Communities in Fiction 9780823263134

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COMMUNITIES IN FIC TION

Fordham University Press New York 2015

Commonalities Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

CO M M U N I T I E S IN FICTION J. Hillis Miller

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Control Number: 2014957907 Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

In memory of Helen Tartar old friend, super editor

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ix

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xi

1 Theories of Community: Williams, Heidegger, and Others . . . . . . . . . .

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2 Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community . . . . . . .

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3 Individual and Community in The Return of the Native . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4 Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5 Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 6 Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264 Coda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327

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I L L U S T R AT I O N S

1 From Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, frontispiece: “Mr. Crawley before the Magistrates”. . . . . . . . . . 50 2 From Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, in Chapter 1: “Mr. and Mrs. Crawley” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 3 Anthony Van Dyck, Cupid and Psyche (1639–40) . . . . . . . . . . 102 4 “Sketch Map of the Scene of the Story,” in Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .111 5 “Map 17, Dorchester 1873, of Ordnance Survey of England and Wales” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 6 Egdon Heath, in Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 7 Bloom’s End, in Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 8 Alderworth, in Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 9 Shadwater Weir, in Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 10 “Conrad’s Topographical Relief Map of Sulaco” . . . . . . . . . . . 160 11 “Costaguana’s occidental province” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 12 “Part of the town of Sulaco” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I warmly thank all those audiences who have listened to early versions of chapters in this book. They have asked constructive questions that have helped me in revision and expansion. These audiences have included those who have attended my Critical Theory Emphasis Miniseminars over a tenyear period at the University of California, Irvine. Some of these seminars have included material eventually used in revised form in this book. I thank Sue Showler, Kyung Kim, Barbara Caldwell, and many others at Irvine who have kindly facilitated these seminars. They have been a great pleasure and honor to give. Lectures drawn from ongoing work on this book have also been given at many other universities in the United States and around the world, including China (for a section of the Conrad chapter), France (for a short version of the Woolf chapter), and Spain (for the Cervantes/ Pynchon chapter). Though most of this book has not been previously published, sections or shorter versions of four chapters have been published. All these have been revised to fit the argument of this book, and, for Chapters 3 and 5, greatly lengthened. A précis of one section of Chapter 4 has been published in Chinese, and Chapter 6 in an earlier form has been published in Spanish. A much shorter version of Chapter 3 appeared as “Individual and Community in The Return of the Native: A Reappraisal,” in Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate, ed. Keith Wilson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 154–73. I thank Keith Wilson and the University of Toronto Press for permission to reuse this material in lengthened and revised form.

The first version of some of the material in Chapter 4 was given as a lecture at a conference on Conrad sponsored by Professor Jakob Lothe of the University of Oslo and was entitled “ ‘Material Interests’: Modernist English Literature as Critique of Global Capitalism.” This material is reused in revised and distributed form in the third section of Chapter 4 of this book. The conference was held on September 22–24, 2005, at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters in Oslo. Professor Lothe was Group Leader of a research group on Narrative Theory and Analysis. I was a participant in this group and have fond memories of it. My Oslo lecture was subsequently published as a chapter in Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, edited by Jakob Lothe, Jeremy Hawthorn, and James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 160–77. I am extremely grateful to Jakob Lothe, James Phelan, and Ohio State University Press for permission to reuse this material in revised form. A Chinese translation by Yifan Zhang and Yingjian Guo of a part of the third section of Chapter 4, under the title “Material Interests: Modernist English Literature as Critique of Global Capitalism,” has been published in the Journal of Zhengzhou University, Vol. 5 (2004), 127–30. A somewhat longer version was given in English as a lecture at an International Conference on Globalization and Local Culture held June 5–9, 2004, at Zhengzhou University, and again at an International Conference on Critical Inquiry held June 12–15, 2004, at Tsinghua University in Beijing. This material has been revised and expanded in order to fit into the argument of a much longer chapter on Conrad’s Nostromo in this book. A much shorter version of Chapter 5 has been published, in French and in English, in digital form as “ ‘Waves’ Theory: an anachronistic reading,” and “La theorie des Vagues: lecture anachronistic,” in Virginia Woolf Among the Philosophers, ed. Chantal Delourme, special issue of Le tour critique 2 (2013), 113–20; 121–29; http://letourcritique.u-paris10.fr/index.php/letour critique/issue/view/3 (accessed January 26, 2014). I thank Richard Pedot, Chantal Delourme, and Le tour critique for permission to reuse this material in revised and lengthened form. Chapter 6 appeared in Spanish in a somewhat earlier form as “El Coloquio de los Perros como Narrativa Postmoderna,” trans. María Jesús López Sánchez-Vizcaíno, in La Tropelía. Hacia el Coloquio de los Perros, ed. Julián Jiménez Heffernan (Tenerife and Madrid: Artemisaediciones, 2008), 33–98. An abbreviated version of the section of this essay on Pynchon apxii

Acknowledgments

peared in English as “Thomas Pynchon’s ‘The Secret Integration’ as Postmodern Narrative,” in Foreign Languages and Culture Teaching and Research 18, no. 1 (Tianjin: Tianjin University of Technology, June, 2005), 1–9. I am grateful to Professor Heffernan for granting me permission to reuse this material and give my thanks also to Paula Martín Salvan for many kindnesses. This essay was given originally in shorter form as a lecture in English for a conference on Cervantes’s “The Dogs’ Colloquy” at the University of Córdoba in 2005.

Acknowledgments

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COMMUNITIES IN FIC TION

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1 THEORIES OF COMMUNIT Y Williams, Heidegger, and Others

Raymond Williams’s entry for “community” in Keywords is straightforward enough, though it is characteristically succinct, comprehensive, and subtle. He gives a brief history of the etymology of the word and of the different meanings the word has had since it entered the English language in the fourteenth century. He also sets “community” against two French and German words, commune and Gemeinde. He refers to Tönnies’s influential contrast (1887) between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: an organic community, on the one hand, and an impersonal organization or corporation, on the other. Though Williams distinguishes five senses of “community,” the essence of his definition is expressed in the following phrases: “a sense of common identity and characteristics,” and “the body of direct relationships” as opposed to “the organized establishment of realm or state.” A community is “relatively small,” with a “sense of immediacy or locality.” Williams stresses the affective aspect of the word and its performative power: “Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships.” What Williams meant by “community” is developed more circumstantially in The Country and the City, especially in Chapters 10, 16, and 18 of that book: “Enclosures, Commons and Communities,” “Knowable Communities,” and “Wessex and the Border.” The last two are on George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, respectively. Williams does not wholly admire George Eliot, nor Jane Austen, whereas Hardy gets his more or less complete approval.

What is the difference? “Jane Austen,” says Williams, “had been prying and analytic, but into a limited group of people in their relations with each other” (168). Eliot, according to Williams, was, like Jane Austen before her, more or less limited in her comprehension of people to members of the gentry. The latter formed her “knowable community.” She did not really understand the common people: rural farmers, laborers, servants, and tradesmen. They and their community were “unknowable” to her. In Williams’s view, Eliot projected her own inner life into working class people in her novels. She was consistently condescending to such people. “George Eliot,” says Williams, “gives her own consciousness, often disguised as a personal dialect, to the characters with whom she does really feel; but the strain of the impersonation is usually evident—in Adam, Daniel, Maggie, or Felix Holt” (169). The latter judgment, by the way, seems questionable. Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, for example, seems to me a plausible characterization of someone to a considerable degree unlike George Eliot herself. Like Williams, I come from a rural background, though at the distance of an extra generation, so, like Williams, I too can speak from direct experience about this. Can it be that there is a trace of misogyny in Williams’s put-down of Austen and Eliot, in favor of male novelists like Hardy and Lawrence? “Prying and analytic” is a really nasty epithet, and what worse can one say of a supposedly objective realist novelist than that all her protagonists are versions of herself? Eliot, it happens, had had a lot of direct experience with rural people as a child, for example by traveling around the neighborhood with her father in his carriage. He was an estate agent, neither peasant nor aristocrat, but located at an in-between class site well suited to comparative observation by an astute and sharp-eyed daughter who shared his class placement. In my judgment, Williams is, as we say, shooting from the hip in his put-down of Eliot. Williams’s judgment of Hardy is quite different. Hardy, he says, truly understood the rural personages and communities he represents in his novels. He understood them because he had experienced rural life fi rst hand as a child. He also had a sharp eye for what rural life is really like. Hardy’s “essential position and attribute” are his “intensity and precision of observation” (205). Hardy’s great subject is the displacement of such rural people by education or migration, or both. More precisely, Hardy focuses on the resulting alienation, even if such displaced persons try to go home again, as Clym Yeobright does in The Return of the Native. Hardy’s goal was “to describe and value a way of life with which he was closely yet uncertainly con2

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nected” (200). The perspective expressed in his novels is that of someone who was inside and outside at once ( just like George Eliot, by the way!). This is because such a position was Hardy’s own life situation: In becoming an architect and a friend of the family of a vicar (the kind of family, also, from which his wife came) Hardy moved to a different point in the social structure, with connections to the educated but not the owning class, and yet also with connections through his family to that shifting body of small employers, dealers, craftsmen, and cottagers who were themselves never wholly distinct, in family, from the laborers. (200) Nowhere does Williams say in so many words why it is better to describe accurately a rural community than to describe accurately the disasters of courtship and marriage among the gentry, as Eliot did in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, or as did Henry James, whom Williams also does not much like. He just takes it for granted that Hardy’s subject matter is better, perhaps because Williams thought “real history” was taking place among rural people, not among the gentry. His panoramic chapter in The Country and the City, on “Enclosures, Commons and Communities,” supports that view. For Williams, the essential action of English history from the eighteenth century to the present is the gradual rise of capitalism and its destruction of rural community life. He calls this the “increasing penetration by capitalist social relations and the dominance of the market” (98). His view of this is quite different from that of Americans today, such as Francis Fukuyama, or George W. Bush, or Paul Ryan. Williams sees the rise of capitalism as pretty much an unmitigated disaster, a “crisis.” Industrialization, he argues, is only part of the story. “By the late eighteenth century,” he asserts, “we can properly speak of an organized capitalist society, in which what happened to the market, anywhere, whether in industrial or agricultural production, worked its way through to town and country alike, as parts of a single crisis” (98). The increasing dominance of the capitalist system led to mass displacement and alienation, as rural laborers and tenant farmers were forcibly dispossessed and large landed estates established. Enclosure was only one aspect of this process. An equally important factor was the importation of a rigid class system whose material sign was the immense number of large country houses built during the period. A true community, Williams assumes, is classless. He celebrates the precarious remnants of such communities in remote villages that have no Williams, Heidegger, and Others 3

local country house, for example on the Welsh border where Williams himself grew up. He recognizes, however, that even there some invidious class structure exists. It will not do, he recognizes, to idealize these communities, but they are the nearest thing we have in these bad days to true communities. An attractive warmth and enthusiasm pervades Williams’s description of such communities: In some places still, an effective community, of a local kind, can survive in older terms, where small freeholders, tenants, craftsmen and laborers can succeed in being neighbors first and social classes only second. This must never be idealized, for at the points of decision, now as then, the class realities usually show through. But in many intervals, many periods of settlement, there is a kindness, a mutuality, that still manages to flow. (106) The only alternative to these rapidly vanishing communities, Williams holds, is those groups of the oppressed bonding together to fight capitalism and the evils of an “ownership society,” as George W. Bush called it, in what for him was a term of praise. The last sentence of Williams’s chapter is: “Community, to survive, had then to change its terms” (107). Th is is another way of saying, I take it, “Comes the Revolution!” I share Williams’s utopian hope, his belief in what Jacques Derrida calls “the democracy to come,” for which we all should work, however distant its horizon, or however much it may even be permanently over the horizon, always still à venir, to come. Several basic features of Williams’s assumptions about community emerge in The Country and the City. One is the assumption that a true community is not just a relatively small group of people living together in the same place and sharing the same immemorial assumptions in kindness and mutuality. A true community must also be classless. Class structures, particularly those generated by capitalism, destroy community. A second, crucial, assumption, never stated in so many words, but fundamental to Williams’s thinking about community, is that the individual is and should be his social placement, with no residue or leftover that is not determined by the surrounding culture. A small freeholder is a small freeholder through and through. I am my subject position. I raise wheat or brussel sprouts, or make shoes, or work as a carpenter, or milk cows, therefore I am. I am the Archdeacon of Barchester Cathedral, therefore, I am. Among

4

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the things that must be represented accurately in good realist fiction, according to Williams, is the way the nature and fates of the characters are determined more or less completely by their relations to the surrounding community or lack of it. “As in all major realist fiction,” says Williams, “the quality and destiny of persons and the quality and destiny of a whole way of life are seen in the same dimension and not as separable issues” (201). This is, of course, a version of Marxist materialist determinism. Williams’s third essential assumption is that the warmth and mutuality of a true community depends on the ways I know my neighbor. My social placement exposes me entirely to other people, with no corner of private subjectivity hidden away from them. I understand my neighbor or am understood by him or her, in kindness and mutuality, because he or she is, through and through, his or her social role in a small group. This happy intersubjectivity works because all members of the group have in common a set of traditional habits and beliefs that thoroughly determines what they are. This makes the ideal classless rural community a true Gemeinschaft. Williams, for the most part, takes it for granted that belonging to a community is proper and good. For him, a genuine community, if there ever were such a thing, would be characterized by a “tolerant neighborliness” and “traditional mutuality” among equals. The polemical side of Williams’s book is the argument that the rise of capitalism, including agrarian capitalism in rural places all over England, has made community there less and less possible. Community may perhaps still remain only in remote pockets sequestered from the landowners’ big country houses. In those hidden places, a genuine community of laborers, tenant farmers, craftsmen, and small freeholding farmers may even now still exist. Agrarian capitalism, not enclosure as such, Williams argues, more or less completely destroyed the possibility of community in England: “The economic system of landlord, tenant and laborer, which had been extending its hold since the sixteenth century, was now [by the early nineteenth century, with the walls, fences, and “paper rights” of enclosure] in explicit and assertive control. Community, to survive, had then to change its terms” (107). What Williams means by that last sentence, as other earlier remarks in the chapter make clear, is that community can now only exist as the coalition, the solidarity, of the oppressed in opposition to their masters. Though I accept Williams’s picture of the evils of the capitalist system in England, it is

Williams, Heidegger, and Others 5

still reasonable to ask why a small village where everyone accepts class distinctions, goes to the same church, takes care of the sick and the poor, lives by the same laws, and accepts the same social conventions, inequitable though they may be, should be denied the name “community,” even though we might call it a bad one. Williams would probably respond by asking, What true sharing, or having in common, or mutuality, or neighborliness, or kindness can there be between the rich landlord and the tenant farmers he rack-rents and oppresses? Only a small group of families living in the same place in a more or less classless society, or a society in which class distinctions are minimized, can justifiably be called a community. Little or no countenance is given by Williams to the idea that a novel may be an imaginary world, a counter world, a heterotopia with its own somewhat idiosyncratic laws and features. Such a heterotopia is made, no doubt, by a transformation into words of the “real world” as the author saw it. This transformation is brought about through the performative felicity of fictive language. It is, however, by no means a mirror image to be judged solely by the accuracy of its reflection of the phenomenal world, including social phenomena, according to a mistaken ideological assumption that Williams shares with so many critics and teachers of the novel. Nor does Williams give much value to the margin in subjectivity of independence, individuality, idiosyncrasy, or secrecy. Such singularity detaches fictive characters, and perhaps real persons, in part at least, from their circumambient communities. That, for example, is one of Hardy’s main assumptions. Williams disvalues such detachment under negative names like “alienation,” “separation,” and “exposure.” Destructive uprooting is the result of social changes brought about by the triumph of capitalism and its concomitants: the rise of literacy, the displacement of small farmers and agrarian workers, migration to cities, and the imposition of capitalist means of farming. “The exposed and separated individuals,” says Williams, “whom Hardy puts at the centre of his fiction, are only the most developed cases of a general exposure and separation. Yet they are never merely illustrations of this change in a way of life. Each has a dominant personal history, which in psychological terms bears a direct relation to the social character of the change” (210). Each character’s dominant personal history, however individual, reflects and embodies in a special way for that person, according to Williams, 6

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the large-scale social change of which the character is to a considerable degree the helpless victim. A wide variety of other theories of community roughly contemporary with Williams’s ideas have been developed and may be compared to his. Some come before Williams’s The Country and the City (originally published in 1973), and some are more recent. It is unlikely that Williams had read any of these writers, or they he, when he wrote his book. Such theorists of community include Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, JeanLuc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Benedict Anderson, Alphonso Lingis, Jacques Derrida. These writers are by no means all singing the same tune. A full account of what they say about community would take a big book. Nevertheless, a preliminary sketch, beginning with a more extended discussion of Heidegger’s concept of community, can be made. Heidegger, in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) and in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics), asserts that Mitsein, “being together,” is a primordial feature of Dasein, his name for human “being there.” Nevertheless he, notoriously, condemns the discourse of everyday, shared experience as Gerede, “idle talk.” He most prizes those moments when a Dasein becomes aware of itself in its uniqueness and finitude, its Sein zum Tode, “being toward death.” Such a Dasein may then decide to take responsibility for itself by “wanting to have a conscience.” What is for Williams the bad alienation of a character like Jude Fawley in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, or Clym Yeobright in The Return of the Native, is for Heidegger the essential condition of authenticity. Authenticity means taking possession, in solitude, of one’s own Dasein, rather than living in submission to das Man, “the they.” Heidegger’s valuation is exactly the reverse of Williams’s. Heidegger, it may be, is closer to the Protestant tradition of valuing private spiritual life than Williams. Williams gives short shrift to the Protestantism of his rural Welsh border villagers. He sees the local vicar as part of the oppressive class structure. He values the dissenting chapels that were a resistance to the hegemony of the Church of England (The Country and the City, 105), but says nothing about the forms of private spirituality those chapels promoted—for example, private prayer. In the Marxist millennium, one will not have a private subjective life. One will not need to have such a thing. How different are Martin Heidegger’s assumptions! As far as I know, Heidegger never in his life made a comment on a novel, though perhaps Williams, Heidegger, and Others 7

somewhere and at some time he did. Perhaps he never read any novels, though perhaps he read them secretly all the time and was ashamed of that, as many people are and have been since novel-publishing began, just as some people today are ashamed of being addicted to video games. In nineteenthcentury England, reading novels was often seen as a frivolous, and even morally dangerous, practice, especially for women, though for men, too. Both Flaubert’s Emma Bovary and Conrad’s Lord Jim were brought to bad ends by reading too much popular romantic fiction. Heidegger, in any case, was a poetry man. He greatly valued certain poets, Hölderlin above all, but also Rilke, Trakl, and Sophocles. He could relate these poets directly to his own philosophical thinking. It would be interesting to know what he might have thought of The Return of the Native. In Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), his masterwork, Heidegger makes a sharp distinction between Dasein lost in the “they,” das Man, and, opposed to that, authentic Dasein. Human beings, for Heidegger, are “there,” “da,” in ways animals, plants, and stones are not. Daseins are “rich in world” and are “there” in their world. Animals are for Heidegger “poor in world,” and stones, pace Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of “prehension,” have no world at all. Heidegger distributes the positives and negatives in a way exactly opposite to Williams’s valuations. What Williams praises Heidegger detests. What Williams deplores Heidegger celebrates. Heidegger insists that terms “das Man,” or “idle talk,” are descriptive, neutral, not evaluative: “The expression ‘idle talk’ [Gerede] is not to be used here in a ‘disparaging’ [herabziehenden] signification.” Being “lost” in the “they,” or “fallen” into it, or “thrown” into it (Verloren, Verfallen, Geworfen), Heidegger insists, is a normal, “primordial” condition of humankind. Nevertheless, his actual description of Dasein’s lostness in the “they” hardly looks neutral. The terms “lost,” “fallen,” and “thrown,” with their theological overtones, are anything but purely descriptive. They are also strikingly figurative. Human beings are not lost, as in “lost in the woods,” nor fallen, in the sense of “he tripped and fell,” nor thrown in the sense of “thrown over a cliff.” They are lost, fallen, and thrown in the way evil-doers are in the Christian view of human existence. Heidegger professes to dislike figures of speech. He tries to persuade his readers that his terms are meant literally. Nevertheless, they are figures of speech. They are examples of that strange trope called “catachresis,” terms transferred from their normal uses to name something, in this case the human condition, 8

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for which no literal terms exist. A somewhat lurid and violent background story of being thrown down, then lost and suffering a fall (as in “the fall of Man”), gets told by these terms, however neutral and “philosophical” Heidegger wants them to be. Here is part of Heidegger’s powerfully ironic description of what it means to be lost in the “they.” It comes in paragraph 27, the title of which is translated as Everyday Being-one’s-Self and the “They” (Das alltägliche Selbstsein und das Man) (BT, 163; SZ, 126): We have shown earlier how in the environment which lies closest to us, the public “environment” [“Umwelt”] already is ready-to-hand and is also a matter of concern [mitbesorgt]. In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information ser vices such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another [Miteinandersein] dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of “the Others,” in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the “they” is unfolded. [In dieser Unauffälligkeit und Nichtfeststellbarkeit entfaltet das Man seine eigentliche Diktatur.] We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the “great mass” as they shrink back; we find “shocking” what they find shocking. The “they,” which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness. . . . Thus the “they” maintains itself factically in the averageness of that which belongs to it, of that which it regards as valid and that which it does not, and of that to which it grants success and that to which it denies it. In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. This care of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency of Dasein which we call the “leveling down” [Einebnung] of all possibilities of Being. . . . By publicness everything gets obscured, and what has thus been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible Williams, Heidegger, and Others 9

to everyone. . . . Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. [Jeder ist der Andere und Keiner er selbst.] (BT, 164–5; SZ, 126–8) Though Heidegger insists that his analysis is “far removed from any moralizing critique of everyday Dasein, and from the aspirations of a ‘philosophy of culture’ ” [“kulturphilosophischen”] (BT, 211; SZ, 167), if what he says is true, it would have deep implications for a philosophy of culture, or for present-day cultural studies, or for my readings of Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Pynchon, and Cervantes. Heidegger’s angry condemnation of the “they” is echoed in present-day condemnations of the leveling of indigenous cultures everywhere by global economic imperialism and by the increasing worldwide domination of mass media. Soon everyone all over the world, such denunciations assert, will dress alike, eat the same food, drink coffee at a Starbucks, watch the same movies and television news, listen to the same talk shows, and think alike, in a worldwide triumph of the “they.” The difference is that Heidegger, apparently, would consider an indigenous culture, for example the sequestered backwater rural community of The Return of the Native, as much an example of the “they” as the urban noncommunities of those who go to the cinema, watch television network news, and surf the Web. We must go carefully here in measuring just where my novelists stand on the continuum from Williams to Heidegger. Heidegger opposes to Dasein’s everyday lostness in the inauthenticity of the “they,” another possible human condition. Th is he calls “authentic Dasein.” How can Dasein possibly wrest itself from its lostness and become “authentic”? What does that mean, “authentic” (eigentlich)? A long and intricate development much further on in Being and Time describes this process of freeing oneself from the “they.” Being and Time tells a dramatic story. It is the story of Dasein’s possible rescue of itself from having fallen or having been thrown (two rather different images) into das Man. The initial assumption is that each Dasein is actually unique, singular, idiosyncratic, however much it may be primordially lost in the “they.” A given Dasein is not like any of the “Others,” not even like those closest to it, members of the same family or of a local, “indigenous,” community with whom a given Dasein might be thought to share assumptions, customs, ways of living. The reader will remember that for Williams, on the contrary, individuality is inseparable from its surroundings, except through its alienation in “separation” and “exposure,” which is seen as a bad thing. 10

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Heidegger calls Dasein’s confrontation of its own individuality an experience of the uncanny, das Unheimlichkeit. I cite the German word here, “unat-home-ness,” because it suggests the way Dasein in its singularity is not at home in any house, family, or community. Like a homeless ghost, Dasein is an intruder or stranger who has invaded the home, though, as Freud says of the uncanny, that stranger seems familiar, something already seen before. When I confront myself in my individuality I feel that this is me and yet not me, not the everyday me that is lost in the “they,” but a different more unsettling me that is a misfit, as we say. I recognize myself as strange, in short, as uncanny: In the face of its thrownness Dasein flees to the relief which comes with the supposed freedom of the they-self. This fleeing has been described as a fleeing in the face of the uncanniness which is basically determinative for individualized Being-in-the-world. Uncanniness reveals itself authentically in the basic state-of-mind of anxiety [Angst]; and, as the most elemental way in which thrown Dasein is disclosed, it puts Dasein’s Beingin-the-world face to face with the “nothing” of the world [das Nichts der Welt]; in the face of this “nothing,” Dasein is anxious with anxiety about its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. What if this Dasein, which finds itself in the very depths of its uncannniness, should be the caller of the call of conscience [der Rufer des Gewissensrufes wäre]? . . . Uncanniness is the basic kind of Being-in-the-world, even though in an everyday way it has been covered up. (BT, 321, 322; SZ, 276, 277) What brings about this confrontation of my potentially authentic self by my everyday inauthentic self? Here things get very strange in Heidegger, even uncanny in their singularity, though what he says seems oddly familiar after all. One might say that Heidegger’s greatness as a philosopher is to have said things that no one had ever said in just that way before but that nevertheless seem strangely familiar, as if I knew them already without knowing that I knew them. They therefore may strike me as plausible, persuasive. They seem not entirely off the wall. Heidegger hypothesizes that each Dasein is endowed with what, in a characteristically barbarous phrase, he calls its “ownmost potentiality for being.” Dasein is not yet what it could be or should be. What it could be or should be is “ownmost” (eigentlich), that is, something that belongs uniquely to that one Dasein alone and to no other. No one else has the same potentiality for Williams, Heidegger, and Others 11

being as I do, just as no one but me can die my own death. My ownmost potentiality for being is, for Heidegger, essentially a “being towards death” (Sein zum Tode) (BT, 378; SZ, 329). It is an essential feature of each Dasein that however much it is now a “being there,” it is mortal—that is, some day it will cease to “be there.” Paradoxically, though Heidegger never puts it this way, my “ownmost potentiality-for-Being” incorporates as one of its essential features a potentiality for one day not being there, for being dead, the possibility of an impossibility, as Derrida calls it. How in the world can I come to confront my uncanny individuality with its built-in penchant toward death? The answer is that I must answer what Heidegger calls “the call of conscience” (der Ruf des Gewissens) (BT, 317; SZ, 272). Conscience essentially calls Dasein to accept a primordial being guilty, Schuldigsein. I am not guilty of this or that sin or crime, but originally guilty through and through as a fundamental feature of my Dasein. Through the call of conscience Dasein “has been summoned [aufgerufen] to itself—that is, to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being [zu seinem eigensten Seinkönnen]. . . . Conscience summons Dasein’s Self from its lostness in the ‘they’ [aus der Verlorenheit in das Man]” (BT, 318, 319; SZ, 273, 274). This sounds strangely familiar. It is the language of Christian theology and Christian ethics, with its notion of original sin, and with its appeal to conscience as the still small voice of God within the soul, calling the soul to mend its ways. Heidegger insists, however, that his discourse is not a theology. The call of conscience, he says, does not come from God. Heidegger’s genius is to have taken the terminology of Christian theology and redefined all the traditional key terms for the relation of the soul to its “ground” in God, Who has created it. Heidegger has twisted all these terms so that they express a secular ontology. He does this by a kind of doubling of the self within itself, or of each Dasein within itself. When Dasein heeds the call of conscience it is lift ing itself, as it were, by its own bootstraps. This happens without any help from God or from anything transcendent. It happens only through the doubling immanence of Dasein to itself. “In conscience,” says Heidegger, “Dasein calls itself.” (Das Dasein ruft im Gewissen sich selbst.) (BT, 320; SZ, 275). He goes on to specify what this means: “Indeed the call is precisely something which we ourselves have neither planned nor prepared for nor voluntarily performed, nor have we ever done so. ‘It’ calls [‘Es’ ruft], against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtedly does not

12

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come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me. [Der ruf kommt aus mir und doch über mich.]” (BT, 320, SZ, 275). A “call,” the reader should note, is a special kind of performative utterance, as in Louis Althusser’s famous example of the call society makes when it interpellates me to assimilate myself to the surrounding ideology with all its ISAs, or “Ideological State Apparatuses.” Althusser’s call occurs when, for example, a policeman hails me with a “Hey you!” The call of conscience in Heidegger, however, is just the reverse of the policeman’s call in Althusser’s example. Conscience calls me to extricate myself from the community and to become my authentic self, not, as in Althusser, to accept my place within a dominating ideological community or national construct. When someone or something calls me, I cannot simply ignore the call. The call is a felicitous performative utterance not in the sense that it preprograms my answer, but in the sense that it puts me in the position of having to respond in some way or other. I must say yes or no. Even not responding is a response. The circularity involved in dividing Dasein into a deeply grounded caller, inside and outside me at once, and the ungrounded, superficial inauthentic one-who-is-called is indicated in the opposition between two often-repeated terms in this part of Sein und Zeit. On the one hand is the call of conscience, which comes unbidden from the depths or heights of Dasein and demands an answer, a yes or a no. On the other hand is what Heidegger calls “wanting to have a conscience.” The call of conscience comes unbidden, involuntarily, and yet I will not hear the call of conscience unless, for some mysterious reason, I am seized by the desire that Heidegger names with a marvelous compound term (in German) implying conscious will, that is, “wanting to have a conscience” (Gewissen-haben-wollen) (BT, 334; SZ, 288). That is what I mean by calling the Heideggerian process of becoming an authentic, solidly grounded Dasein a lifting oneself up by one’s bootstraps. “What if this Dasein,” asks Heidegger in a portentous rhetorical question, “which finds itself in the very depths of its uncanniness [im Grunde seiner Unheimlichkeit], should be the caller of the call of conscience?” (BT, 321; SZ, 276). He answers the question in a set of formulations that sums up the distinction, for Heidegger, between being in a community, that is, lost in the “they,” and detaching oneself from the community for the sake of becoming what one already secretly potentially is, that is, authentic Dasein:

Williams, Heidegger, and Others 13

In its “who,” the caller is definable in a “worldly” way by nothing at all. The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, thrown Being-in-theworld as the “not-at-home” [als Un-zuhause]—the bare “that-it-is” in the “nothing” of the world. The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday they-self; it is something like an alien voice. What could be more alien to the “they,” lost in the manifold “world” of its concern, than the Self that has been individualized down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown into the “nothing”? “It” calls, even though it gives the concernfully curious ear [das besorgend neugierige Ohr] nothing to hear which might be passed along in further retelling and talked about in public. But what is Dasein even to report from the uncanniness of its thrown Being [seines geworfenen Seins]? (BT, 321–2; SZ, 276–7) My everyday Dasein, it appears, is inhabited at its deepest levels by something, an “it,” that is wholly alien to me, wholly “other,” and yet that is more myself than I am. (I borrow that phrase from Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest and a Scotist. It is significant that Heidegger’s doctoral dissertation was on the medieval Catholic theologian, Duns Scotus. Scotus, as opposed to Aquinas, believed in the “equivocity of being”; that is, he believed that everything from God on down to the least created thing has “being” in the same way. Heidegger’s ubiquitous “Being,” one might hazard, is a secularized echo of Scotist equivocity.) One more important feature of the call of conscience is implicit in the passage just cited and made explicit further on in Sein und Zeit. A “call” is implicitly a mode of discourse, even though it is a performative utterance, not a constative one, as for example in the Althusserian policeman’s peremptory “Hey you!” or in God’s call to Abraham, in Genesis: “And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am” (Gen. 22:1). Heidegger’s call of conscience, however, is in the mode of silence: “The call discourses in the uncanny mode of keeping silent [Modus des Schweigens]” (BT, 322; SZ, 277). The response of Dasein to the silent call of conscience must also take the form of keeping silent. It is not the sort of thing one talks about to other people. To talk about it or even to express it in language would be to traduce it, to betray it by formulating it in public language, the “idle talk” (Gerede), of the “they.” The call and the answer to the call are incommensurate with ordinary language, the language I share with the other members of my community. 14

Theories of Community

Though Heidegger does not give any specific examples, the model here might be Abraham’s response, shared not even with his wife, to God’s command that he sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, as interpreted by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling. Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent, as Wittgenstein said. Of course, in an essential and inescapable paradox, the Biblical authors, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger all speak in public language. They write and publish the silent secrets. The Bible is the archetype or paradigm of public language, the esoteric turned exoteric, a discourse all with ears to hear can hear. It is available to all everywhere in every language, as in all those Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms. These various discourses give away what is secret; otherwise we would know nothing about what happened silently. This paradox belongs especially to this region of thought. In a somewhat similar way, novelists, or rather the narrators invented by novelists, by way of an uncanny species of telepathy, penetrate and then give away to every reader the secrets of their characters. They reveal precious things that the characters keep in their hearts and about which they keep silent to everyone around them, family, friends, the whole community. The Return of the Native presents many cases of this. An example is the process by which Eustacia tires of her love for Wildeve and then shifts to Clym Yeobright as the object of her desire and fascination. Eustacia in her selfconsciousness of course knows about this shift. The narrator tells the reader about it, but no one among the novel’s characters but Eustacia knows. It is a secret, but also in a peculiar way an open secret because the narrator and every reader of the novel know it. One obvious problem with the call of conscience is that it is unverifiable to another person. It carries its own verification, even for the one who hears it. “Jehovah told me to sacrifice my son. I heard a voice telling me to do so.” That would not stand up well in a court of law as an excuse for a father’s murder of his son. Three great world religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, take the story of a father’s willingness to sacrifice his son as their founding story, while the other great strand in our tradition, the Graeco-Roman one, takes instead Oedipus’s actual, though inadvertent, murder of his father. No two positions could be in starker contrast than those of Williams and Heidegger, as stark as the opposition between Oedipus and Abraham. What is good for Williams, belonging to an egalitarian community, is bad for Heidegger. It is given the dyslogistic name of being lost in the “they.” What is bad for Williams, alienation from any organic community, is good for Heidegger Williams, Heidegger, and Others 15

because only by such detachment can Dasein become an authentic self. Which authority has it right? It is not all that easy to decide, though much is at stake in making a decision. It is somewhat easier to focus on examples that will at least permit understanding further just what is at stake. I now turn briefly to some other modern theorists of community. Nancy’s thinking about community, in the two books listed in endnote 4, is complex. It is not at all easy to summarize in a phrase or two. For Nancy, to compress violently, each individual is at once unique, singular, and at the same time plural, “exposed,” in the etymological sense of “set outside,” to others. Those others remain, however, fundamentally other, alien, strangers each enclosed in his or her singularity. What we most share is that we shall all die, though each singularity will die its own death. Th is means that each community, at all times and places, is désoeuvrée, “unworked.” For Agamben, the “coming community” will be agglomerations, not necessarily malign, of “whatever [quodlibet] singularities.” The title of Lingis’s book on community names this agglomeration “the community of those who have nothing in common.” Lingis’s book emphasizes the encounter with the stranger as essential to human life today. Blanchot’s La communauté inavouable is a small book commenting on Nancy’s La communauté désoeuvrée in its relation to Bataille’s “acephalic” (headless) community. Blanchot describes communities that are inavouable. They are unavowable in the sense of being secret, hidden, and shameful, but also in the sense of being incompatible with the “felicitous” public speech acts. Such public “avowals” found, support, and constantly renew the communities we all would like to live in or even may think we live in. In unavowable communities, such performative speech acts are impossible or, in J. L. Austin’s term, “infelicitous.” They do not work to make something predictable happen. Jacques Derrida, finally, is deeply suspicious of Heidegger’s Mitsein, and of the validity of anything like Williams’s celebration of a community of people who share the same assumptions and live in kindness and mutuality. Derrida’s last seminar (2002–2003) is on Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, an odd couple! In the first session of this seminar Derrida intransigently asserts that each man or woman is marooned on his or her own island, enclosed in a singular world, with no isthmus, bridge, or other means of communication to the sealed 16

Theories of Community

worlds of others, or from their worlds to mine. The consequence is that since “the difference between one world and another will remain always unbridgeable [infranchissable],” “the community of the world [la communauté du monde],” including animals and human beings of different cultures, is “always constructed, simulated by a set of stabilizing apparatuses [dispositifs], more or less stable, then, and never natural, language in the broad sense, codes of traces [les codes de traces] being designed, among all living beings, to construct a unity of the world always deconstructible [une unité du monde toujours déconstructible], nowhere and never given in nature.” In some remarkable pages in “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida posits a suicidal tendency in each community that he calls a form of “autoimmunity”: Community as com-mon auto-immunity [com-mune auto-immunité]: no community that would not cultivate its own auto-immunity, a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of selfprotection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact [du maintien de l’intégrité intacte de soi]), and this in view of some sort of invisible and spectral sur-vival. I conclude that assumptions about the nature of individuality and intersubjectivity largely determine one’s ideas about community. Williams’s community is only one possibility within a wide spectrum of recent concepts of community. These concepts are incompatible. They cannot be synthesized or reconciled. Il faut choisir. How do I choose? I wish with all my heart I could believe in Williams’s classless communities, but I fear that real communities are more like the communities of self-destructive autoimmunity Derrida describes. Certainly, the United States these days, if you think of it as one immense community, is a better example of Derrida’s self-destructive autoimmune community than of Williams’s community of kindness and mutuality. Such Gemeinschaften may nevertheless still exist in small pockets here and there in the rural United States, though often with distressing ideological prejudices, racist or xenophobic ones. The new media, however— iPhones, Facebook, the Internet, video games, e-mail, and the rest—are fast destroying those remnants, however problematic they are. The chapters that follow, in asking, as a basis for careful reading, whether this or that novel represents a “true community,” presuppose this complex and often contradictory tradition of thinking about community. Williams, Heidegger, and Others 17

2 T R O L LO P E’S T H E L A S T C H R O N I C L E OF BARSET AS A MODEL OF VIC TORIAN COMMUNIT Y

DOUBLE READING

I advocate in the strongest terms what I call a double reading of novels. In one reading you give yourself, heart and soul, without reservation, to reading the novel. You re-create the novel’s characters and the action, topography, houses, gardens, and so on within your mind and feelings, within what might be called your internal cinema. The second reading should be performed, impossibly, at the same time. This is the interrogative one, the suspicious one. It is the reading in which you investigate how the magic is performed. You ask just what is being put over on you in the way of ideology formation by that magic. How is the novel coaching me, interpellating me, to believe in certain ways, to value in certain ways, and to behave in certain ways? You must read, impossibly, in both those ways at once, saying “Never mind. I yield myself without resistance to the magic,” and at the same time asking: “How does the novel do it? Why does it do it? Just what is the novel doing to me?” The first kind of reading might be called “fast reading.” It does not pause over the words, but hurries on in order to re-create the characters and their stories in the reader’s mind. The second is that “slow reading” Nietzsche advocated, pausing over every word and phrase, asking questions, looking before and after. If you do not perform the first, fast reading, you will not have anything worth putting in question by means of the second reading. Each reading inhibits the other. That is what I mean by saying that doing both kinds of reading at once is both impossible and necessary.

N O V E L S A S M O D E L S O F CO M M U N I T Y

My clue in the double reading I shall perform in this chapter is a question: What does it mean to speak of all those big multi-plotted Victorian novels as “models of community”? I take Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset as a paradigmatic example. It was first published in thirty-two weekly parts between 1 December 1866 and 6 July 1867 by Smith, Elder & Co., and then issued in two volumes by Smith, Elder in 1867. Nothing is more problematic than the idea of a paradigmatic example. Each example is sui generis. It is an example only of itself, though it may bear a family resemblance to other cases of “the same thing,” in this case Victorian multi-plotted novels. The word “paradigm” comes from the Greek word paradeigma, which means “architectural plan,” as well as “model example.” What would it mean to think of The Last Chronicle of Barset as the architectural plan or model example for all the others, all the other novels by Trollope or all Victorian novels? Are they all modeled on the same plan? That would seem unlikely. To fi nd out, it would be necessary to read all of them, or a lot of them, with the same slow reading as I shall perform for The Last Chronicle of Barset. This would be a virtually interminable task. My generalizations are therefore tentative, heuristic hypotheses, not proven laws. The Last Chronicle of Barset has, it seems, three major plots, the story of Mr. Crawley and the stolen check for twenty pounds, the story of Grace Crawley’s courtship by Major Grantly, and the story of Lily Dale’s decision to become an old maid. The archdeacon’s story, however, might almost be described as another plot. Other subplots include the deaths of Mrs Proudie, the “she-bishop,” the death of Mr. Harding, and the stories of Johnny Eames’s disreputable London acquaintances, the Dobbs Broughtons, the Demolines, and the Van Sievers. As the reader can see from the frittering away of my classification into multiple “subplots,” the attempt to organize The Last Chronicle of Barset according the traditional idea of interwoven plots does not work all that well. Nothing in this novel corresponds to the ferocious concentration on a single plot action of Aristotle’s paradigmatic example of plot, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. Nevertheless, Trollope expresses in An Autobiography his allegiance to an Aristotlean concept of unity. “There should be no episodes in a novel,” he roundly declares. “Every sentence, every word through all Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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those pages, should tend to the telling of the story. Such episodes distract the attention of the reader and always do so disagreeably. . . . Though the novel which you have to write must be long, let it be all one. And this exclusion of episodes should be carried down to the smallest details. Every sentence, and every word should tend to the telling of the story.” Trollope does nevertheless go on immediately to allow for subplots that reinforce the main plot: “Though his story should be all one, yet it may have many parts. Though the plot itself may require but few characters, it may be enlarged so as to find its full development in many. There may be subsidiary plots which shall all tend to the elucidation of the main story and which will take their places as parts of one and the same work,—as there may be many figures on a canvas which shall not to the spectator seem to form themselves into separate pictures” (AA, 153). This sounds plausible enough, but just which is the main plot of The Last Chronicle of Barset (Crawley’s story, presumably), and just how do the other plots all contribute to the elucidation of that main plot? I shall return to that issue later. Trollope’s formulation, in any case, allows for a lot of latitude and sideways displacement. As Henry James recognized in the preface to Roderick Hudson, “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.” It is better, as I shall show in detail later, to speak of The Last Chronicle of Barset in terms not of plot but in terms of centers of consciousness embedded in a collective community consciousness. Trollope himself writes eloquently in An Autobiography of his inability to concoct a plot and of the predominance of character over plot in the generation of his stories: How short is the time devoted to the manipulation of a plot can be known only to those who have written plays or novels;—I may say also how very little time the brain is able to devote to such wearing work. There are usually some hours of agonizing doubt, almost of despair,—at least so it has been with me,—or perhaps some days. And then, with nothing settled in my brain as to the final development of events, with no capability of settling any thing, but with a most distinct conception of some character or characters, I have rushed at the work, as a rider rushes at a fence which he does not see. . . . At such times [when he has been on vacation 20

Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

“at some quiet spot in the mountains”] I have been able to imbue myself thoroughly with the characters I have had in hand. I have wandered alone among the rocks and woods crying at their grief, laughing at their absurdities, and thoroughly enjoying their joy. I have been impregnated with my own creations till it has been my only excitement to sit with the pen in my hand and drive my team before me at as quick a pace as I could make them travel. (AA, 114, 115; on character and plot see also AA, 149–50) The true subject of The Last Chronicle of Barset, it can be argued, is the community of Barset, as its laws and conventions are revealed by way of the individual life stories that take place within it and by contrast with those taking place outside Barset, primarily in this novel fashionable London society. One can speak of such a novel as a “model of community” in at least three different ways. “Model” suggests a cunning replica in miniature, as one speaks of “model railroads” or “model airplanes” or of the half-sized model of the Eiffel Tower, complete to the last rivet, that is one of the wonders of Las Vegas. Such a model is to be evaluated by its truth of representation. It must correspond point for point with the “real” community it imitates in miniature. Most evaluations of Trollope take this tack, as in the familiar statement in a letter of 1860 by Nathaniel Hawthorne in praise of Trollope. Trollope himself cites it in An Autobiography, and Sophie Gilmartin cites it once more in her Introduction to the new Penguin edition of The Last Chronicle of Barset: Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste,—solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of. And these books are just as English as a beefsteak. (AA, 96) Hawthorne’s figure is not even of miniaturization or of representation. Trollope’s novels are actual pieces of English life, detached and put under a glass case where the reader may see all that is going on. More usual in Victorian criticism were images of realistic representation, of truth of Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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correspondence. Gilmartin’s notes to her edition of The Last Chronicle, for example, stress the way the novel accurately reflects the operation of English law or of Ecclesiastical politics at the time the novel was written. County magistrates would indeed bind over someone accused of a crime to be tried at the next convening of the “Assizes,” as happens in the novel. A series of commissions and acts of parliament—the Ecclesiastical Commission of 1835, the Established Church Act of 1836, the Pluralities Act of 1838, and the Dean and Chapter Act of 1840—had reformed the Church of England, as the novel accurately reflects. The novel accurately represents the distinctions among various members of the clergy: prebends, perpetual curates, deans, archdeacons, and so on. It is widely assumed, in almost innumerable essays and books on Trollope, that his novels are more or less scrupulously accurate representations of the social structure—the laws, customs, and the ideologies of middle and upper class English men and women in the high Victorian period. This makes these novels models of community in the first of my senses. To see a novel as a “model of community,” may, however, have a second meaning. When Dickens speaks of old Mr. Turveydrop in Bleak House as a “Model of Deportment,” he means not so much that he is a copy of some existing reality (though he models himself on the Prince Regent, a notorious dandy) as that he is someone to be imitated. To call The Last Chronicle of Barset a “model of community” in this second sense means not that it is an accurate representation of a pre-existing extra-literary social reality but that it provides examples of ideal behavior to be imitated. The novel shows its readers the way to go. It is in that sense performative rather than constative. It exhorts, or commands, or coaches its readers to act and judge as the good characters in the novel do. It is right that Johnny Eames should remain faithful to his forever-unfulfilled love for Lily Dale. It is right that Lily should persist in refusing his proposals because she loves another man. It is right that Major Grantly should persist in his love for Grace Crawley, even though he thinks her father is a thief. It is right that the Reverend Crawley should defy Mrs. Proudie, the “she-bishop.” It is right that the Archdeacon, Major Grantly’s father, should be won over by the very sight of Grace Crawley when he first encounters her, though he has threatened to disinherit his son if he makes so unworthy a match. Grace herself is a wonderfully attractive model of the way modest young women should behave when they are in love. 22

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Seen as a “model of community” in this second sense, The Last Chronicle of Barset does not so much imitate any pre-existing community as present an ideal community full of ethically admirable persons whom we should imitate. It shows the way a community ought to be, not the way it is. It also shows what is by no means always the case in the real world, virtue rewarded. The pleasure of the text, for those who love Trollope’s novels, and it is an exquisite pleasure, is the pleasure of seeing justice done and things coming out happily in the end. When you pick up another Trollope novel and begin to read, you can be pretty sure that this is going to happen, just as you can be pretty sure, when you pick up a novel by Henry James and begin to read, that things are going to turn out badly. The “spoils of Poynton” are going to get burned; marriages always are disasters; nobody gets what he or she wants. That is another sort of pleasure altogether from the pleasure of reading Trollope. In An Autobiography, Trollope seems to give his full allegiance to the second way of seeing a novel as a model of community or a model community. After praising with modest gratitude Hawthorne’s characterization of his novels as putting a lump of English earth under a glass case, Trollope goes on to say that this is the way he hopes his novels will teach virtue: I have always desired to “hew out some lump of the earth,” and to make men and women walk upon it just as they do walk here among us,—[Note that Trollope has here subtly shifted Hawthorne’s figure from saying real people are put under a glass case to saying imaginary people are invented who are like real people] with not more of excellence, nor with exaggerated baseness,—so that my readers might recognize human beings like to themselves, and not feel themselves to be carried away among gods or demons. If I could do this, then, I thought, I might succeed in impregnating the mind of the novel reader with a feeling that honesty is the best policy, that truth prevails while falsehood fails, that a girl will be loved as she is pure and sweet and unselfish,—and that a man will be honored as he is true and honest and brave of heart; that things meanly done are ugly and odious, and things nobly done beautiful and gracious. (AA, 96) One can hardly imagine a more succinct statement of the predominant Victorian ideology of proper interpersonal relations. The reader may have noted two odd but powerfully suggestive uses of the word “impregnate.” Trollope’s mind and feelings when he is in the midst of writing a novel Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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are “impregnated” with his creations, in a kind of auto-insemination, with pen hinting at penis: “I have been impregnated with my own creations till it has been my only excitement to sit with the pen in my hand and drive my team before me at as quick a pace as I could make them travel.” He wants to “impregnate” his readers with moral standards. The sexual image is a powerful claim that the creation and publication of literary works is performative, not constative. It makes something new happen, just as the sex act may lead to the birth of a new human being. The figure is explicitly masculine or even sexist. The novelist is male and his readers are receptive females. Trollope’s novel, however, like novels in general, can be seen as “models of community” in yet a third way. The Last Chronicle of Barset can be seen as a supplementary or virtual reality, with its own idiosyncratic laws and proprieties. It does not necessarily bear any relation, either constative or performative, to the real world, but exists by itself, separate, unique, waiting to be entered and lived in for its own sake by anyone who picks up a copy and reads. Trollope’s account, in his posthumously published An Autobiography, of the genesis of his novels would support this third mode of modeling as much as either of the other two, though both of the other two notions of modeling are also present in An Autobiography, according to an almost inevitable heterogeneity in such theorizing.

