, 173, 178 Sykora, Katharina 47 tapping 128–9 Taylor, John F. 144–5 They Won’t Forget (film, d. LeRoy) 69, 70, 72, 82–6 third sex 43, 174 Train de vie (film, d. Mihaileanu) 211 trains 9, 15, 20, 209–10 Transparent (TV series) 21 transvestism see cross-dressing Trimble, Sarah 134 Trubowitz, Lara 53 Uganda Plan 143 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich 25 Ulysses (Joyce) 135–56 Emmet in 147–8 ending of 154 exile in 5 fitness, trope of 137 Jewish figures 111, 138 language of 146 Moses in 145, 146–7 Parnell in 143 Scotland in 141 speech defects 144, 146–7 sports, games and fitness 150–3 Taylor’s speech 144–5 traumatic earliness of 136 two-headed octopus 140–1 Zionism 137, 148–50 Valente, Joseph 12, 35, 144 vampires 54

Index see also Dracula (Stoker) Van Helsing (character in Dracula) 35 vernacular modernism 67–8 Vidocq, François Eugene 29–30 Villa, Renzo 35 Wagner, Richard 3, 38, 112 Walkowitz, Rebecca 1, 10, 186 Wandervogel 190, 191 Ward, Sean Francis 134 Warner Bros. 71 Weininger, Otto definition of degeneration 25 and the Jewish joke 205–6, 211 Jewish self-hatred of 52–3 Jewishness of 26–7 responses to 20 work of 17–18 Weizmann, Chaim 155 Welles, Orson 96 Wilde, Oscar 11, 37, 112, 180–1 Wollaeger, Mark 7 women in Bad Seed 95 as criminals 30–1 in gangster films 75 inequality of 45–6 inferiority of 32 sexuality of 31 Woolf, Virginia 184–6, 209 Orlando 183, 184, 185 Zionism Balfour Declaration 138 of Herzl 34, 39, 147 of Hirschfeld 44 and Ireland 139 Jewishness of 190–2 of Nordau 34, 36, 38, 39–40, 138–9, 149, 155 in Ulysses 137, 148–50 Žižek, Slavoj 20, 205, 207, 211