W H Y T R O L LO P E B E C A M E A N O V E L I S T, A S A N AU T O B I O G R A P H Y T E L L S I T

In An Autobiography, Trollope tells the reader that, as the son of an impecunious gentleman sent as a day-boarder to English public schools, Winchester and Harrow, he was miserably unhappy as a child and adolescent. He stresses the way his unhappiness, his sense of being a “pariah,” was connected especially to the way he was excluded from the play of the other boys. He compensated for that exclusion by indulging in habitual daydreaming. Here is what Trollope says. The paragraph must be cited in extenso because it is the key to understanding what made Trollope so indefatigable a writer of novels: I will mention here another habit which had grown upon me from still earlier years,—which I myself often regarded with dismay when I thought 24 Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

of the hours devoted to it,—but which I suppose must have tended to make me what I have been. As a boy, even as a child, I was thrown much upon myself. I have explained, when speaking of my school days, how it came to pass that other boys would not play with me. I was therefore alone and had to form my plays within myself. Play of some kind was necessary to me then,—as it has always been. Study was not my bent, and I could not please myself by being all idle. Thus it came to pass that I was always going about with some castle-in-the-air firmly built within my mind. Nor were these efforts in architecture spasmodic, or subject to constant change from day to day. For weeks, for months, if I remember rightly, from year to year I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions and proprieties and unities. Nothing impossible was ever introduced,—nor even anything which from outward circumstances would seem to be violently improbable. I was myself of course my own hero. Such is a necessity of castle-building. But I never became a king, or a duke,—much less, when my height and personal appearance were fi xed, would I be an Antinous, or six feet high. I never was a learned man, nor even a philosopher. But I was a very clever person, and beautiful young women used to be fond of me. And I strove to be kind of heart and open of hand and noble in thought, despising mean things, and altogether I was a very much better fellow than I have ever succeeded in being since. This had been the occupation of my life for six or seven years before I went to the Post Office, and was by no means abandoned when I commenced my work. There can, I imagine, hardly be a more dangerous mental practice; but I have often doubted whether, had it not been my practice, I should ever have written a novel. I learned in this way to maintain an interest in a fictitious story, to dwell on a work created by my own imagination, and to live in a world altogether outside the world of my own material life. In after years I have done the same,—with this difference, that I have discarded the hero of my early dreams, and have been able to lay my own identity aside. (AA, 32–3) This extraordinary passage has long fascinated me for its candor, its selfinsight, and its analytical rigor. From the perspective of my topic of novels as models of community, the passage describes the way Trollope’s daydreaming and then novel-writing were a compensation for his exclusion from the real community within which he lived. The word he uses is “Pariah,” which Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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is derived from a Tamil word meaning 1) “a member of a low caste of agricultural and domestic workers in southern India or Burma,” and 2) “a social outcaste” (American Heritage Dictionary). “My college bills had not been paid,” says Trollope, speaking of his years at Winchester, “and the school tradesmen who administered to the wants of the boys were told not to extend their credit to me. Boots, waistcoats, and pocket-handkerchiefs which with some slight superveillance were at the command of other scholars, were closed luxuries to me. My schoolfellows of course knew that it was so, and I became a Pariah” (AA, 12). Trollope’s selfpity, tempered with an ironic distance, in these passages is moving. It matches the self-pity of the Reverend Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barset, as he sits brooding over the injustices that have been heaped on his head and on his exclusion from the community. Whether Trollope in An Autobiography described his childhood as it was, or whether he dramatized it on the model of the many pariahs in his novels that he had imagined over the years, of which Crawley is one of the most notable, is not as easy to decide as might first appear. For other examples, think of Mr. Harding in The Warden (1855), or the Duke of Omnium in The Prime Minister (1876), or Trevelyan in He Knew He Was Right (1869), or of all those Trollopean heroines who stick to their loves in the face of tremendous community pressure from family and friends. The obvious psycho-biographical interpretation may be a metalepsis, putting cause for effect, the cart before the horse. “It is the nature of boys to be cruel,” says Trollope. “I have sometimes doubted whether among each other they do usually suffer much, one from the other’s cruelty,—but I suffered horribly! I could make no stand against it. I had no friend to whom I could pour out my sorrows. I was big, and awkward, and ugly, and, I have no doubt, skulked about in a most unattractive manner. Of course I was ill-dressed and dirty. But, ah, how well I remember all the agonies of my young heart, how I considered whether I should always be alone,—whether I could not fi nd my way up to the top of that college tower, and from thence put an end of everything!” (AA, 12). Trollope did not commit suicide. He found another way out. In his account of his sufferings at the various schools to which he was sent, he stresses especially two features, the pain of being unjustly accused of wrongdoing, and the pain of being excluded from the games of the other boys: “I remember well how on an occasion four boys were selected as having been the perpetrators of some nameless horror. What it was, to this day I cannot even guess [though 26

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I suppose readers today will guess that the ‘nameless horror’ was either masturbation or homosexual activity],—but I was one of the four, innocent as a babe, but adjudged to have been the guiltiest of the guilty. We each had to write out a sermon, and my sermon was the longest of the four” (AA, 9). A few pages later, Trollope notes, But I was never able to overcome,—or even to attempt to overcome,— the absolute isolation of my school position. Of the cricket ground, or racket court, I was allowed to know nothing. And yet I longed for these things with an exceeding longing. I coveted popularity with a coveting that was almost mean. It seemed to me that there would be an Elysium in the intimacy of those very boys whom I was bound to hate because they hated me. Something of the disgrace of my school days has clung to me all through life. (AA, 16–17) A shared game is, like a novel, a model of community, but one that is in a different way part of the community, a way of living in the community. A game like cricket or rackets is like the community in which it is embedded in being rule-bound, with specific roles assigned to each of the players. A team sport has clear assumptions, transparent to all the players, about what constitutes fair play and accepted moves. It also has a clear means of deciding who wins and who loses. We know that England’s imperial wars were won on the playing fields of Eton. School games were, and still are, in English public schools, important ways in which the ideology of what it means to be English are instilled into young people’s minds and bodies. The difference now is that girls in such schools are also interpellated by games to adopt English ideals of behavior, fair play, and class discrimination. Poor Trollope happens to have been on the wrong side of the latter, that is, class discrimination, and in a particularly cruel way. Like Mr. Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barset, he was discriminated against as the son of a gentleman who did not have enough money to dress and behave like a gentleman. Trollope spontaneously opts, as might have been expected, for a version of that fi rst notion of community Jean-Luc Nancy repudiates as an error. Trollope sees those game-playing young Englishmen at Harrow who treat him so badly as a band of brothers who are all versions of the same pattern, not a community of those who have nothing in common. Trollope’s school-fellows are transparent to one another and agree with one another in ideals and judgments, in ideological mind-sets, even Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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though they may play different positions, so to speak, on the cricket field. It is the young Trollope who is other to them, a pariah, an outcast, and an outcaste. He is fundamentally different from them, not the same or assimilable. Whether or not the model of community presented in The Last Chronicle of Barset unequivocally exemplifies Nancy’s first mode of being together, or Mitsein, as Heidegger calls it, remains to be seen.

F R O M D AY D R E A M S TO N O V E L  W R I T I N G

It is against this miserable way of being in the world that Trollope defines the genesis of his vocation as a novelist. That vocation goes by way of an intermediate stage of daydreaming, as the passage cited earlier attests. I cite again the crucial passage: “I have explained,” says Trollope, “when speaking of my school days, how it came to pass that other boys would not play with me. I was therefore alone and had to form my plays within myself. Play of some kind was necessary to me then,—as it has always been.” The habit of daydreaming was private play, solitary play, play with himself, or within himself. It was a substitute and compensation for being excluded from the collective play of his schoolmates. A number of quite extraordinary features characterize Trollope’s daydreams. Most people, I suppose, daydream, however self-indulgent and even shameful such a habit is, as Trollope himself avers: “There can, I imagine, hardly be a more dangerous mental practice . . . .” What is dangerous about it? I suppose in part because it is narcissistic, selfish, perhaps like that “nameless horror” in which the young Trollope was falsely accused of indulging. Daydreaming comes under a stern Protestant interdict similar to the one issued against novel-reading. Both deviate from engagement in the real world of doing good works and of accomplishing productive work, by means of which prosperity on earth and eternal bliss in Heaven are obtained. Daydreams and novel-reading enter imaginary, impalpable worlds that have no purchase on the real world. They are most likely the work of the dev il. Most people’s daydreams, mine for example, are relatively short, intermittent, and discontinuous. Mine do not persuade even me. They do not satisfy. I can see they are absurd. That is one reason I need to read novels. What is so remarkable about Trollope’s daydreams is that they were carried on as continuous stories from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, even from year to year. Moreover, while many people’s daydreams 28

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may be fantasies, frank wish-fulfi llments improving on an unsatisfactory reality, Trollope’s daydreams were deliberately prosaic and “realistic” (like his novels). They were modeled on the familiar everyday world: “Nothing impossible was ever introduced,—nor even anything which from outward circumstances would seem to be violently improbable.” Ludwig Wittgenstein has argued, in Philosophical Investigations, that no such thing as a private game exists, just as no such thing as a private language exists. Why not? It takes two to tango. It takes, according to Wittgenstein, at least a community of two, perhaps three, two players and a spectator. All three are necessary to set up a game and to make sure all the players abide by the rules and conventions that make a game or a language possible. A community is to be defined in part as a group of people who share a single linguistic idiom, with its idiosyncrasies of grammar, syntax, pronunciation, proverbial expressions, and so on. A single person has no obligation to stick to the same sign-system from one moment to the next. A child discovers that when learning the game of solitaire. The child at first discovers that he or she can always win by cheating or by changing the rules along the way. Then the child comes to recognize that doing that is no fun. He or she begins to obey the rules, as though there were a spectator looking over her or his shoulder, an adult super-ego making sure she or he does not cheat. It is as though she or he were divided into two persons, the player and an opponent. The latter is embodied in the luck of the cards as they turn up. Trollope avoided the danger of changing the rules in midstream in a daydream by dividing himself tacitly into a daydreaming community of two persons, the daydreamer and the one who binds the daydreamer strictly to obey certain rules: “For weeks, for months, if I remember rightly, from year to year I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions and proprieties and unities.” If it takes two to tango, I must divide myself into two, or, actually, three, the superego lawgiver and the implicitly two players who obey the laws, the rules of the game, in order to play a game with oneself, in defiance of Wittgenstein. Trollope’s years-long continually renewed and continually lawful daydreams were a frank wish fulfi llment. They reversed the solitude, suffering, injustice, and failure of his actual life by imagining happy and triumphant adventures: “I never was a learned man, nor even a philosopher. But I was a very clever person, and beautiful young women used to be fond of me. And I strove to be kind of heart and open of hand and noble in thought, despising Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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mean things, and altogether I was a very much better fellow than I have ever succeeded in being since.” Trollope’s daydreams were shameful, guilty, secret, private. Nevertheless, Trollope is no doubt right to say that he would never have become a novelist if he had not indulged in this “dangerous mental practice”: “There can, I imagine, hardly be a more dangerous mental practice; but I have often doubted whether, had it not been my practice, I should ever have written a novel. I learned in this way to maintain an interest in a fictitious story, to dwell on a work created by my own imagination, and to live in a world altogether outside the world of my own material life.” “Practice” here has a double meaning. It means “habitual act.” Trollope might have said: “It has long been my practice to get up at five and begin work on my current novel.” “Practice,” however, also calls attention to the way Trollope’s practice of daydreaming was admirable practice for his vocation as a novelist. Practice makes perfect. Why did daydreaming lead to novel-writing? Daydreaming, he says, taught him how to live in a fictitious or imaginary world of his own devising, a world that is explicitly defi ned as outside “the world of my own material life.” These phrases justify my claim that Trollope’s novels, at least by his own account of them, were models of community not in being modeled on the real world and not in being presented as the way the real world ought to be, but as alternative imaginary worlds. They were separate from the real world. These virtual realities obeyed their own separate, idiosyncratic, and selflegislated “laws, . . . proportions and proprieties and unities.” In spite of their obeying rules of probability (“Nothing impossible was ever introduced,— nor even anything which from outward circumstances would seem to be violently improbable.”), they established their own laws and proportions and proprieties and unities. In this they were like those computer games in which the player is invited to invent a science fiction realm, a “sim city” or “simulated” city, with its imaginary constitution, class structure, laws, and technology. They also fit Wolfgang Iser’s defi nition in The Fictive and the Imaginary of the imaginary as different from either the real or the fictive. I shall identify later the way the characterizations of his novels Trollope makes in An Autobiography are true, if they are true, of The Last Chronicle of Barset. What Trollope asserts about his daydreams and novels receives support, however, from Trollope’s insistence in An Autobiography that the characters in his novels were not modeled on real people. He claims that 30

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they were entirely imaginary. Both Archdeacon Grantly and the journalist Tom Towers, in the first Barset novel, The Warden, seemed to the novel’s readers, as Trollope says in An Autobiography, so life-like that they must have been based on real people. This was, readers supposed, libelously so in the case of Tom Towers. Towers was thought to be an attack on the editor of the London Times. Not so, says Trollope. I made them both up out of my pure imagination, or what I call my “moral consciousness” (whatever that means). Trollope’s sentences about this are quite remarkable in their assertion of the sovereign power and authority of the author, These are defined here as the ability to make up characters out of nothing: I may as well declare at once that no one at the commencement could have had less reason than myself to presume himself to be able to write about clergymen. I have often been asked in what period of my early life I had lived so long in a Cathedral city as to have become intimate with the ways of a Close. I never lived in any Cathedral city,—except London, never knew anything of any Close, and at that time had enjoyed no peculiar intimacy with any clergyman. My Archdeacon, who has been said to be life-like, and for whom I confess I have all a parent’s fond affection [an echo of the image of “impregnation”], was, I think, the simple result of an effort of my moral consciousness. It was such as that in my opinion that an archdeacon should be,—or at any rate would be with such advantages as an archdeacon might have; and lo, an Archdeacon was produced who has been declared by competent authorities to be a real archdeacon down to the very ground. And yet, so far as I can remember, I had not then even spoken to an archdeacon. I have felt the compliment to be very great. . . . [A]t that time, living away in Ireland, I had not even heard the name of any gentleman connected with the Times newspaper, and could not have intended to represent any individual by Tom Towers. As I had created an archdeacon, so had I created a journalist, and the one creation was no more personal or indicative of morbid tendencies than the other. If Tom Towers was at all like any gentleman then connected with the Times my moral consciousness must again have been very powerful. (AA, 63–4, 68) Trollope consulted his “moral consciousness” and “lo, an Archdeacon was produced”! So much for the received opinion that novels are reflections of the real social world they enter when they are published, in a mirroring circuit Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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of the same back to the same. It would be a big mistake to read Trollope’s novels as accurate representations of Victorian middle- and upper-class life. Often sober historians and sociologists fall into the trap of this circularity. Trollope’s novels, or George Eliot’s, or Elizabeth Gaskell’s, are, we are told, accurate reflections of what English middle class life was really like at that time. The evidence for what English middle class life was like at that time then turns out to be heavily dependent on the testimony of novels, in a kind of hallucinatory illusion, a confusion of the imaginary and the real. To succumb to this illusion is to make the fundamental ideological mistake of confusing “linguistic with natural reality, reference with pheomenalism,” as Paul de Man puts it. Because the words appear to be constative, capable of being proved true or false, we think they must refer to some phenomena in the real world. This aberration is the primordial ideological mistake. The language of The Last Chronicle is referential all right. No language is non-referential. But it is referentiality without referent, except in the imaginary world that is performatively generated by the language of the novel. You can encounter the Reverend Josiah Crawley only between the covers of a book, only by reading The Last Chronicle of Barset.

H O W D O T R O L LO P E ’S N O V E L S D I F F E R F R O M H I S D AY D R E A M S ?

At this point, however, I must identify the ways Trollope’s novels as imaginary worlds are different from his daydreams. Three differences are crucial, as follows. 1. Trollope says nothing about the degree to which his daydreams were “worded” as they took place, as opposed to being internal theater or mental cinema. It would be interesting to know. The novels, however, only come into being through the written and then printed word. A novel is a creature of the print epoch. Until a novel is printed and circulated, it does not really exist as a novel. 2. This particular form of exposure or “outing” makes possible a second feature of Trollope’s novels that makes them differ from his daydreams. His daydreams remained private. His novels were and are as public as you can get. There they are on the shelves. Anyone who can read English can pick them up, read them, and share in the implicit community of all the others who have read that par ticular novel. 32

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3. The third feature distinguishing the novels from the daydreams is crucial. Trollope was the hero of his daydreams. In his novels he sets himself aside and writes about purely imaginary people, people other than himself. Perhaps we might feel today that Trollope projects himself in all sorts of complicated and hard-to-identify ways into the swarm of male and female characters he invents. Trollope himself denies that this is the case: “In after years I have done the same [that is, dwelt in a purely imaginary world, adjacent to the real world and supplementary to it],—with this difference, that I have discarded the hero of my early dreams, and have been able to lay my own identity aside.” As I have elsewhere observed, Trollope’s self-analysis in An Autobiography of the genesis of his novel writing did not do his reputation any good. It seems as if he is confessing to writing potboilers just to make money to live on. He gives scrupulous accounts of just how much money he made as a writer and of the way his success as a novelist gave him social success, too. He obtained election to various London clubs, invitations to dinner parties and country houses, the opportunity to meet important people, and so on. His boasts about this are a striking confi rmation of Sigmund Freud’s account, in the twenty-third lecture of Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, of the relation of artistic creation to the life of the artist. At the very end of that lecture, which is on “The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms,” Freud turns, more or less, it appears, as an afterthought, to the question of art’s function in psychic and social life. He hypothesizes that the artist is someone (a male someone) who is deprived for one reason or another, as the young Anthony Trollope certainly was, of what all men want, “honor, power, and the love of women.” In this state of deprivation, the artist turns to fantasy satisfaction, as all men are prone to do. The difference with the artist is that he is able to express his fantasies in ways that are accessible to others. He gives others pleasure by doing their fantasizing for them better than they can do it for themselves. Through this success in getting their fantasies shared, artists are accepted in the real community from which they have been excluded as “pariahs,” to use Trollope’s term. They thereby gain in reality what they have before had only in fantasy: honor, power, and the love of women, that is, just those things that Trollope tells us he possessed in his daydreams, though not yet in reality. Here is the way Freud expresses this detour through art back to reality: Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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Before I let you go to-day, however, I should like to direct your attention a little longer to a side of the life of phantasy which deserves the most general interest. For there is a path that lead back from phantasy to reality— the path, that is, of art. An artist is once more in rudiments an introvert, not far removed from neurosis. He [Note the sexism here! What about all the female artists?] is oppressed by excessively powerful instinctual needs. He desires to win honour, power, wealth, fame and the love of women; but he lacks the means for achieving these satisfactions. Consequently, like any other unsatisfied man, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, and his libido too, to the wishful constructions of his life of phantasy, whence the path might lead to neurosis. . . . An artist, however, finds a path back to reality in the following manner. To be sure, he is not the only one who leads a life of phantasy. Access to the half-way region of phantasy is permitted by the universal assent of mankind, and everyone suffering from privation expects to derive alleviation and consolation from it. But for those who are not artists the yield of pleasure to be derived from the sources of phantasy is very limited. The ruthlessness of their repressions forces them to become content with such meager day-dreams as are allowed to become conscious. A man who is a true artist has more at his disposal. In the first place, he understands how to work over his daydreams in such a way as to make them lose what is too personal about them and repels strangers, and to make it possible for others to share in the enjoyment of them. He understands, too, how to tone them down so that they do not easily betray their origin from proscribed sources. Furthermore, he possesses the mysterious power of shaping some particular material until it has become a faithful image of his phantasy; and he knows, moreover, how to link so large a yield of pleasure to this representation of his unconscious phantasy that, for the time being at least, repressions are outweighed and lifted by it. If he is able to accomplish all this, he makes it possible for other people once more to derive consolation and alleviation from their own sources of pleasure in their unconscious which have become inaccessible to them; he earns their gratitude and admiration and he has thus achieved through his phantasy what originally he had achieved only in his phantasy—honour, power and the love of women. This matches so exactly Trollope’s own self-analysis (with the exception, of course, of the references to the unconscious and to “prohibited sources”) 34

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that it might almost have been written as a commentary on Trollope’s An Autobiography. What is most important for my purposes here, however, is the way the consonance between Freud and Trollope supports my claim that Trollope’s novels, and The Last Chronicle of Barset in particular, can be seen as “models of community” in three intertwined, contradictory, but inextricably connected, ways. Trollope made it back into the real community by way of the detour of art not so much through the money he made, his election to clubs, and so on, as by getting readers to read his novels and to enter into the alternative, virtual, imaginary realities such reading generates. He was excluded from the games of others. The success of his novels might be defined as getting others to play his game. He got them to accept the laws, proprieties, and unities he created for these alternative worlds. By doing so they entered into a new community, created and legislated by Trollope, through a sovereign performative fiat. I say “performative” to call attention to the way Trollope’s novels are extended speech acts in the sense J. L. Austin defines speech acts in How To Do Things in Words. “I invite you to enter the community of Barset. Follow me!” We can still join this assembly today. This is the community of Trollope’s readers, the community of those for whom Trollope’s characters are as real as real people, perhaps more real. Nowadays that community is no doubt much smaller than it once was. Most people these days get the pleasures of entering imaginary worlds through cinema, television, the Internet, or video games.

THE AMAZING REVIEWS OF THE LAST CHRONICLE OF BARSET

The reviews of The Last Chronicle of Barset that appeared when it first came out are striking confirmation that this novel and Trollope’s other Barset novels were taken as if the characters were real by Victorian readers. The reviewers consistently speak of the characters as if they were real people whom they know intimately and love, hate, or love to hate. The title announces itself as the end of the Barset series. Trollope kills off in the novel two personages who have figured in the series from the beginning: Mr. Harding and Mrs. Proudie, the “she-bishop.” Trollope tells in An Autobiography how he overheard in one of his clubs two clergymen abusing Mrs. Proudie and saying how tedious they found her. Trollope rose up and confronted the startled clergymen: “I got up and standing between them I acknowledged myself to be the culprit. ‘As to Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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Mrs Proudie,’ I said, ‘I will go home and kill her before the week is over.’ And so I did. The two gentlemen were utterly confounded and one of them begged me to forget his frivolous observations” (AA, 177). Contemporary reviewers lament the deaths of Mr. Harding and Mrs. Proudie in terms that sound like real mourning. Most of all they lament the loss, once and for all, of the whole Barset imaginary world. Three of the six contemporary reviews of the novel say so nearly the same thing that it almost seems they must have been written by the same person. I need to cite them in extenso to show their remarkable similarity. Their consonance suggests that they speak for the common experience of Trollope’s community of readers. The author of the unsigned notice in the Spectator of July 13, 1867, speaks with ironic hyperbole of his or her sorrow at losing forever the Barset alternative world. The reviewer imagines a collective voice rising up from all over London, and England generally mourning an irreparable loss. This mourning is in response to Trollope’s promise, speaking now in his own voice, at the very end of the novel, that he will write no more Barset novels. This promise is made in the context of a confession that the fictitious Barset world, with all its personages, has seemed to him altogether real, even though it is created out of words that are referential but without phenomenalism. The Barset world has been experienced not as something Trollope has invented, but as something pre-existing he has been allowed to enter and tell other people about: I may not boast that any beside myself have so realized the place, and the people, and the facts, as to make such reminiscences possible as those which I should attempt to evoke by an appeal to perfect fellowship. But to me Barset has been a real county, and its city a real city, and the spires and towers have been before my eyes, and the voices of the people are known to my ears, and the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps. To them all I now say farewell. That I have been induced to wander among them too long by my love of old friendships, and by the sweetness of old faces, is a fault for which I may perhaps be more readily forgiven, when I repeat, with some solemnity of assurance, the promise made in my title, that this shall be the last chronicle of Barset. This passage is a quite extraordinary testimony to the way fictions are experienced by authors and readers as imaginary alternative worlds, virtual 36

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realities. I suppose people feel that way today about characters, places, and events in fi lms, television, and even video games. Trollope’s narrator, here speaking as Trollope himself, makes two appeals to friendship. One is to the fellowship of those who, like him, take Barset as real. The other is to his feeling of friendship for the characters in the novels. Trollope, or rather the words on the page, are the mediator binding each of those communities to the other. It then becomes a community of those who feel that they belong to the community of Barset. Here is the way the Spectator reviewer expresses this, as a response to Trollope’s farewell to Barset: The general effect of this announcement has been naturally enough very great discouragement. Men who do not go much into society feel as if all the society they had, had suddenly agreed to emigrate to New Zealand, or Vancouver’s Island, or some other place, where they will never hear of them any more. “What am I to do without ever meeting Archdeacon Grantly?” a man said the other day; “he was one of my best and most intimate friends, and the mere prospect of never hearing his ‘Good heavens!’ again when any proposition is made touching the dignity of Church or State, is a bewilderment and pain to me. It was bad enough to lose the Old Warden, Mr. Septimus Harding, but that was a natural death, and we must all bow to blows of that kind. But to lose the Archdeacon and Mrs. Grantly in the prime of their life, is more than I can bear. Life has lost one of its principal alleviations. Mr. Trollope has no right to break old ties in this cruel and reckless way, only to please himself, and then make a hypocritical merit of it.” We confess to feeling a good deal of sympathy with this gentleman. . . . On the whole, it is a bitter and needless parting. If all the world prefer to hear about these Barchester people, whom they know so well, to hearing about other new people, whom they do not know at all and care nothing for, and Mr. Trollope is the only person who knows about them, it is a selfish and cruel proceeding on his part to shut them off from their friends. (CH, 291–2) The “unsigned notice” in the London Review for July 20, 1867, speaks in almost identical terms: There can be but few of Mr. Trollope’s readers in whose minds the fi rst [sic—the word should be “last”] words of the book now before us will not inspire a gentle melancholy. It is really to be, he says, “with some Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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solemnity of assurance,” the last chronicle of Barset which we shall receive from his hands, and we cannot but feel grieved to have to say farewell to scenes which so many pleasant associations have endeared. To us, as well as to him, Barset has long been a real country, and its city a real city; and the spires and towers have been before our eyes, and the voices of the people are known to our ears, and the pavements of the city ways are familiar to our footsteps. [These phrases are of course cited from the last paragraph of The Last Chronicle.] Long ago we there, under Mr. Trollope’s guidance, made acquaintances which have since then seemed to ripen into friendships, and now that we are told that we shall see their faces no more we are conscious of a genuine sensation of regret. Several of Mr. Trollope’s Barsetshire characters have been from time to time so vividly brought before us that we have thoroughly accepted the reality of their existence, their shadowy forms have seemed to take equal substance with those of our living neighbors, and their fictitious joys and sorrows have often entered more deeply into our speculations than have those of the persons who really live and move and have their being around us. (CH, 299) Margaret Oliphant, a popular novelist herself, begins her review in Blackwood’s Magazine for September 1867, with a reprise of the other reviewers’ complaints about Trollope’s unjustified cruelty in depriving them once and for all of so many old friends. Yet would we chide our beloved novelist for his “Last Chronicle.” We did not ask that this chronicle should be the last. We were in no hurry to be done with our old friends. And there are certain things which he has done without consulting us against which we greatly demur. To kill Mrs. Proudie was murder, or manslaughter at the least. We do not believe she had any disease of the heart; she died not by natural causes, but by his hand in a fit of weariness or passion. When we were thinking no evil, lo! some sudden disgust seized him, and he slew her at a blow. The crime was so uncalled for, that we not only shudder at it, but resent it. It was cruel to us; and it rather—looks—as—if—he did not know how to get through the crisis in a more natural way. (CH, 303) No doubt there is some hyperbolic irony in these extraordinary reviews. Nevertheless they seem to express a genuine sense in these readers that 38

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Trollope’s characters exist somewhere as real people. You will note that I fall into the same fallacious illusion later on in this chapter when I write things like “gradually more or less everyone comes to believe that Crawley has indeed stolen the check, in a fit of forgetfulness about where he got it.” That is a normal, but deeply problematic, way for literary critics to write about the characters in novels. We forget that novels are made of words and that the characters in them exist only in words as they performatively affect our imaginations.

WHY READ THE L AST CHRONICLE?

The Last Chronicle of Barset is a “model of community” in all three of the contradictory ways I have identified. It is a mimesis of real social life in Victorian England. It exhorts its readers to model themselves on its characters and to incarnate in themselves the ideologies it so persuasively dramatizes. It gives its readers access to an alternative world, a realm governed by its own to some degree idiosyncratic laws, proprieties, and unities. In entering that world, readers not only join the Barset community. They also join the community of other readers who feel that Mr. Crawley, Grace Crawly, the Archdeacon, Lily Dale, and the rest are personal friends. Further questions implicitly underlie all my investigation. What social or personal function, if any, do any of these three operations have that occur when we read The Last Chronicle of Barset? What function did reading the novel have for its first readers? What possible use can there be in reading it today? I leave those questions dangling in the air for now and turn to another so far unanswered question. This one must be answered first, before we can identify the values, if any, of reading this novel, now or then. Exactly what are the characteristics of the community we enter when we pick up The Last Chronicle of Barset and begin to read its first sentence: “ ‘I can never bring myself to believe it, John,’ said Mary Walker, the pretty daughter of Mr. George Walker, attorney of Silverbridge”? (7). In order to answer that question, I must present a reading of the novel.

T H E N A R R ATO R A S CO L L E C T I V E CO N S C I O U S N E S S

The narrator of The Last Chronicle of Barset is a collective consciousness. To put this in slightly different terms, the narrator is the voice of a Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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community that has somehow got itself turned into written language. What does this mean? The narrator as collective consciousness is a variant of what is conventionally called the “omniscient narrator.” That term has always been problematic. It carries with it, necessarily, a lot of theological baggage that may or may not be appropriate in a given case. God is everywhere at all times, and knows everything, all at once. God knows all, in a perpetual clairvoyance that knows no temporal or spatial limits and that can penetrate into the minds and hearts of his creatures and know about them even what they do not consciously know about themselves. The narrator as community voice, on the contrary, is not omniscient. It is limited to what the community knows and to what individuals within the community know. Nicholas Royle’s brilliant substitution of “telepathic narrator” for “omniscient narrator” works admirably as a definition of the narrative voice in Trollope’s novels. Trollope has, strictly speaking, no concept of the unconscious, at least in the Freudian sense. He grants his characters, for the most part, a spontaneous access to every corner of their own minds. Qualifications of that assertion will be examined later. The narrator, or, as I should rather call it, the telepathic narrative voice, knows what they know and can speak for that knowledge. The sign that that voice has been transmuted, transcoded, translated, into written language is the use of the past tense. The first sentence of the novel has the phrase “said Mary Walker,” not “says Mary Walker.” For the narrative voice as a collective consciousness, whatever happens occurs in some past moment. Writing it down relocates what was once a present happening into an indefinitely close or remote past, into a kind of essential pastness. Whatever is written down has always already happened by the time it is written down. The collective consciousness of the community has, however, more knowledge or a different knowledge from the knowledge one by one of the individual consciousnesses that make up the community. It speaks for whatever everybody knows or thinks or feels, as well as for what a given character thinks and feels at a certain moment. For Trollope, what each individual thinks and feels is not solitary or individual. It is magically generated and controlled by what everybody in the surrounding community thinks and feels. The hypothesis of a collective telepathic consciousness as narrator of fictions is a feature of now old-fashioned phenomenological speculation. I first heard of such an idea sixty years ago, precisely apropos of Trollope, from 40

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the distinguished phenomenological critic, or “critic of consciousness,” George Poulet. The concept of collective consciousness is one solution to a knotty problem. Th is problem obsessed Edmund Husserl in his later years, as I have also shown elsewhere. Given the apparently irreducible isolation, self-enclosure, self-knowledge, and singularity of each consciousness (the starting point of Husserlian phenomenology), how can solipsism be avoided? How can there be a plausible notion of intersubjectivity or of communication between those apparently windowless monads, the “I’s” or “egos” or “selves” or “subjectivities” that each one of us exemplifies in a unique way? Husserl solved that problem, or thought he did, in the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations. That solution did not satisfy him, however. His late manuscripts are full of further attempts to escape solipsism. Those attempts were never fully satisfying to him. In the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl speaks of one consciousness’s access to another consciousness as happening by way of “analogical apperception.” This defines my access to the mind of another as doubly displaced, doubly negative. It is not “logical,” but “analogical.” I assume on no definitive empirical basis that the other person must have a consciousness that is analogous to mine. It is not a “perception” but an “apperception,” that is, not really a perception, but a perception that is qualified by the prefix “ap-,” “away from, off.” That prefix can be either an intensive or a privative. It can mean, when added to different stems, a whole series of contradictory things: being away from, lack of, separation of, away from, away, off, return, intensive action, keeping off, defense, change from an existing state, and reversal, as in “apocalypse.” The prefix gives with one hand what it takes away with the other. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “apperception” as 1) “conscious perception with full awareness” and 2) “the process of understanding by which newly observed qualities of an object are related to past experience.” This gives and takes at once, since the full awareness of the consciousness of another may be no more than the projection onto the face, speech, and behavior of the other of my “past experience” of myself, in a dubious act of analogical thinking. Here is what Jacques Derrida, in a passage in an unpublished seminar on the phrase “Je t’aime” (I love you) has to say about Husserl’s formula of “analogical apperception” of the other: This act of faith is required by love, just as for all witnessing, insofar as it is a question of what takes place or is experienced within someone, some Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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singular existence (ego or Dasein) there where the other cannot in any way have a direct, intuitive and original [originaire], access. The other will never be on my side and will never have an intuitive, original access, in person, to the phenomenality for which I am origin of the world. In order to describe this zone which rests at bottom that of the secret and of absolute singularity, that of what is absolutely proper to me and of which I cannot expropriate myself, one of the best routes to follow would be that of the Fift h of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. Husserl recalls there what is at once an axiom and an absolute evidence, that is to say, that the ego which has a intuitive, immediate, and original phenomenological access, in person, to the present phenomenality of its own experiences and of all that is proper to it can never have access other than an indirect one, appresentative and analogical [apprésentatif ou analogique], to the experiences of the other, of the alter ego, which will never themselves, in person, appear to the ego, and of which the constitution within me requires such embarrassing procedures for transcendental phenomenology. . . . The irreducible alterity [L’irréductible altérité], which is also the irreducible singularity and therefore the irreducible secret is the condition of love and of the declaration of love as witness and not as proof [comme témoignage et non comme prevue]. Heideggerian “Mitsein” or Jean-Luc Nancy’s assertion in Being Singular Plural that each of us is primordially exposed to the others, so that my singularity is always plural, are two more recent ways of dealing with the problem of intersubjectivity. Trollope’s hypothesis of a collective consciousness is another way. In any case, knowledge of the other is not a problem for Trollope. As I shall show, he takes for granted, as a primordial feature of living together with others in a unified community, a high degree of mutual understanding. Each person in that community, of whatever gender or class, has an extraordinary power to penetrate into the minds and feelings of any other member of the community. That this ability goes beyond class lines is indicated in a passage in which Trollope ascribes to the Barsetshire grooms an infallible insight into the fact that Crawley is a gentleman. This matches the similar insight of members of Crawley’s own class. For Trollope, the other is almost completely transparent to me if, and only if, he or she belongs to my community. That “almost” is all-important, as I shall show.

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Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

I do not myself believe that such a spooky thing as a community consciousness exists in the real world. However successfully I may be interpellated by various Ideological State Apparatuses, as Louis Althusser called them—church, state, schools, politicians, the media—to think, believe, feel, and act in certain ways, this happens, in my view, by way of signs, not by the “action at a distance” of some ghostly community consciousness that permeates mine, as our bodies are traversed and penetrated by invisible radio and television signals coming from all directions, in an unimaginable cacophony. Such a consciousness of the community, however, may be hypothesized, projected by language, in a work of fiction, precisely as one of its most fictive, unreal, or “science fiction” aspects. This happens by way of a hallucinatory “as if.” For each of the characters it is as if their lives were being narrated by an invisible consciousness/language that not only knows them from within, but also appropriates them. The narrative voice assimilates each individual consciousness for the construction of its wider knowledge.

T H E O P E N I N G PAG E S O F T H E L A S T C H R O N I C L E

To enter a world in which such a community consciousness exists is one of the pleasures or terrors, depending on how you feel about it, of reading The Last Chronicle of Barset. The opening pages of the novel move constantly between telling the reader what a given character thought and telling the reader what “everybody” thought about the Reverend Josiah Crawley’s plight and about that check for twenty pounds he has been accused of stealing. At first community opinion is divided, more or less along gender lines, but gradually more or less everyone comes to believe that Crawley has indeed stolen the check, in a fit of forgetfulness about where he got it. “I can never bring myself to believe it, John,” says Mary Walker in the opening words of the novel, to which her brother John answers, “You’ll have to bring yourself to believe it” (7). The reader will note that it is a matter of belief, not of certain knowledge, just as it is with the jury in a court case. They must decide “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Belief is performative, not constative. This is so both in the sense that belief is not based on certain knowledge and in the sense that the words “I believe so and so” make something happen. At the moment just

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before the start of the Iraq War, to say, “I believe Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction,” even though no certain evidence for that existed and even though it was in fact a baseless belief, had the performative effect of seeming to justify unilateral military action against Iraq. That mistaken belief brought terrible consequences in the way of military and civilian casualties as well as destabilization of Iraq and the whole Middle East. Baseless belief is not innocent. It has consequences. Mary Walker says, in response to her mother’s, “I would rather give no opinion, my dear,” “But you must think something when everybody is talking about it, mamma” (8). Two pages later, the narrator speaks for the collective consciousness it embodies: “The whole county was astir in this matter of this alleged guilt of the Reverend Josiah Crawley—the whole county almost as keenly as the family of Mr Walker, of Silverbridge” (10). Several chapters later the reader is told that Major Grantly, who is in love with Mr. Crawley’s daughter, goes to the Barchester “county-club” to see what people are saying: Then he went to Barchester, not open-mouthed with inquiry, but rather with open ears, and it seemed to him that all men in Barchester were of one mind. There was a county-club in Barchester, and at this county-club nine men out of every ten were talking about Mr. Crawley. It was by no means necessary that a man should ask questions on the subject. Opinion was expressed so freely that no such asking was required; and opinion in Barchester—at any rate in the county-club—seemed now to be all of one mind. . . . Henry Grantly, as he drove home to Silverbridge on the Sunday afternoon, summed up all the evidence in his own mind, and brought in a verdict of Guilty against the father of the girl he loved. (62) Henry Grantly is here the semi-detached consciousness, “his own mind” as part of the community’s “one mind.” The collective community consciousness, for which the narrator speaks, is fi ltered through Grantly’s mind. The mind of the community, so fi ltered, is transmitted to the reader in a form of indirect discourse, the narrator speaking for the character. I shall have more to say later about this form of language. It embodies individual consciousness within community consciousness in a special form of narration. The community is “all of one mind.” Before the paragraph is over, Grantly joins his mind to that collective mind. He comes to believe as they do, and pronounces, as they do, the verdict of Guilty on Mr. Crawley. (Crawley is, 44 Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

by the way, entirely innocent, as the reader and the community ultimately discover. He is as innocent as Saddam Hussein, who, bad as he was, was innocent of having weapons of mass destruction.) Even much later in the novel, when Mr. Crawley’s trial is imminent, the reader is told that “there wasn’t a man, woman, or child in all Barchester who was not talking of Mr Crawley at that very moment” (754). Nor is the direct representation of the collective consciousness of Barset limited to its passing of judgment on Crawley. In a paragraph early in the novel, the narrator makes an inventory of what various people were saying about Henry Grantly’s love for Grace Crawley: It has been said that Major Grantly had thrown a favorable eye on Grace Crawley—by which report occasion was given to all men and women in those parts to hint that the Crawleys, with all their piety and humility, were very cunning, and that one of the Grantlys was—to say the least of it—very soft, admitted as it was throughout the county of Barsetshire, that there was no family therein more widely awake to the affairs generally of this world and the next combined, than the family of which Archdeacon Grantly was the respected head and patriarch. [Then follows a repertoire of what various specific people said.] . . . Such and such like had been the expressions of the opinion of men and women in Silverbridge. (19) Many more examples of this sort of notation could be cited from the novel. Their iteration generates in the reader the impression that a mind of the community exists within which all individual minds are embedded. That allencompassing mind permeates them. Each incarnates it in his or her self-consciousness. The telepathic narrative voice speaks for the community consensus. It encompasses all these individual minds like a universal medium that subtly coerces them to be “all of one mind.” Everybody thinks what his or her neighbors think, just as almost all United States media accepted as a fact that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

H O W T H E N A R R AT I V E V O I C E R E P R E S E N T S I N D I V I D UA L CO N S C I O U S N E S S E S

The characters in The Last Chronicle of Barset are surrounded, penetrated, and bathed in a ubiquitous community consciousness whose borders are the Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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borders of the community itself, that is, the topographical frontiers of the county of Barsetshire. The characters exist not as Leibnizian windowless monads in this medium, but as monads that are both detached, in the sense of having certain privacies, and at the same time exposed not only to the penetrating gaze and surveillance of the narrative voice, but also to other monads. This figure of monads suspended in a transparent medium and transparent to themselves and to one another is a much more apt description of The Last Chronicle of Barset than to speak of it as a multiplotted novel in which several separate plots are carried on simultaneously. The plots exist as separate characters, each with his or her own story, and the stories all overlap or are intertwined, so that they cannot be neatly separated from one another. Trollope’s age did not have to wait for twentieth-century mass media to create, at least in imagination, what Gianni Vattimo calls, in severe disparagement, The Transparent Society. If this is the case, just what mode of access to the characters does the collective consciousness have? Just how can it speak for them, and through written and then printed words transmit their states of mind to those who read English? My goal remains to identify just what sort of community Barsetshire is. I think of it as an imaginary, virtual, or fictive realm the reader of the novel enters by means of the words. Having posited a narrative voice that can speak for the whole imaginary community, Trollope’s next challenge is to invent linguistic strategies that will convey to his reader his own sense of the characters’ reality and virtual independent existence. The reader will remember the passages I cited previously that show how, having posited, invented, or discovered the characters for a given novel, in a sovereign act of prosopopoeia, or creation from nothing, those characters lived within him as if they were real people, not factitiously invented personages whom he could manipulate at will: “At such times, I have been able to imbue myself thoroughly with the characters I have had in hand. I have wandered alone among the rocks and woods crying at their grief, laughing at their absurdities, and thoroughly enjoying their joy. I have been impregnated with my own creations till it has been my only excitement to sit with the pen in my hand and drive my team before me at as quick a pace as I could make them travel” (AA, 115). In this extraordinary passage, the sexual figure reverses and reverses again, first in a feminization of what is usually thought of as a masculine act of authorial invention, and then in a return to male authority. Trollope is “imbued” with his characters. His whole be46 Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

ing, body, mind, feelings are saturated with the characters he has invented, as though he were impregnated with them, carry ing them within himself as the result of an act of self-fecundation. This feminization then reverses into an implicitly onanistic figure of the writer as a male with his pen in his hand driving his team as fast as it will go. He grasps his pen and writes furiously, covering pages with words, as the ink flows from the pen. Trollope has just been speaking of the way, at such times, when he is on “vacation,” he can write sixteen pages a day rather than his usual eight. These are times occupied “not in the conception [another implicitly sexual word], but in the telling of the story” (AA, 115). Telling is a kind of giving birth. The narrative voice in The Last Chronicle of Barset is a pure, transparent, neutral medium. It speaks of itself only rarely as an “I.” It transmits without distortion the judgments and vision of the collective community, the states of mind of the characters from moment to moment, and their interaction by way of what they say to one another. Trollope in An Autobiography uses a series of eloquent metaphors to describe the facility and invisibility of the process by which he transposes or transcodes what had a subjective and to some degree non-verbal existence into written language. Neither the narrative voice in the novel itself nor Trollope in An Autobiography speaks of the message as invented. It is defi ned as registered, reported, transferred by language from some pre-existing mode into new printed language that conveys it effortlessly into the mind of the reader. Touching faith! The art of the telegraphist makes a surprising appearance here given that this was a relatively new technology at that time. Telegrams sent and received do not figure largely in Trollope’s novels. His characters communicate by letter. I shall have more to say later about letters in his novels. More likely to be familar to Trollope’s readers is a figure drawn from typesetting. That is a technology on which Trollope’s career as a novelist intimately depended, in those days before the linotype machine. In Trollope’s day, each letter was set individually by hand. The ultimate transposition from the handwritten manuscript to the printed book was the fi nal relay in a sequence of codings and recodings that began with the phantasmal existence of the characters—their thoughts, feelings, and language—in the author’s mind. The initial writing down is just one stage in that process, though perhaps the most delicate and precarious and the one most requiring talent and practiced skill: Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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[The novelist’s] language must come from him as music comes from the rapid touch of the great performer’s fi ngers, as words come from the mouth of the indignant orator, as letters fly from the fingers of the trained compositor, as the syllables tinkled out by little bells form themselves to the ear of the telegraphist. (AA, 116) What Macaulay says should be remembered by all writers: “How little the all-important art of making meaning pellucid is studied now! Hardly any popular author except myself thinks of it.” The language used should be as ready and as efficient a conductor of the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader as the electric spark which passes from one battery to another battery. (AA, 151) The young novelist will probably ask, or more probably bethink himself [sic], how he is to acquire that knowledge of human nature which will tell him with accuracy what men or what women would say in this or that position. He must acquire it as the compositor who is to print his words has learned the art of distributing his type, by constant and intelligent practice. (AA, 155) Oddly enough, “distributing his type,” David Skilton’s note in the Penguin edition tells us, means “breaking up type which has previously been set up and returning it to its proper compartments in the case.” That is strange because it describes the art of writing not as the gathering together of letters and words so that they accurately express and transmit what begins as a wordless “conception” in the writer’s mind, but rather as a scattering of sentences back to detached words and words back to detached letters that are now arranged in compartments in the senseless order of the alphabet. I do not know what to make of the strange interruption in the flow of meaning’s current from battery to battery, a scattering not a gathering, that this metaphor implies, if Skilton has it right. You tell me. Perhaps it means no more than that Trollope got his terminology backward. In any case, the power of the printed words in Victorian novels to generate a virtual reality within the mind of the reader is quite extraordinary. It is even more extraordinary than the power cinema or video games have because the latter depend on visions that are presented directly before the spectator’s eyes. Novels perform their magic through the much more indirect means of those inert words on the printed page. The characters, their 48

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world, their actions, their speech must exist first in the mind of the author and then be transmitted by words to the reader, as Trollope eloquently affirms in another of those quite amazing passages in An Autobiography: But the novelist has other aims than the elucidation of his plot. He desires to make his readers so intimately acquainted with his characters that the creations of his brain should be to them speaking, moving, living human creatures. This he can never do unless he knows those fictitious personages himself, and can never know them well unless he can live with them in the full reality of established intimacy. They must be with him as he lies down to sleep and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them. He must argue with them, quarrel with them, forgive them, and even submit to them. He must know of them whether they be cold-blooded or passionate, whether true or false, and how far true and how far false. The depth and the breadth and the narrowness and shallowness of each should be clear to him. And as, here in our outer world, we know that men and women change,—become worse or better as temptation or conscience may guide them,—so should these creatures [“creations” in other versions of the An Autobiography] of his change, and every change should be noted by him. On the last day of each month recorded every person in his novel should be a month older than on the first. (AA, 149–50) As impalpable ghosts inhabiting Trollope’s mind, his characters have no more public or shared an existence than did the figures in Trollope’s guilty, youthful, self-indulgent daydreams. The characters die as what they are, phantoms within Trollope’s imagination, and are turned into the dead letters on the pages he writes and then gets printed. The characters are then reborn, resurrected, raised as a ghost is raised by a proper incantation, within the inner world of the reader when he or she reads the printed words. This is an amazing prestidigitation. Without it, literature as a cultural form specific to the age of the printed book would have been impossible. This prosopopoeia, an invocation of phantasms or specters, is all done not with mirrors but with the feeble instrument of the printed word. And these ghosts are raised not in any visible theater but in the invisible theater of the mind.

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T H E I L LU S T R AT I O N S

What can be said of the role played in this magic incantation by the illustrations for Victorian novels—for example, the forty admirable woodengraved illustrations John Everett Millais prepared for Trollope’s Orley Farm or the less celebrated thirty-two wood-engraved illustrations and thirty-two vignettes prepared by George H. Thomas that appear in both the weekly sixpenny parts and in the early bound book editions of The Last Chronicle of Barset? Figure 1 shows the frontispiece that opens the first edition. The sixty-four illustrations and vignettes in the fi rst edition do not appear in any of the modern editions I have seen. No doubt the reasons are partly economic. It is expensive to include a lot of illustrations in a cheap paperback, but I think the reasons are also ideological. It was generally assumed in most of the twentieth-century that the illustrations were not important. Their absence in modern editions of The Last Chronicle of Barset hides the fact that it, like most Victorian novels, was a multi-media collective creation. The omission of the original illustrations, until recently at least, from modern reprints of Victorian novels fundamentally falsifies their original mode of existence, as a good bit of recent scholarship has begun to show.

Figure 1. From Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1867), frontispiece, as reproduced in the Gutenberg Kindle e-text. The original caption reads, “Mr. Crawley before the Magistrates.” 50

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E-texts, however, have begun to include the original illustrations of Victorian novels. The Gutenberg Kindle e-text of The Last Chronicle, for example, comes in two versions, one with the original illustrations and vignettes, the other without. This is the first time I have been able to see them. It is a new experience of the novel for me, in more ways than one. Reading a novel on Kindle is quite different from reading it in a printed book. A different procedure is required for moving around in the text. The Search function is a wonderful aid, but browsing is difficult. An e-text lives in cyberspace, while a printed book dwells as a material object in your hands or on your book shelves. Now, moreover, I am led to recognize that The Last Chronicle was a multimedia production when it first came out. I henceforth need to take into account in any interpretation the interaction of picture and text in this novel. In the original illustrations for a given Victorian novel, some artist, good or bad (for The Last Chronicle the moderately good George Housman Thomas), made concrete and visible the interior visions that reading the novel called up in him [almost all were male], as one reader among many. Sometimes, however, the novelist had a hand in directing the form the illustrations took, notoriously so in the case of the illustrations for Dickens’s novels by “Phiz” (Hablôt K. Browne). The original illustrations of Victorian novels no doubt guided the imaginations of their readers—for example, Henry James as a childhood reader of Oliver Twist. James testifies in a striking passage in A Small Boy and Others that the George Cruikshank illustrations for that novel had more effect on him than the text itself. Speaking of those illustrations, James, with wonderful astuteness, writes: “It perhaps even seemed to me more Cruikshank’s than Dickens’s; it was a thing of such vividly terrible images, and all marked with that peculiarity of Cruikshank that the offered flowers or goodnesses, the scenes and figures intended to comfort and cheer, present themselves under his hand as but more subtly sinister or more suggestively queer, than the frank badnesses and horrors.” Cruikshank’s Sikes, James is in effect saying, looks, paradoxically, wholesome and sane compared to his Mr. Brownlow or his Oliver. The original illustrations, for example those for The Last Chronicle, function as an important adjunct to verbal meaning. They give a modern reader much information about Victorian décor, dress, architecture, and interior furnishings. Often, however, at least in my case, the illustrations contradict my interior sense of what the characters looked like and of how they were Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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dressed. My own interior theater, inhabited by the specters within me reading invokes, are not the same as those in the illustrations. I want to say, “You have got it wrong. That is not at all how she looked at that moment.” Films made of novels often affect me the same way. They arouse a strong sense of the discrepancy between how I think the characters “really looked,” and the distorted imitation, a pale guess, the illustration or the film wants to impose on me. The magic performed by the words as incantation predominates over what seems to me a distorted representation of that in visible form by some other person or by the elaborate apparatus of film-making. I conclude that each person’s interior theater, generated by reading a given novel, is probably different from all the other interior theaters. My vision is unique, sui generis, incommensurate with all others.

F R E E I N D I R E C T D I S CO U R S E

Well, just what sorts of words get written down by that furiously driven pen on those blank pages so that Trollope’s phantoms can become our phantoms too and haunt us as they haunted him? Trollope’s problem, once he has invented his special version of the Victorian telepathic narrator, is to devise a language that will pass on to his readers his own “conception” of his characters. Trollope’s solution is a variant of the device called “free indirect discourse.” That narrative technique is a basic convention in Victorian novels. Trollope ascribes to his narrative voice an ability to penetrate wholly within the minds, bodies, and feelings of the characters, to coincide closely and totally with them. The narrative voice then speaks for what it finds there at any given moment of the characters’ lives. Trollope gifts his narrative voice with the ability to know the characters completely, without any residue of opacity. The characters are wholly transparent to the narrator. The Last Chronicle of Barset is in narrative technique like most Victorian novels, but not like Henry James’s The Awkward Age, nor like James’s avowed model, the French novels of “Gyp.” The Last Chronicle is made up primarily of the alternation between passages of dialogue, most often, though not always, between just two of the characters, and passages in which the narrative voice reports to the reader what was going on at a given moment within the subjectivity of one or another of the characters. The Awkward Age and “Gyp’s” novels are almost exclusively dialogue. In such novels the reader is left to infer what the characters are thinking and feeling. 52 Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

The rhetorical or narratological devices that Trollope employs to get inside the characters are extremely varied and supple. I have used the term “free indirect discourse.” That is hardly an adequate term for a narrative strategy that moves within a single paragraph from direct reporting, in the first person, present tense, of what the character said to himself or herself, through free indirect discourse proper, that reports in the third person past tense what the character probably said to himself or herself in the fi rst person present tense, to a more general description, in the language of the narrative voice, not demonstrably the character’s own language, of the character’s state of mind and feelings, of his or her total awareness of his life situation at that moment. It is at this third level that the narrative voice is likely to employ figures of speech that appear not to be the character’s own. They are catachreses for what has no literal language, neither for the character himself or herself, nor for the narrative voice, that ubiquitous “it.” Maurice Blanchot, in “La voix narrative,” calls this “it” “le neutre,” the neutral. Whatever some linguists and narratologists may say or wish to believe, for the sake of scientific clarity, free indirect discourse is notoriously and demonstrably undecidable. I mean by this that in most cases it is impossible to decide whether the language proffered is the character’s own, a transposition into the third person past tense of what the character actually said or thought to himself or herself, or whether it is a turning into language of what was, for the character, a wordless state of mind. In any case, Trollope’s goal in these passages is to make transparent to the reader what is transparent to the narrative voice that speaks as the collective consciousness of the community. The situation of the characters in this imaginary community appears, if you think about it a little, quite uncanny, unsettling, magical, extraordinary, not at all like what I hope and believe is my situation in the real world. Though the characters are completely unaware of it, they are penetrated, known intimately, spied on constantly by the narrative consciousness. This spying is an act of total surveillance like that exercised these days in the United States and abroad by our National Security Agency, through the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and by way of new telecommunication devices like computers, email, the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and even by recording all the conversations we have on the now old-fashioned telephone. Trollope’s narrator’s knowledge, in its entirety, is then transmitted by the printed word to the members of an indefinitely large community Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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of readers. This strange, unreal, situation of the characters is one thing I mean by speaking of this as an imaginary community. It is fictive through and through, quite unlike, in its laws and proprieties and unities, the real world before digitalization. I much regret that something like this all-seeing surveillance is happening to me at this moment, as I type these words on my computer’s keyboard. What once was fiction has now become a deeply disquieting reality. Trollope’s mode of narratological surveillance, however, is so ubiquitous an aspect of the linguistic texture in The Last Chronicle of Barset that a large number of examples might be given. A quite incomplete and rather casual inventory, more or less limited to early parts of the novel, finds examples on pages 107, 115, 186, 202, 212, 227, 270, 293–4, 344, and 587 ff. of the Penguin edition. In the first, the narrative voice represents the bishop’s state of mind as he confronts the latest crisis with his imperious wife, that is, her determination to get Mr. Crawley, who has been accused of theft, out of his pulpit. The second depicts Crawley’s state of mind as he sits brooding, hour after hour, over his plight and over the injustices that have been heaped on his head. The remaining examples, in order, enter the monad named Josiah Crawley again, as he walks home from the bishop’s palace through the mud, exulting about his victory over the bishop and over the she-bishop (“The distaff were more fitting for you,” he had said to Mrs. Proudie [186]); the next presents the Reverend Mr. Robarts as he thinks about his past relation to Crawley and his coming interview with him; the next gives the mind of Major Grantly as he thinks of what he will lose if he defies his family and proposes to Grace Crawley; the next tells what Mrs. Dale thought as she confronted the fact that her daughter Lily might marry after all the man who has jilted her, Adolphus Crosbie; the next presents Henry Grantly again as he as he is on his way by train to propose to Grace; the next reports Grace Crawley’s state of mind just after Henry Grantly has actually proposed; the next recounts what went on in Johnny Eames’s mind as he walked over to Lily Dale’s house to propose to her one last futile time; and the last, an example I find particularly moving, registers the transformation, spread out over a whole chapter, of the archdeacon’s initial hatred of Grace Crawley because she has, as he thinks, entrapped his son into behaving foolishly, into admiration and fatherly love for her, when he recognizes her beauty and goodness.

54 Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

In this last example, two tears ultimately form in the archdeacon’s eyes and “gradually [trickle] down his old nose,” as he confronts Grace and recognizes her nobility. He ends by kissing her and promising that when the cloud passes away from her father she “shall come to us and be our daughter” (595, 596). The sequence culminates in a registration by the narrative voice of the archdeacon’s awareness of his complete change of feeling toward Grace: As he walked across to the Court, whither he was obliged to go, because of his chaise, he was lost in surprise at what had occurred. He had gone to the parsonage hating the girl, and despising his son. Now, as he retraced his steps, his feelings were altogether changed. He admired the girl—and as for his son, even his anger was for the moment altogether gone. He would write to his son at once and implore him to stop the sale [of all his household goods, a sale that Henry Grantly has instigated because he thinks his father will disinherit him if he marries Grace]. He would tell his son all that had occurred, or rather would make Mrs Grantly do so. (596) The reader will see even from this short citation why it is impossible to separate out the narrator knowledge of the characters from their knowledge of themselves and from their knowledge of one another. Each such passage presents all three at once because they all exist at once. The narrative voice finds the characters transparent to it because each character is transparent to himself or herself. Moreover, what the character thinks and feels is always oriented toward other people. It is a form of exposure to other people. The reader will also see that the mode of discourse of such passages is not wholly, or not always, strictly speaking, free indirect discourse. It is a much more supple and variable use of language to represent interior thoughts and feelings. When the narrative voice says Archdeacon Grantly “was lost in surprise at what had occurred,” this is not a transposition of “I am lost in surprise” but an objective description of his state of mind. The locution, “He had gone to the parsonage hating the girl, and despising his son” describes, in my view, a wordless state of mind rather than being a transposition of inner speech, while “He would write his son at once and implore him to stop the sale” may conceivably, though not certainly, be indirect discourse for, “I will write my son at once and implore him to stop the sale.”

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The reader will also note, even from this brief example, that Trollope tends to embed his narrative voice’s reports in a specific material location and situation, as well as in a specific moment in time. Sometimes, however, as I shall show, an iterated self-consciousness, something that went on from time to time through time and was repeated, is represented. The reader will note, in addition, that when the narrative voice enters into the consciousness of a character it finds that the character is wholly transparent to himself or herself. Not only have the archdeacon’s feelings changed. He also knows, with full self-awareness, that they have changed. Moreover, as the reader can also see, the archdeacon’s self-awareness is so intimately identified with his exposure to others, in this case, the change of his feelings toward Grace Crawley, that one would be permitted to say that his self-awareness is an example of the way self-awareness, for Trollope, is always an awareness of others. Grace’s goodness and beauty are transparently evident to the archdeacon as soon as he meets her and looks into her eyes. The narrative voice reports this in a slightly earlier passage in this chapter: Now that he was close to her, he could look into her eyes, and he could see the exact form of her features, and could understand—could not help understanding—the character of her countenance. It was a noble face, having in it nothing that was poor, nothing that was mean, nothing that was shapeless. It was a face that promised infi nite beauty, with a promise that was on the very verge of fulfi llment. [Grace is in her late teens.] There was a play about her mouth as she spoke and a curl in her nostrils, as the eager words came from her, which almost made the selfish father give way. Why had they not told him that she was such a one as this? Why had not Henry himself spoken of the speciality of her beauty? (594) The reader, my reader I mean in this case, need hardly be told that Grace is here being presented as a “Model of Deportment” for all British middleclass maidens to emulate. As Grace is, so should they be. The power of Victorian novels to inculcate behavior and ideological belief is demonstrated in such passages, as a concomitant of their ability to move the reader. Such a passage is far more effective in the instilling of an ideological assumption than a dozen sermons about maidenly modesty, reticence, and courageous self-sacrificing renunciation. Grace gets to marry Henry Grantly and she gets also all the wealth his father bestows on him. She does this by nobly promising the archdeacon that she will never marry Henry as long as 56

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anyone believes that her father is a thief. The reader of the passage about the archdeacon’s surprise at his change of feelings will, finally, note that, for Trollope, a character’s self-awareness is not limited to the situation of the immediate moment. It characteristically looks before and after in a total simultaneous awareness of the whole course of the person’s life. Trollope’s characters have total memory of their pasts and a sure intuition of the future. The archdeacon is shown in an earlier passage, for example, as being, in the midst of his wrath against his son, nevertheless fully aware that he will never be able to carry out his threat to disinherit him. My figure for The Last Chronicle of Barset of a transparent medium, bounded by the frontiers of Barsetshire, in which the characters are embedded as so many windowed monads, must be augmented to describe that medium and all it contains as in constant movement and transition. Trollope himself stresses this feature in a passage quoted earlier from An Autobiography. This temporal change happens as the characters and their relations to one another change, though “gradually,” to use one of Trollope’s favorite words. The narrator moves into one character’s mind, then back out again to report dialogue between two or more characters, then into the mind of a different character, then, eventually, into the mind of the first character at a later, changed stage of his or her life. As was conventional for the Victorian novel, the text of The Last Chronicle is divided into chapters. Abrupt breaks often occur in the shift from one chapter to another. The narrator jumps from one time to another, across a temporal gap, or from one milieu within Barsetshire to another, or even out of Barsetshire into London. An example is the narration of Grace Crawley’s decision to leave Allington to go back home to help tend her sick father, at the end of Chapter 36 (“And then she went” [364]). This is followed immediately at the beginning of the next chapter by a magical transference of the reader to Hook Court in the heart of London’s financial district, “the City”: “Mr Dobbs Broughton and Mr Musselboro were sitting together on a certain morning at their office in the City, discussing the affairs of their joint business” (364). Chapters were then gathered to make each of the weekly parts. Asterisks in the Penguin edition signal the breaks between these parts. The first readers encountered the novel in this discontinuous way, as it came out from week to week. When one milieu has been left for another and then returned to, Trollope tends to recapitulate what has happened to that first milieu in the interim. This gives the novel a gathering forward movement of recapitulation Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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that aims to make everything that happens in all its milieus fully transparent to the reader. The narrator keeps no secrets from the reader.

O N E E X A M P L E D I S P L AY E D

It is impractical, alas, to cite and discuss all the passages of this sort for which I have given page references, much less all the others later in the novel. This is too bad because each differs somewhat from the others. All the features I have identified are not always present or not always present in the same way. Nevertheless, enough is enough. Their length is an essential feature of most of them. One passage of this sort I will, however, cite in extenso. I shall then comment on it, to give the reader a further sense of what such passages are like. I choose the eloquent passage describing what went on in Crawley’s mind as he sat hour after hour brooding over his sufferings. The illustration from the original edition appears in Figure 2, and the passage follows here.

Figure 2. From Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1867), in Chapter 1, as reproduced in the Gutenberg Kindle e-text. The original caption reads, “Mr. and Mrs. Crawley.” 58 Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

The passage and the illustration illuminate one another, in a mixed media give and take. What she [Mrs. Crawley] most dreaded was that he should sit idle over the fire and do nothing. When he was so seated she could read his mind, as though it was open to her as a book. She had been quite right when she had accused him of over-indulgence in his grief. He did give way to it till it became a luxury to him—a luxury which she would not have had the heart to deny him, had she not felt it to be of all luxuries the most pernicious. During these long hours in which he would sit speechless, doing nothing, he was telling himself from minute to minute that of all God’s creatures he was the most heavily afflicted, and was reveling in the sense of the injustice done to him. He was recalling all the facts of his life, his education, which had been costly, and, as regarded knowledge, successful, his vocation to the Church, when in his youth he had determined to devote himself to the ser vice of his Savior, disregarding promotion or the favor of men; the short, sweet days of his early love, in which he had devoted himself again—thinking nothing of self, but everything of her; his diligent working, in which he had ever done his very utmost for the parish in which he was placed, and always his best for the poorest; the success of other men who had been his compeers, and, as he too often told himself, intellectually his inferiors, then of his children, who had been carried off from his love to the churchyard—over whose graves he himself had stood, reading out the pathetic words of the funeral service with unswerving voice and a bleeding heart; and then of his children still living, who loved their mother so much better than they loved him. And he would recall all the circumstances of his poverty—how he had been driven to accept alms, to fly from creditors, to hide himself, to see his chairs and tables seized before the eyes of those over whom he had been set as their spiritual pastor. And in it all, I think, there was nothing so bitter to the man as the derogation from the spiritual grandeur of his position as priest among men, which came as one necessary result from his poverty. St Paul could go forth without money in his purse or shoes to his feet or two suits to his back, and his poverty never stood in the way of his preaching, or hindered the veneration of the faithful. St Paul, indeed, was called upon to bear stripes, was flung into prison, encountered terrible dangers. But Mr Crawley—so he told himself—could have Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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encountered all that without flinching. The stripes and scorn of the unfaithful would have been nothing to him, if only the faithful would have believed in him, poor as he was, as they would have believed in him had he been rich! Even they whom he had most loved treated him almost with derision, because he was now different from them. Dean Arabin had laughed at him because he had persisted in walking ten miles through the mud instead of being conveyed in the dean’s carriage; and yet, after that, he had been driven to accept the dean’s charity! No one respected him. No one! His very wife thought he was a lunatic. And now he had been publicly branded as a thief, and in all likelihood would end his days in a gaol! Such were always his thoughts as he sat idle, silent, moody, over the fire, and his wife knew well their currents. It would certainly be better that he should drive himself to some employment, if any employment could be found possible to him. (115–17) The reader can see that this passage confirms what I have said about the much shorter citation telling of the archdeacon’s face-to-face encounter with Grace. Each of these passages, however, differs from the other in the way it uses the rhetorical devices at the command of the narrative voice to transmit to the reader the interiority of one or another of the characters. I hope the reader will agree with me in admiring the lucidity and power with which Trollope manipulates the narrative voice’s language here. He does this to represent a consciousness of the consciousness of another in a way that transmits this double consciousness into the reader’s own consciousness. It is a facility born of long years of practice in a cunning art of representing imaginary minds. What is done in these passages is so clear that it looks easy, but try it yourself and you will see how difficult it is. The passage I have cited transmits Crawley’s state of mind through his wife’s awareness of that state of mind. The passage expresses a consciousness of someone who is conscious of another’s consciousness: “When he was so seated she could read his mind, as though it was open to her as a book.” To the transparency of Mrs. Crawley to the narrative voice and to herself and the transparency of both to the reader must be added the almost complete transparency of the characters to one another. Notations of this (quite unrealistic) intersubjective transparency abound in the novel. One example is the archdeacon’s instant recognition that Grace is good, pure, and in every way lovable. Another is Henry Grantly’s under60

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standing that Grace loves him in return for his proffered love, though she has not spoken one word of love. This gives him justification to declare, over her objections, that they are engaged and then kissing her on the forehead and the lips to seal their compact. In another scene, Henry Grantly understands that his father is promising him a large inheritance if he will abandon his love for Grace: “The archdeacon uttered no such words as these, and did not even allude to Grace Crawley; but the words were as good as spoken, and had they been spoken ever so plainly the major could not have understood them more clearly” (216). Another passage describes Crawley’s remarkable appearance as others would interpret it: “the repressed indignation of the habitual frown, the long nose and large powerful mouth, the deep furrows on the cheek, and the general look of thought and suffering, all combined to make the appearance of the man remarkable, and to describe to the beholders at once his true character” (178). In yet another place, Major Grantly can tell from the way Mrs. Walker looks, her “air of settled grief,” that she believes Crawley to be guilty, though she does not say so (62). In another comment, the whole group of those in the community who are on the archdeacon’s side against the bishop are said by the narrative voice to understand one another intimately: “It may therefore be supposed that Dr Thorne, and Mrs Thorne, and the archdeacon, knew each other intimately, and understood each other’s feelings on these matters” (100). In another passage, Mr. Robarts is said to understand Crawly perfectly and spontaneously, without needing to think about it: “Mr Robarts, without analyzing it, understood it all, and knew that behind the humility there was a crushing pride—a pride which, in all probability, would rise up and crush him before he could get himself out of the room again” (204). “He understood it all” is a leitmotif in the novel. It occurs repeatedly as an assertion of the clairvoyant insight one character has into the mind and motives of another—for example, on pages 106 and 149. In another passage, Mr. Sowerby of Chaldicotes, “in his day . . . reckoned to be the best preserver of foxes in Barsetshire” (329), is said to have been able to tell whether a landowner is serious about preserving foxes not by anything he says but by whether there are any foxes in his covers. The man’s interiority is known by his milieu: “I don’t care what a man says to me, I can read it all like a book when I see his covers drawn” (329). The image of reading a book, which is what the reader is at that moment doing, reappears here as a figure for total clairvoyance. It is first used to define Mrs. Crawley’s understanding of her Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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husband. Of the limits of this clairvoyant insight of one character into the mind of his neighbor, by way of a sharing of ideals, behaviors, beliefs that define them as members of one community, I shall say something later.

T R O L LO P E V E R S U S AU S T E N

A comparison of Anthony Trollope’s presuppositions about intersubjectivity with Jane Austen’s quite different assumptions will show just how wrong it is to make generalizations about the narratological procedures of nineteenth-century English novels. The whole point of Austen’s Emma (1815), for example, is to show that an intelligent and sensitive girl can make horrible mistakes in her readings of other people. Such a story would be impossible for Trollope because his characters are granted such a large degree of telepathic insight into other people’s minds. For Austen, other people are to a large degree opaque. No direct access to their minds and feelings is possible. Austen’s Emma is an inveterate matchmaker. She especially tries to get her friend Harriet Smith married “above her station.” Harriet is eventually revealed to be the love child of a wealthy tradesman. The father has been supporting his illegitimate daughter with monthly money. Emma at first mistakenly thinks the new vicar, Mr. Elton, is in love with Harriet Smith. She is then horrified and mortified to discover that he is in love with her, Emma. Then she mistakenly thinks Frank Churchill is in love with her, Emma, whereas he is secretly engaged to Jane Fairfax. She invents a whole story, on the basis of a little evidence, about how Jane Fairfax loves and is loved by a married man, Mr. Dixon. She even, mistakenly once more, thinks Frank Churchill is falling in love with Harriet Smith. It never crosses her mind that Mr. Knightly has long loved her, Emma. Emma fears Mr. Knightly may be coming to love Harriet. Nothing of this sort could happen in The Last Chronicle. Such mistakes occur in Emma because each character in the novel, however intelligent and sensitive, is immured in his or her consciousness. Each character is forced to interpret other people indirectly, on the basis of speech, facial expressions, and so on. These are open to gross misreading, even by smart people of good will like Emma. That makes it possible for anyone to put the signs together in a completely mistaken way, as Emma consistently does. She fails Epistemology 101. Austen’s Persuasion (1817), by the way, her last novel, has a heroine and “point 62 Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

of view,” Anne Elliot, who, though subject to the same epistemological limitations as Emma (no direct access to other minds), has admirable insight into other people. She almost always reads the signs right. She is, one might guess, a projection of Jane Austen herself. I think, by the way, that Austen’s rendering of the human predicament is “truer to life” than Trollope’s. For me, a big part of the pleasure of reading Trollope is the delight of entering into an imaginary world that is radically different from the real world in which I believe I live. What a satisfaction to dwell in a realm in which people are to a considerable degree transparent to one another! I delight in this, however imaginary this transparency is, or however much it is like a science fiction wish-fulfillment fantasy in which human beings can fly, as in the Harry Potter stories that have recently been so successful. The difference between Trollope and Austen can be seen clearly in the different ways they employ indirect discourse. That form of language is a basic narratological resource for both novelists. For both, the narrative voice is relatively impersonal, more an “it” than a he or she. In Trollope’s case, however, as in the example I have cited previously, indirect discourse is used to express one character’s spontaneous insight into what the other person is thinking and feeling. Some irony is no doubt involved in the transposition of first person present tense into third person past tense. This transposition puts “She understood it all” in place of “I understand it all.” Trollope’s irony is, however, a relatively gentle distancing. Other examples in The Last Chronicle include the Reverend Crawley’s defiance of Mrs. Proudie, the “She-Bishop”: “The distaff were more fitting for you” (186); or Archdeacon Grantly’s instant recognition that Grace Crawley, whom he has until that moment despised without ever having met her, is in every way worthy to be his son’s wife: “Why had they not told him that she was such a one as this?” (594). The Last Chronicle consists, in large part, of scenes in which one character confronts another. Often the two are in violent opposition, as Crawley is opposed to Mrs. Proudie, or Henry Grantly to his father the archdeacon when the latter objects to his planned marriage to Grace Crawley, or even Grace to the archdeacon when she assures him she will never marry his son as long as her father has not been exonerated. Most of Trollope’s people are characterized by an extreme stubbornness. They stick to their commitments and to being what they are, against all persuasions. Trollope’s characters tend to be willful, even, one might say, Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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pig-headed. The Reverend Crawley, Mrs. Proudie, Grace Crawley, Major Grantly, and Lily Dale are notable examples of this obstinate recalcitrance in The Last Chronicle. Enjoying the way such characters defy the world in order to remain true to themselves is one of the great pleasures of reading Trollope. “Confrontation,” after all, comes from “ frons,” the Latin word for “forehead.” Those who confront one another go head to head. Though those confronting one another face to face, or forehead to forehead, in Trollope’s novels, may be opposed, each, however, has telepathic insight into the other’s thoughts and feelings. Each understands the position of the other. The drama does not arise from misunderstanding or misinterpretation. The all-knowing narrator as collective community consciousness transmits these confrontations to the reader. For Austen, on the contrary, the narrator of Emma (and therefore its reader) knows more than Emma does. Indirect discourse is used as the main resource of the famous Austenian irony generated by superior knowledge. This is especially true if you have read the novel before or have seen the admirable BBC television fi lm adaptation. The latter follows the novel closely, often word for word, though of course it can give little of Emma’s interior monologue as reported through indirect discourse in the novel proper. The whole cinematic narration is, moreover, necessarily truncated, even though the fi lm is four hours long. Here is one good example of the irony of indirect discourse in Emma. The contrast with The Last Chronicle is clear. Emma is reflecting on the way Frank Churchill’s rescue of Harriet Smith from the gypsies is almost certain, she thinks, to be the prelude to a love affair between them. She is radically wrong, as usual. The reader’s recognition that she is once more imagining things generates the acute pleasure of reading this passage of indirect discourse: Such an adventure as this,—a fine young man and a lovely young woman thrown together in such a way, could hardly fail of suggesting certain ideas to the coldest heart and the steadiest brain. So Emma thought, at least. [Here the narrator speaks directly.] Could a linguist, could a grammarian, could even a mathematician have seen what she did, have witnessed their appearance together, and heard their history of it, without feeling

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that circumstances had been at work to make them peculiarly interesting to each other?—How much more must an imaginist, like herself, be on fire with speculation and foresight!—especially with such ground-work of anticipation as her mind had already made. . . . And knowing, as she did, the favourable state of mind of each at this period, it struck her the more. He was wishing to get the better of his attachment to herself [a complete fantasy, by the way], she [Harriet] was just recovering from her mania for Mr. Elton. It seemed as if every thing united to promise the most interesting consequences. It was not possible that the occurrence should not be strongly recommending each to the other. . . . Every thing was to take its natural course, however, neither impelled nor assisted. She would not stir a step, nor drop a hint. No, she had had enough of interference. There could be no harm in a scheme, a mere passive scheme. It was no more than a wish. Beyond that she would on no account proceed. The reader will see how, in this passage, interior speech (“I will not stir a step, nor drop a hint”) is transposed into erlebte rede, as the German’s call free indirect discourse: “She would not stir, nor drop a hint.” Emma is indeed an “imaginist.” She names her own fault, though without recognizing it is a fault. A few pages later another formulation for her proneness to error appears. Mr. Knightly has, through careful and more or less disinterested observation, figured out, correctly, that an understanding exists between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax: He could not understand it; but there were symptoms of intelligence between them—he thought so at least—symptoms of admiration on his [Frank Churchill’s] side, which, once having observed, he could not persuade himself to think entirely devoid of meaning, however he might wish to escape any of Emma’s error’s of imagination. . . . nor could he avoid observations which, unless it were like Cowper and his fi re at twilight, “Myself creating what I saw,” brought him yet stronger suspicion of there being something of private liking, or private understanding even, between Frank Churchill and Jane.

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Trollope’s characters are, for the most part, not imaginists, nor do they create what they see. They see clearly what is there to see, even the goings on in other people’s minds.

LETTERS IN THE LAST CHRONICLE

One important form of the openness of the characters to one another in The Last Chronicle is the letters they exchange. Much could be said about the letters in Trollope’s novels. That Trollope’s characters communicate by letter indicates the technological stage to which Trollope’s novels belong. This is the stage just before the telegraph and then the telephone began to displace the postal system as the dominant means of communication at a distance. The telegraph makes one crucial appearance in The Last Chronicle of Barset. Mrs. Arabin sends “a message by the wires” (742) from Venice to let Crawley’s lawyer, Mr. Toogood, know that she has given the check to Crawley and that he has not stolen it. The happy dénouement of the novel is brought about in the nick of time, just before Crawley’s trial is to begin, by a new technology that will gradually replace written letters for many purposes, as email is today replacing the postal system. The good news Mrs. Arabin’s telegram brings, however, is spread throughout the community neither by telegraph nor by letters but by good old-fashioned word of mouth, an extremely efficient and almost instantaneous means of communication in a rural community, then as now. A servant is in the room when Mrs. Arabin’s telegram is read. She tells all the other servants, who tell those in other houses. Lawyer Walker’s daughter “hurried out of the room to convey the secret to her special circle of friends” (“It was known throughout Silverbridge that night, and indeed it made so much commotion that it kept many people for an hour out of their beds” [743]). Anthony Trollope was for many years a fairly high official in the British Post Office. He was the inventor of the pillar post-box. He devoted himself to making the entire British postal system more efficient, for example by working, on the scene, to improve rural postal pickup and delivery and by making trips to Ireland, the United States, the West Indies, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, in part in his official capacity as a representative of the British Post Office. He traveled for the sake of improving the efficiency with which letters were sent and received in such far-flung places. Most of those places, it will be noted, were parts of the British Empire. The 66

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wireless “wiring” of the whole world is these days a major concomitant of globalization. Emails can be sent and received by me on my remote island in Maine from and to all over the world. In Trollope’s day, however, the British Empire depended on an efficient postal system that could put all parts of the empire in rapid communication with one another. This made these distant places all part of an Empire-spanning network of communication ensuring the hegemony of the Queen and of the imperial bureaucracy, not to speak of the worldwide English commercial domination. Speaking of his work over a two-year period to improve the Irish postal system, Trollope says: It is amusing to watch how a passion will grow upon a man. During those two years it was the ambition of my life to cover the country with rural Letter Carriers. I do not remember that in any case a rural post proposed by me was negatived by the authorities . . . . In all those visits [to remote farmhouses] I was in truth a beneficent angel to the public,—bringing everywhere with me an earlier, cheaper, and much more regular delivery of letters. But not infrequently the angelic nature of my mission was imperfectly understood. . . . I did, however, do my work, and I can look back upon what I did with thorough satisfaction. I was altogether in earnest, and I believe that many a farmer has his letters brought daily to his house free of charge, who but for me would still have had to send to the post town for them twice a week, or have paid a man for bringing them irregularly to his door. (AA, 61, 62, 63) The word “angel,” of course, means, etymologically, “messenger,” from the Greek word “angelos.” In The Last Chronicle, Trollope plays on this by having Crawley, who knows Greek, confound the bishop’s messenger, the hapless Mr. Thumble, by telling him, “I will regard you as one of the angels of the church” (132). Trollope’s goal, it might be said, was to provide angelically quick and perfect communication by letter throughout the whole British Empire. It does not take much in the way of “analogical apperception” to see that the angelic transparency of persons to one another [angels are telepathic] and, through the narrative voice, to us the readers, in The Last Chronicle of Barset, is analogous to the rapid sending and receiving of letters he strove to bring into being for the British postal system. He wanted to make them all, it could be said, members of one community, just as he wants to make us readers members of an imaginary angelic community generated Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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by the novel’s words. The postal system is an alternative metaphor to the telegraphy and typesetting ones that he uses in An Autobiography to defi ne his goals as a writer. The latter are cited earlier in this chapter. Trollope is quite circumstantial about the conditions of letter sending and receiving in England at the time of the novel. You could say that in The Last Chronicle a letter always reaches its destination. I am thinking of the quarrel about this between Lacan and Derrida over the meaning of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” Letters in Trollope are never purloined or intercepted along the way. They always get to where they are addressed and they get there promptly and without delay, the same day or the next. In one scene, Johnny Eames is shown dealing rapidly with the letters that have accumulated for him in his lodgings in London while he has been away making his last futile proposal to Lily Dale. His work in the “General Office” is as a private secretary to Sir Raffle Buffle. He writes innumerable letters that present Sir Raffle’s compliments but that give “in no one note a single word of information that could be of use to any person” (388). In another earlier scene, the role receiving letters plays in the daily ritual of Lily Dale’s household is charmingly and circumstantially described: The ladies at the Small House at Allington breakfasted always at nine—a liberal nine; and the postman whose duty it was to deliver letters in that village at half-past eight, being also liberal in his ideas as to time, always arrived punctually in the middle of breakfast, so that Mrs Dale expected her letters, and Lily hers, just before their second cup of tea, as though the letters formed a part of the morning meal. Jane, the maidservant, always brought them in, and handed them to Mrs Dale—for Lily had in these days come to preside at the breakfast-table; and then there would be an examination of the outsides before the envelopes were violated, and as each party knew pretty well the circumstances of the correspondence of the other, there would be some guessing as to what this or that epistle might contain; and after that a reading out loud of passages, and not unfrequently of the entire letter. (221) Trollope does not write epistolary novels. Nevertheless, hardly a novel by him is without interpolated letters. These letters are models of clarity and eloquence. Trollope ascribes to all of his characters, or almost all, an ability to say in letters what they mean, to communicate their thoughts and feelings clearly, completely, and succinctly to the recipient of the letter and to 68

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us as readers of the letters. The letters are an important device by which Trollope conveys to the reader what the letter-writer is like at that moment of his or her life. Trollope not infrequently says something like what he says about the letter from Adolphus Crosbie to Lily Dale’s mother: “Our story will perhaps be best told by communicating the letter to the reader before it was discussed with Lily. The letter was as follows:—” (223). In one sense, the letters are purloined, intercepted, often before they reach their destinations, since they are illicitly opened and exposed to the reader. We get to read the letters sent from Crawley to his bishop, refusing to comply with the bishop’s epistolary order that he cease preaching in his church. We get to read that letter from Crosbie, the man who has foully jilted Lily, and we read Mrs. Dale’s curt reply. We read Major Grantly’s letter to Grace after he has proposed to her. We read her noble letter of renunciation, refusing to marry him while he father is accused of theft, but not able to bring herself to lie by saying she does not love him. The transparency of the characters to one another and to the reader is emblematized in the letters they exchange. The reader purloins these with impunity, through the connivance of the narrative voice.

B AC K TO C R AW L E Y ’S H A L F  I N S A N E B R O O D I N G S

I have shown how a universal transparency among the characters is exemplified in the notation of Crawley’s self-pitying broodings. A second peculiarity of the passage I have cited is that, for all its circumstantial detail, it does not describe just a single moment, the instant the reader is in at that stage of the narration. Mrs. Crawley is torn between her awareness that it will be good for her husband to go out among his poor parishioners and her fear that he may be intending to commit suicide. The passage describes an iterated scene, one that takes place over and over again. Crawley habitually and on many different occasions sits by the fire feeling sorry for himself, luxuriating in his self-pity: “During these long hours, in which he would sit speechless, doing nothing, he was telling himself from minute to minute that of all God’s creatures he was the most heavily afflicted, and was reveling in the sense of the injustice done to him.” In spite of the passage’s specificity, its goal is to present a global and longcontinued state of mind. The narrative voice presents what Crawley felt like to himself as he sat brooding by the fire. That state of mind is elaborately Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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reticulated. It is made of a whole series of distinct thoughts, or rather memories that follow one another, linked by a “then”—for example, “then of his children.” He thinks of the all the circumstances of his past and present life, his education, his marriage, his children, dead and live, his ministry, his poverty, the low esteem in which he is held, as opposed to St. Paul, and, finally, of his present misery as a man accused unjustly of theft. Generally in such passages, Trollope’s characters are not just transparently present to themselves in the present. Their whole past lives are also transparently present to them, in a total simultaneous panoramic memory. Any detail of that whole may be called up spontaneously and without effort. Finally, this passage exemplifies that limitation of describing Trollope’s procedure as a species of the free indirect discourse I mentioned earlier. Some of the language of this paragraph seems to be, though the reader can never be absolutely certain, a transposition of words Crawley actually said to himself. “I could encounter all that without f linching” has become “But Mr. Crawley—so he told himself—could have encountered all that without flinching.” Other sentences seem more likely to be the transcription into language by the narrative voice of what was wordless thinking on Mr. Crawley’s part: “then of his children, who had been carried off from his love to the churchyard.” Other passages move more definitely into the detached language of the narrative voice, speaking here of itself as an “I”: “And in it all, I think, there was nothing so bitter to the man as the derogation from the spiritual grandeur of his position, as priest among men.” The best description of the passage’s discourse mode or linguistic strategy is to say that it is generated by a constant alternation, or fluctuation, or coming and going, between, on the one hand, transposition of words Crawley actually said to himself from first person present tense into third person past tense and, on the other hand, language spoken by the narrative voice either to give language to what was a wordless state of mind in Crawley or to pass judgment from a further position outside. The narrative voice in the latter case speaks for the opinion of the community’s collective consciousness in an “I think.” This “I” is not a singular person but a collective personage speaking of itself as an “I.” All that I have said so far would strongly support the conclusion that The Last Chronicle of Barset is, as one might have expected from the beginning, a magnificent example of the first kind of community Marx and Jean-Luc Nancy describe. It is an organic collection of people living together, know70

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ing one another well, and sharing ideals and assumptions. It is, in Tönnies’s terms, a Gemeinschaft, not a Gesellschaft. Nancy, you will remember from Chapter 1, denounces the Gemeinschaft model as untrue to the actual form human beings living together in communities takes. Barsetshire, it would appear, is a spectacularly pure example, pace Nancy, of his first kind of community. It is a community of members who are all essentially alike and who share similar beliefs, values, and judgments. Therefore they are able to understand one another perfectly. They live in a universal happy transparency that leaves no dark corner of secrets unilluminated or opaque. A total transference of this transparency into the mind of the reader is therefore possible. All men and women in this community are my friends, my brothers and sisters, in an all-encompassing brotherhood and sisterhood that recalls the ideals of the earliest Christian communities. These ideals are mimed even today when a baby is baptized in a Christian church into the local “community of Christians.” The congregation all join in to express their solidarity with one another, their brotherhood and sisterhood in Christ, and to welcome the new member, now given a name in God’s name, and so incorporated into the community.

FA L L I N G I N LO V E A S A B L AC K H O L E I N CO M M U N I T Y T R A N S PA R E N C Y

No girl ever lived with any beauty belonging to her who had a smaller knowledge of her own possession than Grace Crawley. Nor had she the slightest pride in her own acquirements. (293) One major problem appears at once in this characterization of The Last Chronicle of Barset. How, if the transparency is so total, can there be any story at all, any change in the characters or in their relations to one another? I propose the following formula: Stories in Trollope’s novels arise from perturbations in the general transparency that may be compared to black holes as they disturb or occlude the transparency of cosmic space. In order to demonstrate the truth of my proposition, let me begin by looking carefully at another of those passages I listed that represent consciousness as consciousness of another consciousness. This one describes Grace’s mind and feelings just after Henry Grantly has proposed to her and while she is deciding just how to say what she must say in refusing him: Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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She had said no word to him yet, except that one in which she had acknowledged her love for his child, and had expressed no surprise, even in her countenance, at his proposal. And yet the idea that he should do such a thing [as propose to her], since the idea that he certainly would do it had become clear to her, had fi lled her with a world of surprise. No girl ever lived with any beauty belonging to her who had a smaller knowledge of her own possession than Grace Crawley. Nor had the slightest pride in her own acquirements. That she had been taught in many things more than had been taught to other girls, had come of her poverty and of the desolation of her home. She had learned to read Greek and Italian because there had been nothing else for her to do in that sad house. And, subsequently, accuracy of knowledge had been necessary for the earning of her bread. I think that Grace had at times been weak enough to envy the idleness and almost to envy the ignorance of other girls. Her figure was light, perfect in symmetry, full of grace at all points; but she had thought nothing of her figure, remembering only the poverty of her dress, but remembering also with a brave resolution that she would never be ashamed of it. And as her acquaintance with Major Grantly had begun and had grown, and as she had learned to feel unconsciously that his company was pleasanter to her than that of any other person she knew, she had still told herself that anything like love must be out of the question. But then words had been spoken, and there had been glances in his eye, and a tone in his voice, and a touch upon his fingers, of which she could not altogether refuse to accept the meaning. And others had spoken to her of it, the two Miss Prettymans and her friend Lily. Yet she would not admit to herself that it could be so, and she would not allow herself to confess to herself that she loved him. Then had come the last killing misery to which her father had been subjected. He had been accused of stealing money, and had been committed to be tried for the theft. From that moment, at any rate, any hope, if there had been a hope, must be crushed. But she swore to herself bravely that there had been no such hope. And she assured herself also that nothing had passed which had entitled her to expect anything beyond ordinary friendship from the man of whom she certainly had thought much. Even if those touches and those tones and those glances had meant anything, all such meaning must be annihilated by this disgrace which had come upon her. She might know that her father was innocent; she might be sure, at any rate, that he had been 72

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innocent in intention, but the world thought differently, and she, her brothers and sister, and her mother and her poor father, must bend to the world’s opinion. If those dangerous joys had meant anything, they must be taken as meaning nothing more. Thus she argued with herself, and, fortified by such self-teachings, she had come down to Allington. . . . She had expected nothing, hoped for nothing, and yet when nothing came she was sad. She thought of one special half-hour in which he had said almost all that he might have said— more than he ought to have said—of a moment during which her hand had remained in his; of a certain pressure with which he had put her shawl upon her shoulders. If he had only written to her one word to tell her that he believed her father was innocent! But no; she had no right to expect anything from him. And then Lily had ceased to talk of him, and she did expect nothing. Now he was there before her, asking her to become his wife. (293–5) For the most part, this passage exemplifies all those traits I have found in the passage using free indirect discourse to describe Crawley’s self-luxuriating brooding. As she pauses before deciding just how to refuse Henry Grantly’s proposal, Grace’s whole life situation is present to her in a total simultaneous sense of herself in relation to other people. This is eloquently transmitted to the reader by the narrative voice. Trollope does this by means of those devices of closeness and distance from Grace’s own inner speech that I have identified for the Josiah Crawley passage. This passage differs from the other, however, in two crucial ways. The narrative voice knows and tells more about Grace Crawley than she knows about herself. As a result, the coincidence between the narrative consciousness and the character’s consciousness is not perfect. Moreover, Grace is not wholly transparent to herself. In a substantial part of the passage the narrative voice is telling the reader things about Grace of which she is ignorant: “No girl ever lived with any beauty belonging to her who had a smaller knowledge of her own possession than Grace Crawley. Nor had she the slightest pride in her own acquirements.” And so on. The careful reader may have noted that an obscure play on words, unusual for Trollope and only implicit, is used to describe Grace’s peculiar beauty: “Her figure was light, perfect symmetry, full of grace at all points . . .” (294). Grace is graceful. Some obscure echo of the religious meaning of the word “grace” also attaches to her name. It names what she is, not only graceful but Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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full of grace. If Mrs. Walker can see nothing in her, the narrative voice certainly can. The name is played on again when Mr. Crawley tells Henry, “She is fit to grace the house of the best gentleman in England, had I not made her unfit,” to which Henry answers, “She shall grace mine. . . . By God, she shall!—tomorrow, if she’ll have me” (675). In another later place, the narrative voice tells the reader that Grace had refused Henry Grantly’s proposal “lest she should bring disgrace upon him” (841). The word “disgrace” already appears in the passage I have just cited: “Even if those touches and those tones and those glances had meant anything, all such meaning must be annihilated by this disgrace which had come upon her.” The word “disgrace” also appears in many other places as a name for Grace’s feeling of being unfit for life as a gentlewoman, for example to continue her teaching or to marry Major Grantly. In representing Grace’s partial transparency to herself, Trollope has a delicate balance to keep. Modest Victorian maidens were not supposed to be aware of their beauty or intelligence and not supposed to have any pride in these. They were also supposed to be able to be in love without admitting to themselves that they were in love. They must wait until their Prince Charming condescends to wake them from their sleeping-beauty slumber. Then they could admit to themselves that they have long, unconsciously, loved their lover. They must know and yet not know that they are in love, a neat trick if you can do it. Grace Crawley is a splendid example of this contradiction. Once more, the narrative voice has to speak for her, from a certain distance outside her own consciousness, in order to be able to say for her what she was incapable of saying for herself: And as her acquaintance with Major Grantly had begun and had grown, and as she had learned to feel unconsciously that his company was pleasanter to her than that of any other person she knew, she had still told herself that anything like love must be out of the question. But then words had been spoken, and there had been glances in his eye, and a tone in his voice, and a touch upon his fingers, of which she could not altogether refuse to accept the meaning. . . . If those dangerous joys had meant anything, they must be taken as meaning nothing more. Thus she had argued with herself . . . (294) A Trollopean unconscious does after all exist, though one no doubt quite different from the Freudian one. Grace is here divided into two persons and 74

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“argues with herself.” One self obeys the conventional law that says a maiden must not speak until spoken to. She must not know her own love except in response to the declared love of her lover, which may or may not ever come. Once her lover’s love is declared, however, she must fi nd that she is already in love with him, from some initiatory moment that she is unable to recover in her memory. On this point, her memory is imperfect, however perfectly she may otherwise remember all her past. This strange, temporal dialectic of falling in love appears in many other Trollope novels, for example in Ayala’s Angel. The moment of falling in love is an event, a life-determining occurrence. Trollope’s good characters fall in love once and for all. Falling in love is not, however, experienced as such at the moment of its happening. Only in retrospect can you locate what was a decisive break in your life. Such was the situation of unmarried women in Trollope’s day. It was controlled by a set of ideological assumptions that his novels strongly reinforce. But if Grace, as a good and graceful girl, must not know that she is in love, nevertheless her integrity and goodness depend on falling in love, “unconsciously,” once and for all, and then sticking stubbornly to that spontaneous commitment of her whole self to another person. Falling in love and being in love are absolutes for Trollope. It is a rock bottom unquestioned and unquestionable ideologeme for him and presumably for many of his readers. The causes of a genuine falling in love and then remaining in love are mysterious, irrational, hidden, secret. A man happens to fall in a girl’s way, or a girl in a man’s way, and they spontaneously fall in love. Th is love is an orientation of their whole beings toward one another. Such falling in love is not able to be made transparent, explicable, or rationally justified either to the character to whom it happens, nor to the narrative voice, nor to the reader by way of the narration. Falling in love, as it happens regularly here and there to unmarried persons in a Trollopean community, is therefore a set of black holes in the general community transparency. Since marriage, in those communities, as in most communities real and imaginary, is the means by which the community is continued from generation to generation through the procreation of children and through the redistribution of property, rank, and wealth, one can say that the community depends absolutely on what denies its chief characteristic: its openness. Only when love is mutually expressed and the couple has been married is the opacity removed and the couple assimilated into the community transparency. Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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This explains why Trollope’s communities are so fascinated by the question of what men the unmarried daughters will marry. An unmarried young woman is different, mysterious, unassimilated, secret: a black hole. As a result, everyone around, each family member or friend, is anxious to get that young woman married off. Everybody wants the secret to vanish. To some degree, nevertheless, the secret remains permanently in place as the unexplained opacity of why this particular young woman came to fall in love with just that young man, or that young man with that particular young woman. In his presentation of the courtship of Henry Grantly and Grace Crawley, Trollope subtly and delicately dramatizes the exposure of two persons to the singularity and otherness of another person as it exposes also their own secrecy or otherness to themselves. Grace has “unconsciously” fallen in love with Henry Grantly. It is not something for which she is responsible or can be held responsible. It happens in a way that is beyond her control. As is characteristic of Trollope’s novels, the falling in love in Grace’s case takes place against the opposition of family and friends. The archdeacon and Mrs. Grantly, Henry’s parents, are social climbers, social snobs, or at least the archdeacon is. He rejoices that his daughter has married Lord Hartletop, a marquis, and that their child is little Lord Dumbello. They hate the thought of a marriage alliance to a girl without money whose father has been accused of theft. The community in general cannot understand Henry’s love for Grace, as is indicated by a passage I cited earlier about how the whole community thought Henry must be pretty soft to fall for Grace; they think he must have been entrapped: “Mrs Walker, the most good-natured woman in Silverbridge, had acknowledged to her daughter that she could not understand it—that she could not see anything at all in Grace Crawley” (19). Why did Henry Grantly fall in love with Grace? Why did she return his love? No answer other than contingent ones can be given to those questions, but once falling in love happens, it is irrevocable. The community is renewed by what subverts it, in locations here and there within the community of inexplicable and, strictly speaking, unjustifiable, allegiances that bind two people to one another for life. Trollope’s communities are by no means examples of total group solidarity. The community of Barsetshire is characterized by intense antagonisms and oppositions, for example that between Crawley and Mrs. Proudie, in which each person must hold up his or her part in the game and stand up for himself or herself with unshakable stubbornness. Grace does this in refusing Henry. Lily does it in refusing Johnny Eames. 76

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Trollope’s characters play their roles to the hilt, with a kind of joyous abandon to being themselves, often in stubborn opposition to all the others. Trollope takes special joy in presenting acts of justified defiance—for example, the great scene in which the abject Mr. Crawley defies the bishop and his wife and walks home through the mud exulting in his victory. Trollope clearly revels in Crawley’s stubbornness. In explaining how difficult it will be for Crawley’s friends to get him to agree to hire a lawyer to defend him, the narrator gives an eloquent characterization of his obstinacy. It would apply, mutatis mutandis, to the other main characters, too. The Last Chronicle might almost be called a novel about varieties of stubbornness: “That there would be a difficulty was acknowledged. Mr Crawley was known to be a man not easy of persuasion, with a will of his own, with a great energy of obstinacy on points which he chose to take up as being of importance to his calling, or to his own professional status. He had pleaded his own cause before the magistrates, and it might be that he would insist on doing the same thing before the judge” (103). “Will of his own” here is a synonym for stubbornness, for obstinately holding one’s own, as in the narrator’s description of Lily Dale’s behavior after she has been jilted by Adolphus Crosbie: “But she had been very strong, stout at heart, of a fi xed purpose, and capable of resistance against oppression. Even her own mother had been astonished, and sometimes almost dismayed, by the strength of her will” (160).

A N OT H E R B L AC K H O L E

Several other story lines in The Last Chronicle of Barset can be seen as commentaries on Grace Crawley’s love story, or as analogies for it. The reader will remember that Trollope says that in a good novel all must be unified, the story all one, though he allows for subsidiary stories that contribute to the understanding of the chief story line. I claim that the unity of The Last Chronicle of Barset lies not in one story line, with analogous subplots, but in a series of stories about those exemplary black holes I have mentioned. These stories echo one another. A right reading of the novel lies in confronting those black holes, in noticing they are there, and in trying to understand their import as they resonate among themselves. The love story of Grace Crawley and Henry Grantly has a happy ending because each loves the other with a love that comes spontaneously and without self-conscious decision from the depths of the self. These depths are an Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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underground ground of the self where the self is not even known to itself. They are at a level of singularity and otherness. Even though such depths are alien to the community’s openness, the allegiances they provoke and support can be assimilated into the community by the sacrament of marriage. These alliances thereby keep the community going from generation to generation. The black holes of inaugural allegiances, by a perverse law, bring renovating novelty into the community. In many cases in Trollope’s novels, the renovating marriages take place against one form or another of the community’s collective opposition. The community is kept viable by what opposes it. What happens, however, if something goes wrong with this transaction, if, as Thomas Hardy puts it in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, “the coarse appropriates the fi ner . . . , the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man”? The story of Lily Dale and Johnny Eames in The Small House at Allington, with its climax in The Last Chronicle of Barset, is an example of such a contretemps or misalignment. Johnny loves Lily with his whole heart. It is a total, irrevocable, and permanent commitment, like that of Grace or Henry for one another. Being in love with Lily is what Johnny Eames is. All Lily’s family and friends support Johnny’s suit and approve of it. Lily, however, in The Small House at Allington, gives herself heart and soul to Adolphus Crosbie, just before Johnny gets established enough in the world to propose to her. Crosbie then crassly jilts Lily to marry a society heiress. This produces a permanent impasse that cannot lead to a happy ending, When Crosbie’s wife dies and he tries to approach Lily again she (wisely) refuses to have anything to do with him. She nevertheless goes on refusing Johnny’s repeated proposals. She explains to Johnny on the occasion of yet one more of these forlorn proposals that she still loves Crosbie, even though she knows full well what an unworthy bounder he is. The scene of Johnny’s proposal is one of the great scenes in Trollope for understanding the ideology of being in love in Victorian fiction and in Victorian culture. When Johnny asks Lily what it is that hinders her from accepting his proposal, she answers in an act of total self-exposure. She shares her secret singularity with the lover she must refuse: I will tell you. You are so good and true, and so excellent—such a dear, dear, dear friend, that I will tell you everything, so that you may read my heart. I will tell you as I tell mamma—you and her and no one else—for 78 Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

you are the choice friend of my heart. I cannot be your wife because of the love I bear for another man. . . . I think, Johnny, you and I are alike in this, that when we have loved we cannot bring ourselves to change. You will not change, though it would be so much better you should do so. . . . Nor can I. When I sleep I dream of him. When I am alone I cannot banish him from my thoughts. I cannot define what it is to love him. I want nothing from him—nothing, nothing. But I move about through my little world thinking of him, and I shall do so to the end. . . . You I cannot marry. Him I will not marry. (352, 354) The thing that defi nes Lily’s integrity, the quality that makes her like Grace, is her ability to be in love once only, once and for all. The result in her case is that she must remain separate and alone, as Johnny Eames must also do. Neither is ever fully assimilated into the community, which only marrying and having children, she and others are shown as thinking, would suffice to bring about. As Lily promises Johnny she will do, she goes home and writes down two words after her name in her notebook: “Lilian Dale— Old Maid” (358). Just why Lily made the big mistake of falling in love with Crosbie is not explained. It cannot be explained. It is, like Grace’s love for Henry Grantly, or like his for her, or like Johnny Eames’s love for Lily, inexplicable. It is a black hole in the general transparency of the Barsetshire community. Lily’s catastrophe arises from a possibility that is latent in the Trollopean ideology of loving. She loves a man who is incapable of loving anyone in the way she loves him, whatever he may say, when he approaches her again, about never having ceased to love her even when he was married to another woman. To have jilted Lily proves his lack of integrity.

A CO U N T E R E X A M P L E

The London episodes of Madalina Demolines, Conway Dalrymple, and the Dobbs Broughtons provide a counter example helping to defi ne the role of genuine loving as both subversion and renewal of the Barset community. The London episodes are interleaved with the Barsetshire ones, with abrupt discontinuous breaks between chapters or weekly parts that signal the shift from one storyline to the other. This alternation-without-transition forms the rhythm of The Last Chronicle’s narration. The early reviewers, and perhaps many modern readers too, have found the London episodes unpleasant Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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and unnecessary. According to the unsigned notice in the Athenaeum of August 3, 1867, “Miss Clara van Siever, Madalina Demolines, with the two old harridans, their mothers, Musselborough, Bangles, Dobbs Broughton and Mrs. Dobbs Broughton, even Conway himself, and all the story of the mock loves of Madalina and Mrs. Dobbs Broughton are altogether out of place. No one ever wishes to hear of them further; their introduction is a mistake.” With all due respect for the Athenaeum reviewer, I must disagree. I think he or she missed the point, which is a somewhat subtle and contradictory one. The London episodes dramatize negative examples, examples of inauthentic loving that help the reader to understand the authentic loving of Grace and Henry, Lily and Johnny. A further implication is that genuine communities are unlikely or impossible in a big city. A good community, a Gemeinschaft, is, as Raymond Williams also believed, only possible in a rural setting. Neither Madalina Demolines nor Mrs. Dobbs Broughton is capable of anything more than playacting at being in love. Of his fl irtation with Madalina, Johnny Eames says, “It’s as good as a play” (259). The narrative voice describes the extramarital fl irtation of Mrs. Dobbs Broughton in similar terms: Croquet is a pretty game out of doors, and chess is delightful in a drawingroom. Battledore and shuttlecock and hunt-the-slipper have also their attractions. Proverbs are good, and cross questions with crooked answers may be made very amusing. But none of these games are equal to the game of love-making—providing that the players can be quite sure that there shall be no heart in the matter. Any touch of heart not only destroys the pleasure of the game, but makes the player awkward and incapable and robs him of his skill. And thus it is that there are many people who cannot play the game at all. A deficiency of some needed internal physical strength prevents the owners of the heart from keeping a proper control over its valves, and thus emotion sets in, and the pulses are accelerated, and feeling supervenes. For such a one to attempt a game of love-making, is as though your friend with the gout should insist on playing croquet. A sense of the ridiculous, if nothing else, should in either case deter the affl icted one from the attempt. There was no such absurdity with our friend Mrs Dobbs Broughton and Conway Dalrymple. Their valves and pulses were all right. They could play the game without the slightest 80

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danger of any inconvenient result—of any inconvenient result, that is, as regarded their own feelings. (266–7) For these disagreeable and disreputable people, love can never be more than a play or a game. Though Mrs. Dobbs Broughton “probably loved her husband in a sensible, humdrum way, feeling him to be a bore, knowing him to be vulgar, aware that he often took a good deal more wine than was good for him, and that he was almost as uneducated as a hog” (267), she is entirely incapable of the kind of loving Grace, Lily, or Mrs. Crawley exemplify. Madalina’s goal is to entrap Johnny Eames into a breech of promise. In a powerfully comic scene he has to call out the window to a passing London bobby to extricate himself. The London group of personages cannot by any stretch of the imagination be defi ned as a “community.” They are too superficial. The figure of meretricious playacting is further dramatized in the picture of Miss Van Siever as Jael driving the nail into Sisera’s head in the Old Testament story (with the rascal Musselborough, Dobbs Broughton’s business partner in the City, as Sisera). The society portrait painter Conway Dalrymple is painting this parodic masterpiece in Mrs. Dobbs Broughton’s boudoir, without the knowledge of the latter’s husband. The portrait of Mrs. Dobbs Broughton as the Th ree Graces that Conway has previously painted makes the same point. Trollope is here making fun of those Victorian portraits that showed members of the British middle class in fancy dress pretending to be someone other than who they were, often some mythological personage Though Trollope does not call attention to the sardonic echo, the reader is invited to set Grace Crawley, with all her grace, against the triple portrait of Mrs. Dobbs Broughton facing three ways, to the front and to each side, in a representation of the three Graces. If they were not side by side but superimposed, something like a Picasso might have been produced before its time by the ironic Conway Dalrymple. Conway knows quite well what fools he is making of these people, as he gets gradually rich from their fees. These London episodes are analogous to the whole atmosphere and milieu of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), but the function of the London stories in The Last Chronicle is to show by contrast to the Barsetshire community what a non-community is like. When Dobbs Broughton’s speculations fail and he blows out his brains, something real happens in London all right. It is a real event, however, that passes judgment on the hollowness Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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of a prosperity that rests on shaky ground, as opposed to the solid ground of landowning and money invested in the “two per cents” of the prosperous Barsetshire folk like Archdeacon Grantly. Dobbs Broughton’s death sets the seal upon his fakery. The deaths in Barsetshire of old Mr. Harding and even of Mrs. Proudie, on the contrary, confi rm them as having been consistently themselves throughout their lives. They stubbornly remain what they are. Death, however, can be defined as another form of singularity. It is another black hole in the community transparency. In dying, these characters take the secrets of their different integrities with them to the grave. Trollope’s narrative voice insists on the secrecy of Mrs. Proudie’s self-awareness and self-condemnation in her last days before her death by a heart attack. Mr. Harding fades so gradually from life into death that, in his case at least, the continuity from one time to another of Trollope’s good persons throughout his or her life, is preserved almost beyond the grave. “Gradually,” as I have elsewhere observed, is a key concept in Trollope’s narrative of character development. His good characters change, if they change at all, so gradually that the change is almost imperceptible. Harding’s death is somewhat like the extremely long drawn out happy ending of The Last Chronicle. The ending goes on for chapter to chapter after the revelation that Crawley has not stolen the check for twenty pounds, just as Mr. Harding dies by inches, so to speak: “It was manifest to all now that he became feebler and feebler from day to day, and that he would never leave his bed again” (830). Another contradictory implication of the London episodes may be evanescently glimpsed. It is a never-explictly-articulated suggestion generated by their juxtaposition with the Barsetshire stories. We are, after all, reading a novel, one that is certainly “as good as a play.” Trollope did indeed write a few plays, though never with much success. The Barsetshire people play their characters to the hilt, but that playing is to some degree role-playing. The London scenes suggest, ever so discreetly, and perhaps only to a reader who, like me, is given to suspicious, ironic reading, that the difference between the London characters and the Barsetshire characters may not be absolute. The two sets of characters may, to some degree, be analogous. To put this another way, the solidly grounded loving of the good characters has to be taken on faith. By definition it remains secret, hidden, other, unintelligible, a black hole. Jacques Derrida in his seminar on the utterance “je t’aime” has persuasively argued that when someone says that to me I must take it 82

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on faith. I do not have access to the grounds in substantial loving the declaration of love may or may not have. Moreover, “ je t’aime” is a performative utterance, not a constative one. It brings about the thing it names and brings about also my loving in response to the “je t’aime” my beloved utters to me. As Derrida persuasively argues in Limited Inc., it is not the case that the parodic or parasitical speech act is straightforwardly subsidiary to the “standard” speech act. Each depends on the other and is its ground of possibility. “A standard act,” says Derrida, “depends as much upon the possibility of being repeated, and thus potentially [éventuellement] of being mimed, feigned, cited, played, simulated, parasited, etc., as the latter possibility depends upon the possibility said to be opposed to it.” Trollope’s careful account of the way Major Grantly talks himself into believing that things have gone too far between him and Grace to allow him to abandon his courtship can be seen as not absolutely different from the mock loves of Madalina and Mrs. Dobbs Broughton. It is impossible to know. No way exists to penetrate a black hole, not even with the clairvoyant power possessed by the narrative voice. The characters are, after all, imaginary beings, initially figures in Trollope’s own internal theater, in some sense fictive, factitious. He is free to ascribe to them what secrets he likes, even secrets from his narrative voice’s telepathic penetration. As for Lily Dale’s sticking to her love for Adolphus Crosbie and refusing the patiently, or not so patiently, iterated proposals of Johnny Eames, Trollope himself is in An Autobiography far harder on Lily than I have been. He calls her a prig. This word suggests a fraudulent and deliberate pretense of virtue. The American Heritage Dictionary defines a prig as “a person regarded as overprecise, affectedly arrogant, smug, or narrow-minded.” Who is Lily to give herself such airs? She should take Johnny and be grateful. Far from being “authentic,” she is perhaps in her own way as bad as Madalina or as Mrs Dobbs Broughton, née Maria Clutterbuck. Here is the way Trollope puts this: In the love with which she has been greeted, I have hardly joined with much enthusiasm, feeling that she is somewhat of a female prig. She became first engaged to a snob who jilted her, and then, though in truth she loved another man who was hardly good enough, she could not extricate herself sufficiently from the collapse of her first great misfortune to be able to make up her mind to be the wife of one whom, though she loved him, she did not altogether reverence. Prig as she was, she made Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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her way into the hearts of many readers,—both young and old,—so that, from that time to this, I have been continuously honored with letters the purport of which has always been to beg me to marry Lily Dale to Johnny Eames. (AA, 117) This account of Lily Dale, focused on The Small House at Allington, does not agree with what is said in The Last Chronicle of Barset, where Lily says she still loves Crosbie and does not love Johnny Eames. If she does love Johnny, she is not aware of it. It must be a part of her unconscious that, unlike Grace’s at first unconscious love for Henry Grantly, never comes to the surface of her awareness. How would one know which judgment of her is the correct one? Of a black hole one must say, as Ludwig Wittgenstein notoriously said of another kind of unspeakable in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “whereof one cannot speak one must remain silent.” This is so, even though, as in the case of The Last Chronicle, the entire reading of a given novel depends on projecting either an authentic singularity or a hollow nothingness into the recesses of the characters. The reader is not, cannot, be given direct access to these hidden places. We are immured in analogical apperception.

T H E B L AC K E S T B L AC K H O L E I N T H E L A S T C H R O N I C L E

“You mean that you forget?” “Absolutely; totally. I wish, Mr Toogood, I could explain to you the toilsome perseverance with which I have cudgeled my poor brains, endeavoring to extract from them some scintilla of memory that would aid me.” (317) The most important black hole in the Barsetshire community is, without doubt, the Reverend Josiah Crawley’s memory lapse. With an account of this I shall fall silent myself, at least in this chapter. Several issues of import to the stability of the Barsetshire community are at stake in Crawley’s story. One is the question of memory. Crawley totally forgets where he got the check for twenty pounds. As I have shown, one dimension of the general transparency of this community’s members to one another and to themselves is their elephantine memories. They never forget. Each person’s past is wholly present to him or her in the present, in what might be called a simultaneous spatial panorama. It does not have to be recalled by an act of deliberate 84

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remembering, which the German’s call Gedächtnis, but is immediately at hand in a perpetually renewed spontaneous remembering. The Germans call that inward possession of the past Erinnerung, “innering.” Crawley has lost this kind of remembering. A blank spot obscures his memory, even though he remembers most things and can still remember and chant out long passages in Greek from the Greek tragedians. He cannot, however, remember where he got that check for twenty pounds. I began this chapter by citing passages that show how all members of the Barsetshire community are fascinated by Crawley’s memory lapse, turned toward it, focused on it, talking of nothing else, just as Crawley himself thinks of hardly anything else, cudgeling his brains constantly to try to remember. They all, including Crawley himself, are fascinated by this blank place because all more or less tacitly understand how much is at stake. What is at stake is nothing less than the security of that general intersubjective transparency within which they all dwell, as within a warm, reassuring, circumambient milieu. If even one absolutely opaque region in this pellucidity exists, one black hole, then the universality of this transparency is put in question. It cannot be taken for granted as the shared environment within which all members of this community dwell together. The reader is told early in the novel that Crawley’s wife thinks he is “half mad.” Other members of the community are not so charitable. “The real truth is,” says the lawyer, Mr. Walker, “. . . he is as mad as a hatter” (197). To be half mad does not make sense, though it may be a charitable judgment on Mrs. Crawley’s part. One is either mad or sane, I should think, even though Hamlet, the reader will remember, says, “I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw” (Hamlet, II, ii, 375). To define sanity as knowing a hawk from a handsaw looks a little mad in itself, when you think of it. That is true of all Hamlet’s wonderful discourse in this part of Shakespeare’s play. Trollope’s defi nition of madness is amusingly pedestrian when juxtaposed to Hamlet’s madness, as is Trollope’s prophecy in The Fixed Period (1882) of a time when horseless carriages will speed around the countryside at the insane pace of twenty miles an hour. For Trollope, to have one little blot on your memory is to be mad. Crawley’s double bind is an impasse of which he and his family and friends are painfully aware. If he can escape conviction for theft by pleading insanity, or by being judged insane, then he will not be fit to be a Christian clergyman and should be placed in a madhouse. If he is judged to be sane, he must be Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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held responsible, condemned, and imprisoned, for passing that stolen check, even though he cannot remember how he got it. Either way, he will have “had it.” The consequence of Crawley’s forgetting is that he is universally described as different, whereas all the others are much more similar, denizens of the same transparent community. “Papa, you know,” writes Grace in a letter to Lily Dale, “is not like other people. He forgets things; and is always thinking, thinking, thinking of his great misfortunes” (52). Mr. Toogood, the other lawyer in the story besides Mr. Walker, calls him “Such a queer fish—so unlike anybody else in the world” (395). No one would say quite that about any other of the Barsetshire characters, not even Mrs. Proudie. One disastrous consequence of Crawley’s difference is that by it the general law whereby each character in Barsetshire is transparent to all the others is abrogated. I have cited the early passage in which the reader is told that when Crawley sits brooding on his plight, his wife can “read him like a book.” A much later passage records the failure of this reading when Crawley is at the nadir of his fortunes and in the depths of his despair. The narrative voice here understands Crawley better than his wife does, but even that voice cannot fi ll in the blank in his memory. The long paragraph is one of the best depictions in the novel of the way Crawley is a queer fish, different from everybody else: I think that at this time nobody saw clearly the working of his mind— not even his wife, who studied it very closely, who gave him credit for all his high qualities, and who had gradually learned to acknowledge to herself that she must distrust his judgment in many things. She knew that he was good, and yet weak, that he was afflicted by false pride and supported by true pride, that his intellect was still very bright, yet so dismally obscured on many sides as almost to justify people in saying that he was mad. She knew that he was almost a saint, and yet almost a castaway through vanity and hatred of those above him. But she did not know that he knew all this of himself also. She did not comprehend that he should be hourly telling himself that people were calling him mad and were so calling him with truth. It did not occur to her that he could see her insight into him. She doubted as to the way in which he had got the cheque—never imagining, however, that he had willfully stolen it— thinking that his mind had been so much astray as to admit of his fi nding it and using it without willful guilt—thinking also, alas, that a man 86 Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

who could so act was hardly fit for such duties as those which were entrusted to him. But she did not dream that this was precisely his own idea of his own state and of his own position—that he was always inquiring of himself whether he was not mad; whether, if mad, he was not bound to lay down his office; that he was ever taxing himself with improper hostility to the bishop—never forgetting for a moment his wrath against the bishop and the bishop’s wife, still comforting himself with his triumph over the bishop and the bishop’s wife—but, for all that, accusing himself of a heavy sin and proposing to himself to go to the palace and there humbly to relinquish his clerical authority. Such a course of action he was proposing to himself, but not with any realised idea that he would so act. He was as a man who walks along a river’s bank thinking of suicide, calculating how best he might kill himself—whether the river does not offer an opportunity too good to be neglected, telling himself that the water is pleasant and cool, and that his ears would soon be deaf to the harsh noises of the world—but yet knowing, or thinking that he knows, that he never will kill himself. So it was with Mr Crawley. Though his imagination pictured to himself the whole scene—how he would humble himself to the ground as he acknowledged his unfitness, how he would endure the small-voiced triumph of the little bishop, how, from the abjectness of his own humility, even from the ground on which he would be crouching, he would rebuke the loudmouthed triumph of the bishop’s wife; though there was no touch wanting to the picture which he thus drew—he did not really propose to himself to commit this professional suicide. His wife, too, had considered whether it might be in truth becoming that he should give up his clerical duties, at any rate for a while; but she had never thought that the idea was present to his mind also. (402–4) The second security on which the solidarity of the Barsetshire community is based, and that is endangered by Crawley’s forgetting, is the assumption that each person will remain consistent with himself through time. Crawley is a good man. It is assumed in the Trollopean imaginary world that a good person will remain good, a bad person bad. A lady will always be a lady, a gentleman a gentleman, and those not gentlemen or ladies can never become such by trying. Crawley is a gentleman and good. Therefore it is unthinkable that he can have stolen a check for twenty pounds, however great was his need. If Trollope’s characters change, for example by falling in Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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love, they change by imperceptible degrees, “gradually,” in ways that are not perceptible to themselves or to others. They do not change in fundamental character. Miss Prettyman puts this in an aphoristic rhetorical question, apropos of her assumption that Crawley must be innocent: “Whoever heard of anybody becoming so base as that all at once” (66)? Much later, the old clergyman, Mr. Harding, cites the source of this proverb, Juvenal (Satires II, 83): “I cannot bring myself to think that he is guilty. What does the Latin proverb say? ‘No one of a sudden becomes most base’ ” (418). The Barset community maintains itself by that confidence. If Crawley can be proven to have stolen that check, this basic and universal law of the Barset community will have been broken. It will have been shown to be invalid, if in this case, then potentially in all other cases, thereby undermining the community. Crawley’s forgetting jeopardizes one final universal Barset assumption. This is the assumption that the English legal system always works to bring justice. “But it will come right at the assizes,” says old Mr. Dale, Lily’s uncle. “They always get at the truth there” (162–3). Miss Prettyman assures Grace of her confidence in the law: “My dear, . . . in England, where the laws are good, no gentleman is ever made out to be guilty when he is innocent; and your papa, of course, is innocent. Therefore you should not trouble yourself” (43). The reader, if he or she knows Trollope’s other novels, is fairly confident throughout that Crawley must be innocent, even though Lady Mason, in Orley Farm (1861–62), is a counter example. She has, it turns out, forged the codicil to her husband’s will, even though she is, apparently, a good member of her community. In The Last Chronicle, in spite of all that points toward Crawley’s innocence, the laws of England work in such a way that the county magistrates feel themselves forced, on the basis of the evidence, to commit Crawley to be tried at the assizes. Lawyer Walker speaks at one point of the near certainty that Crawley will be convicted, and thereby, the reader suspects, a terrible miscarriage of justice perpetrated: It is presumed that a man can account for the possession of a cheque. It may be that a man should have a cheque in his possession and not be able to account for it, and should yet be open to no grave suspicion. In such a case a jury has to judge. Here is the fact: that Mr Crawley has the cheque, and brings it in to use some considerable time after it is drawn; and the additional fact that the drawer of the cheque had lost it, as he thought, in Mr Crawley’s house, and had looked for it there, soon after it was drawn, 88

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and long before it was paid. A jury must judge; but, as a lawyer, I should say that the burden of disproof lies with Mr Crawley. (400) All these certainties and securities of the Barset community are put in question by Crawley’s inability to remember. The happy ending is brought about by Mrs. Arabin’s testimony. She finally returns from her travels and reveals that, without telling her husband, she put the check in the envelope with the fift y pounds in notes to be given to Crawley by her husband, Dean Arabin. The check had been given to her in rent payment for a property she owns. She had not known, however, that it had been stolen by a cousin of the landlord of “The Dragon of Wantly,” the inn in Barchester. When the news is brought by Mr. Toogood and Major Grantly to Mr. Crawley, everybody but Crawley cries—Mr. Toogood, the major, and Mrs. Crawley—in a general expression of shared emotion. The subsequent kisses exchanged between the archdeacon and Grace, and between Grace and the major, seal their covenants and induct her into her new family. I cried, too, in sympathy, virtual tears for a virtual joy, something I rarely do in response to a novel. By reading The Last Chronicle you, too, can join the party! In the end, Crawley is given a new, more lucrative living. Grace marries Henry Grantly. The arrogant she-bishop, Mrs. Proudie, has died. Everybody else lives happily ever after. The community of Barsetshire is triumphantly sustained in its universal transparency.

W H I C H K I N D O F CO M M U N I T Y I S I T ?

My reading would seem at first to support the claim that Barsetshire represents a pure example of the first kind of community in Jean-Luc Nancy’s typology. Barsetshire is apparently a community in which all the characters are similar, bound together by sharing the same assumptions, beliefs, values, and judgments. They are related to one another within the milieu of a collective unclouded intersubjectivity. The only problem with this reading is that the happy ending of the novel leaves the black holes I have identified as black as ever, or almost. Crawley does not suddenly remember where he got the check. It is remembered for him, or rather the memory that he had but could not believe in is confirmed by Mrs. Arabin’s letter. When the truth is revealed to him, he no longer says he totally forgets where he got the check. He changes his tune and says his forgetting was Last Chronicle of Barset as a Model of Victorian Community

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only momentary. He did not, he now claims, believe his true memory because it was contradicted by the dean’s testimony and therefore must be wrong. A failure to believe in one’s own memory, an odd sort of false forgetting, is substituted for a failure of memory. Trollope has a narrow line to walk here. What he wants to say now contradicts what he has said earlier. It must nevertheless be said if Crawley can be plausibly re-assimilated into the community in the general reconciliation that characterizes the happy ending of this as of so many other Trollope novels or of so many Victorian novels generally: “Gentlemen,” said Mr Crawley. “I was sure of it. I knew it. Weak as my mind may be—and at times it is very weak—I was certain that I could not have erred in such a matter. The more I struggled with my memory, the more fi xed with me became the fact—which I had forgotten but for a moment—that the document had formed a part of that small packet handed to me by the dean. But look you, sirs—bear with me yet for a moment. I said that it was so, and the dean denied it.” “The dean did not know it, man,” said Toogood, almost in a passion. “Bear with me yet awhile. So far have I been from misdoubting the dean—whom I have long known to be in all things a true and honest gentleman—that I postponed the elaborated result of my own memory to his word. And I felt myself the more constrained to do this, because in a moment of forgetfulness, in the wantonness of inconsiderate haste, with wicked thoughtlessness, I had allowed myself to make a false statement—unwittingly false, indeed, nathless very false, unpardonably false. I had declared, without thinking, that the money had come to me from the hands of Mr Soames, thereby seeming to cast a reflection upon that gentleman. When I had been guilty of so great a blunder, of so gross a violation of that ordinary care which should govern all words between man and man, especially when any question of money may be in doubt— how could I expect that anyone should accept my statement when contravened by that made by the dean? Gentlemen, I did not believe my own memory. Though all the little circumstances of that envelope, with its rich but perilous freightage, came back upon me from time to time with an exactness that has appeared to me to be almost marvellous, yet I have told myself that it was not so!” (768–9)

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In the first sentence of the last chapter, “Conclusion,” the narrator says, “It now only remains for me to gather together a few loose strings, and tie them together in a knot, so that my work may not become untwisted” (856). Certain story lines do nevertheless remain untwisted, or interrupted by unintelligible breaks that can never be filled in or tied up. Even if Crawley’s lapse in memory was only momentary, it was still a lapse. Lily Dale remains an old maid. No explanation can be given for the origin of Grace Crawley’s love for Henry Grantly or his for her. I conclude that The Last Chronicle of Barset, quite unexpectedly, represents, however indirectly or evasively, an example of Nancy’s second kind of community, the community of those who, at the deepest levels of their singularity, have nothing in common. At those levels they are all “queer fish,” all other to one another and even other to themselves. Another way to put this would be to say that far from dramatizing an imaginary world that was a wish-fulfillment or successful compensation for Trollope’s sense of being a “pariah,” his novel writing was, ever so covertly, a way of projecting into fictions his permanent and ineradicable sense of his forlorn difference from others. Far from fulfi lling Freud’s prescription defining the artist as someone who finds the way back to reality for himself and his readers or spectators through the material embodiment in words or paint of his fantasy, Trollope’s novels in the end confirm his own singularity and bring his readers news of theirs. The novels do this by exposing the reader’s singularity to the singularity of others, Trollope himself and his imaginary avatars. The portrait of the Reverend Josiah Crawley is perhaps Trollope’s most powerful representation of what it feels like to be a Pariah. In reading Trollope’s novels, if we read them with care, we too come to share in this community of those who, deep down, have nothing in common. I asked near the beginning of this chapter about the utility of reading Trollope’s novels, either for its original readers or for us today. It is not all that easy to answer that question. At first it seemed that the value of reading Trollope might be to allow us entry into a community of the first kind. It now seems that this value might be the more challenging one of leading us to understand how our solidarity with others is a participation in that “unavowable community” or “unworked community” of singularities who share with one another only the separation and incommunicability of those singularities.

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WHO CARES?

Nevertheless, Barset’s community of transparency survives the threats to it, crucial as they are to The Last Chronicle’s meaning. Crawley did not steal the check. His memory was accurate all along. Major Grantley and Grace Crawley marry with the whole community’s approval. Lily Dale remains true to her love for Crosbie, bounder though he is. I have called Trollope’s basic assumptions about selfhood, intersubjectivity, the otherness of the other, falling in love, and so on, a version of Victorian “ideology.” I have confessed that I find these assumptions wish-fulfi llments, not something true to life. I wish life were like that, but it isn’t. That might seem to disqualify taking The Last Chronicle of Barset seriously. Who cares what contrary-to-fact ideas those old Victorians believed in, according to Trollope, or were interpellated to believe in by his novels? Even in the “enlightened” twenty-first century, however, the diverse theoretical and philosophical writings about these issues by Husserl, Buber, Heidegger, Austen, Levinas, Habermas, Derrida, Nancy, and a host of others, have pretty much been a set of variations on Trollopean assumptions, even when what they write seems intended to put these assumptions in question. How, for example, Austen’s How to Do Things with Words infers, can we make promises and keep them, or be held responsible if we break a promise, unless we are each a fi xed self subsisting through time and endowed with freedom to choose? Much of even the most sophisticated modernist and postmodernist literature, not to speak of recent popular novels, is still based on some version of Trollope’s ideology. Mass media today, popular culture, the advertizing that appeals to us as unique individuals able to make responsible individual choices about the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and medicines we take— all these are variants of the same assumptions. One example out of innumerable possible ones is the recent vogue, transmitted enthusiastically by the media, of the dubious and now already largely discredited “discovery” by neuroscientists of “mirror neurons” that give each of us direct access to what is going on in another person’s mind and feelings. Which of us can claim to be free of some version of Trollopean ideology? I conclude that we can enjoy Trollope’s novels with a clear conscience, even if, or perhaps because, they are a species of fantasy or science fiction. We can also learn a lot from these novels about our own deeply rooted and endlessly reinforced assumptions about our selfhood, our relations to others, and our community affiliations. 92

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3 INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNIT Y I N T H E R E T U R N O F T H E N AT I V E

PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

Michael Millgate’s authoritative Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist places The Return of the Native in the context of Hardy’s admiration for William Barnes’s work, especially Barnes’s poems in Dorsetshire dialect. Hardy admired the linguistic accuracy of those poems, as well as Barnes’s deep understanding of local Dorset customs. As is proper for a biographical study, Millgate also places The Return of the Native in the context of Hardy’s life, for example his nomad existence with his wife at the time he was writing the novel. Hardy and his wife moved from temporary dwelling to temporary dwelling. They had not yet settled at Max Gate, the house Hardy built for himself not far from his birthplace. Building Max Gate, one might say, made him an example of the return of the native. Millgate is right, however, to end his chapter on The Return of the Native by echoing Thomas Wolfe. Clym Yeobright in the novel discovers, as did Thomas Hardy in his own life, that “you can’t go home again.” Why not? What would it mean to go home again, that is, to return to your native soil after a period away? My discussion of The Return of the Native will investigate these and several related questions. What is the relation of individual to community in this novel? Do the events of the novel take place within what can be legitimately called a “community,” that is, a “home” for those who dwell within it? Just what is a “community”? Why is it that “you” can’t go home again? What conception of the “you,” that is, of the separable individual, would be necessary in order to make plausible the claim that once uprooted from your

native soil you cannot be planted there again? Hardy says in the Poems 1912– 13 that his first wife was in a way made homeless by being moved to Dorset from her native Cornwall and then ultimately being buried far from the sea she so loved: “She will never be stirred / In her loamy cell / By the waves long heard / And loved so well.” Is living rooted and eventually buried in some native soil the normal and proper condition for humankind? Must uprooting be called “alienation” or some other bad thing? A rapidly increasing percentage of human beings worldwide are “uprooted” in this sense. I now dwell and have dwelled for many years far from my native Virginia. However long I shall have lived in Deer Isle, Maine, I shall never be anything but what Deer Isle natives call “from away.” Novelists, or rather the narrators invented by novelists, by way of an uncanny species of telepathy, penetrate and then give away to every reader the secrets of their characters. They reveal precious things that the characters keep in their hearts and about which they keep silent to everyone around them, family, friends, the whole community. The Return of the Native presents many cases of this. An example is the process by which Eustacia tires of her love for Wildeve and then shifts to Clym Yeobright as the object of her desire and fascination. Eustacia of course knows about this. The narrator tells the reader about it, but no one among the novel’s characters but Eustacia knows. It is a secret, but also in a peculiar way an open secret, since the narrator and every reader of the novel know it. My remarks about novels and characters’ secrets in novels can function as an entry into Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Just where does Hardy, in this novel, stand on an imaginary continuum, if such a thing can be imagined, between Williams and Heidegger? Their ideas about community are discussed at length in Chapter 1. An extensive and careful reading of the novel will be necessary to give an answer. This present chapter builds on my previous essay on The Return of the Native and presupposes what that essay has to say about the tropological rhetoric of that novel, especially its dependence on a strange metaleptic reversal whereby the landscape is defined in prosopopoeic catachreses (for example, the ascription of a “face” to Egdon Heath), whereas the characters are described in catachreses drawn from language about the landscape. This happens in a constant linguistic coming and going in which neither side is a solid “literal” of which the other side is the figurative transfer. The various characters rise up from their locations here and there on the heath as 94

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avatars of a hidden sun behind the visible sun and as embodiments of the heath’s fictive personification, while the heath is described in terms drawn from human bodies and their inner life: It [Egdon Heath] was at present a place perfectly accordant with man’s nature—neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly: neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have lived long apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities. Another much later passage, when Eustacia is making her way for the last time to Rainbarrow, makes a grotesque use of fungi on the heath surface to make them personify a colossal body, not just a face: “Skirting the pool she followed the path towards Rainbarrow, occasionally stumbling over twisted furze-roots, tufts of rushes, or oozing stumps of fleshy fungi, which at this season lay scattered about the heath like the rotten liver and lungs of some colossal animal” (370). The various interwoven plots of The Return of the Native, as I demonstrated in detail in that previous essay, are enactments of one or another of those “tragical possibilities” that seem to be expressed by the face of the heath. I moved toward a conclusion of my reading of The Return of the Native by asserting that: The investigation of topography in The Return of the Native reveals the intimate connection between prosopopoeia and catachresis. Where nothing but figure is possible, that figure is always a catachresis. The double crisscross personifications of The Return of the Native—the personification of the heath as a colossal being, the representation of the heath by the characters—are catachreses. A catachresis is a name transferred from one realm to something in another realm that has no literal name, as in “leg of a table” or “face of a mountain.” The entities are not really a leg or a face, but no literal word in either case exists, so the transfer does not fit the traditional definition of a metaphor as the substitution of a figurative, transferred word for a literal word. The crisscross substitutions in The Return of the Native are a system of figures for the placeless place where the sun goes when it sets. The sun, however, is not “it,” but another figure for the it in its vanishing. The “it,” Hardy’s novel implies, seems Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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not to be just an effect of language. It seems really and independently to exist. Language, or any system of signs, such as the place names and proper names in The Return of the Native, or the configuration of conventional representations on Hardy’s “A Sketch Map of the Scene of the Story” included in the first edition of 1878, seems to be an effect of the “it,” simultaneously shaped and undone by its force. Or rather, for Hardy, whether the it is an effect of language or whether language is effected, affected, infected by the “it” can never be decided, since the results would be the same in either case. I now find this triumphant climax in an undecidability or aporia less satisfying than I did in 1989. I can hear every reader groan, especially nowadays: “Oh, dear. Another undecidable aporia! How quaint. I thought we were finished with those long ago.” I share this impatience. Surely a good reader of The Return of the Native ought to be able to decide this par ticu lar issue one way or the other, both for Hardy and for the reader. I would like to think of myself these days as fully demystified and as fully aware that language performatively creates as an ideological illusion the conviction that there is an “it” that pre-exists language. I would like to think that Hardy was demystified, too, on the basis of his consistently ironic treatment of religious belief, for example in many poems that are clearly meant to mock such belief. Karl Marx argues persuasively in The German Ideology that illusory religious belief, especially belief in the Incarnation, Jesus as the embodiment of spirit, Christ the God-man, is the origin of all ideology. A notable example is the ascription of spiritual value in commodity fetishism to fashionable clothes or automobiles or iPhones. That would seem to settle that, in a triumphant clear-seeing. It would allow me a clear conscience in my disbelief in the “It.” I would be scot-free to disbelieve, that is, unless I happen to remember Paul de Man’s distressing, but alas distressingly plausible, climactic assertion in his essay on Rousseau’s Profession du foi, “Allegory of Reading.” No one, he says, can free herself or himself from ideology. It is those who think they are clear-seers who are most victims of illusion. What is most distressing about de Man’s analyses is that he shows that the effort of unmasking ideologies and of accounting for their occurrence in itself leads to a repetition of the linguistic aberrations that brought about the ideological mystifications in the first place. This is perhaps said most clearly near the end of “Allegory of Reading”: “Deconstructive 96

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readings can point out the unwarranted identifications achieved by substitution, but they are powerless to prevent their recurrence even in their own discourse, and to uncross, so to speak, the aberrant exchanges that have taken place. Their gesture merely reiterates the rhetorical defiguration that caused the error in the first place.” A little later in the essay, de Man specifically applies this to religious belief: “But if we decide that belief, in the most extensive use of the term (which must include all possible forms of idolatry and ideology) can once and forever be overcome by the enlightened mind, then this twilight of the idols [Götzendämmerung in the manuscript, a reference to the title of a book by Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s title puns on the title of an opera by Richard Wagner: Götterdämmerung, “Twilight of the Gods”] will be all the more foolish in not recognizing itself as the first victim of its occurrence” (ibid., 245). If de Man is right, it would be more accurate to remain with my original formulations about language and the “it” in The Return of the Native, uneasy-making as they are.

A N E W LO O K AT T H E R E T U R N O F T H E N AT I V E

A return to the text of The Return of the Native shows that Hardy almost always has it both ways. He both personifies nature and sees people as expressions of that personification and at the same time gives some verbal clue that this spiritualization of nature as the embodiment of some spooky “It” is no more than the reification of a figure of speech, the age-old error of taking a figure of speech literally. Here is just one striking example (80–2). The whole passage is too long to cite here in its entirety, so I abbreviate. The three pages are an extraordinary example of the constant “poetry” of Hardy’s discourse in The Return of the Native. I mean by “poetry” an elaborate system of figurative exchanges and substitutions, repeated tirelessly in the intimate stylistic texture of the text. The narrator has been presenting in dramatic terms Eustacia Vye’s appearance as “the figure against the sky” (80) on the top of Rainbarrow, with its layers of ashes going down over the centuries to the prehistoric funeral pyre at the bottom. She is waiting impatiently and fruitlessly for her lover, Wildeve, to appear for yet another rendezvous. The narrator characteristically deviates from the figure in the landscape to the landscape itself, which the human figure, it turns out, figures. In this case the narrator describes the sounds made by the wind as it scours the heath. These sounds are figured as Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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a chorus of voices: “treble, tenor, and bass notes were to be found therein,” for example “the baritone buzz of a holly tree” (81). One note in particular, however, “bore a great resemblance to the ruins of human song which remains in the throat of fourscore and ten. It was a worn whisper, dry and papery, and it brushed so distinctly across the ear that, by the accustomed, the material minutiae in which it originated could be realized as by a touch” (81). The source of this whispering sound is, the narrator assures the reader, the innumerable “mummied heath-bells of the past summer” (81). Sound here becomes, by synesthesia, touch, and the sound is personified as human song in chorus, treble, tenor, and bass. This chorus then becomes, in a striking prosopopoeia, the voice of a single hidden person that the whole heath personifies, exposes, and expresses in a speaking “discourse”: “The spirit moved them.” A meaning of the phrase forced itself upon the attention; and an emotional listener’s fetichistic [sic] mood might have ended in one of more advanced quality. It was not, after all, that the lefthand expanse of old blooms spoke, or the right-hand, or those on the slope in front; but it was the single person of something else speaking through each at once. [The first edition puts a period after “front” and then begins a new sentence: “It was the single person of something else speaking through each in turn.”] (81–2) The multiple voices here become one voice speaking through each of the mummified heath-bells at once. The notes in the New Wessex edition give Judges 13:25 as near to “The spirit moved them,” but the Biblical phrase is not all that close to Hardy’s: “And the Spirit of the Lord began to move him [Samson] at times in the camp of Dan between Zorah and Eshtaol.” Closer might be the Quaker exhortation that those in a Quaker meeting speak as “the spirit moves them.” The second verse of Genesis 1 says, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” In Hardy’s text the wind becomes a spirit that moves “them,” that is, the heath-bells. Robbie Eaton, who teaches Bible and knows the Bible intimately, immediately thought of II Samuel 5:23–4, in which the Lord directs David on how to defeat the Philistine army: “And when David inquired of the Lord, he said, Thou shalt not go up; but fetch a compass behind them, and come upon them over against the mulberry trees. And let it be, when thou hearest the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees, that then thou shalt bestir thyself; 98

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for then shall the Lord go out before thee to smite the host of the Philistines.” The problem, of course, with this striking parallel is that Hardy’s phrase, “The spirit moved them,” appears nowhere in it, at least not in the King James translation. The “meaning of the phrase” that “forced itself upon the attention,” as Hardy puts is, is nevertheless clear enough. Whose “attention”? The attention, I suppose, of anyone present or of that anonymous no one for whom the narrator speaks. The present application of the phrase is to the wind as a single person speaking through the heath-bells. Hardy is here employing, whether he knows it or not, the age-old triple incarnating figuration that is embodied in the Greek word Ψυχή (psyche, pronounced saiki) or in the Latin word anima. Both mean, or originally meant, “wind,” “breath,” and “soul,” all three at once in their unity and distinction. The butterfly was Psyche’s emblem, partly because the Greek word for butterfly uses the same characters, though with a different accent mark. Belief that the wind is a spirit used to be called “primitive animism,” as if only an uncivilized man or woman could endow matter illusorily with spirit or a breathing soul. The wind on the heath is at the same time the soul of “the single person of something else speaking through each [dried heath-bell] at once.” The wind as soul is also, at the same time, the breathing (inspiration, expiration, suspiration) of the voice that speaks through all these tiny dried bells, and, as I shall show, speaks also in Eustacia’s long drawn-out sigh. That Hardy understood the rhetorical substitutions he was exploiting is indicated in the concluding phrase of the second sentence: “an emotional listener’s fetichistic mood might have ended in one of more advanced quality.” A fetish, the American Heritage Dictionary says, is “a material object believed among primitive cultures to have magical power.” The word, to my surprise, because I thought it must be borrowed from the language of some “primitive culture,” comes ultimately, by way of French and then Portuguese, from Latin factitius, “made by art,” from facere, to make, do. A fetish is factitious. “Primitive” fetishes were sometimes dolls or whatnot “made by art” and then endowed “by art” with a spiritual or magical power that was projected into them. An example is Susan Nonsuch’s attempt, in The Return of the Native, to destroy Eustacia, thought by Susan to be a witch, by melting her wax effigy stuck all over with pins. Hardy most likely knew the early anthropologists’ or sociologists’ use of the word fetish, whereas we today would think of Marx’s analysis of “commodity fetishism,” probably unknown Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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to Hardy, and of Freud’s adaptation of the anthropologist’s word to name the endowment, say, of my beloved’s shoe or some other article of her clothing with her sexual allure, so that I caress and kiss the shoe. In all these cases, something like the triple pun in psyche is in play. Hardy’s emotional listener makes a fetish out of the sound of the wind in the heath-bells and projects a single hidden spiritual person, the “It,” into them: “it was the single person of something else speaking through each at once.” “It” is both a “person” and an impersonal “something else.” Hardy’s narrative voice, and its submissive listener, is both subject to the fetishism and at the same time “deconstructs” it, if I may dare to employ that word. The narrative voice does that by using a term (“fetichistic”) that shows he or it knows it is a projection. The hidden person is a fetishistic illusion projected into what is really no more than an impersonal wind blowing over the heath. It is not I, the reader, who performs a deconstructive reading. The text deconstructs itself by way of that little (misspelled) word “fetichistic.” If we assume, by the way, that the narrator is a “he,” perhaps Hardy himself, we are yielding to just the illusion he is deconstructing. He or it (and we) believe and disbelieve at the same time, in an oscillating coming and going, or twisting and untwisting, that is like the one that de Man describes as the unsuccessful movement of enlightenment. If we think we know, we are the first victims of the superstition we are subjecting to a “rhetorical reading.” The next two paragraphs incorporate human breath in a remarkable way into the tropological system of exchanges, or what the narrative voice calls this “discourse,” “this wild rhetoric of night”: Suddenly, on the barrow, there mingled with all this wild rhetoric of night a sound which modulated so naturally into the rest that its beginning and ending were hardly to be distinguished. The bluffs, and the bushes, and the heather-bells had broken silence; at last, so did the woman; and her articulation was but another phase of the same discourse as theirs. Thrown out on the winds it became twined in with them, and with them it flew away. What she uttered was a lengthened sighing, apparently at something in her mind which had led to her presence here. There was a spasmodic abandonment about it as if, in allowing herself to utter the sound, the woman’s brain had authorized what it could not regulate. (82)

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Eustacia’s sigh is no more than an extension of the psychic interchange of wind, breath, and soul that the spirit of the impersonal “It” moves. She is just another form of the heath-bells. Her sigh is spasmodic, unregulated, and undeliberate, just as is the dry suspiration of the wind in the dried heath-bells. The various action of the characters as they crisscross the heath and interact in what I long ago called Hardy’s “dance of desire” are embodiments, like the rabbits, butterfl ies, grasshoppers, and other progeny of the heath, of what the narrative voice calls, in the opening chapter, the “tragical possibilities” “suggested” by the seamed and antique “countenance” of the heath. In a reciprocal formulation a few sentences beyond what I have just cited, the narrative voice comments on the way Eustacia’s “play of features” gives away her character and even what she is thinking and feeling: “what is called the play of the features often helps more in understanding a man or woman than the earnest labours of all the other members together” (82). At this moment, the reader may remember that the Greek word “psyche” was personified as the name of the heroine of one of the most influential Latin tales, the long and complex story of “Cupid and Psyche” in Apuleius’s second-century a.d. novel, The Golden Ass or Metamorphoses. Cupid and Psyche already appear in Greek art as early as the fourth century b.c. Their story has been told, interpreted, and illustrated in many different ways over the centuries. (See Figure 3 for one such example.) As the lengthy and detailed entry in Wikipedia, adorned with reproductions of many famous paintings, asserts, “Since the rediscovery of Apuleius’s novel in the Renaissance, the reception of Cupid and Psyche in the classical tradition has been extensive. The story has been retold in poetry, drama, and opera, and depicted widely in painting, sculpture and even wallpaper.” High points of the elaborate story are the moment when the sleeping psyche is awakened by Cupid’s kiss, her abandonment when she defies Venus’s interdict and brings a lamp to look at Cupid sleeping, and their triumphant transfiguring deifying marriage. Hardy does not mention Cupid and Psyche in The Return of the Native, but Walter Pater translated Apuleius’s version in Marius the Epicurean (1885), shortly after the appearance in 1878 of The Return of the Native, and Hardy probably knew Keats’s great love poem to Fanny Brawne, the Ode to Psyche, with its happy ending:

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And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in! (ll. 64–67) Keats, like others, including Hardy, associates love with lamps and torches as surrogates for the sun. Just as the tale of Cupid and Psyche can be seen as a dramatization of the complexities of the word “psyche,” with perhaps NeoPlatonic overtones, so the various unhappy love stories of The Return of the Native, especially the stories of Eustacia Vye and Wildeve, are narrative embodiments of the solar drama that is enacted in other ways by the heath itself and in different ways by all its creatures.

Figure 3. Anthony Van Dyck, Cupid and Psyche (1639–40), in the Royal Collection of the United Kingdom, taken from a reproduction in the public domain in http://commons.wikimedia .org /wiki /File:Cupid _and _Psyche _-_Anthony_Van _Dyck _(1639-40).jpg, accessed May 4, 2014.

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CO M M U N I T Y I N T H E R E T U R N O F T H E N AT I V E

I turn now to my investigation of individual and community in The Return of the Native. This novel, like all novels, mutatis mutandis, is a literary work. It is not a work of ethnography, sociology, philosophy, autobiography, or history. It belongs to literature as defined in the West, that is, to an institution that began in the seventeenth century and is a concomitant of Western modernity. Literature belongs to the print epoch. It is related to a gradual increase in literacy, to the rise of the modern nation state, to the slow development of capitalism out of feudal monarchies, and to the appearance of Western style democracies with their right to free speech. Free speech is the liberty to say, write, or print anything without being punished for it. Such freedom is of course never fully realized. The right to free speech takes a peculiar form in literary works. The author is always able to describe the opinions of the characters and the narrator as imaginary, not his or her real opinions. The author can say, even about the narrator, “That was not me speaking, but an imaginary personage.” The disclaimer at the beginning of mystery stories is a ritualized example: “Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” Such claims, by the way, are often false. The Return of the Native fits the genre of the popu lar novel, as authors, readers, publishers, and critics understood that genre in 1878, the year the novel was first published in three-volume form. It had been initially published in serial form in the magazine Belgravia in that same year. This means the first readers got it in installments. This probably accounts for the deliberately episodic quality of the novel. The Return of the Native proceeds by dramatic stages, self-enclosed sections each with its own climax, like a television soap opera. The Return of the Native was widely reviewed, though the reviews were somewhat mixed. On the whole, they were to some degree reserved and patronizing. In spite of the tendency among Victorian critics and reviewers to judge a novel by its “truth to life,” most critics also recognized that a novel is a work of invention, not a text straightforwardly referential. This means that though the novel may be based in manifold ways on the “real world,” the real world is, in each novel, transformed by an act of language into what may be called a virtual reality, with its own distinct laws and characteristics. Somewhat idiosyncratic and “unrealistic” characters people this imaginary world. Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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Novels, nevertheless, coach their readers to view the people around them as like characters in novels. This happens by way of what may be called the performative function of the novel as it is read and so enters back into the real world. A novel does not necessarily give accurate information about the world, but it is often a “felicitous” speech act, a way of doing things with words. It can change the minds and hearts of its readers both by reaffirming ideological prejudices and by challenging them. The characters in novels, however, are not “real people,” nor even representations in language of real people. They are simulacra, imaginary personages who do not correspond completely to any real people. Characters in novels may be compared to the personages on the screen in video games or to those in anime films. The means employed are, of course, different: computer animation programs for video games or anime; language using certain conventional rhetorical procedures for novels. Not only ordinary novel readers but also even the most sophisticated critics are taken in by what Walter Pater calls a “real illusion.” They start talking about the characters in novels as if they were real people. Nor am I exempt from that almost irresistible error. I make no claims to being a sophisticated critic. I confess that I willingly allow myself to be taken in by the magic of The Return of the Native. It is a magic that makes me intensely interested in those imaginary characters and their fates. I also, however, have a great curiosity about how the magic, in a given case, is performed. I want to study the back of the tapestry, so to speak, to see how it was woven. The linguistic procedures Hardy follows in creating the illusions of Eustacia, Clym, Mrs. Yeobright and the rest are, I must say, somewhat weird. They are to a considerable degree an atypical modification of procedures followed by other Victorian novelists—for example, George Eliot or Anthony Trollope. One can, in any case, enter the world of The Return of the Native not by visiting Dorsetshire, but exclusively by reading the novel and by yielding to the real illusion its words generate in an adept reader. One consequence of this essentially fictive quality is that what may be most important about The Return of the Native, most necessary for the critic or reader to notice, are not resemblances to the real world of Dorsetshire. More important are features that are peculiar to Hardy’s own imagination, his peculiar angle of vision, most of all his ways with language. Those features transform the real landscape and people into a virtual reality. We value,

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or should value, Hardy most of all for that peculiarity of vision, for something that is uniquely Hardyan.

H A R DY ’S I D I O S Y N C R A S I E S

One example of a Hardyan idiosyncrasy would be the frequency with which Hardy shows his characters spying on one another, seeing without being seen. Essential information is passed on to the reader in this indirect way rather than by straightforward omniscient narration. Diggory Venn, for example, in a strange scene, hides himself under two large sheets of cut turf and creeps forward in the night to overhear the conversation of Wildeve and Eustacia on the top of Rainbarrow. In a characteristic prosopopoeia, the narrative voice observes that when Eustacia and Wildeve sink from Venn’s sight, “They were as two horns which the sluggish heath had put forth from its crown, like a mollusk, and had now again drawn in” (112). Eustacia learns about Clym Yeobright’s return home from Paris (that is the “return of the native” named in the tile) and about his fitness as a mate for her by hearing the voices of the heath men outside her house. Those voices come down the large chimney to be audible to Eustacia inside. A somewhat grotesque embodiment of this motif is Eustacia’s habit of using her shipcaptain grandfather’s telescope to search the surrounding countryside and spy on her neighbors. She finds out in that way that her estranged husband is moving back to his dead mother’s house (355). Another distinctive feature of The Return of the Native is the narrator’s sharp eye and ear for small details in the landscape, things at the limit of sensation. Hardy assigns to his narrator in this novel an attention to tiny details in nature. He uses this propensity as a self-defi nition in a late poem, “Afterwards.” He imagines that after his death his neighbors will say: “He was a man who used to notice such things” (Complete Poems, 553). An elaborate paragraph, for example, already commented on, describes the “acoustic picture” (111) made by the three distinct sounds the wind makes when sweeping across the heath at night (80–1). Hardy’s narrator often notes subtle details of the weather and of the small creatures that populate the heath: rabbits, ants, and snakes, or, in one place, “independent worlds of ephemerons . . . passing their time in mad carousal, some in the air, some on the hot ground and vegetation, some in the tepid and

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stringy water of a nearly dried pool” (297). When Mrs. Yeobright looks up the valley of the heath toward the distant church where her son Clym, against her wishes, is being married to Eustacia Vye, the narrator notes that the valley was “alive with butterfl ies, and with grasshoppers whose husky noises on every side formed a whispered chorus” (238). Hardy had sharp ears as well as sharp eyes. A further example of Hardy’s admirable poetry of small things is a paragraph describing the way bees, butterflies, grasshoppers, snakes, rabbits, and other such small “creeping and winged things” (273) take no notice of Clym when he is working away as a furze-cutter on the heath: “his daily life was a curious microscopic sort, his whole world being limited to the circuit of a few feet from his person” (273). The paragraph is too long to quote in its entirety here, but it ends with an admirable notation about rabbits: “Litters of young rabbits came out from their forms [that is, their burrows] to sun themselves upon hillocks, the hot beams blazing through the delicate tissue of each thin-fleshed ear, and firing it to a blood-red transparency in which the veins could be seen” (274). Human beings and rabbits are equally emanations from the heath and subject to the sun’s power, as is indicated by a beautiful passage describing Thomasin irradiated by the sun as she gathers stored apples in Mrs. Yeobright’s loft: “The loft was lighted by a semicircular hole, through which the pigeons crept to their lodgings in the same high quarters of the premises; and from this hole the sun shone in a bright yellow patch upon the figure of the maiden as she knelt and plunged her naked arms into the soft brown fern, which, from its abundance, was used on Egdon for packing away stores of all kinds. The pigeons were flying about her head with the greatest unconcern . . .” (136). These passages are also good examples of the solar drama that is so important in The Return of the Native. In one place, the narrator comments that “The sun had branded the whole heath with his mark” (296). All living creatures are given life by the sun and express its constructive/destructive power in their comings, goings, and interactions. All living things, people included, are penetrated and irradiated by the sun in its diurnal and seasonal precessions. The quarrel between Wildeve and Mrs. Yeobright results, for example, according to Clym, from their “inflammable natures” (270). Another distinctive feature of Hardy’s imagination is the inordinate attention paid to the faces of the protagonists as indices to their characters. What the narrator says about Clym Yeobright’s face is the best example of 106

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this. In Hardy’s figure, a face is not something to look at but something to read, as though it were inscribed with legible characters: A strange power in the lounger’s appearance lay in the fact that, though his whole figure was visible, the observer’s eye was only aware of his face. . . . The face was well shaped, even excellently. But the mind within was beginning to use it as a mere waste tablet whereon to trace its idiosyncrasies as they developed themselves. . . . Hence people who began by beholding him ended by perusing him. His countenance was overlaid with legible meanings. . . . The observer’s eye was arrested, not by his face as a picture, but by his face as a page; not by what it was, but by what it recorded. His features were attractive in the light of symbols, as sounds intrinsically common become attractive in language, and as shapes intrinsically simple become interesting in writing. (162, 191) Another stylistic peculiarity of The Return of the Native is the immense number of references to historical, literary, Biblical, and mythological figures, often odd ones, that are used to define the characters by analogy. To give just one example, Mrs. Yeobright’s possession of a “singular insight into life, considering that she had never mixed with it” is compared, somewhat grotesquely, to the ability of two celebrated blind men, “Blacklock, a poet blind from his birth,” who “could describe visual objects with accuracy,” and “Professor Sanderson, who was also blind,” but “gave excellent lectures on color” (212). These comparisons are weird, to say the least. Michael Millgate objects to them (Millgate, 131), but they have several important functions. They establish the narrator as someone who knows the Bible, Greek literature, history, and odd arcane facts. He can be trusted to interpret wisely the story he tells. He speaks with authority. The comparisons also work to enhance, or at least to attempt to enhance, the stature of the protagonists, who, after all, are a pretty obscure and provincial lot. Such comparisons are a regular feature of Victorian fiction, for example in George Eliot’s novels, though Eliot uses them more ironically. Such comparisons, finally, are an important feature of that constant movement from close-ups to distant visions and back again in the rapid rhythmic systole and diastole of the narrator’s perspective. One moment the narrator is seeing the heath’s ants and ephemerons or the subtle aspects of Clym’s face. The next moment the narrator is far enough away to see the novel’s events in the perspective of the whole of Western culture from the Greeks and Biblical times until now. An example Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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is the comparison of Clym’s tormented face when he learns of Eustacia’s complicity in the circumstances leading to his mother’s death, to representations of the blinded Oedipus: “The pupils of his eyes, fi xed steadfastly on blankness, were vaguely lit with an icy shine; his mouth had passed into the phase more or less imaginatively represented in studies of Oedipus” (342). Clym is not all that much like Oedipus, but the comparison does call attention to what may be an excessive love for his mother, whose death he has in large measure caused, and to the paradox, a reversal of the Sophoclean one, that Clym remains in various ways blinded, even after what the title of Book Fifth calls, in echo of Aristotle, “The Discovery.” I note in passing that all the main characters are fatherless, ironically like Oedipus after his inadvertent patricide. It is also a basic assumption in Hardy’s virtual reality that his characters do not have direct access to one another’s minds. This is like Jane Austen but different from Hardy’s contemporary Anthony Trollope. Trollope’s characters often know exactly what the other person is thinking and feeling, as I have shown in Chapter 2. This clairvoyance is for the most part denied Hardy’s characters. One example can be seen in the way Eustacia secretly thinks of her desire to go to Paris, against her husband Clym’s wishes, even while the happy newlyweds are looking deep into one another’s eyes: “Her hopes were bound up in this dream. In the quiet days since their marriage, when Yeobright had been poring over her lips, her eyes, and the lines of her face, she had mused and mused on the subject, even while in the act of returning his gaze” (262). The reader is told this secret, but it is hidden from Clym. Later the narrator confirms this, apropos of Eustacia’s renewed relation to Wildeve: “Nobody could have imagined from her bearing now that here stood the woman who had joined with him in the impassioned dance of the week before, unless indeed he could have penetrated below the surface and gauged the real depth of that still stream” (300). Hardy’s characters, however, cannot, for the most part, ever penetrate beneath the surface of those still streams, their fellows’ embodied minds. An additional feature special to Hardy’s world is the inordinate role played by chance, happenstance, or just plain bad luck, in determining “fateful” consequences and in ruining the often-good intentions of the characters. Famous examples from outside The Return of the Native include Hardy’s poem on the sinking of the Titanic, “The Convergence of the Twain.” The iceberg just happened to be there, and the Titanic just happened to be at the 108

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wrong place at the wrong time and steam into it. Another celebrated example, from Tess of the d’Urbervilles, is the way Tess’s confessional letter to Angel Clare before their marriage just happens to go under the rug in his room when she puts it under the door. He therefore does not receive it, and so their marriage is ruined even before it is consummated. In The Return of the Native, the role of chance is vividly dramatized in the gambling scene with dice on the nighttime heath, first by lantern light and then by the light of glow-worms when a Death’s head moth puts out the lantern. In this episode, Christian Cantle loses all Mrs. Yeobright’s hundred guineas to Wildeve, who then loses them all to Diggory Venn. Diggory, just by chance, does not learn from Wildeve that half the guineas were to go to Clym, so he gives them all to Thomasin, in an honest mistake. This leads to Mrs. Yeobright’s estrangement from her son Clym, since he does not thank her for the present. This in turn indirectly brings about her angry quarrel with Eustacia, now her daughter-in-law. That quarrel ultimately leads to her death. As the narrator says, Venn’s mistake was “an error which afterwards helped to cause more misfortune than treble the loss in money value could have done” (257). In Hardy’s world, Murphy’s Law operates with a vengeance. What can go wrong does go wrong, just by accident, not through the malign actions of some spooky “It.” Yet another example of chance’s role is the way Mrs. Yeobright, in her attempt to reconcile her estrangement from her son Clym, happens to arrive at his house, on a blazing hot day at the end of August, just at the moment Wildeve arrives to visit Eustacia. This leads to Mrs. Yeobright’s death. She mistakenly thinks Clym has closed the door against her and starts the five-mile walk back home in the heat, to die of heart failure and an adder bite. The chapter is called “A Conjuncture and Its Result upon the Pedestrian.” The narrator comments that “it happened that the time of his [Wildeve’s] arrival coincided with that of Mrs. Yeobright’s pause on the hill near the house [from which she can see Wildeve enter it]” (300, my emphasis). A concatenation of such happenstances precipitates the catastrophe of The Return of the Native. Clym decides to delay for a day in sending his warm letter to Eustacia appealing for a reconciliation. Timothy Fairways forgets to deliver the letter when he promised, and then, when he does deliver it, Eustacia’s grandfather puts it on the mantle-piece for her to read on the morrow. Though he calls to her in the darkened house to tell her the letter Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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is there, Eustacia has just left for her walk through the rain first to Rainbarrow and then to throw herself into Shadwater Weir, where she drowns. The episode anticipates, of course, Tess’s letter of wedding night confession to Angel that goes under his rug when she slips it under his door. In both cases an absurd contingency or series of contingencies has disastrous consequences. This happens not because of some malign “Fate,” but just through accidental happenstances. For Hardy, as for Derrida, a letter never, or almost never, reaches its destination. This goes against Jacques Lacan’s touching confidence, in his seminar on Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” that a letter always reaches its destination. All these conjunctions just happen, in another case of what Hardy, in the title of a book of his poems, calls “Satires of Circumstance.” Hardy makes no attempt to ascribe this bad luck to Providence or Destiny or Fate. These malign coincidences just occur—according to ordinary physical laws of cause and effect. A final feature special to Hardy’s narrative imagination is the implacable psychological and natural laws that bring it about that things usually go very badly for Hardy’s characters. Victorian critics called this Hardy’s “pessimism.” They often deplored it. An example is what the reviewer in the Spectator, possibly R. H. Hutton, said about Clym Yeobright’s remorse after his mother’s death: “The hero’s agony is pure, unalloyed misery, not grief of the deepest and noblest type, which can see hope in the future and repent the errors of the past” (Cox, 59). Hardy does not often see hope for the future, however much some of his characters may repent the errors of their pasts. Their despair is just unmitigated despair, not despair “of the deepest and noblest type.” This set of idiosyncratic stylistic, psychological, and conceptual features, in their interrelations and recurrences, makes up the narrative presuppositions of the counter-world that the words of The Return of the Native create.

T H E E G D O N CO M M U N I T Y I N T H E R E T U R N O F T H E N AT I V E

I turn now to the relation between individual and community in The Return of the Native. This relation necessarily takes its place among the other features that combine to make the heterotopia called The Return of the Native. In earlier discussions of this novel, in Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire and in “Philosophy, Literature, Topography: Heidegger and Hardy,” 110

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in Topographies (see endnote 15), I have identified the way Hardy creates an imaginary topography for Return, complete with a “Sketch Map of the Scene of the Story” in the first book edition of 1878. Hardy made up imaginary place names and imaginary topographical features transmogrified from real ones. As a comparison of Hardy’s sketch map, shown in Figure 4,

Figure 4. “Sketch Map of the Scene of the Story,” in Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1878). Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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Figure 5. “Map 17, Dorchester 1873, of Ordnance Survey of England and Wales,” from the Map Collection, Yale University Library.

with an accurate Ordnance Survey map of the region, shown in Figure 5, makes clear, as do remarks Hardy makes in the Preface and in the Postscript, the scene of the story is a transformation of a real landscape into a fictitious one. Hardy invents different place names. He moves houses and landscape features from their real places to imaginary ones. A peculiarity of Hardy’s map is that although the locations of the main protagonists’ houses are shown, none of the houses dwelt in by the rustic characters are indicated, even though they are not infrequently mentioned in the novel itself. That absence suggests that they are not important enough to be mapped. Perhaps Hardy did not have a clear idea of just where they were in his imaginary topography, though I doubt that. Sometimes the words of the novel give fairly defi nite indications. Hardy had a powerful visual imagination. That Hardy had the details of this 112

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imaginary topography vividly in mind as he wrote the novel is demonstrated by the many references to distances, compass directions, and the paths the characters take as they crisscross the landscape in their transactions with one another. I still agree with what I said in my earlier essay about the way an adept reader creates his or her own mental version of Hardy’s topography. The words on the page become an interior space within which the action occurs before the mind’s eye, as an imaginary theater. That has happened to me again in re-reading the novel now. I was also right to see the main action as a “dance of desire” executed by the main protagonists as they approach and withdraw from one another in crisscross exchanges that are governed by that implacable law of Hardy’s fictional worlds: “Love lives on propinquity, but dies of contact.” Eustacia expresses that insight within The Return of the Native. In the height of her love for Clym and his for her, she nevertheless foresees the end of love: “Yet I know that we shall not love like this always. Nothing can ensure the continuance of love. It will evaporate like a spirit” (219). The narrator, moreover, formulates more than once the remorseless law that says I desire those who are desired by others: “The sentiment which lurks more or less in all animate nature—that of not desiring the undesired of others—was lively as a passion in the supersubtle epicurean heart of Eustacia” (126). Later, the reader is told that Wildeve’s love for Eustacia is renewed just because she is now unattainable. Her “preciousness in his eyes was increasing in geometrical progression with each new incident that reminded him of their hopeless division” (256). I was also right in my essay on topography in The Return of the Native to see that Hardy affirms a closeness to the heath for many of the main characters, for Diggory Venn, for example, who hides himself under its turfs, or for Clym Yeobright, who has a special affinity for the heath, as though he were a plant that had grown there: “If any one knew the heath well it was Clym. He was permeated with its scenes, with its substance, and with its odors. He might be said to be its product” (197). Eustacia is defined by her hatred of the heath, but also by her proximity to it and by her similarity to its tragic grandeur. The reader first sees her rising from the top of Rainbarrow as though she had come up from underground. Shortly before she drowns, we see her sinking down on the top of Rainbarrow, under her umbrella: “[S]he sighed bitterly and ceased to stand erect, gradually crouching down under the umbrella as if she were drawn into the Barrow by a hand from beneath” (371). Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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I also rightly saw Hardy’s topography in The Return of the Native as a thoroughly humanized one. The landscape is marked by generations and generations of human beings who have been born, dwelled, and died there, from time immemorial. This collective living in one place has built up layer after layer of human traces there, like the layers of old fires’ ashes on the top of Rainbarrow. Those layers, as Hardy specifies, go down to the first funeral pyre lit there when the tumulus was made for some primeval warrior. Commenting on the gathering of heath folk to light the Fawkes Fire, the narrator says, in a remarkable passage: The ashes of the original British pyre which blazed from that summit lay fresh and undisturbed in the barrow beneath their tread. The flames from funeral piles long ago kindled there had shone down upon the lowlands as these were shining now. Festival fires to Thor and Woden had followed on the same ground and duly had their day. Indeed, it is pretty well known that such blazes as this the heathmen were now enjoying are rather the lineal descendants from jumbled Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention of popular feeling about Gunpowder Plot. (45) The layers of ashes on Rainbarrow form a series of embodied time coulisses. In my earlier account, however, I paid too little attention to the presence in the novel of an ongoing action, in the now of the novel. The action changes the scene once more. The heath men and women as they live on Egdon transform the landscape a little further, bit by bit. The narrator, for example, mentions quite recent and often unsuccessful attempts to clear and cultivate bits of the heath. The heath folk form a community that intervenes between the protagonists and the heath. This community constitutes the immediate cultural milieu within which or, rather, above which they can act, can live, love, and die.

R U R A L CO M M U N I T Y I N T H E R E T U R N O F T H E N AT I V E

Should we say that this group of heath folk constitutes a genuine community, or is it a spurious one? The inhabitants of Egdon seem to fit Williams’s definition of an organic community of neighborly mutuality. That community is also sequestered, for the most part, from the evils of agrarian capitalism that, in Williams’s view, gradually destroys any possibility of true rural communities. 114

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What are the distinctive characteristics of the community within which or above which the main events take place? I say “above which” to put the community of natives on a par with the heath itself. The main actions take place with the heath and the heath men and women as conditioning “environment” or “Umwelt.” My account will be thematic rather than stressing, as I have done already earlier in this chapter, the system of substitutive tropes that makes heath, heath folk, and the protagonists one single textual weave of solar interchanges that take place under the sun. The reader should keep in mind, however, that Hardy, in his presentation of the Egdon community, is quite unique among British novelists in seeing his fictional communities as rooted in their environments. The Egdon community is of the heath heathy. It is therefore open to description by way of an anthropomorphic system of tropological exchanges that define the heath in terms of people (“it seemed to awake and listen”) and the people in terms of the heath. Eustacia sinks down on Rainbarrow “as if she were drawn into the Barrow by a hand from beneath.” Clym is a “product” of the heath. None of my other examples in this book have any such idea of community, nor do Jane Austen or George Eliot, for example, among novelists I do not include. Only D. H. Lawrence comes to mind as a similar/dissimilar example, but this is not the place to interrogate Lawrence’s work on Hardy, nor Lawrence’s own novels. Hardy, somewhat unexpectedly, anticipates Heidegger’s vision of proper communities, for example in “Building, Dwelling, Th inking” (Bauen, Wohnen, Denken). For Heidegger, a valid community is rooted in the landscape and in the buildings, roads, bridges, and so on that men and women have constructed in order to live in that environment. Hardy, however, does not have Heidegger’s dangerous penchant for pushing this toward fascist Blut und Erde. Nor is there anything in Heidegger like Hardy’s deconstruction of his system of crisscross substitutions, as in that word “fetichistic,” or as in “seems” and “as if” in the citations just made. The community of The Return of the Native is introduced in the initial scene of the Fift h of November bonfire that all the natives gather to make and light on the top of Rainbarrow, as their forefathers have done for generations. They work cooperatively together. No one is in charge or gives orders. This community is made up of the workingmen and women who live on or adjacent to the heath. It does not include in quite the same way, as I shall specify, the main protagonists of the story. The members of this native Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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community make their livings from the heath or work as servants to the genteel folk who live nearby. Hardy mentions one man who lives by digging turf for fuel, another who cuts furze, and a woman who lives by making “besoms,” or brooms, from plants that grow on the heath. These people have been born and bred there. They have never left Egdon Heath. An exception is Grandfer Cantle. Cantle was in the “Bang-up Locals” in 1804— that is, he was a member of a local militia organized to resist the expected invasion by Napoleon. As a local militiaman, he made it all the way to Budmouth, on the neighboring seacoast a few miles away. The chief act of the “Locals” seems to have been to march away when an actual invasion was (falsely) reported in Budmouth. This is another of Hardy’s ironies. All the members of this community speak in the local dialect, or in Hardy’s rendition of it. Early reviewers criticized this rendition for inaccuracy and for being too “intellectual.” Hardy defended himself in an essay by saying that an exact reproduction of the way Dorset rustics actually talk would be too hard to read. He just wanted to convey a sense of that dialect to his educated, metropolitan readers (Cox, xxii–xiii). Hardy’s heath men and women are relatively undifferentiated from one another, though they have distinctive names: Humphrey, Timothy Fairway, Susan Nunsuch, Olly Dowden. Grandfer Cantle is individualized, as is his son Christian Cantle. Christian is a weedy man scared of his own shadow. He is a man whom no woman will marry because he is not masculine enough. This is because he was born at the new moon and fulfills the folk adage, “No moon, no man.” Christian is said to be like a wether, that is, like a castrated sheep: “ ’Tis said I be only the rames [dialect for ‘skeleton’ or ‘carcase’] of a man, and no good for my race at all,” says Christian, upon which Fairway observes, to the company generally, “Well, there’s many just as bad as he. . . . Wethers must live their time as well as other men, pour soul” (54). All these characters reveal themselves by their talk. That talk resembles the idle talk of the “they,” as described by Heidegger. It is desultory, gossipy, and wandering. It is made up for the most part of received opinions and well-known stories, especially stories about their “betters,” the gentlefolk who live on the heath. The heath folk tell one another what they all already know. Hardy’s rustics seem to have little in the way of separate interiorities. At least those subjectivities are rarely and then sparsely presented. The reader is told what the heath folk say, what clothes they wear, something of what they look like, what their gestures and behaviors are. They make comments 116 Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

on one another and on their “betters.” Their talk, or “chatter,” is a mixture of folk wisdom, superstition, ideological biases, and shrewd insight. An example of the latter is Timothy Fairway’s comment on his own marriage. This is a prophetic anticipation of the miserable marriages of the protagonists later in the novel: . . . all the time I was as hot as dog-days, what with the marrying, and what with the woman a-hanging to me, and what with Jack Changley and a lot more chaps grinning at me through church window. But the next moment a strawmote would have knocked me down, for I called to mind that if thy [Humphrey’s] father and mother had had high words once, they’d been at it twenty times since they’d been man and wife, and I zid myself as the next poor stunpoll to get into the same mess . . . . Ah—well, what a day ’twas! (51) The heath folk go through life in a way like sleepwalkers. The mind of the community speaks through them. They light Fawkes Fires, or perform the mummers’ play of St. George and the Saracens at Christmas, or put up a Maypole on the first of May, all in the same somnambulistic way. These things are what you do and have always done as long as anyone can remember, at set times of the year. Hardy’s narrative voice comments astutely, as a professional anthropologist might, that you can always tell a true folk performance from a reproduction by the unimpassioned way it is run through: A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervor, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether they will or no. This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival may be known from a spurious reproduction. (147) The reference to Balaam is a characteristic Hardyan learned allusion dragged in by the narrator. Balaam is the unwilling prophet in Numbers 22–24 who, inspired by God, blesses the Israelite army rather than cursing it, as the Moabite King Balak has commanded him to do. His clairvoyant ass, which can see God standing in the way, refuses to carry him further Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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toward the intended cursing. The rustic characters in The Return of the Native would most likely never have thought of such a parallel. The narrative voice is inside and outside the community at once. He (or it) is an expert on the ways of this community. At the same time, the narrative voice speaks as an outsider who sees those ways from an ironic distance. The narrator’s task is to explain that community to middle class urban literate readers. How many of my readers today have ever witnessed or participated in a genuine “fossilized survival”? In my own life, only certain things done at Christmas and Easter come even close: trimming the tree, singing carols whether you want to or not, eating certain foods, hiding Easter eggs because it is what you do at Christmas or Easter—in other words, what your parents and grandparents did. One curious feature of the Egdon community is that, for the most part, they do not go to church. The church is too far away to be easily reached, even on Christmas day. This has some importance. It means that the church does not often function as a social gathering place for all classes and levels of this community. Church in some communities is a place to see and be seen, a place where courtships may be surreptitiously begun and carried on. The lack of churchgoing in Return also means, perhaps, that the heath folk’s Christianity is to some degree merely nominal. As the narrative voice comments, apropos of the erection of a Maypole outside Thomasin’s bedroom window: “Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine” (401). The lack of churchgoing also means that no conspicuous weekly community gathering externalizes class distinctions, with the squire and his family in a special pew, lesser folk in lesser pews, and the minister above them all. Here is the narrator’s quasi-ethnographical comment on this: The customary expedient of provincial girls and men in such circumstances [when they want to see their neighbors or be seen by them] is churchgoing. . . . But these tender schemes were not feasible among the scattered inhabitants of Egdon Heath. In name they were parishioners, but virtually they belonged to no parish at all. People who came to these few isolated homes to keep Christmas with their friends remained in their friends’ chimney-corners drinking mead and other comforting liquors 118

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till they left again for good and all. Rain, snow, ice, mud everywhere around, they did not care to trudge two or three miles to sit all wet-footed and splashed to the nape of their necks among those who, though in some measure neighbours, lived close to the church, and entered it clean and dry. (145–6) The role that courtship sometimes played in rural communities by churchgoing is to a considerable degree replaced in the Egdon community by country dancing. Examples are the improvised community dance atop Rainbarrow in the embers of the Fift h of November bonfire, or the dances that precede the mummers’ play at Mrs. Yeobright’s Christmas party, or the outdoor evening public dance that Eustacia goes to alone when her marriage to Clym has turned sour, there to meet Wildeve and dance wildly with him. The reflected light of the moon here replaces the sun as the light that binds things and people in submission to the life force: “the circular mouths of the trombone, ophicleide [a now long-obsolete “deep-toned, bugle-like instrument” (Notes in New Wessex Edition, 437)], and French horn gleamed out like huge eyes . . . . Eustacia floated round and round on Wildeve’s arm, her faced rapt and statuesque” (283). She dances with Wildeve because he just happens to have come there too: “The dance had come like an irresistible attack upon whatever sense of social order there was in their minds, to drive them back into old paths which were now doubly irregular” (284). They are doubly irregular because each is married to someone else. It is a double infidelity. The passage is also an example of Hardy’s figurative use of the paths that the characters literally traverse across the heath in their interactions with one another. Hardy’s narrator comments, apropos of Mrs. Yeobright’s Christmas party dance, on the social function of dancing in this community. The passage expresses, in indirect discourse, Eustacia’s awareness of the seductive power of dancing: “To dance with a man is to concentrate a twelvemonth’s regulation fi re upon him in the fragment of an hour. To pass to courtship without acquaintance, to pass to marriage without courtship, is a skipping of terms reserved for those alone who tread this royal road” (156). I have stressed that the world of The Return of the Native is an imaginary one, a virtual reality. It is hard to resist believing, however, that Hardy is speaking through the narrator as a kind of anthropological expert reporting on a vanishing way of life. The novel’s action is supposed to have taken place, according to Hardy, between 1840 and 1850, thirty or more years Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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before the novel was published in 1878. C. J. Weber has narrowed this to 1842–43 (439). Hardy is no doubt basing what he says on his own childhood experience in the village of Upper Bockhampton, near the “original” of Egdon Heath. There is no reason to doubt that this particular virtual reality is closely based on real landscapes, real ways of living, and even real houses. The Return of the Native in the Anniversary Edition of Hardy’s works (the 1920 reissue of the American Edition version of the Wessex Edition) contains photographs of the originals of Blooms-End, of the Yeobrights’ house, and of Alderworth Cottage, where Clym Yeobright lives with Eustacia after their marriage, as well as photographs of what Hardy calls, in the novel, “Egdon Heath” and “Shadwater Weir.” The photographs are by Hardy’s photographer friend, Hermann Lea. They come originally from Lea’s Thomas Hardy’s Wessex and are reproduced in the Anniversary Edition of Hardy’s works. The captions were added for the Anniversary Edition and are cited from that source. These photographs appear in Figures 6 through 9. You will note that the captions speak of fictitious events as having actually taken place in these once real and photographable settings—for example, “It was at the church in this village that Clym and Eustacia were married.” These photographs have a peculiar effect, at least on me. Because they are in a now-outmoded monochromatic technology (photogravures), and because these pictures were taken a long time ago in any case, they function paradoxically, for me at least, to emphasize the fictional quality of the text they “illustrate,” not to reinforce its mimetic realism. Whatever these hundred-year-old photographs show has long since changed and would no longer be registered by the same technology. Juxtaposed to Hardy’s text, the photographs show that any “mimic representation” is artificial in the sense of being subject to some technology or other, whether that is an archaic kind of photography or the inscribing of words on a page.

T H E E G D O N CO M M U N I T Y A S A “ T H E Y ”

The narrator’s knowledge of the imaginary Egdon community that dwells in the environment so quaintly photographed is detailed and circumstantial. He (or it) records that the behavior and judgments of the heath folk reveal all sorts of prejudices and superstitions. They take a dim view of education. They think Clym Yeobright’s scheme to educate the rural population is 120

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Figure 6. Egdon Heath, in Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, vol. IV of The Writings of Thomas Hardy in Prose and Verse (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1920), Frontispiece. The caption in Hermann Lea’s Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, from which the photographs are drawn, is “Wareham Heath,” a real place, but the caption in the Anniversary Edition reproduction reads: “Egdon Heath represents that vast expanse of moorland which extends, almost without a break, from Dorchester to Bournemouth, and is the scene of practically all the incidents in ‘The Return of the Native.’ “ ‘Under the general name of “Egdon Heath,” which has been given to the sombre scene of the story, are united or typified heaths of various real names, to the number of at least a dozen. It is pleasant to dream that some spot in the extensive tract whose south-western quarter is here described, may be the heath of that traditionary King of Wessex—Lear.’ “To picture Egdon Heath as it appears in the story, ‘imagine it at the transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness,’ for ‘nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time.’ ”

Figure 7. Bloom’s End, in Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, vol. IV of The Writings of Thomas Hardy in Prose and Verse (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1920). The caption in Hermann Lea’s Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, from which the photographs are drawn, is “Bhompston Farm,” a real place, but the caption in the Anniversary Edition reproduction reads: “Blooms-End, the name given to the home of the Yeobrights, was drawn from a farm-house called Bhompston, which stands in a green field just off the margin of Egdon Heath in the direction of Lower Bockhampton village. In the old oakbeamed room of this house the mummers were assembled to play ‘St. George and the Dragon’ at the Christmas revels.”

Figure 8. Alderworth, in Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, vol. IV of The Writings of Thomas Hardy in Prose and Verse (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1920). The caption in Hermann Lea’s Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, from which the photographs are drawn, is “Brickyard Cottage, Aff puddle Heath,” a real place, but the caption in the Anniversary Edition reproduction reads: “Alderworth, the fictitious name of the cottage which Clym rented after his marriage to Eustacia, was situated ‘about two miles beyond the village of East Egdon.’ East Egdon represents Aff puddle, a village near Dorchester. It was at the church in this village that Clym and Eustacia were married. “The cottage was in a lonely situation, for ‘it was almost as lonely as that of Eustacia’s grandfather, but the fact that it stood near a heath was disguised by a belt of firs which almost enclosed the premises.’ ”

foolish and ill conceived. “But, for my part,” says one of the rustics, “I think he had better mind his business” (195). All the heath folk know folksongs, as well as the text of the mummers’ play of Saint George and the Saracens. Grandfer Cantle sings by the Fawkes Day bonfire a ballad that was recorded in the seventeenth century and that has an ironic parallel to the main action. It was called, variously, “Queen Eleanor’s Confession,” “Earl Marshal,” or “The Jovial Crew” (426). Queen Eleanor, like Eustacia Vye, was not altogether a good and faithful wife. The novel is full of other folk customs and folk beliefs. These include the custom of singing a song at the bridegroom’s house when he has taken his bride home on the wedding Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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Figure 9. Shadwater Weir, in Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, vol. IV of The Writings of Thomas Hardy in Prose and Verse (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1920). The caption in Hermann Lea’s Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, from which the photographs are drawn, is “The Weir, Woodsford Meadows,” a real place, but the caption in the Anniversary Edition reproduction reads: “Shadwater Weir, situated at the foot of one of the slopes of Egdon Heath, ‘had at its foot a large circular pool, fi ft y feet in diameter, into which the water flowed through the huge hatches.’ The actual weir from which Shadwater Weir was drawn can be found in the meadows behind Woodsford Castle. It takes in the whole water of the river Froom; in winter the pool is a boiling cauldron, the flow of water rushing with terrific force. It has been little changed since the time when Damon Wildeve and Eustacia were supposed to have been drowned in it.”

night, the belief that only the fat of a fried adder will cure an adder bite, and Susan Nunsuch’s belief, shared by some of her neighbors, that Eustacia is a witch. Susan believes Eustacia has hexed her children and made them ill. Susan pricks Eustacia’s arm in church, drawing blood. This was supposed to deprive her of her witch’s powers. At the end of the novel, on the stormy, rainy night when Eustacia drowns herself, Susan sticks pins in a wax effigy of Eustacia and then melts the effigy in the fire in an attempt to perform a little malign magic of her own. It seems to work. The members of this community are good at telling stories about themselves or about their neighbors. They have a long collective memory—for 124

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example, Humphrey’s memory, by way of his mother’s memory, of the beheading of Louis the Fourteenth (132), another elimination of the father, as in absence of fathers in the novel itself, or, closer by in the past; Timothy Fairway’s memory and circumstantial account of the scene in the church when Mrs. Yeobright “forbad the banns” between Wildeve and her niece Thomasin (48–9); or the wonderful memorial celebration, by Timothy Fairway again, of what a great musician Thomasin Yeobright’s father, now long dead, was: “Whenever a club walked [an annual parade of a local community organization] he’d play the clarinet in the band that marched before ’em as if he’d never touched anything but a clarinet all his life. And then, when they got to church-door he’d throw down the clarinet, mount the gallery, snatch up the bass-viol, and rozum away as if he’s never played anything but a bass-viol” (75). All these highly specific details of local life go to show that the collection of heath folk is a genuine community. They share an elaborate set of assumptions and ways of living. They thereby fulfill the conditions for a true community as defined, for example, by Raymond Williams. The members of the Egdon community have, for the most part, no separate individualized lives and no interiorities worth investigating, at least by Hardy’s narrator. Nothing dramatic ever happens to them. They are born, marry, quarrel with their wives, work, have children, grow old, die. They do all the quasi-ritual things Hardy’s narrator tells us they do during the round of the seasons. Then they die and are buried in the local churchyard. Their separate individualities are lost in the “they.” They are representatives, however, of a more or less positive version of Heidegger’s das Man. They do not, even so, have enough consciousness of themselves as separate individualities to be anything like Heideggerian authentic Daseins. Therefore, they do not have life stories worth telling. Hardy’s narrator is not particularly condescending to them for that lack, as Heidegger certainly is in his description of newspaper reading, public-transportation-taking members of the “they,” who think and judge not for themselves but just as those around them do. Hardy, on the contrary, admires and warmly sympathizes with the heath folk. The Return of the Native celebrates and commemorates the true natives of the heath as a vanishing species. Hardy’s double attitude toward the Egdon Heath community is neatly expressed in a sentence from his essay of 1883, “The Dorsetshire Laborer”: “. . . it is among such communities as these that happiness will find her last refuge on earth, since it is among them that Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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a perfect insight into the conditions of existence will be longest postponed.” Hardy’s essay is a detailed and eloquent account of the gradual passing away of this happiness. It is the happiness of being well-deceived. The disappearance of this happiness takes place through manifold social and material changes in rural working class life, as the “natives” become more educated, more mobile, more open to the outside world, and more directly subjected to capitalist agrarian practices.

T H E M A I N C H A R AC T E R S A S O U T S I D E T H E R U R A L CO M M U N I T Y, THOUGH INTERTWINED WITH IT

All the main protagonists of The Return of the Native differ from those in the community of heath folk in that they are already beginning to approach a perfect insight into the conditions of existence, to their sorrow. They have risen further from their source, the sun-irradiated heath. Th is means that, unlike the heath folk, they do have separate subjectivities. They are aware of themselves as different and as having unique destinies. They therefore have life stories that the narrator can tell. They might consequently be considered to have what Heidegger calls authentic Daseins. They have wrested themselves, or have been wrested, from the “they” of the local community. Their lives are lived not only against the background of the heath, as they crisscross it in their transactions with one another, but also against the background of the local community, though that community to some degree intervenes in their lives, as the heath does. It is a community, however, of which they are not really members. The crucial difference between Heidegger and Hardy, however, is that Heidegger sees authentic Dasein in highly positive terms, even though it means having a conscience, feeling guilty, and living “towards death,” whereas self-consciousness and awareness of the human plight are more or less unmitigated disasters for Hardy’s protagonists. The stories Hardy’s narrator tells, moreover, involve exclusively characters who are not really members of the Egdon community in another sense. In Deer Isle, Maine, where I now live most of the year, a sharp distinction is made between those who are “from here” and those who are “from away.” If you are “from away” you have no hope of ever becoming a native, “from here,” nor do your children or grandchildren. It will take generations and generations of local inhabitation before people might forget that your 126 Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

family is from away. All Hardy’s protagonists in The Return of the Native are in one way or another “from away.” They have not been born in Egdon into a family that has lived and died there for many generations, as long as anyone can remember. Even if they have been born there, like Clym, Thomasin, and Diggory Venn, they have not, except for Thomasin, lived all of their lives there. They have not always lived absorbed into the ways of life and the prejudices of the community. To go away even for a short time is, in Egdon, to cease forever to be a real “native.” The narrator is quite specific for each of the protagonists about just how this is the case. Eustacia is the granddaughter of a ship captain in the Royal Navy who, invalided out, has come “from away” to live in a house, “Mistover,” next to Egdon Heath. Eustacia’s father was a bandmaster from Corfu. She is definitely from away. Mrs. Yeobright is a curate’s daughter from outside the local community who has married a now deceased local farmer. Nevertheless, she has “a standing which can only be expressed by the word genteel,” and had “once dreamt of doing better things” (59–60). She too is from away. Her detachment, as well as her gentility, has rubbed off on the orphan niece she has brought up, Thomasin. Wildeve was trained as a civil engineer and has worked in an office in Budmouth, the neighboring fashionable seaside resort, just as Eustacia lived there as a child. Wildeve has failed as an engineer and has come to Egdon “from away” to take over the local tavern, the Quiet Woman Inn. Diggory Venn is the son of a dairy farmer nearby, but he has taken up the wandering trade of “reddleman.” He is someone who goes from sheep farm to sheep farm over a wide area selling reddle for dipping sheep. He is only a periodic and temporary resident in Egdon, as he travels from place to place in his gypsy cart mobile home. Clym Yeobright has been well educated and has worked as a diamond merchant in Paris. His experience detaches him permanently from his beloved natal heath, however hard he tries to return to it and immerse himself in the local trade of furze-cutting.

S E L F  AWA R E N E S S A S D E TAC H M E N T

All these characters are also detached from the community by several other characteristics they all have, in a different form for each. Each is of a higher class than the heath folk and recognized as, to some degree, “genteel” by them. Each is more highly educated than the heath folk Each is, Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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finally, in one way or another an “intellectual.” Each is thoughtful and reflective, someone who sees himself or herself and the surrounding world from a detached perspective. Each, unfortunately for him or her, unlike “the Dorsetshire laborer,” does have something approaching “perfect insight into the conditions of existence.” The introductory presentation of each or the account of some later moment of crisis for each gives the narrator an opportunity to specify the par ticu lar self-awareness and awareness of the grim universal human condition a given protagonist has. This selfawareness might be called a dark version of that taking possession of one’s “ownmost possibilities of Being,” which Heidegger calls “authentic Dasein.” Each has detached himself or herself from the “they” of the Egdon community. Each lives an independent inner life that is, to a considerable degree, secret and silent. Each inner life is not only kept hidden from the others, but also is in any case incommunicable to them. This secrecy manifests a universal failure in this novel of any character to understand the others or to be understood by them. Nevertheless, the narrator betrays the secret life of each to the reader, according to a conventional practice in novels. It is a peculiarity of Hardy’s presentation of his protagonists’ “Daseins” that notations of what they are actually thinking and feeling at a given moment are relatively brief and laconic. Relatively little use, as opposed to, say, Trollope’s practice, is made of that basic convention of Victorian fiction, free indirect discourse. Free indirect discourse presents the intimate here and now of a character’s thoughts and feelings, transposed from first person present tense to third person past tense. An example of the latter is a brief passage about Diggory Venn: “He sat in his van and considered. From Thomasin’s words and manner he had plainly gathered that Wildeve neglected her. For whom could he neglect her if not for Eustacia? Yet it was scarcely credible that things had come to such a head as to indicate that Eustacia systematically encouraged him. Venn resolved to reconnoiter somewhat carefully the lonely road which led along the vale from Wildeve’s dwelling to Clym’s house at Alderworth” (289). Direct notations of subjectivity in The Return of the Native tend, unlike the one just cited, to move rapidly out into generalizations about the constant qualities of that person’s mind. A passage I shall cite describing Wildeve’s yearning for Eustacia just because she is marrying Clym exemplifies several consistently used features of the presentation of character in 128

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The Return of the Native. It exemplifies the law of mediated desire that I have cited earlier. A given person’s desire is only for those who are desired by others. The passage also exemplifies the way Hardy’s narrator tends to move rapidly from sparse notations about the subjective here and now of the characters’ subjectivities to generalizations, and then to literary or historical allusions. The narrator dilates further and further away from direct, intimate notation of a subjectivity’s actual texture and contents. The passage also exemplifies the way subjectivity tends to be registered in this novel in terms of the body, or in terms of the characters’ habitual ways of seeing the outside world in which they find themselves—that is, in a par ticu lar situation. Such notations stand by metonymy for their characteristic subjectivities. They tend to see the world as if from a distance, as an antagonist, or as something within which they do not fit. The passage also exemplifies the way the local community functions as the means by which the main protagonists learn about one another. Because they are often estranged from one another and have little direct contact, they often communicate or get information about one another through the Egdon rustics. The passage I shall cite describes Wildeve’s reaction to learning that Eustacia is going to marry Clym from the driver of a cart coming down from Mistover, who has stopped for a drink at the Quiet Woman Inn. Such passages are characteristic of Hardy’s narrative tactics. They are more a comment by the narrator about the character’s constant quality of mind than a direct, intimate representation of it at a par ticular moment: The old longing for Eustacia had reappeared in his soul: and it was mainly because he had discovered that it was another man’s intention to possess her. To be yearning for the difficult, to be weary of that offered; to care for the remote, to dislike the near; it was Wildeve’s nature always. This is the true mark of the man of sentiment. Though Wildeve’s fevered feeling had not been elaborated to real poetical compass, it was of the standard sort. He might have been called the Rousseau of Egdon. (237) The narrator begins with the here and now of Wildeve’s state of mind but withdraws rapidly to a wider compass, moving through a general definition of Wildeve’s temperament to end with a comparison to Rousseau. The latter functions in the same complex and multiple fashion that the multitude of such literary, historical, and Biblical allusions operate in the novel. Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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They are meant, one guesses, to establish the narrator’s credentials to be respected by his metropolitan, literate readers, and by the reviewers. They also establish the narrator as someone with a wide comprehensive vision. The narrative voice may notice little things like grasshoppers and rabbits’ ears in the sunlight, but he or it also sees all particulars in the context of an allembracing insight into the ephemerality and ultimate pointlessness of any individual human existence. This is that insight into humanity’s true “conditions of existence” that Hardy says would destroy the happiness of the Dorsetshire laborer. He sees such insight as more and more characterizing all mankind in this late age of the world. Hardy’s narrator ascribes some version of this devastating insight to all the main protagonists of the novel, except Thomasin. Since innocence, as we know, is bliss, this might possibly justify the happy ending for her. About that happy ending there will be more to say. The main characters echo the narrator’s wide vision, though each is isolated in his or her special version of it. This awareness of the futility of human existence and of the way “I,” in par ticular, exemplify it is Hardy’s dark version of Heideggerian benign withdrawal from the “they” into autonomous and authentic Dasein. For example, the narrator tells the reader that Mrs. Yeobright sees human things as though from a vast distance and as a pointless swirling of ephemeral creatures. This figure anticipates the more highly developed version of this in the choruses of The Dynasts. The passage also exemplifies the way Hardy often presents subjectivity in terms of special ways of perceiving the external world as opposed to reporting introspection as such: She had a singular insight into life, considering that she had never mixed with it. . . . What was the great world to Mrs. Yeobright? A multitude whose tendencies could be perceived, though not its essences. Communities were seen by her as from a distance; she saw them as we see the throngs which cover the canvases of Sallaert, Van Alsloot, and others of that school—vast masses of beings, jostling, zigzagging, and processioning in definite directions, but whose features are indistinguishable by the very comprehensiveness of the view. One could see that, as far as it had gone, her life was very complete on its reflective side. (212) Diggory Venn lurks here and there on the heath as what the narrator calls a “Mephistophelian visitant” (104). He spies on the other characters as a de130

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tached and unseen seer (like Satan in Paradise Lost) who objectifies the narrator’s invisible clairvoyance. The reflective reader may note that Thomasin’s name is a feminine version of Hardy’s own name. This suggests that in some way, conscious or unconscious, Hardy identified himself with Thomasin, or idealized himself in her passivity and more or less unreflective goodness. The narrative voice of Tess of the d’Urbervilles characterizes itself by way of the novel’s epigraph, from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona. The narrative voice is a protective enclosure for Tess, or at least for her “name”: “Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed / Shall lodge thee.” Diggory Venn, as an objectification of the narrator’s watchful distance, plays somewhat the same role in relation to Thomasin in The Return of the Native as that of the narrator in Tess in relation to Tess. Diggory, however, often intervenes actively, usually with disastrous consequences, whatever his loving good intentions toward Thomasin may be. An example is his manipulation of Eustacia, Mrs. Yeobright, and Wildeve so that Wildeve decides to marry Thomasin after all. Venn, the reader might conclude, should have kept his distance. Wildeve, as the passage cited earlier indicates, is a Rousseau-like man of sentiment. The narrator explicitly makes this comparison. Wildeve cares only for the remote and unattainable. This is a sure recipe for unhappiness and for perpetually unsatisfied desire. It ultimately leads Wildeve to his death when his love for Eustacia returns in intensified form just because she is unattainable. A full chapter is devoted to a description of Eustacia’s character. She is presented as a narcissistic, melancholic “Queen of Night” (93), “the raw material of a divinity” (93). “Her high gods were William the Conqueror, Strafford, and Napoleon Bonaparte, as they had appeared in the Lady’s History used at the establishment in which she was educated” (97). Eustacia wants only to exercise power over men by way of her beauty. She is incapable, as she knows well enough, of loving anyone for long. For her, as for Hardy’s characters generally, possession rapidly destroys love, but she differs from most of them in knowing this beforehand: “To be loved to madness—such was her great desire” (96). She knows, however, “that any love she might win would sink simultaneously with the sand in the glass. . . . Fidelity in love for fidelity’s sake had less attraction for her than for most women: fidelity because of love’s grip had much. A blaze of love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years” (96). Eustacia does actually carry an hourglass in her wanderings on the heath. Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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Eustacia is obsessed with a foolish and unfulfi llable desire to be somewhere else, somewhere different, especially Paris, though if she ever got there she would soon find it as unsatisfactory and boring as Egdon Heath. She believes that “certain creatures of her mind, the chief being Destiny” (96), not particular human beings, have it in for her. When she wanders up to the top of Rainbarrow in the rainstorm, before she throws herself into Shadwater Weir, she does not blame herself or those around her, in her self-pitying suicidal despair, but large abstractions, “destiny” and “Heaven,” in which the narrator evidently does not believe: “ ‘How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! . . . I do not deserve my lot!’ she cried in a frenzy of bitter revolt. ‘O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to Heaven at all!” (372) Eustacia might almost be seen as an ironic parody of Heidegger’s “authentic Dasein.” She is certainly withdrawn from the “they,” and she certainly thinks of herself as a unique singularity with a special destiny of her own that does lead straight to death, but all these Heideggerian elements are presented in a dyslogistic and self-deceptive form. They are not presented as the heroic heeding of conscience’s call in a resolute being toward death that Heidegger praises. Rather than taking possession of her selfhood and special situation, her suffering leads her to detach herself from herself, and to see herself as if from a great distance, in a way rather like the detached vision of the narrator: “Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was” (357–8). Clym Yeobright, on the other hand, is presented explicitly as the man who already is what mankind as a whole, in Hardy’s view, is rapidly becoming. He does not blame his lot on “destiny” or “Heaven.” Clym is already someone who sees clearly the sad conditions of existence. He is, like Hardy himself, a thoughtful intellectual. His bodily beauty is being consumed and gradually destroyed by thought. As in the case of Eustacia, a long generalizing characterization of Clym prepares for his behavior in the novel. Like so many others of the main protagonists, he sees things from a distance. The narrator defines him by this detached disillusioned vision rather than by his interior thoughts or feelings at any one moment of his life. His disillu-

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sionment is the exact opposite of the naïve faith, the “old-fashioned reveling in the general situation,” that the Egdon rustics have: In Clym Yeobright’s face could be dimly seen the typical countenance of the future. . . . The truth seems to be that a long line of disillusive centuries has permanently displaced the Hellenic idea of life, or whatever it may be called. What the Greeks only suspected we know well; what their Aeschylus imagined our nursery children feel. That old-fashioned reveling in the general situation grows less and less possible as we uncover the defects of natural laws, and see the quandary that man is in by their operation. (191) Hardy, in short, ascribes to Clym Yeobright his own “disillusive” insights into the way the mismatch between what men and women want and what natural laws allow makes happiness and the satisfaction of desire impossible. The heath folk may think they are at home on Egdon Heath, but humankind and the world they find themselves in do not fit. Men and women can never be at home in the world. They are permanently “unheimlich,” whether they know it or not. One might say that the narrator has distributed among the main characters different facets of himself, though in each case in a different, idiosyncratic combination. Each of the characters is imprisoned within his or her version of what Hardy in Jude the Obscure calls the “coming will not to live.” None of the protagonists can ever communicate his or her secret interiority to others. The actions of the novel are therefore made up of the doomed contretemps of the characters as they interact destructively. These interactions are dramatized in their crisscross movements over the heath. They are always at cross-purposes with one another, never able to achieve happiness for themselves or for others. Their intentions, however well meant, tend to misfire, just as do the speech acts they perform, such as promises to love one another forever, or marriage vows, or attempts to stop bad marriages, such as Mrs. Yeobright’s forbidding of the banns between Thomasin and Wildeve. The latter is a striking and little-used performative utterance. The minister of the church announces on successive Sundays the “banns,” that is, the intention to wed of two of his parishioners. Each time, he asks if anyone in the congregation knows of any impediment to the marriage. Mrs. Yeobright, to everyone’s consternation, stands up in church and “forbids

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the banns.” This event takes place before the action begins. All the heath community know about it, as a local scandal (see 48–9). In three cases—Mrs. Yeobright, Wildeve, and Eustacia—the characters’ intersecting trajectories lead to deaths that are ignominious rather than tragic. The bringing to the surface of the barely alive Clym, whose legs are clasped tightly by the dead Wildeve’s arms, emblematizes the destructive relation among the main characters in this novel. Clym is left alive to vibrate between a Hardyan pessimism and a returning idealism that makes him end in a faintly ridiculous role as an itinerant preacher of a secular ethics: “Yeobright had, in fact, found his vocation in the career of an itinerant open-air preacher and lecturer on morally unimpeachable subjects” (423). Much irony is present in that phrase “morally unimpeachable subjects.” Hardy was often accused of being far from morally unimpeachable. He gave up novel writing for good after the uproar over the supposed immorality and blasphemy of Jude the Obscure. My return to re-reading The Return of the Native was originally motivated by investigations I had been making of Victorian and modernist multiplotted novels as models of community. That formulation, it turns out, does not fit this novel. Though the heath folk form a community, the main actions of the novel focus on a non-community of distinctive individuals who interact with one another destructively and without mutual understanding. Nor is The Return of the Native really “multi-plotted.” Each of the main characters, rather, has his or her own separate, and to a considerable degree private, plot. Each has a life-story that intersects destructively with those of the others, but the whole does not form an integrated plot of the sort that Aristotle had in mind in the Poetics and that he saw as exemplified by Oedipus the King.

T H E “ H A P P Y E N D I N G”

What then should the reader make of the happy ending? Thomasin marries Diggory Venn, who has loved her from afar faithfully, and for the most part secretly, after she refuses him twice. A footnote at the end of the next to the last chapter is an intrusion on the narrator’s discourse by Hardy himself. Hardy speaks in his own voice as a ghostly intruder who has not been heard from before, except in the Preface and in the Postscript. The latter is printed, for some reason, at the beginning, in the New Wessex Edition. Hardy speaks 134 Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

in the footnote as the “writer” who has made up the whole fiction. That footnote passes implacable judgment on the meretricious and inconsistent happy ending. Hardy wrote the new ending because the editor of Belgravia, the popular magazine in which The Return of the Novel was first published in installments, had insisted that Hardy write a happy ending. He did that against his original intention, against consistency, and against the laws prohibiting human happiness that govern so sternly the virtual reality of The Return of the Native. The footnote reads as follows: The writer may state here that the original conception of the story did not design a marriage between Thomasin and Venn. He was to have retained his isolated and weird character to the last, and to have disappeared mysteriously from the heath, nobody knowing whither—Thomasin remaining a widow. But certain circumstances of serial publication led to a change of intent. Readers can therefore choose between the endings, and those with an austere artistic code can assume the more consistent conclusion to be the true one. (413) So much for the happy ending! Who would not want to have “an austere artistic code” rather than a banal one, the one shared with the “they”? And who would admire a novel whose ending is inconsistent with all that has gone before? The only problem is that Hardy did not ever write that consistent ending. Where, I ask in conclusion, should we put Hardy in relation to Williams and Heidegger? Somewhere in between, I think, or, rather, in an anomalous position that does not fit exactly what either Williams or Heidegger says about the nature of community, about the nature of the individual, and about the proper or desirable relation between them. The relation between Williams and Heidegger on these points, the reader will remember, is a chiasmus. What seems good to Williams, living immersed in an organic community, seems bad to Heidegger. It is defined as being lost in das Man. What seems good to Heidegger, the detached self-possession of authentic Dasein, seems bad to Williams. It is defined by the latter as alienation from belonging to a community. Hardy’s The Return of the Native does not fit either of these paradigms. An organic, traditional, egalitarian community, to a considerable degree sequestered from capitalism, forms the background of the main action of the novel, superimposed as an active, Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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present-day way of living on the landscape of Egdon Heath. That community, however, is presented as happy because it is blissfully ignorant. It is lost in illusions, immersed in them. It does not understand humankind’s true conditions of existence. The main characters, on the contrary, live in detachment from that circumambient community. They live in selfconscious awareness of their specific situations and of the general conditions of human existence, as Hardy sees them. They might therefore be taken as examples of Heideggerian authentic Dasein. The crucial difference, however, is the judgment passed by the two authors on that state. For all his dark rigor and talk of a primordial “being guilty,” Heidegger sees authentic Dasein as on the whole a positive and desirable state. It is the state of someone who is rooted in Being, who has resolutely taken possession of his or her “ownmost possibilities of Being,” who has answered the call of conscience, and who is living authentically oriented toward his or her own death. Heidegger, moreover, explicitly sees authentic Daseins as able to live together in a new kind of community in which each Dasein helps the others to be their authentic selves. He calls this condition Mitdasein. Here is what Heidegger, somewhat surprisingly, says about this happy state. It is surprising because it substantially modifies his general stress on the privacy, secrecy, and silence of authentic Dasein. I give some of the German here because it is difficult to get the flavor from the translation. The German word translated as “resoluteness,” for example, is “die Entschlossenheit,” which means, literally, “closed in on itself,” like a clenched fist. A “Schloss” is a castle. Resoluteness [Die Entschlossenheit] brings the self right into its current concernful Being-alongside what is ready-to-hand, and pushes it into solicitous Being with Others [in das fürsorgende Mitsein mit den Anderen]. In the light of the “for-the-sake-of-which” of one’s self-chosen potentiality-for-Being [des selbstgewählten Seinkönnens], resolute Dasein frees itself for its world. Dasein’s resoluteness towards itself is what first makes it possible to let the Others who are with it “be” in their ownmost potentiality-for-Being [die mitseienden Anderen “sein” zu lassen in ihrem eigensten Seinkönnen], and to co-disclose this potentiality in the solicitude which leaps forth and liberates. When Dasein is resolute, it can become the “conscience” of Others [Das entschlossene Dasein kann zum “Gewissen” der Anderen werden.]. Only by authentically Being-their-Selves 136

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in resoluteness can people authentically be with one another [das eigentliche Miteinander]—not by ambiguous and jealous stipulations and talkative fraternizing in the “they” [im Man] and in what “they” want to undertake. (BT, 344–5; SZ, 298) “Talkative fraternizing in the ‘they’ ” is a good description of the desultory conversations of the heath folk that the narrator of The Return of the Native so lovingly records. Heidegger’s description of a Utopian community of authentic Daseins, each helping the others to activate resolutely their ownmost potentialities for Being is wonderfully optimistic and positive. Nothing of the sort seems possible in Hardy’s imagined world. For one thing, Hardy’s characters are not shown as resolutely choosing to be what they are. Their distinctive natures are imposed on them, willy-nilly. They cannot help being what they are and behaving accordingly. For Hardy, detaching oneself from the community, or never having belonged to one, and living as not a “native” anywhere, is a more or less unmitigated disaster. It leads to deaths that are, as I have said, ignominious or melodramatic rather than tragic. These deaths hardly correspond to the sort of thing Heidegger appears to have had in mind in his talk about each person dying his or her own death. The deaths in The Return of the Native are often the result of bad luck and misunderstanding, including self-misunderstanding, or they are the result of basic character flaws that the characters cannot help. Nor can Hardy’s thoughtful and self-conscious characters help one another be themselves. They work continually against one another. They have no true understanding of one another. They cause one another much grief. They even contribute, as Clym Yeobright conspicuously does, and in spite of his best intentions, to the deaths of others. Clym is partly responsible for his mother’s death, for Eustacia’s death, and for Wildeve’s death. He blames himself bitterly for the first two of these. Nothing in Hardy, finally, corresponds to Heidegger’s conviction that authentic Dasein is rooted in Being, Sein. The characters may believe that they must be the sport of some malign deity or fate, but the narrator presents this as an illusion, a fantasy. Hardy is righter than Heidegger, I believe, in his prophetic insight into the rootless conditions of existence in the West, as more men and women within Western modernity endure those conditions. They lack conviction that there is for Dasein any grounding in “Being.” Clym’s Oedipal anguish in no way testifies to some inscrutable wish Individual and Community in The Return of the Native

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of God to punish him. It is evidence rather of the vast and total indifference of nature to human suffering or joy. At the climax of his despair, Clym sees “only the imperturbable countenance of the heath, which, having defied the cataclysmal onsets of centuries, reduced to insignificance by its seamed and antique features the wildest turmoil of a single man” (342). He achieves at that moment “a consciousness of a vast impassivity in all which lay around him” (343). Clym’s consciousness here coincides closely with the narrator’s, and with what the evidence of Hardy’s writing in fiction and in poetry suggests was Hardy’s own habitual consciousness. Hardy would probably have seen the appeal, all over our “globalizing” world today, of extreme forms of traditional religions as one desperate response to this painful sense of rootlessness and alienation. Clym’s final vocation as an itinerant preacher is the example within The Return of the Native. In ending this reading of The Return of the Native I return to the beginning, the unidentified epigraph printed under the title: To Sorrow I bade good-morrow, And thought to leave her far away behind; But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly; She is so constant to me, and so kind: I would deceive her And so leave her, But ah! she is so constant and so kind. This comes from Keats’s Endymion, Bk. IV, ll. 173–81. It is sung by Cynthia disguised as an Indian maid. What she sings certainly fits what happens to all the characters in Hardy’s novel, especially if we dismiss the factitious happy ending. All the main characters in the novel attempt unsuccessfully to say goodbye to “sorrow,” but sorrow is their mate. A further irony lies in the way Keats’s poem, unlike Hardy’s hypothetical novel with “the more consistent conclusion,” ends with Endymion’s happy union with Cynthia. No such happiness is possible for Hardy’s main characters. The protagonists of The Return of the Native dwell in a community of mutuallygenerated sorrow. That sorrow much less touches the Egdon heath folk, in their innocence, though Captain Vye’s servant boy, Charley, in his adoration of Eustacia, touchingly shares in that sorrow when she dies. 138

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4 CO N R A D ’S CO LO N I A L NONCOMMUNIT Y Nostromo In memory of Edward M. Said When you do hermeneutics, you are concerned with the meaning of the work; when you do poetics, you are concerned with the stylistics or with the description of the way in which a work means. The question is whether these two are complementary, whether you can cover the full work by doing hermeneutics and poetics at the same time. The experience of trying to do this shows that it is not the case. When one tries to achieve this complementarity, the poetics always drops out, and what one always does is hermeneutics. One is so attracted by problems of meaning that it is impossible to do hermeneutics and poetics at the same time. From the moment you start to get involved with problems of meaning, as I unfortunately tend to do, forget about the poetics. The two are not complementary, the two may be mutually exclusive in a certain way, and that is part of the problem which Benjamin states, a purely linguistic problem. (Paul de Man, “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’ ”)

P R E LU D E

Henry James, in a review of Conrad’s Chance, says Conrad is “absolutely alone as a votary of the way to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing.” What James says would be even truer of Nostromo. That means anything like a complete accounting for Nostromo in a critical essay like this one also requires an exorbitant doing. “Pour la commodité du récit,” as

Proust puts it, for ease of my narration, to make it perspicuous, I have divided this chapter into four sections, with many labeled subsections in each section: The Origins of Nostromo, Material Vision in Nostromo: As Conrad Does It, “Material Interests”: Nostromo as Critique of Capitalist Imperialism, Ideologies of Love and War: Psychodramas of Intertwined Isolatoes in Nostromo.

THE ORIGINS OF NOSTROMO

Conrad opens the “Author’s Note” to Nostromo (1904) of October 1917, by saying that “Nostromo is the most anxiously meditated of the longer novels which belong to the period following upon the publication of the Typhoon volume of short stories.” This “Author’s Note” (or “Note,” as the Modern Library edition calls it) is an exceedingly peculiar document in a number of ways. What does that mean: “most anxiously meditated”? I suppose what it means seems obvious enough. Nostromo is a big novel, Conrad’s biggest, with the largest number of characters whose stories are more or less completely told. It is natural that such a novel would take a lot of planning, a lot of meditative figuring out beforehand and even in the course of writing. Why that meditating should be “anxious” is not quite clear, however. I suppose it is plausible to assume that Conrad was worried about whether he could get such an ambitious novel to come out right. Writing is always a matter of anxiety. It is not at first clear, nevertheless, whether Conrad means by “anxiously meditated” no more than what Heidegger calls Sorge, “care” for some task ready at hand, or whether he means something like what Heidegger calls genuine existential angst. Angst is an anxiety that goes all the way down to the depths of one’s being. It exceeds any particular “care.” What follows in the “Author’s Note” makes it clear that Conrad suffered angst, all right, over Nostromo. The note is precious evidence of the way Conrad’s imagination worked, at least according to his testimony. He may, of course, be making it up, romanticizing a prosaic process or ironically inflating it. Conrad was an ironist through and through. After he finished the Typhoon volume, says Conrad, he went into a peculiar and disquieting state, at least for a professional writer, as he was. He was someone who needed to write in order to earn his daily bread. Conrad

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says there was a “change” “in that mysterious, extraneous thing which has nothing to do with the theories of art; a subtle change in the nature of the inspiration, a phenomenon for which I cannot in any way be held responsible. What, however, did cause me some concern was that after finishing the last story of the Typhoon volume (‘To-morrow’) it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about” (Note, 1). That is pretty terrifying. At one time the writing is going along swimmingly. “Inspiration,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, “comes unbidden.” Conrad writes story after story as though the vein of inspiration could never dry up. Then suddenly, involuntarily, through what Conrad calls not a drying up of inspiration, but “a subtle change in the nature of the inspiration,” it seems somehow that there is nothing more in the world to write about. Conrad’s ability to write remains in undiminished strength. That is, I suppose, one definition of “inspiration.” Now, however, through a “subtle change,” nothing seems left as an object on which to exercise that power of writing. Conrad stresses that it is not his fault. It just happened. It was a “phenomenon for which I cannot in any way be held responsible.” Nor is this change caused by some change in “the theories of art,” Conrad’s or anyone else’s. Conrad could mean by this, I suppose, either that a change in theories of art could lead to new exigencies that might make writing something like Typhoon no longer possible, or that certain theories of art, perhaps theories of art’s sources, might explain his sudden change of inspiration. No, it was a change in what Conrad calls the “mysterious, extraneous thing” that governs the nature of his inspiration, something wholly outside himself and wholly outside his control. The change just happens, mysteriously. That causes anxiety, concern, angst. The rest of the “Author’s Note” details the steps by which Conrad escaped what might be called, in a Kierkegaardian phrase, this “sickness unto death” and came to write Nostromo. It is important to note at the outset that Conrad does not say anything like what critics say about the “sources” of Nostromo. For whatever reason, Conrad does not say, I had been reading Edward B. Eastwick’s Venezuela, G. F. Masterman’s Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay, S. Perez Triana’s Down the Orinoco, and writings on South America by my friend R. B. Cunninghame Graham. These gave me the idea of writing a novel about an imaginary South

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American country that would amalgamate material from these various books, including South American history, its landscapes, as well as characters’ names and personalities drawn from real people as described in these books. Why does Conrad not say that? Why does he hide his “sources”? Was it a somewhat guilty cover-up, or an honest forgetting, or is it evidence that Conrad disagreed by anticipation with modern “art theories” about the genesis of literary works? In any case, the story Conrad tells in 1917 of the origin of Nostromo is quite different from those of modern Conrad critics. Just what does Conrad actually say about the genesis of Nostromo? His account parallels many of Henry James’s accounts in the prefaces to the New York Edition of his novels and stories, where he tells the reader how a small germ or donnée, for example a vagrant anecdote told at the dinner table, produced a big novel when James’s imagination began developing it. In Conrad’s case, according to his testimony, he once heard, back in 1875 or 1876, on the only sea voyage he made to South America, or rather to the Gulf of Mexico, of a man who had stolen a lighter full of silver during the turmoil of a South American revolution. A “lighter” is a barge used for transporting goods short distances, for example from the shore out to an anchored ship. A sail or sails move the lighter in Nostromo, not an engine. Years later, Conrad says, quite by accident he “came upon the very thing in a shabby volume picked up outside a second-hand-book shop” (Note, 2). This book contained a circumstantial account of that extraordinary theft and of the brazenly villainous man who did it. Sure enough, scholars (Halverson and Watt) have identified the shabby volume as On Many Seas: The Life and Exploits of a Yankee Sailor, by H. E. Hamblen writing under the pseudonym of “Frederick Benton Williams.” Though, as Conrad says, he had spent only a few hours ashore in Venezuela, when he was “very young” (Note, 1), nevertheless, according to him, the account in the shabby volume vividly reminded him of “that distant time when everything was so fresh, so surprising, so venturesome, so interesting: bits of strange coasts under the stars, shadows of hills in the sunshine, men’s passions in the dusk, gossip half-forgotten, faces grown dim” (Note, 3). The result of this flood of half-forgotten memories from Conrad’s youth was a sudden reversal of his inspiration’s suspension: “Perhaps, perhaps, there was still in the world something to write about” (Note, 3). To “invent a circumstantial account of the robbery” seemed to 142

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Conrad uninteresting: “I did not think the game was worth the candle” (Note, 3). It was only when it came to him that the thief need not be villainous that the possibility of making a Conradian novel out of this anecdote came to him. Here at last would be something worth writing about. Conrad’s expression of this transition is odd in two ways. He says that the notion that the thief might be a “man of character,” just that quite narrow shift, gave him suddenly his first glimpse of the whole province of Sulaco. “Man of character,” by the way, may be an allusion to Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. The subtitle of Hardy’s novel is “A Story of a Man of Character.” The tiny germ transformed in Conrad’s imagination, that thief turned from villainous to good, or at least into a “man of character,” gave him the entire novel, or a glimpse of it, like a “little bang” expanding into an entire fictive cosmos. Conrad’s image is of a dawning. He did not think it out rationally. It just dawned on him, out of nowhere, all of a sudden. That what dawned was a separate cosmos or imaginary world Conrad’s insistence on Sulaco’s isolation and totalizing self-enclosure confirms. Nevertheless, what is outside Sulaco intervenes decisively, as I shall show. That destructive intervention is a central theme of Nostromo. The other oddness is that Conrad, however ironically, speaks of Sulaco not as something he invented but as something he discovered. It was already in existence waiting to be found and described, not something he made up out of the materials of his reading. Here are Conrad’s exact words: It was only when it dawned upon me that the purloiner of the treasure need not necessarily be a confirmed rogue, that he could be even a man of character, an actor, and possibly a victim in the changing scenes of a revolution, it was only then that I had the first vision of a twilight country which was to become the province of Sulaco, with its high, shadowy sierra and its misty campo for mute witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men short-sighted in good and evil. Such are in very truth the obscure origins of Nostromo—the book. (Note, 3–4) In the remainder of the “Author’s Note,” Conrad goes on consistently speaking of Sulaco as something that was there already waiting to be discovered and then revealed through Conrad’s written and ultimately printed account. It is as though he were the fi rst explorer of a hitherto unknown country. Sulaco is like one of those blank places on the world map that so Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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fascinated the Marlow of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness when he was a child, just as Conrad himself was fascinated. Few, if any, blank places still exist for us today anywhere on the globe, or even on the surface of the moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, or the sun. We have mapped them all. No doubt Conrad is speaking figuratively when he speaks of Sulaco as a real place only he had discovered, but the figure is solemnly, if ironically, with a straight face, kept up through the whole of the “Author’s Note.” Conrad speaks of his fear that he might, as he says, “lose myself in the ever-enlarging vistas opening before me as I progressed deeper in my knowledge of the country” (Note, 4). A moment later, the trope defining the writing of the novel as the record of a discovery, not an invention, is given an extravagant and ostentatious expression. It is compared to what everyone knows is a hyperbolically fantastic work of fiction, a parody of early travel books, that is, Gulliver’s Travels. Conrad speaks, no doubt ironically, half-jokingly, and, as he says, “figuratively” (Note, 4), of his two years’ absorption in writing Nostromo as his absence in that imaginary country: “. . . my sojourn on the Continent of Latin America, famed for its hospitality, lasted for about two years. On my return I found (speaking somewhat in the style of Captain Gulliver) my family all well, my wife heartily glad to learn that the fuss was all over, and our small boy considerably grown during my absence” (Note, 4). What is odd about this and other similar passages in the “Author’s Note” is not only that Conrad speaks of the people and places of Costaguana as having a real existence, independent of his language, not as something he has invented through language, but also the way he asserts that only he has access to this strange place and to its people. He says, for example, that My principal authority for the history of Costaguana is, of course, my venerated friend, the late Don José Avellanos, Minister to the Courts of England and Spain, etc., etc., in his impartial and eloquent “History of Fift y Years of Misrule.” That work was never published—the reader will discover why [the manuscript gets destroyed by the revolutionary mob]— and I am, in fact, the only person in the world possessed of its contents. (Note, 4) Conrad, of course, invented Don José and all the rest of the characters, or, perhaps it might be better to say, he “discovered” them by an effort of the imagination. We can encounter Don José and his “History of Fift y Years of Misrule” only by reading Conrad’s book. 144

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Robert Penn Warren expresses this succinctly, in his introduction to the Modern Library Edition of 1951, based on the first Doubleday edition of 1904. The latter has, by the way, some important variant readings here and there, differences from the standard Heinemann and Dent editions of the 1920s. C. T. Watts gives an account of these and also an account of differences between the edition of 1904 and the serial version. “Long before, in 1875 and 1876,” says Warren, “when on the Saint-Antoine (running guns for a revolution), Conrad had been ashore for a few hours at ports on the Gulf of Mexico, but of the coast that might have given him a model for his Occidental Province and its people he knew nothing. There were books and hearsay to help, the odds and ends of information. But in the end, the land, its people, and its history had to be dreamed up, evoked out of the primal fecund darkness that always lies below our imagination” (ix). I’m dubious about that “primal fecund darkness,” which sounds like something borrowed from the Marlow of Heart of Darkness, but I’ll buy “dreamed up.” That’s right on. Nostromo was “dreamed up.” The “Author’s Note” specifies just how that happened. The “dreaming up,” however, as we know now, was based not just on the sources Conrad acknowledges in the “Note,” but on those books about South American landscape and history Conrad had read. He had never been to the west coast of Central America in his life, though he says he landed for brief visits on the east coast, in Columbia and Venezuela, whereas his novels and tales about Malaysia were based on extensive fi rst-hand experience. This difference can be taken as a striking testimony to the performative power of reading. Conrad read Cunninghame Graham, Masterman, Eastwick, Páez, et al. Out of this he created in his mind, or discovered there as a spontaneous vision, an imaginary Central American country made of the transformation and amalgamation of bits and pieces from all those books that stuck in his memory, or below the level of his conscious memory, undergoing many sea-changes there, into something “rich and strange.” When you or I read Nostromo, something analogous happens. Each reader creates in his or her mind, on the basis of the words on the page, in response to their performative power, a mental image, or what I call a virtual reality, unique in each case, or perhaps even different in each reading by the same person, of the landscape of Sulaco, the town, its inhabitants, and all the events of the novel: the re-establishment of the mine, the murder of Hirsch, the suicide of Decoud, the accidental shooting of Nostromo, and so on. The words Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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on the page become the instigators of a mental cinema or magic show, just as Conrad’s reading of those source books was another such instigator. My discourse about Nostromo here adds itself to the almost innumerable other essays about the novel. Almost one hundred new essays a year on Conrad get listed in the MLA bibliography. That boggles the mind. You could spend a lifetime just reading the old ones and keeping up with the new. Though it is good to learn all you can from these “secondary works,” it is probably best to read Conrad for oneself. It is best to trust one’s own imagination and to allow it to create a new, unique, and private mental cinema on the basis of the words Conrad wrote. I said “secondary works.” It might be better to say “tertiary,” since my words are a response to Conrad’s words which were a response to those “source books” he read. In the remainder of the “Author’s Note” Conrad goes on to express, in the same mock-solemn, half-ironic way, in a parody of acknowledgments in a book preface, his obligation to the hospitality of the people of Sulaco, especially Mrs. Gould and Charles Gould, whom he speaks of as if they were real people whom he had visited for two years: “I confess that, for me, that time is the time of firm friendships and unforgotten hospitalities. And in my gratitude I must mention here Mrs. Gould, ‘the first lady of Sulaco,’ . . . and Charles Gould . . .” (Note, 5). Conrad then goes on at some length, in blatant contradiction to the trope of invention as discovery, as opposed to mimetic copying, he has been sustaining, to explain that Nostromo (the character) is modeled in part on a Mediterranean sailor he had known in his early days, “Dominic, the Padrone of the Tremolino” (Note, 6). Antonia Avellanos, the political radical loved by the radical sceptic Decoud, is modeled, Conrad says, in part on an early schoolboy love of Conrad’s, with Conrad himself playing the role played by Decoud in the novel: “I was not the only one in love with her; but it was I who had to hear oftenest her scathing criticism of my levities—very much like poor Decoud—or stand the brunt of her austere, her scathing invective” (Note, 8). Once more, however, what Conrad here says reveals the degree to which Nostromo, Antonia, Decoud, and the rest are not so much “modeled” on their “sources” as radical transformations of these in the alembic of Conrad’s imagination. In a similar way, the politics of the novel are “modeled,” in part, on Polish revolutionary politics as Conrad knew them in his youth. Antonia’s invectives against Decoud’s skepticism about politics are a trans146

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formation of Conrad’s boyhood beloved’s invectives against Conrad’s waverings. The “Author’s Note” ends with an image of the “beautiful Antonia” as she is today in Sulaco, “awaiting impatiently the dawns of other New Eras, the coming of more revolutions” (9). Conrad asks, in parentheses, “(or can it be the Other)” (Note, 8). He means, I suppose, “Can it be that youthful love of mine whom I abandoned forever when I left Poland to go to sea, and whom I imagine, by way of my imagination of the fictitious Antonia, as she may be today.” In A Personal Record, Conrad takes a somewhat different way of defining the way Costaguana is a virtual reality: I had, like the prophet of old, ‘wrestled with the Lord’ for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the darkness of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds on the sky, and for the breath of life that had to be blown into the shapes of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile. These are, perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult to characterize otherwise the intimacy and strain of a creative effort in which mind and will and conscience are engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day, away from the world, and to the exclusion of all that makes life really lovable and gentle . . . .  Conrad’s creation of the world of Costaguana is spoken of in this passage as a counter-creation, as something that he had to wrestle with the Lord to obtain, since it is in opposition to His creation. Conrad’s writing of Nostromo is something like Jehovah’s breathing of life into Adam and Eve. This creation of an alternative world, complete with its own landscape and geography, takes place “away from the world,” that is, away from God’s creation, in a solitary creative struggle that, Conrad says, is like nothing so much as “the everlasting somber stress of the westward winter passage around Cape Horn” (PR, 98–9). Just as God’s creation, in the thought of certain seventeenth-century French theologians, depends absolutely on what they called “continuous creation,” that is, on God’s willing from moment to moment to keep the world and all the people in it in existence, since otherwise they would vanish, so Costaguana depends for its existence on the continuous exercise of Conrad’s will and creative imagination. This must be kept up from minute to minute, day after day, and month after month. If Conrad’s effort flags, the whole shebang disappears in an instant, like a snuffed candle. This happens Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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when a neighbor, a general’s daughter, walks in on him unawares while he is writing and says, “How do you do?” (PR, 99). Conrad stresses the quasimaterial nature of Nostromo’s virtual world, a “materiality without matter,” as it existed in his imagination and nowhere else. It is a matter of mountains, sea, and clouds, even of grains of sand, as well as of imaginary people. In this passage, Conrad also stresses the way Costaguana is a spatio-temporal whole. It exists as a “whole world,” all at once, present all together in his mind. All novels create a counterworld, separate from the real one, with its own laws, geography, weather, and other characteristics, but I know of no other novel that makes this so explicit as Nostromo does, for example in the initial description of its topography in the opening chapters. The visit of the general’s daughter destroys it all: The whole world of Costaguana (the country, you may remember, of my seaboard tale), men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town, campo (there was not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand of its soil I had not placed in position with my own hands); all the history, geography, politics, finance; the wealth of Charles Gould’s silver-mine, and the splendor of the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores, whose name, cried out in the night (Dr. Monygham heard it pass over his head—in Linda Viola’s voice), dominated even after death the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love—all that had come down crashing about my ears. I felt I could never pick up the pieces—. . . . (PR, 100) We can have access to Costaguana only because Conrad wrote down his vision, whereas Conrad apparently lived there before he wrote it down. Or perhaps the act of imagining Costaguana coincided with the act of writing it down. This might be called a performative “act of literature,” a special mode of speech act. Edward Said, with his usual clairvoyance as a reader, even when what he sees goes to some degree against what he might wish to fi nd, notices in his own way, employing the musical analogy that recurs in the interview now printed in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century, how Nostromo detaches itself from its sources: . . . what Conrad is attempting in Nostromo is a structure of such monumental solidity that it has an integrity of its own quite without reference to the outside world. Though this is only a speculation, I think that halfway through the book it’s as if Conrad loses interest in the real world of 148

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human beings and becomes fascinated with the workings of his own method and his own writing. It has an integrity quite of its own—the way, for example, Bach might construct a fugue around a very uninteresting subject, and by the middle of the piece you are so involved in keeping the five, or four, voices going, and understanding the relationships between them, that this becomes the most interesting thing about it. I think there is a similar impulse at work in Nostromo. Said is right on the mark. Having assembled his Costaguana from the imaginative transformation of various miscellaneous materials, he then became more and more absorbed in working out the intertwined destinies of the characters with which he had peopled his heterotopia. I conclude from all I have said so far that, like The Return of the Native, though with some differences, Nostromo is a work of literature, not a work of history, autobiography, political theory, ethnography, psychoanalysis, ecology, or travel. I mean by this that Nostromo was conceived, written, published, read, and reviewed as a work within the established genre of literature as it has been defined in the West since the seventeenth century. This has been the print epoch. It has coincided with the development of Westernstyle democracies with their putative right to free speech. That means, in the case of literature, the right to invent anything whatsoever and not be held responsible for its referential or constative value, its value as truth of correspondence. The era of printed literature is now coming to an end, in what promises to be a long, drawn-out agony, as new media replace the printed book: cinema, television, popular music downloaded from the Internet, video games, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. It will not do to be condescending to these new media. They have immense power to influence the way people think, believe, and behave, while literature’s power, once paramount, is fading. The presentation of the war in Iraq on network news, for example the fi lm clips that were chosen and that are shown repeatedly, are obviously influenced by the conventions of war films and video games. An example is a clip, shown over and over in different contexts on NBC Nightly News during the Iraq War, of American soldiers in battle dress and armed to the teeth breaking into a supposed Iraqi terrorist house. This scene of breaking in is a common motif in video games. For every few people who have read Heart of Darkness, thousands of people, I am sure, have seen the film Apocalypse Now. Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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A lot of literary creativity as well as amazing technical know-how goes into video games. If Conrad were around today, he would probably be writing movie or television scripts, or programming video games. I can imagine a game called “Costaguana,” in which the players try to bring off or thwart a revolution in an imaginary South American republic, just as there is a video game as well as a film for Lord of the Rings. The goal of “Costaguana” would be to establish a new nation state, with a constitution, laws, institutions, industries, corporations, and so on, as we tried to do in Afghanistan and Iraq. The fading of literature’s power may be one reason why such strenuous efforts have to be made by university professors to justify the study of literature. They love literature, but they are sometimes perhaps a little embarrassed to be caught reading a work of literature “for pleasure,” “for its own sake.” By “for its own sake” I mean for the sake of the entry into a purely imaginary realm, unique and different in each case, that each literary work allows. The social and personal function of reading literature is no longer so easily taken for granted. As a consequence, humanities professors disguise their love of literature, if they still have it, in the masquerade of hard-headed, empirical, politically progressive cultural studies; or feminist studies; or studies in gender, class, and race; or investigations into the material bases of culture; or studies based on the recent vogue in the humanities of cognitive science. One difference between Nostromo and The Return of the Native is that the former is even more obviously a dreamland rather than an imaginative picture of an actual place, as Hardy’s novel is. Another difference is that Conrad is much more self-conscious and articulate about the formation of Nostromo as a counter-creation than Hardy is. Hardy is more matter-of-fact. He takes literature more or less for granted as a public institution. He is writing a novel, and everybody knows what novels are. Literature is already for Conrad something problematic in itself. It was also increasingly problematic for Conrad’s “modernist” contemporaries, whether in France with Mallarmé, Valéry, and Proust, or in the German-speaking part of Europe, with Mann, Kafka, or Musil, or in England and Ireland, with Joyce, Woolf, and Conrad’s friend and collaborator, Ford Madox Ford.

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Conrad had long discussions with Ford about literary technique. Together they developed a self-conscious theory of literary “impressionism.” Th is 150

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was somewhat analogous to impressionism in painting and was to some degree modeled on Steven Crane’s narrative technique in The Red Badge of Courage. As Eloise Knapp Hay has shown in an authoritative essay, Conrad’s relation to impressionism was complex. It went, according to her, through three phases. Conrad initially deplored and detested impressionism in painting. In 1890, he called it “the school of Charenton” after the name of a madhouse. Later, however, in separate essays on Stephen Crane and Alphonse Daudet, Conrad praised an impressionist method in fictional narration, though with reservations about its failure to get to the bottom of things. Impressionist writers, in this case Daudet, have a gift for seeing “only the surface of things . . . for the reason that most things have nothing but a surface” (quoted in Hay, 138). Most people who know anything about Conrad remember that in the Paterian Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” he said that “art may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe,” and “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” The irony of these high-minded statements, when set against Nostromo, is, of course, that Sulaco is precisely invisible, or visible only to Conrad’s inner eye. It does not exist as a place one could visit to check the accuracy of Conrad’s act of “rendering justice.” His goal in Nostromo is to make the reader see an imaginary, never-never land. The third stage of Conrad’s relation to impressionism was a late change to less equivocal admiration for Stephen Crane and to a self-conscious attempt to remain on the surface of things in his own writing: “I am only a story-teller. . . . I do not want to go to the bottom of things. I want to consider reality as something rough and crude over which I let my fingers play. Nothing more” (quoted in Hay, 143). Well, So What? What difference does it make that Nostromo is a virtual reality, like a Bach fugue, as Said says, in which complex internal relationships are all-important, and in which the straightforward referential function of language is suspended? This does not mean we should not learn all we can about Conrad’s “sources,” or “contexts,” or about what Benita Parry calls the “historical, political, and ideological materials” of Nostromo. Robert Hampson’s recent Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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discussion of Nostromo is exemplary in doing this. Nor does it mean that we should not concern ourselves with Conrad’s relevance to our globalized political and economic situation today. It is hard to read Nostromo and not think of the long sad history, before and after Conrad wrote that novel, of United States intervention in South America, or even of our recent intervention, governed as it has been by “material interests,” in Iraq and Afghanistan. I shall have more to say about these analogies. Dick Cheney, the erstwhile CEO of the global transnational corporation Halliburton, is a twenty-first century version of the American capitalist Holroyd in Nostromo. It could be argued that Cheney to some degree lowered himself by becoming a mere Vice President of the United States, though as Vice President he remained to some degree still the agent of Halliburton and other such “material interests.” His business “expertise” also meant that he and the rest of the George W. Bush administration ran the United States government as much as they could in the same way that Fastow and Kenneth Lay ran Enron. Running the United States as if it were a corporation was a wonderful opportunity for plunder, trillions of dollars taken from American citizens rather than the mere billions Enron purloined from stockholders. Conrad’s Holroyd prophetically anticipates those more recent devotees of “material interests” and imperial power. The relation of Nostromo to history, politics, and ideology dramatizes one specific form such a relation can have. In one direction, towards its origin, Nostromo is a transformation, in what I have called the alembic of Conrad’s creative imagination, of the materials that went into it. It is a magical translation or transmogrification of those materials into something rich and strange. The sum total of the “sources” cannot predict this result, nor can they fully account for it. The real person Dominic does not explain the character Nostromo. The small anecdote Conrad had encountered about the “original” of Nostromo (the villain who stole the lighter full of silver) is completely transcended by the complex personality and story Conrad has invented for his fictional Capataz de Cargadores. One has to read the novel to find out about Nostromo. The same thing can be said for the novel’s relation to all its other “sources,” including the facts of South American history, its revolutions, and its acts of nation-building. In the other direction, toward the future, Nostromo enters back into history not by giving us constative facts about South American history. History books are the place to find out about that. Nostromo re-enters history, 152

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rather, by way of the unpredictable performative effects it may have on its readers. It may do its work by getting its readers to see history differently by way of a fiction, rather than by a direct representation of history. A work of fiction “works” performatively not by way of discursive statements but, as Aristotle knew, by its action, its plot, the stories it tells. Its essential dimension is temporal sequence. A novel may possibly work to get its readers to see their own histories differently, and to behave differently as a result. They might vote differently in the next election, for example, though I would not count on that. Conrad’s characteristic ironic method of narration, which is by no means absent from Nostromo, paradoxically aids in bringing about this performative effect. Irony, as Paul de Man surprisingly affirms in “The Concept of Irony,” excuses, and promises, and consoles. It may also work as an effective exhortation to political action. Marx’s Das Capital and The German Ideology are, among other things, wonderful works of sustained ironic invective, often in the admirably devastating discussions in footnotes of Marx’s adversaries. This use of irony does not mean that Das Capital and The German Ideology are any the less world-changing works. Reading Nostromo In order to understand how Nostromo might be performatively effective as opposed to mimetically accurate or constatively informing, it will be necessary to read the novel with attentive care. This is no easy task with such a big work. Moreover, Nostromo seems to me an exceedingly peculiar use of modernist conventions of narration. No other novel I know of is at all like it, even among Conrad’s other works. By “reading” Nostromo, I mean scrupulous attention to matters of technique and to rhetorical features, to the puzzling materiality of those words and letters on the page as they give birth in the reader’s mind to the whole province of Sulaco: mountains, plains, town, harbor, islands, sea, and the people there. The performative force of a literary work lies not in thematic generalities that can be distilled from it, nor in a description of the characters, nor in a summary of the plot. That force lies in local details as they accumulate. A reading, if such a thing is possible, must try to take account of these in their enigmatic power to change the world of the reader, in however small a way. Determining whether or not Sulaco is a community and, if so, just what kind of a community it is, is my chosen focus in this chapter. The question Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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of communities in fiction is also my central concern in the other chapters of this book. As a means of getting to that, however, I must say something about the setting and about the mode of presentation, that is, about the specific qualities of Costaguana and about the narrator or, it might be better to say, the “narrative voice.” Nostromo, after all, begins not with the people and their stories, but with the landscape. It is the landscape that seems to have formed itself in visionary fashion within Conrad’s mind when he first glimpsed the possibility that something to write about might still exist after all. That is one similarity with The Return of the Native. The latter begins not with the people but with the long personifying description of Egdon Heath as night falls. I have elsewhere written in detail about Hardy’s prosopopoeia of the heath and its function in The Return. Conrad’s topographical rhetoric is, however, quite different from Hardy’s, as I shall show. First, however, it is worth reflecting on what is odd about beginning with landscape rather than plunging into some scene involving the main characters of the novel. Henry James’s late masterpieces all begin with such a plunge. It is a hallmark of the New Historicism, one of its conventions or presentational reflexes, to begin with some specific detail or scene. Doing so is a way of saying, “You are reading a work in the mode of the New Historicism. I do not begin with generalities or with statistics. I begin with an odd historical fact, in all its apparently absurd circumstantiality. You will understand later what I am up to.” Henry James’s The Ambassadors, for example, begins in medias res, with Strether’s arrival at the hotel in Chester after his transatlantic voyage from America: “Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive until evening he was not wholly disconcerted.” “Not wholly disconcerted”— who but James could have concocted such a self-cancelling phrase, with its double negative, turning on “not” and “dis-,” after an earlier “not”: “was apparently not to arrive”? “Apparently”? “Not wholly”? All Strether’s fastidious doubleness is presented in these locutions. The double negative programs all his behavior to its culmination in his refusal of Maria Gostrey’s offer of herself to him. He refuses, he says, so he will not have gotten anything out of it for himself. The Wings of the Dove begins no less abruptly: “She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point 154

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of going away without sight of him.” The Golden Bowl’s first words are, “The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him. . . .” Such openings leave the reader wondering just who Strether, Waymarsh, Kate Croy, and the Prince are and just what in the world they are doing at those moments. Nor does Conrad never open a novel is this way. His first novel, Almayer’s Folly, started in 1889, begins with enigmatic words, called out by some unknown person: “Kaspar! Makan!” and then plunges the reader immediately into Almayer’s consciousness: “The well-known shrill voice startled Almayer from his dream of a splendid future into the unpleasant realities of the present hour.” Those peremptory words, “Kaspar! Makan!” were the first words of Conrad’s writing career. They were a sort of dawning or wakeup call to his vocation. “Rise and shine, Joseph Conrad!” The Opening of Nostromo The first words of Nostromo, written fourteen years later, in 1903, are quite different: “In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco—the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity—had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo” (3). In Henry James’s beginnings, setting is almost incidental. The reader only gradually learns just where the characters are. The immediate focus is on the consciousness of one of the protagonists, as it is presented intimately and yet ironically in the discourse of the narrator. In Nostromo, Conrad gives the empty setting without the people—as yet. The whole of the first chapter is too long, alas, to cite in toto here, though it takes up only six pages. Those pages are completely devoted to creating in the mind of the reader the entire panorama of Conrad’s imaginary province of Sulaco as it existed already in Conrad’s mind or, perhaps, as he discovered it in the act of writing about it. Several salient features of this performative topographical act (“Let there be Sulaco!”) may be identified. As in the “Author’s Note” of 1917, so in the novel itself, Conrad stresses the more or less complete hermetic self-enclosure of Sulaco. Speaking of his departure from Poland and from his youthful ladylove there, Conrad in the “Author’s Note” says he “was really going away for good, going very far—even as far as Sulaco, lying unknown, hidden from Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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all eyes in the darkness of the Placid Gulf” (Note, 8). Sulaco was unknown and hidden from all eyes because it did not exist, or rather it came into existence only when Conrad discovered it in the depths of his imagination as an invented place on the west coast of South America, and wrote it down so we can visit the place by reading the book. Conrad had, as I have said, never been to the west coast of South America in his life. That Sulaco is secret, hidden, and unknown, is re-enforced by the topography Conrad ascribes to it. In The Mirror of the Sea Conrad says that a seaman’s life in relation to the shore is made up of “the rhythmical swing” of “Landfall and Departure.” He goes on to specify that “Landfall” means the first glimpse of a shore as your ship approaches it from the open sea, not the actual arrival on shore: “Your Landfall, be it a peculiarly shaped mountain, a rocky headland, or a stretch of sand-dunes, you meet at first with a single glance” (MS, 3). Anyone who is even a small boat sailor, as I am, will know how strange, how magical, how inviting, and yet how somehow ominous, a shore, even one you know well, appears from the sea. Conrad presents Sulaco as though the reader were approaching it from the sea. Th is perspective is even reinforced by the subtitle of the novel: “A Tale of the Seaboard.” It is neither a story of land nor a story of the sea, but, precisely, a story of the edge or boundary between them, the seaboard. As is so often the case with Conrad’s topographical descriptions, the mode of the description almost seems as if it were intended as directions for a movie-camera crew. This scenario tells the camera-man to move from a distant view closer and closer in by stages until focusing finally on the jetty in the inner harbor of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company. The reader sees this as it appears from the beach of the Great Isabel, the largest of the three islands not far out in the Golfo Placido. The reader might not notice at first that the cinematic nature of the initial description is enhanced by the way it is all in the present tense. The narration slips almost unnoticeably into the usual past tense somewhere in the second paragraph of the second chapter. This opening in the present tense is what might be called visionary. It is the exposure by way of a figurative ship making landfall of the whole inner topography of Nostromo as a virtual reality Conrad had “discovered.” The shift to the past tense throws all the events of the novel back into the past, as objects of a mnemonics. These events become accessible to the total recall of the quite impersonal narrative voice as it moves back and forth over 156

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the past in the sometimes bewildering time shifts, flashbacks, flashforwards, encapsulated episodes, accounts of iterated actions, that make up the novel. If the space of the novel is a panoramic whole, the past, too, is panoramic, spread out as a unit before the narrator’s total recall. That leaves the narrative voice free to choose any piece to narrate. The narrative is not bound by sequential or causal chronology, or by some single teleological goal, though the death of Nostromo more or less brings the need for narration to an end. As Conrad says at the end of the “Author’s Note”: “. . . the moment the breath left the body of the Magnificent Capataz, the Man of the People freed at last from the toils of love and wealth, there was nothing more for me to do in Sulaco” (Note, 9). He means, I suppose, that there was nothing more to narrate, no more story to tell. The endpoint of narratability in Nostromo is not marriage, as in Jane Austin’s novels or in so many novels by Anthony Trollope, but death, the death of the principle protagonist, as, for example, in Hamlet. One implicit target of Conrad’s complex narrative sequencing in Nostromo is the ordinary assumption about how history should be written. It takes the reader quite a while to realize that the center of the novel is an account of the revolution that leads indirectly to the founding of the separate Republic of Sulaco, to the saving of the silver mine, and to Nostromo’s theft of the lighter full of silver. All of these take place in a relatively short space of time, but much moving backwards and forwards is necessary to account for these events fully and adequately. The present tense of the opening chapter works unostentatiously to suggest that the whole scene is timeless, always the same from day to day, month to month, and year to year. Sulaco is close enough to the equator not even to have much in the way of seasons. It is always sunshiny by day and cloudy by night. The entire landscape was there before mankind came, and it will still be there when mankind has vanished. The narrator’s Landfall vision stresses the unapproachability of the Placid Gulf. “Never a strong wind had been known to blow upon its waters” (6). (This is an unlikelihood, by the way. Any open water will get strong wind some of the time.) Sailing ships routinely get becalmed for days in the Golfo Placido within sight of the harbor. That is a little spooky, if you think of it. There you are, almost there, but you are magically suspended just short of the goal by something so seemingly trivial as a chronic lack of wind at that spot on the seaboard. This predictable windlessness, along with the great range of mountains on the inland Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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side, beyond the plain, has for generations, before steam navigation, safely sequestered Sulaco from the outside world. It is almost like an enchanted island or like a sleeping beauty princess. “Some harbors of the earth,” says the narrator, “are made difficult of access by the treachery of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores” (3). Sulaco is protected, on the contrary, “by the prevailing calms of its vast gulf” (3): “Sulaco had found an inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous semicircular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, with its walls of loft y mountains hung with the mourning draperies of clouds” (3). I shall return to the significance of this elaborate architectural metaphor, or rather simile. Conrad says “as if.” After this initial Landfall view, the narrative perspective moves gradually inward, first with a minute description on one side of the Punta Mala, “an insignificant cape,” “the last spur of the coast range” (4). Conrad does not say whether left or right, but it is probably on the right or starboard side of the gulf as you approach from the sea. I shall return to the question of mapping Sulaco. On the other side of the semicircle is the much more impressive “peninsula of Azuera.” It is called that presumably because it looks from a distant sea approach like “an isolated patch of blue mist float[ing] lightly on the glare of the horizon” (4). Azuera is rocky and full of ravines. It is absolutely dry and barren, except for the thorny thickets at its entrance. The narrator tells a folk story, believed to be true by all the poor people of Sulaco, about two gringo sailors and a “good-for-nothing mozo” (4) (Native American) who tried to hack their way by machete onto the peninsula to get the buried treasure in gold reputed to be there. After the smoke from their first night’s campfire, they were never seen or heard from again: “The sailors, the Indian, and the stolen burro were never seen again” (5). Their ghosts, everyone believes, now rich but everlastingly hungry and thirsty, still haunt the ravines and rocks of Azuera. This fable anticipates the fate of all those in the main story whose desires and fantasies are captured by the San Tomé silver mine. Nostromo is on one level a somewhat wry and ironically twisted version of a parable or cautionary tale as old, at least, as Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale,” with its stern moral: Radix malorum est cupiditas. You see, I told you that Nostromo is a fantasy invented by Conrad, with some help from tradition. The narrator’s account then moves through a spectacular view of the distant mountains, the Cordillera, crowned with the snow-covered Higuerota,

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to a description of the everlasting diurnal sequence, as experienced by a ship becalmed on the gulf, with clouds rising over the mountains but never quite making it out over the water, except at night, when it becomes pitch black and the sailors can hear but not see showers beginning and ceasing here and there on the gulf, though there is still no wind. The narration then moves to a circumstantial description of the three uninhabited islets, the Great Isabel, the Little Isabel, and Hermosa (“Beautiful”), the smallest. These islets stand opposite the entrance to the harbor of Sulaco. The chapter ends with a sentence about the town of Sulaco itself, out of direct line of sight from the sea, but visible at a little distance from within the harbor itself, with its “tops of wall, a great cupola, gleams of white miradors [towers] in a vast grove of orange-trees” (8). This first chapter is a wonderful opening for the novel. It confirms that Conrad had a clear and detailed vision of Sulaco’s topography in his mind, whatever critics like Berthoud and Hampson may have said about its being a de Certeauvian heterotopia, that is, not always quite making noncontradictory rational sense as something you could put down on a map. Conrad, it happens, did sketch a topographical relief map of Sulaco on page 345 of the manuscript. It is reproduced in Eloise Knapp Hays’s The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad (173). I must say the map is a little difficult to interpret. It is hard to decide just which is the Punta Mala, which the Azuera, just where is the harbor, where the town of Sulaco is, as they are described in the opening pages of the novel. I think that large projection in the middle of the coastline must be the Azuera and that tiny black rectangle to its right must be the harbor dock. Presumably Conrad knew, but he has not put any place names on his map. Cedric Watts, in his admirable small book on Nostromo, provides detailed maps of the region and of the town of Sulaco (64–5). He is an expert, so he must know where all these items are located, just how high Higuerota is, and so on. Figures 10–12 show those various maps, fi rst Conrad’s own in Figure 10, and then Watts’s reconstructions in Figures 11 and 12. Material Vision in the Opening Two fundamental and related features of this scene-setting opening may be identified.

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Figure 10. “Conrad’s Topographical Relief Map of Sulaco,” from page 345 of the original manuscript, as reproduced in Eloise Knapp Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 173.

Figure 11. “Costaguana’s occidental province,” prepared by Cedric Watts, in Cedric T. Watts, Joseph Conrad: Nostromo (London: Penguin, 1990), 64.

First: The topographical features are presented in what might be called a materialist mode. They are just the physical elements that happen to be there and that make an impression on the senses of the imaginary narrating spectator. They are barely identified as shapes, as colors, as sounds, with minimal names: clouds, mountains, rocks, sea surface, and so on. They are given, one might say, almost at the level of pure phenomenal sensation rather than of perception. They are named, in Kant’s words, “as the poets do it,” that is, 160 Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

Figure 12. “Part of the town of Sulaco,” prepared by Cedric Watts, in Cedric T. Watts, Joseph Conrad: Nostromo (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 65.

with almost complete literality. They are wholly indifferent to mankind, without prescribed or projected meaning for men and women. They are presented as a materialist vision. Second: Th is materialism goes along with another related feature. Almost completely lacking in Nostromo is the sort of landscape personification that permeates Hardy’s description of Egdon Heath at the beginning of The Return of the Native, or Conrad’s own description of the African jungle in Heart of Darkness. Nor is there any projection of some metaphysical “darkness” behind appearances, as happens throughout the stylistic texture of landscape description in Heart of Darkness. The topography of Nostromo is almost completely depthless. It is like a superficial stage set, with nothing behind it. These topographical appearances are not symbolic. They are not allegorical, at least not in the everyday sense of that word. They do not stand for anything beyond themselves. There is apparently nothing hidden behind them, no portentous “other,” nothing like “the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention” that is invoked by Marlow in Heart of Darkness. The topographical appearances in Nostromo are all surface. They have no sympathy for the human actions that are Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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performed with them as backdrop, nor are they antagonistic. They are just implacably indifferent, though even to say that is to humanize them too much. They are just what happens to be there, what the eye can see, the ear can hear. The scene is not teleological. It does not lead to anything, nor is it good for anything. It just goes on repeating itself endlessly as the sun rises and sets, day after day. Th is radical difference from The Heart of Darkness has important consequences for the lives of the people in Nostromo, as I shall show.

Conrad and Kant The attentive reader, however, will have noted my qualifications in the words “almost” and “apparently” in the previous paragraph. Such a reader will probably also have noticed that Conrad’s description of the Golfo Placido is not quite so straightforwardly literal as I have so far claimed. Let me look again at the passage I have cited: “Sulaco had found an inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous semicircular temple open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of cloud” (3). As you can see, the whole landscape of Sulaco is figured architectonically as like an enormous “temple,” with its walls the encircling mountains and its roof the sky. It is as if the relatively neutral word “sanctuary” had called up the temple trope, by way of the tradition that evil-doers and those subject to temptation can find inviolable sanctuary in a church. Conrad’s temple image looks to me more like a Catholic cathedral whose walls are hung with black mourning draperies in honor of some funeral than like a Greek temple. Conrad would have known such churches in his youth in Poland. The figure of the church is superimposed spectrally on the literal scene. What can we, or what should we, make of that? I have already alluded to Kant, an extremely unlikely presence in Nostromo. Though I do not imagine Conrad sitting down one evening to read The Critique of Judgment, he just happens to have invented a trope that is remarkably like the well-known one Kant employs in a climactic passage on the dynamic sublime: If, then, we call the sight of the starry heaven sublime, we must not place at the basis of our judgment concepts of worlds inhabited by rational beings and regard the bright points, with which we see the space above us 162

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fi lled, as their suns moving in circles purposively fi xed with reference to them; but we must regard it, just as we see it [wie man ihn sieht], as a distant, all-embracing vault [ein weites Gewölbe]. Only under such a representation can we range that sublimity that a pure aesthetical judgment ascribes to this object [müssen wir die Erhabenheit setzen, die ein reines ästhetisches Urteil diesem Gegenstande beilegt]. And in the same way, if we are to call the sight of the ocean sublime, we must not think of it as we [ordinarily] do, as implying all kinds of knowledge (that are not contained in immediate intuition [in der unmittelbaren Anschauung]). For example, we sometimes think of the ocean as a vast kingdom of aquatic creatures, or as the great source of those vapors that fill the air with clouds for the benefit of the land, or again as an element which, though dividing continents from each other, yet promotes the greatest communication between them; but these furnish merely teleological judgments. To find the ocean nevertheless sublime we must regard it as poets do [wie die Dichter es tun], merely by what the eye reveals [was der Augenschein zeigt]—if it is at rest, as a clear mirror of water [als einem klaren Wasserspiegel] bounded by the heavens; if it is stormy, as an abyss [Abgrund] threatening to overwhelm everything. The same elements are here as in the passage from Conrad: sky, sea, clouds, stars, though not the shore as such. Stars are mentioned by Conrad in a passage about nighttime on the Golfo Placido that I have not so far cited: “The few stars left below the seaward frown of the vault shine feebly as into the mouth of a black cavern. In its vastness your ship floats unseen under your feet, her sails flutter invisible above your head” (7). Note the evanescent personification in “frown” and “mouth.” These are catachreses. In order to name these natural appearances at all, since they have no literal names, words must be brought in from another realm, most commonly, as here, from the human body, which is projected on nature in a self-canceling trope. Though the dark vault of the shoreward sky at night is not really a face, we say it has a “mouth” and that it “frowns,” in order to be able to say anything about it at all. In a similar way both Kant and Conrad speak of the sky as a “vault,” Gewölbe in German, as though it were a cathedral ceiling. The crucial passage from Kant distinguishes two different ways of looking at such a scene. One is teleological. It sees the sea as a reservoir of fish, Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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the clouds as making rain that irrigates the arable land. Against that kind of looking Kant puts the non-telelogical, purely material vision that sees things as the eye sees them, as pure Augenschein, “eye shine,” prior to any interpretation of their usefulness. This, Kant claims, is to see the way poets do. He has a remarkable confidence that poets are free of ideological distortions or teleological orientations. This seems an extraordinary claim, the more extraordinary the more you think of it. Andrzej Warminski, following Paul de Man, observes that Wordsworth’s poetry does not fit Kant’s description (Warminski, 40–1). Poets, in a long tradition going back to Sydney and before him to Plato, are, as everybody knows, proverbially described as natural-born liars, prevaricators, mythmakers, fashioners of magical and deceiving shows, though Sydney claims that the poet does not really lie, since he “nothing affirmeth.” The poet does not pretend to be telling the truth, only to be proffering fictions. Kant, however, sees true poets as telling the truth in a quite specific way, that is, by not deviating from naming what their eyes see, the uninterpreted Augenschein, eye appearance. A poet like Wordsworth, with all his talk of “something far more deeply interfused,” does not at all fit Kant’s blithe assumption about how poets see and what they do with what they see in naming it. Only Friedrich Hölderlin, among German poets, comes to my mind as possibly doing it right, but his major poetry was written, of course, after Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Only this kind of seeing and poetical naming deserves the name of “that sublimity that a pure aesthetic judgment ascribes to this object.” “Aesthetic judgment [ästhetisches Urteil]” here does not mean “artistic,” but according to pure uninterpreted sensation, as opposed to perception that this is, for example, a salty ocean full of edible fish. Conrad’s narrator’s initial vision of the Golfo Placido is, I claim, a sublime seeing and naming of this sort. It is against this background of a sublime materialist vision of the scene as a whole that the human stories of Nostromo are told. Warminski on de Man on Kant The most authoritative readings of the passage from Kant are those already identified in a footnote: Warminski’s admirable essay, “As the Poets Do It”; one of Paul de Man’s most remarkably original, penetrating, and rigorous essays, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant”; and Colebrook’s “The Geological Sublime.” Warminski’s essay is a reading and subtle modifica164 Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

tion of de Man’s reading. The modification, never acknowledged as such, occurs, as it should, by way of a return to Kant. Just as de Man asserts that “the critical power of a transcendental philosophy,” in Kant, “undoes the very project of such a philosophy leaving us, certainly not with an ideology— for the transcendental and ideological (metaphysical) principles are part of the same system—but with a materialism that Kant’s posterity has not yet begun to face up to” (AI, 89), so it can be said that, with a few exceptions, de Man’s posterity has not yet begun to face up to the implications for literary study and for cultural studies of “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” not to speak of de Man’s other essays. Probably I am not facing up to those implications either. Just what does de Man mean by Kant’s materialism, the kind of materialism that I have dared to ascribe to Nostromo? One must read de Man’s essay for oneself to find out, no easy task, but here are the essential assertions. “The predominant perception,” in the Kant passage, de Man begins by asserting, “is that of the heavens and the ocean as an architectonic construct. The heavens are a vault that covers the totality of earthy space as a roof covers a house” (AI, 81). Similarly, I might note, the heavens are a dark “vault” in Conrad’s description, or in another figure Conrad uses, a poncho: “Sky, land, and sea disappear together out of the world when the Placido—as the saying is—goes to sleep under its black poncho” (7). De Man goes on to find in Kant a figure that is even closer to Conrad’s figure of the great semi-circular “temple” of the Placid Gulf: “Space, in Kant as in Aristotle, is a house in which we dwell more or less safely, or more or less poetically, on this earth. [The allusion is to Hölderlin’s phrase ‘Poetically man dwells,’ and to Heidegger’s commentary on that aphorism.] This is also how the sea is perceived or how, according to Kant, poets perceive it: Its horizontal expanse is like a floor bounded by the horizon, by the walls of heaven as they close off and delimit the building” (AI, 81). De Man goes on, in passages later in the essay, to specify just what he means by Kant’s materialist vision: The poet who sees the heavens as a vault is clearly like the savage [or, one might add, like Frankenstein in one scene in Mary Shelley’s novel, or like “a wild man who, from a distance, sees a house of which he does not know the use”], and unlike Wordsworth. He does not see prior to dwelling, but merely sees. He does not see in order to shelter himself, for there is no suggestion made that he could in any way be threatened, not even by Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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the storm—since it is pointed out that he remains safely on the shore. The link between seeing and dwelling, sehen and wohnen, is teleological and therefore absent in pure aesthetic vision. . . . No mind is involved in the Kantian vision of ocean and heaven. To the extent that any mind, that any judgment, intervenes, it is in error—for it is not the case that heaven is a vault or that the horizon bounds the ocean like the walls of a building. That is how things are to the eye, in the redundancy of their appearance to the eye and not to the mind, as in the redundant word Augenschein, to be understood in opposition to Hegel’s Ideenschein, or sensory appearance of the idea; Augenschein, in which the eye, tautologically, is named twice, as the eye itself and as what appears to the eye. . . . Kant’s vision can therefore hardly be called literal, which would imply its possible figuralization or symbolization by an act of judgment. The only word that comes to mind is that of a material vision, but how this materiality is then to be understood in linguistic terms is not, as yet, clearly intelligible. . . . The sea is called a mirror, not because it is supposed to reflect anything, but to stress a flatness devoid of any suggestion of depth. In the same way and to the same extent that this vision is purely material, devoid of any reflexive or intellectual complication, it is also purely formal, devoid of any semantic depth and reducible to the formal mathematization or geometrization of pure optics. The critique of the aesthetic ends up, in Kant, in a formal materialism that runs counter to all values and characteristics associated with aesthetic experience, including the aesthetic experience of the beautiful and of the sublime as described by Kant and Hegel themselves. The tradition of their interpretation, as it appears from near contemporaries such as Schiller on, has seen only this one, figural, and, if you will, “romantic” aspect of their theories of the imagination, and has entirely overlooked what we call [he means, “what I, Paul de Man, call”] the material aspect. Neither has it understood the place and the function of formalization in this intricate process. (AI, 81–83) The Mirror of the Sea is the name of one of Conrad’s two autobiographical books. Perhaps Conrad did read Kant after all, or by prophetic insight had read de Man’s commentary on Kant! It almost seems one or the other must have been the case. Conrad’s impressionism in Nostromo, his attempt to use the power of words to make the reader see the surface of non-human things, however much he may have gone behind, gone into the depths, of 166 Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

the characters’ souls, is, I claim, a modernist version of Kant’s materialism as understood by Paul de Man. Conrad’s narrative voice reports on an act of “merely seeing.” He sees as, according to Kant, the poets do.

The Materiality of the Letter in Conrad De Man’s essay ends, notoriously, with a claim that the endpoint of Kant’s materialism is a “prosaic materiality of the letter” (AI, 90) that disjoins words and parts of words from one another and leaves the reader staring at meaningless marks on the page. This turn at the end fulfi lls de Man’s implicit promise earlier to explain how we can understand Kant’s materiality “in linguistic terms”: “To the dismemberment of the body corresponds a dismemberment of language, as meaning-producing tropes are replaced by the fragmentation of sentences and propositions into discrete words, or the fragmentation of words into syllables or finally letters” (AI, 89). De Man’s example from Kant is the play between closely related words, echoes that are indigenous to German and impossible to translate, Verwunderung (surprise) as it is echoed by Bewunderung (admiration), or, in a specific passage, “a constant, and finally bewildering alternation of the two terms, Angemessen(heit) [‘adequacy’] and Unangemessen(heit) [‘inadequacy’], to the point where one can no longer tell them apart” (AI, 89–90). At that point, the words are drained of meaning and opposites merge, as when any word is repeated aloud over and over until it finally becomes just senseless sound, the sheer materiality of vibrating air, or as Kant’s words, for someone ignorant of German, are just ink marks on a page. Warminski often uses the motif of a stuttering repetition that drains words of meaning as the powerful culmination of one or another of his essays: One must (only) as the poets must (nevertheless be able to find sublime) as one must as the poets must. (I’ve tried out the German: “Man muß bloß, wie die Dichter es tun, müssen”; “Man muß müssen”; “One, we, must must.”) . . . The event of this repetition is what gets disseminated all along the narrative line and thus renders the text an allegory of its inability to account for its own production (an allegory of unreadability, to coin a phrase)—with Rousseau’s autobiographer doomed to mindlessly, mechanically, repeating “Marion” over and over again, and Kant’s critical Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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philosopher “I must be able to bridge pure reason and practical reason,” “I must exhibit the ideas of reason,” “I must be able to find sublime,” “I must must,” “Ich muß müssen, muß müssen, muß müssen . . .” (Warminski, 55, 61) Is there anything of that sort in Conrad, any “materiality of the letter”? It would seem not. Conrad is a master of the English language. His English is eloquent and correct. He is little given to puns and wordplay, in spite of the joke in the place-name “Costaguana”: guano is hardened bird-dung, used in fertilizer and explosives. Conrad is, however, much given to irony, as in his description of himself as Gulliver when he was writing Nostromo. Irony always introduces a dangerous shimmering in discourse, a wavering in the meaning that may lead to meaninglessness. Nevertheless, Conrad’s words, for the most part, all seem powerfully to retain their literal meaning and force as a way of getting the reader to see his imaginary realm by way of the words. Studies have been made of the effect of Polish, Russian, and French (languages Conrad knew before he learned English) on Conrad’s syntax, semantics, and grammar, but I must say that it sounds, for the most part, like pretty idiomatic English to me, though it is often a little florid and oratorical. Once in a great while, however, something strange happens to Conrad’s masterful command of English. He makes a definite mistake in English. The two examples I have noticed in Nostromo, strangely enough, involve, in one case, writing and reading, and in the other case, dumb materiality as illusory or erroneous meanings are projected into it. In the first example, the narrator reports the effect on Charles Gould, then a schoolboy in England, of reading his father’s letters: “In about a year he had evolved from the lecture of the letters a definite conviction that there was a silver-mine in the Sulaco province of the republic of Costaguana, where poor Uncle Harry had been shot by soldiers a great many years before” (63). “Lecture of the letters” for “reading the letters” is a Gallicism, not proper English. The other mistake I noticed comes in an account of the way Emilia Gould projected all sorts of ideal meanings into the first bar of silver produced by the newly re-opened San Tomé mine: “[S]he had laid her unmercenary hands, with an eagerness that made them tremble, upon the first silver ingot turned out still warm from the mould; and by her imaginative estimate of its power 168 Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

she endowed that lump of metal with a justificative conception, as though it were not a mere fact, but something far-reaching and impalpable, like the true expression of an emotion or the emergency of a principle” (118). By “emergency of a principle,” I suppose Conrad meant the emerging or coming into the open of a principle. That’s not the way you say it in English! The effect of these mistakes in locution is odd. It is as though the façade of Englishness, Conrad as master mariner in the British merchant marine, Conrad as a great British writer, was momentarily pulled away, revealing, like the shabby reality behind the wonderful Wizard of Oz, Josef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski, the Pole for whom English was an acquired language, known less well even than French. The polyglot cosmopolitan Korzeniowski almost decided to write in French, rather than in English. He frequently lapses into French in his letters to Cunninghame Graham, especially in the gloomiest and most skeptical parts. The materiality of the letter shows through, as the reader puzzles over “lecture” and “emergency,” if she happens to have noticed the mistakes. They cannot have their normal semantic meaning. What was Conrad trying to say? The first passage has to do with the meaning Charles Gould ascribes to the letters he receives from his father, a meaning that is ludicrously and ironically reductive of the endless laments from his father that the authorities in Costaguana are impoverishing him by demanding payment for the mine Concession that he is not even using. If letters are readable, a reader will project some meaning into them, but if that projection is incomplete or erroneous, the discrepancy between the materiality of the letter as a mark on the page and any meaning ascribed to it becomes momentarily glimpsed in an act of lecture, which is the French word for “reading.” In the second passage, a discrepancy between letter and meaning is even more apparent. In itself a lump of silver is a “mere fact,” like those surface facts of Sulaco topography the narrative voice objectively and dispassionately names with a kind of ironic reserve that is characteristic of that voice. Mrs. Gould projects into that lump of silver all her hopes for bringing law and order into Sulaco by way of what an often-repeated leitmotif of the novel calls “material interests.” A typographical error is in French called a coquille, a shell, as though one had bitten down on a bit of eggshell in one’s omelet or perhaps as a name displaced from what a broken piece of type in bookprinting is called. “Emergency” is a coquille. It is a bit of shell that interferes with the powerful expression of meaning in the sentence, just as a Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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glimpse of the silver as “mere fact” suspends the grandiose meanings that Emilia Gould, holding it with trembling fingers, imposes on it. The phrase “material interests” contains in itself this contradiction. Matter has no “interest” in itself. It becomes interesting; it is worth investing time, effort, and money in; it bears interest; it becomes money in itself, only when it is stamped with signs. Doing that assimilates sheer matter into human making and doing, buying and selling, all the circuits of exchange and substitution, in this case those of global imperialist capitalism already in full swing in Nostromo. Silver ingots must be stamped into coin to emerge into meaning, but that meaning is fictive. It parodies a tropological system of exchange and substitution whose value rests on nothing but blind faith. That is indeed the case with the global financial system. Returning to the gold standard would not help matters one bit because gold (or silver) has only the meaning and value that is ascribed to it. The wild fluctuations in 2013 in the monetary value of gold are a good proof of that. Conrad’s coquilles, I claim, are examples of the prosaic materiality of the letter in his discourse. They call attention to the meaningless material base of language. I have set Conrad and Kant side by side and have found striking similarities. Does this mean that Conrad is “saying the same thing” as Kant? Is Conrad Kantian through and through? Can I just transfer de Man’s and Warminski’s readings of Kant to my reading of a passage in Conrad’s Nostromo? By no means. Side-by-side comparisons in critical readings are for the sake of differentiation, not for making identical. Well, what’s the difference? Kant’s goal in The Critique of Judgment, especially in the sections on the mathematical and dynamic sublimes, is to erect a trustworthy bridge between The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason, transcendental knowledge and ethics. De Man and Warminski persuade me that this attempt fails: “In Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Sublime,’ ” writes Warminski, “the attempt to ground the critical discourse, to found the very subject of the critical philosophy and transcendental method, instead ungrounds, unfounds, itself in the disarticulation of tropological and performative linguistic models by, ultimately, the ‘last’ linguistic ‘model’: the prosaic materiality of the letter, material inscription” (AI, 61). Conrad, of course, has no such goal. His aim is to show by way of an elaborate imaginary set of events how human history occurs if its background 170

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is the total impersonality and “indifference” of nature, its total lack of transcendent ground, even of a negative one like that in Heart of Darkness.

“ M AT E R I A L I N T E R E S T S” : N O S T R O M O A S C R I T I Q U E O F C A P I TA L I S T I M P E R I A L I S M

I turn now to investigating whether or not Conrad succeeds in reaching his goal. I begin by asking what sort of human community, if it is a community, does Conrad’s narrator describe as having imposed itself through the centuries on the mute, indifferent Sulaco landscape? This happens analogously to the way a bit of silver may be turned into a silver dollar by being stamped with certain words and signs. “Communities in fiction,” after all, is the topic of this book. All I have said so far about Nostromo is preliminary to identifying what sort of community Sulaco is, if it is a community. The objective, laconic descriptions of the Sulaco landscape and of other “phenomenal” appearances do not stop with the first chapter. Nostromo is punctuated with reminders that the mute, impersonal land and what one might call mechanical physical occurrences go on happening behind, beside, or adjacent to the human events with which the novel is most concerned. One example is a description of the early morning in Sulaco at a particularly tense moment two-thirds through the novel. Pedrito Montero is about to arrive. Sotillo has already entered Sulaco and has taken over the port. He is maddened by his search for the silver he knows must be hidden somewhere. The passage is like a late impressionist painting in the way it reduces everything visible to shapes of light and shadow: The sun, which looks late upon Sulaco, issuing in all the fullness of its power high up on the sky from behind the dazzling snow-edge of Higuerota, had precipitated the delicate, smooth, pearly grayness of light, in which the town lies steeped during the early hours, into sharp-cut masses of black shade and spaces of hot, blinding glare. Th ree long rectangles of sunshine fell through the windows of the sala, while just across the street the front of the Avellanos house appeared very somber in its own shadow seen through the flood of light. (419) The effect of this passage in its context is peculiar. It does not suggest, as Heidegger might have done, that the characters and their affairs are embedded in the landscape, at home there, building, dwelling, and thinking (to Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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borrow the title of an essay by Heidegger) in a way that is circumscribed by the material features of just that landscape. Quite the reverse. The implication is that the sun goes on rising day after day, producing, day after day, the same senseless assemblage of visible blocks of blinding light and contrasting shadow, in complete indifference to the human dramas enacted there and in complete separation from them. Except for the almost effaced tropes (for example, “The sun, which looks late upon Sulaco . . .”), the Alain RobbeGrillet of Jalousie (1957) might almost have written the passage. Conrad’s personages are not shown to be at all aware of the visible scene, so preoccupied are they with their own sorrows, anxieties, and concerns. It is only the anonymous narrative voice that notices the scene and records it, like a camera eye, or like an impressionist painter trying to suspend our normal inattention in order paint and make us see not what perception interprets but what impersonal sensation records, what the eye sees. One more chilling example of this, out of many that could be cited, is the account of the blue smoke that arises after a couple of the tyrant Guzman Bento’s aristocratic prisoners are taken behind some bushes and summarily shot: “The irregular report of the fi ring-squad would be heard, followed sometimes by a single finishing shot; a little bluish cloud of smoke would float up above the green bushes, and the Army of Pacification would move on over the savannas, through the forests . . .” (152–3). The careful notation of the color-sensations that would have struck the eye of a dispassionate spectator (the blue smoke above the green bushes) is a characteristic example of Conrad’s “impressionism.” The sentence just quoted is also an example of an iterative narrative technique in the early part of the novel. Conrad writes that “a little bluish cloud of smoke would float up,” not “did float up.” The narrative voice does not here record a single event, but an event that occurred again and again, like the endless substitution of one work-shift for another in the newly reopened San Tomé silver mine. The passage is, moreover, part of a flashback or analepsis breaking the account of Charles Gould’s success in getting the silver mine going again with an account of Don José Avellanos’s sufferings as one of Guzman Bento’s captives. These took place long before the novel begins, if it can be said to have a starting point in the ordinary sense. Those sinister puffs of blue smoke are something that happened over and over in that distant time. Analepsis, prolepsis, iterative narration, time shifts, hiatuses, sudden changes in perspective, tense shifts— Conrad employs all these sophisticated devices to break up 172

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straightforward chronological narration long before Gérard Genette identified them and appropriated or concocted barbarous-sounding names for them from Greek rhetorical terms. Narrative Complexities in Nostromo Nostromo is extremely complicated in its narrative orga nization. It offers narratologists great opportunities to demonstrate in detail the various kinds of narrative complexity employed by modernist authors such as Faulkner, Woolf, James, or Conrad himself. Just about every narrative device that specialists in narrative form have identified is employed in one way or another: time shifts; analepsis; prolepsis; breaks in the narration; shift s in “focalization” from one character’s mind to another by way of the “omniscient” (or, as I should prefer to say, following Nicholas Royle, “telepathic”) narrator’s use of free indirect discourse, or by way of interpolated fi rst person narration or spoken discourse; shift s by the narrator from distant, panoramic vision to extreme close-ups; retellings of the same event from different subjective perspectives; citations of documents, and so on. The chronological trajectory of Sulaco history can be pieced together from these indirections. The story begins in the middle and then shift s backward and forward in a way that the reader may fi nd bewildering, as he or she wonders just where on a time scale a given episode is in relation to some other episode. It is as though all these episodes were going on happening over and over, continually, in the capacious and atemporal mind of the narrator, like the endless succession of similar days and nights over the Golfo Placido that is the setting of Nostromo. The story is presented in an almost cubist rendering of abruptly juxtaposed episodes, rather than by way of the impressionist technique Conrad is often said to have employed. If the goal of Nostromo is to reconstruct the history of an imaginary Central American country, the formal complexity of the novel does more than implicitly claim that form is meaning—that is, that the complexity was necessary if Conrad was to tell at all the story he wanted to tell. Nostromo’s narrative complications also oppose what it suggests is false linear historical narration to another much more complex way to recover through narration “things as they really were.” I shall turn later to the question of the social, political, and ethical “usefulness” of modernist narration of this sort. Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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Identifying the complexities of Conrad’s non-linear narrative, however, is not enough, nor, of course, does Lothe limit himself to that. The most important question is: Why did Conrad do it this way? One answer is that he saw such a to and fro mode of storytelling a more truthful way to render history. Another, perhaps even more important, answer is that such jagged narration establishes the narrator, or rather the narrative voice, as being ubiquitous within Sulaco over all the time of its modern history. The narrative voice has a total simultaneous possession of all the events down to the tiniest detail, spread out before it like a spatial panorama. The narrative voice can move at will back and forth across this spatio-temporal continuum, zooming in or zooming out as may seem necessary, entering and leaving the secret thoughts and feelings of the characters at any time or place. The narrative voice can break up chronological order in order to get the story told in what seems the best way to convey an understanding of it to the reader. One might say that each zoomed-in episode forms a self-enclosed bubble within the circumambient much larger self-enclosed bubble that is all that the narrative voice knows. The narrative voice recounts what happens within each small bubble in moment-to-moment detail, often as the confrontation of two of the characters in conversation with one another. A given episode is often separated by time shifts, hiatuses, breaks in the narrative sequence, from what comes before and after. Not all the narrative voice presumably knows is revealed. The reader is led to believe that the narrative voice could recount a great many more conversations and episodes if it chose to do so. No novel could be long enough to hold them all. What it does not tell remains permanently a secret, known only to Joseph Conrad, just as only he had read the History of Fifty Years of Misrule. All that additional information, known only to Conrad, he carried to the grave in on August 3, 1924, though the reader may feel with such a big novel that he or she has been told enough, all that it is necessary to know. Henry James identified brilliantly this back and forth hovering aspect of Conrad’s narrative technique when he praised Conrad in a review of Chance. Conrad, said James, was “absolutely alone as a votary of the way to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing.” Chance exemplifies this, James claimed, in Marlow’s “prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched ground of the case exposed” (ibid., 149). I would change James’s formulation, however, to say, awkwardly enough, it is more the prolonged hovering flight over the outstretched ground of the case exposed by an anon174

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ymous, ubiquitous linguistic power of turning imaginary events into words that have performative power to make the reader see. I must add that this power is quite “unrealistic,” in the sense that it cannot be operated on real historical events and persons. The text records the fantasy of a magic clairvoyance that is matched by a magic power of presentation through a species of linguistic prestidigitation. Th is sleight of hand makes Nostromo, Emilia Gould, Dr. Monygham, and the rest seem like real people whom we know by a quite extraordinary telepathic power. The narrator’s uncanny omnipresence could not exist in the real world. It can only exist in verbal virtual realities of the type called “literary works.” This is true however much it may be the case that Conrad is implicitly arguing that such an accounting is the only means of actually knowing history “as it really happens.” Anything other than such a prolonged hovering flight, the narration implies, is a falsification. Nostromo as Community History Fredric Jameson’s slogan, “Always Historicize,” means that we should read modernist English literature, or any other literary work of any time, in its immediate historical context. He is no doubt right about that. Nevertheless, certain works of English literature from the beginning of the twentieth century have an uncanny resonance with the global situation today. Examples would be the exploitation of Africa by the Wilcox family in E. M. Forster’s Howards End, or the presentation of the effects of combat on Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Charles Gould and the American financier Holroyd, in Nostromo, are even better examples. Their collaboration is remarkably prophetic of the current course of American global economic aspirations as well as of the effects of these on local cultures and peoples around the world. I shall indicate some of those disquieting consonances later. If Nostromo is a novel not so much about history as about alternative ways to narrate history, this means its goal is not to recover a single life story (as, say, Lord Jim does), but to recover the story of the ways a whole group of individuals were related, each in a different way, to their surrounding community as it evolved through time. Nostromo is a novel about an imagined community, a fictitious community based on Conrad’s reading about South American history. Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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A spectrum or continuum of different ways the individual may be related to others can be identified, going from smaller groups to larger. At the small end is my face-to-face encounter with my neighbor, with my beloved, or with a stranger, in love, friendship, hospitality, indifference, or hostility. A family, especially an extended family or a clan, is a larger group, in this case bound by ties of blood or marriage. A community is somewhat larger. A community is a group of people living in the same place who all know one another and who share the same cultural assumptions. They are not, however, necessarily related by blood or marriage. A nation is larger still. Most commonly a nation is made of a large number of overlapping but to some degree dissonant communities. Largest of all is the worldwide conglomeration of all human beings living on the planet Earth and all more and more subject to the same global economic and cultural hegemonies. At each of these levels, the individual has a relation to others, different in each case and subject to different constraints and conventions. It is, of course, often difficult, in a given case, if not impossible, to maintain a sharp boundary between the different-sized groups. Each form of living together, or of what Heidegger called Mitsein, “being with,” has been the object of vigorous theoretical investigation in recent years, for example Lévinas’s focus on the face-to-face encounter of two persons, or Jacques Derrida’s similar focus in The Politics of Friendship, or work by Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy, Lingis, and others on the concept of community. These have been identified in the first chapter of this book. In what I say about (non)community in Conrad’s Nostromo I shall interrogate primarily the relation of the individual to the community, or lack of it, in this novel, in the context of an intervention by global capitalism. It can certainly be said that the citizens of Sulaco form a community, at least in one sense of the word “community.” They all live together in the same place. All share, more or less, the same moral and religious assumptions. Whether rich or poor, white, black, or Native American, they have been subjected to the same ideological interpellations, the same propaganda, the same political speeches, proclamations, and arbitrary laws. Most of all, they share the same history. Don José Avellanos calls this, in the title of his never-to-be-published manuscript, “Fift y Years of Misrule.” The narrator, magically and quite improbably, has nevertheless read it and can cite from it (157). Though Sulaco is a community of suffer-

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ing, as one revolution after another brings only more injustice and senseless bloodshed, nevertheless, it can be argued, it is a true community. It is small enough so that most people know one another. Don Pépé, who runs the mine, knows all the workers by name. Almost all belong to a single religious faith, Catholic Christianity. If the reader reconstructs the story from a distance, putting the broken pieces of narration back in chronological order, Nostromo appears as a tale of nation-building, the creation of one of those “imagined communities” Benedict Anderson describes in his book of that name. After fifty years of misrule by the central government of Costaguana in Santa Marta, Sulaco, through a series of serio-comic events and accidents, becomes what looks like a prosperous, modern, peaceful, independent state, the Occidental Republic of Sulaco. An example of the fortuitous “causes” of this historical change is the cynical plan for secession devised by the skeptic Decoud shortly before his death. His plan is not motivated by political zeal or belief, but by his love for Antonia Avellanos. I shall return to this later. Nevertheless, Captain Mitchell, in his fatuous incomprehension, recounts the creation of the Republic of Sulaco as a connected story whose destined endpoint is the present-day prosperous nation. He recounts the sequence, in tedious detail, “in the more or less stereotyped relation of the ‘historical events’ which for the next few years was at the ser vice of distinguished strangers visiting Sulaco” (529). The pages following the prevous quote give an example of Captain Mitchell’s version of Sulaco history. Captain Mitchell is the spokesperson for an exemplary “official history.” Such a history has a naïve conception of “historical events” as following one another in a comprehensible linear, causal, and progressive sequence. Conrad quite evidently disdains such historywriting. That false kind of history is represented, in one degree or another, by those source books on South American history by Masterman, Eastwick, Cunninghame Graham, and so on that Conrad had read. Though Nostromo is about the nation-building of an imaginary South American republic, not a real one, nevertheless it is, among other things, a paradigmatic example of an alternative mode of history-writing, difficult to bring off. Conrad implicitly claims that this counter-history is much nearer to the truth of human history and much more able to convey to readers the way history “really happens.”

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Sulaco as a Non-Community If the reader looks a little more closely at what the narrative voice says about Sulaco society, however, it begins to look less and less like a community of the traditional kind—that is, less and less like a community of those who have a lot in common. Sulaco is not much like those egalitarian rural English villages on the Welsh border Raymond Williams, in The Country and the City, so much admires, even though he to some degree resists idealizing them. For one thing, Sulaco “society” is made up of an extraordinary racial and ethnic mixture. This mixture is the product of its sanguinary history, as the narrator emphasizes from the beginning. The Spanish conquistadores enslaved the indigenes, the Native Americans. Wars of liberation from Spain led to wave after wave of military revolutions, one tyranny after another, with incredible bloodshed, cruelty, and injustice. Nevertheless, a large class of aristocratic hacienda-owning, cattle-ranching, pure-blooded Spanish people, “creoles,” remain. They are the core of the “Blanco” party. Black slaves were imported. Then a series of migrations from Europe, people coming either as workmen, political exiles, or as imperialist exploiters, brought English, French, Italians, even a few Germans and Jews. Sailors, like Nostromo, deserted from merchant ships to add to the mix. Much intermarriage of course occurred. Bits of three languages other than English exist in the novel: Spanish, French, and Italian. The narrator often uses Spanish names for occupations and ethnic identifications, as well as for place names such as Cordillera, the name of the overshadowing mountain range. A good bit of the conversation in the novel must be imagined to be carried on not in the English the narrator gives, but in Spanish. Decoud and Antonia are native-born Costaguanans, but they have been educated in France. They talk to one another in French. Giorgio Viola, the old Garibaldino, and his family are Italian, as is Nostromo. They speak Italian to one another. This is signaled even in this English-language book by the way Nostromo addresses Viola as “ Vecchio,” Italian for “old man.” Conrad does not specify what language the descendants of black slaves and the indigenes speak, but presumably some bits of their original languages persist beneath their Spanish. Charles Gould and all his family are English, though Gould was born in Costaguana and educated in England, as is the custom in that family. His wife is English, though 178

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her aunt has married an Italian aristocrat, and Charles Gould meets his future wife in Italy. The railroad workers are partly locals, Indios, but engineers from England run the operation, and some workmen are European. Sulaco, I conclude, is a complex mixture of races, languages, and ethnic allegiances. Sulaco is not all that different in this from the United States, by the way, though we have had, so far, only one, successful, “democratic revolution.” The so-called American Revolution (as if the United States were the whole continent) ushered in government of the people, by the people, and for the people, with liberty and justice for all. I say those words with only a mild trace of irony, though the liberty, justice, and equality did not of course in 1776 extend to black slaves, or to Native Americans, or to women, or even to men who were not above a certain level of wealth. My houses in Maine are on land taken from the Native Americans who had lived in the Penobscot Bay region for at least seven thousand years before the white man came and destroyed their culture in a few generations. “Liberty and justice for all” still has a hollow ring for many Americans—for example, for the African-American men and women who populate our prisons in such disproportionate numbers, or who swell the ranks of the unemployed. The Sulaco (non)community exists, moreover, like the United States one, as a complex layering of differing degrees of power, privilege, wealth, with the African-Americans and Indios at the bottom, extending up through European working-class people, to the Creoles and the dominating quasiforeigners like Charles Gould. Though the Gould family has been in Sulaco for generations, they are still considered Anglos, Inglesi. They are English in appearance, sensibility, mores, and language. The chief form of social mobility in Sulaco is through bribery, chicanery, or outright thievery, such as Nostromo’s theft of the silver, or by way of becoming the leader of a military coup and ruling the country through force, as the indigene Montero momentarily does in Nostromo. It is not much of a community! Martin Decoud at one point sums up succinctly the nature of the Sulaco (non)community in a bitter speech to his idealistic patriotic beloved, Antonia Avellanos. He quotes the great “liberator” of South America, Simón Bolívar, something for which the “Author’s Note,” oddly enough, apologizes. I suppose that is because the citation of Bolívar is a parabasis suspending momentarily the dramatization of a purely imaginary Central American state with an intrusion from actual history. In the “Note” Conrad has been defending, ironically, the “accuracy” of his report of Sulaco history, based Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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as it is on his reading of Avellanos’s “History of Fift y Years of Misrule.” The joke (almost a “post-modern” rather than “modernist” joke) is of course that Avellanos’s “History” is fictitious, along with the whole country of which it tells the story. No way exists to check the accuracy of Conrad’s account against any external referent, nor any way to check what the narrator says against what Avellanos says. Conrad can make it up any way he likes. The quotation of Bolívar reminds Conrad that some actual historical references do exist in the novel, and that these are a discordance: “I have mastered them [the pages of Avellanos’s “History”] in not a few hours of earnest meditation, and I hope that my accuracy will be trusted. In justice to myself, and to allay the fears of prospective readers, I beg to point out that the few historical allusions are never dragged in for the sake of parading my unique erudition, but that each of them is closely related to actuality—either throwing a light on the nature of current events or affecting directly the fortunes of the people of whom I speak” (Note, 4–5). “Actuality”? “Current events?” The words must refer here to the pseudo-actuality of Costaguana history. One such parabasis-like intrusion is Decoud’s citation of Bolívar: “After one Montero there would be another,” the narrator reports, in free indirect discourse, Decoud as having said: . . . the lawlessness of a populace of all colors and races, barbarism, irremediable tyranny. As the great Liberator Bolívar had said in the bitterness of his spirit, “America is ungovernable. Those who worked for her independence have ploughed the sea.” He did not care, he declared boldly; he seized every opportunity to tell her [Antonia] that though she had managed to make a Blanco journalist of him, he was no patriot. First of all, the word had no sense for cultured minds, to whom the narrowness of every belief is odious; and secondly, in connection with the everlasting troubles of this unhappy country it was hopelessly besmirched; it had been the cry of dark barbarism, the cloak of lawlessness, of crimes, of rapacity, of simple thieving. (206) It should be remembered that although what the narrative voice reports Decoud as having said agrees more or less with what the narrative voice itself says, speaking on its own, nevertheless Decoud is explicitly presented as an “idle boulevardier.” He only thinks, falsely, that he is truly Gallicized. His corrosive skepticism leads ultimately to suicide. One might say that Decoud is a side of Conrad that he wants to condemn and separate off from 180

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himself, leaving himself someone who is at least earnestly committed to the endless hard work of the professional writer who earns his daily bread by putting words on paper. Conrad’s letters to Cunninghame Graham often express, it must be said, a skeptical pessimism that is close to Decoud’s, as in one famous passage about the universe as a self-generated, self-generating machine: “It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time space, pain, death, corruption, despair, and all the illusions—and nothing matters.” In any case, what Decoud says matches closely what the narrative voice says about Sulaco’s deplorable history. How did Sulaco come to be such a non-community, or, to give Jean-Luc Nancy’s term a somewhat different meaning from his own, how did Sulaco come to be an inoperative or “unworked” community, a communauté désoeuvrée? Nancy’s book begins with the unqualified statement that “The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly gathers together all other testimonies that this epoch finds itself charged with assuming [chargée d’assumer], by virtue of who knows what decree or necessity (for we bear witness also to the exhaustion of thinking by way of history [l’épuisement de la pensée de l’Histoire]), is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.” Nostromo, it might be said, is a parabolic fable or allegory, a paradigmatic fiction, of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community. Just how does this disaster come about, according to Conrad? Who are the villains in this sad event? It is an event that can no longer even be understood historically. Nancy’s view of “la pensée de l’Histoire,” the reader will note, is quite different from Jameson’s “always historicize.” The dislocation of community must be borne witness to as something that we, or rather I, have experienced even if we (I) cannot explain it: “I have witnessed the conflagration of community. I testify that this is what has happened. I give you my personal word for it, even though I cannot explain it through conventional historicizing.” The magically telepathic narrative voice in Nostromo is such a witness. No doubt, Conrad, quite plausibly, ascribes a lot of stupidity, knavery, limitless greed, thievery, and wanton cruelty to his Costaguanans. Someone had to obey orders and torture Dr. Monygham or Don José Avellanos. Someone had to do as they were told and string Señor Hirsch up to a rafter by his hands tied behind his back, just as someone has had to commit Saddam Hussein’s tortures in Iraq, and someone had to push the buttons and pull the Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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triggers to kill all those Iraqi soldiers and civilians when we took over Iraq and during our occupation, and some par ticular people did that torturing of the detainees in the Iraqi jail, Abu Ghraib, even if they acted on orders from higher up. Someone has done all the torturing of detainees we have been guilty of since the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions started. Someone pulled the triggers or devised the bombs to kill all the teachers, physicians, government officials, and other “intellectuals” in Iraq who were assassinated after “the end of hostilities,” not to speak of all the Iraqi civilians and police who have been killed and are still in 2014 being killed. Someone had to wield all those machetes that butchered men women and children, whole villages of them, in Rwanda not all that many years ago. A human decision and act was necessary to drop all those bombs on Kosovo, or to murder all those Chechnyans, or to retaliate with human suicide bombs in Moscow. Human beings are boundlessly capable of lethal cruelty to one another. It will not do to blame the “authorities” for this or to say, “I was just carry ing out orders.” We have seen a lot of examples of this human propensity for murder, rape, and sadistic cruelty all over the world in recent years. A recent example is the Boston Marathon bombing that left three dead and an estimated 264 injured, some grievously. Nostromo’s Representation of Capitalist Imperialism Nostromo provides a parabolic representation of the violent and unjust side of human history. These traits of human nature, organized in civil wars, revolutions, and “acts of terror,” have certainly stood in the way of Sulaco becoming a community, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, one needs to ask just what has made these deplorable aspects of so-called “human nature” especially active in Sulaco. These aspects always stand in the way of law, order, justice, democracy, and civil society. The answer is twofold. First there was the murderous invasion of South America by the Spanish that killed many of the indigenous population and enslaved the rest, driving them to forced labor and destroying their cultures. Mrs. Gould has a sharp eye for the present condition of the indigenous population. She sees them during her travels all over the country with her husband to get support for the new opening of the mine and to persuade the Indios to come as workmen for the mine:

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Having acquired in southern Europe a knowledge of true peasantry, she was able to appreciate the great worth of the people. She saw the man under the silent, sad-eyed beast of burden. She saw them on the road carrying loads, lonely figures upon the plain, toiling under great straw hats, with their white clothing flapping about their limbs in the wind; she remembered the villages by some group of Indian women at the fountain impressed upon her memory, by the face of some young Indian girl with a melancholy and sensual profile, raising an earthenware vessel of cool water at the door of a dark hut with a wooden porch cumbered with great brown jars. (98) This passage is a good example of that shift from a panoramic view to the specificities of an extreme close-up, in this case in a report of Mrs. Gould’s memory, as it diminishes from her general knowledge of “the great worth of the people” to that “earthenware vessel of cool water at the door of a dark hut with a wooden porch cumbered with great brown jars.” Conrad’s narrator observes that many bridges and roads still remain in Sulaco as evidence of what slave labor by the Indios accomplished (99). Whole tribes, the narrative voice says, died in the effort to establish and work the silver mine. At several places the narrator describes the Native American survivors in their sullen reserve. As the Bible says, “For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” (Gal. 6:7). The consequences of the Spanish conquest still remain as the inaugural events in the whole region. The effect of these events cannot be healed or atoned for even after hundreds of years. They still stand in the way of the formation of any genuine community, Christian or secular, in the usual sense of the word “community.” This “origin” was not a unified and unifying originating event, like the big bang that initiated our cosmos, from which Costaguanan history might have followed in a linear and teleological fashion toward some “far off divine event” of peace and justice for all. It was rather a moment of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls, in a play on the word, “exposition.” The indigenous community, whatever it was like (and it will not do to idealize it too much; pre-Columbian history in South America was extremely bloody, too), was disposed of by being displaced, posed or placed beside itself, unseated, dis-posed. Th is happened through the violent occupying presence of an alien culture bent on converting the “savage heathens” to

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Christianity and on enslaving them as workers in the Eu ropeanizing of Sulaco. This divisive violence at the origin—or origin as polemos, division, exposition—also helps account for the way South American history, as represented by what Conrad in A Personal Record calls events on this “imaginary (but true) seaboard” (PR, 98), is a long story of civil wars, tyrannies, and revolutions. Nor has the history that is Conrad’s “background” for Nostromo come to an end. Twentieth-century events in Brazil, Argentina, Panama, Uruguay, Chile, or Haiti bear witness to this. (A bloody rebellion against the Haitian government of Aristide, led by armed paramilitary forces and parts of the army, was taking place at the moment I first drafted this essay, back in February 10, 2004. The George W. Bush government, in typical United States interventionist fashion, put its support behind Aristide’s ouster. Never mind that he was the democratically elected President.) These sad “but true” histories are the background, the assumed subsoil, of the “imaginary” story Conrad tells. The next phase of Sulacan society was the subsequent invasion of Europeans, in a second wave, after South American republics achieved independence. This was the invasion of global capitalism. It was already in full swing in Conrad’s day. Of course that invasion is still going on today. It is now more often, but not always, transnational corporations, centered in the United States, rather than in Europe, that are doing the exploiting. Nostromo’s main action is a fable-like exemplum of the effects of Western imperialist economic exploitation. The novel can be read with benefit even today as an analysis of capitalist globalization. Nostromo circles around one decisive event in such a history, the moment when foreign capital, what Conrad calls “material interests,” makes it possible to resist a threatened new local tyranny. This happens by way of a successful counter-revolution, and the subsequent establishment of a new regime. The new Occidental Republic of Sulaco will allow foreign exploitation, in this case the working of the San Tomé silver mine, to continue operating peacefully in a stable situation, a nation with law and order. The silver will flow steadily north to San Francisco to make rich investors constantly richer. This prosperity leaves the men who work the mine still earning peasants’ wages, though they now have a hospital, schools, better housing, relative security, and all the benefits that the Catholic Church can confer. Nevertheless, references to labor unrest, strikes and the like, are made 184

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toward the end of the novel. Charles Gould was quite wrong to believe permanent law and order would be established by the triumph of “material interests.” Conrad’s narrator gives a haunting picture of the mine workers at shift-changing time: The heads of gangs, distinguished by brass medals hanging on their bare breasts, marshalled their squads; and at last the mountain would swallow one-half of the silent crowd, while the other half would move off in long fi les down the zigzag paths leading to the bottom of the gorge. It was deep; and, far below a thread of vegetation winding between the blazing rock faces, resembled a slender green cord, in which three lumpy knots of banana patches, palm-leaf roofs, and shady trees marked the Village One, Village Two, Village Three, housing the miners of the Gould Concession. (111) What is most terrifying about this process of exploitation is Conrad’s suggestion of its inevitability, at least in the eyes of the capitalist exploiters. It does not matter what are the motives of the agents of global capitalism, how idealistic, honest, or high-minded they are. They are co-opted in spite of themselves by forces larger than themselves. Charles Gould has inherited the Gould Concession from his father, who was destroyed by it, since, though he was not working the mine, constant levies were made on him by the central government in Santa Marta, until he was ruined financially and spiritually. “It has killed him,” says Charles Gould, when the news of his father’s death reaches him in England (67). He resolves to atone for that death by returning to Sulaco, raising capital on the way, and working the mine, just as, it might be argued, George W. Bush’s actions as president were in part retaliation for the failed assassination attempt against his father. Moreover, as he said in a press conference during his presidency, he thought he had a divine calling to invade Iraq and bring democracy to the world. What went on and still goes on in the mind of George W. Bush is inscrutable, probably extremely strange, frighteningly strange, an imminent threat. Nevertheless, one may guess that one of Bush’s motives for the invasion of Iraq was a desire to make up for his father’s failure to “take out Saddam Hussein” and secure Iraqi oil for Western use. His closest advisors (Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others) certainly encouraged him in that. Charles Gould was, as I have said, born in Sulaco. His sentimental and idealistic belief is that what he calls “material interests” will eventually bring Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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law and order to his unhappy homeland because these will be necessary to the working of the mine. “What is wanted here,” he tells his wife, “is law, good faith, order, security. Anyone may declaim about these things, but I pin my faith to material interests. Only let the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the conditions on which alone they can continue to exist. That’s how your money-making is justified here in the face of lawlessness and disorder. It is justified because the security which it demands must be shared with an oppressed people. A better justice will come afterwards. That’s your ray of hope” (92–3). That noble but naïve confidence found its echoes in American neo-conservative arguments for bringing democracy to Iraq in order to secure the smooth working of the oil industry there. That is our present-day form of “material interests.” The latter (oil exploitation) is bound to bring the former (Western-style capitalist democracy)—in good time—since oil exploitation requires law and order. This is a version of the “trickle down” theory, or, in George W. Bush’s words, “it’s our calling to bring democracy to the world,” “to change the world.” Of course this has not worked. Both Iraq and Afghanistan, after we finally “pulled out,” have been even more violent and unstable. Westernstyle democracies they are not. Charles Gould, in spite of his English sentimental idealism and practical efficiency, is no more than a tool of global capitalism. The latter is represented, as every reader of the novel will remember, by the sinister American businessman and entrepreneur from San Francisco, Holroyd. Holroyd funds the re-opening of the San Tomé mine as a kind of personal hobby. It is one small feature of his global enterprise. That enterprise includes, as a significant detail, a commitment to building protestant churches everywhere the influence of his company reaches. Or, rather, Holroyd funds not the mine, but Charles Gould. It is Gould he has bought, not the mine, out of his confidence in Gould’s integrity, courage, practicality, mine-engineering know-how, and fanatical devotion to making the mine successful at all costs. Holroyd’s recompense is the steady flow of large amounts of silver north by steamer to San Francisco from the port of Sulaco. Holroyd has a canny sense of the precariousness of the San Tomé enterprise. He is ready at a moment’s notice to withdraw funding if things go badly, for example through a new revolution installing another tyrannical dictator who will take over the mine for his own enrichment. Nevertheless, Holroyd sees global capitalism as destined to conquer the world. He states this 186

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certainty in a chilling speech to Charles Gould. Gould does not care what Holroyd believes as long as he (Gould) obtains the money necessary to get the mine working. Holroyd’s speech is chilling because it is so prescient. A CEO of ADM, “Supermarket to the World,” or Enron, or Bechtel, or Fluor, or Monsanto, or Texaco, or Halliburton, Dick Cheney, for example, when he ran Halliburton, might make such a speech in our own time, at least in private, to confidantes or confederates. It is not insignificant that Holroyd’s big office building of steel and glass is located in San Francisco, since so many transnational corporations even today are located in California, if not in Texas. Conrad foresaw the movement of global capitalism’s center westward from Paris and London first to New York and then to Texas and California. What Conrad did not foresee is that it would be oil and gas rather than silver or other metals that would be the center of global capitalism. Nor did he foresee that the development and use of oil and gas would cause environmental destruction and global warming that would sooner or later bring the whole process of economic imperialism to a halt and inundate our coastal cities, if nuclear war does not finish us all off before that. Western-style industrialized and now digitized civilization, as it spreads all over the world, requires oil and gas not just for automobiles and heating, but for military might and explosives; for the airplanes that span the globe; for plastics, metal, and paper manufacture; for producing fertilizers and pesticides that grow the corn and soybeans that feed the cattle that make the beef that feeds people; and now for the production of personal computers, television sets, satellites, fiber optic cables, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of global telecommunications and the mass media. Surprisingly, it takes two thirds as much oil or coal-based CO2-emitting energy to produce a PC as to produce an automobile, a large amount in both cases. When the oil and gas are gone, in a hundred years or less, we are going to be in big trouble, up the proverbial creek without a paddle, and with rising waters to boot. Holroyd, by the way, is a perfect United Statesian, that is, a mixture of many races. He is also a splendid exemplar of religion’s connection to the rise of capitalism. He is a “millionaire endower of churches on a scale befitting the greatness of his native land” (84). “His hair was iron gray,” says the narrator, “his eyebrows were still black, and his massive profile was the profi le of a Caesar’s head on an old Roman coin. But his parentage was German and Scotch and English, with remote strains of Danish and French Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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blood, giving him the temperament of a Puritan and an insatiable imagination of conquest” (84). Here is this insatiable capitalist’s prophetic account of the way United States–based global capitalism is bound to take over the world: Now what is Costaguana? It is the bottomless pit of ten per cent. loans and other fool investments. European capital had been flung into it with both hands for years. Not ours, though. We in this country know just about enough to keep in-doors when it rains. We can sit and watch. Of course, some day we shall step in. We are bound to. But there’s no hurry. Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of God’s universe. We shall be giving the word for everything—industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound, and beyond, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth. We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it—and neither can we, I guess. (85) Holroyd makes this remarkable statement to Charles Gould, during the latter’s visit to Holroyd’s office in San Francisco to raise venture capital for the mine. The reader will remember the huge losses the Bank of America and other banks incurred some years ago from bad South American loans. This was long before the recent global financial melt-down. These American banks in their boundless greed seem to have forgotten the lesson that Conrad’s Holroyd already knew. Holroyd was right in the short run, but now, in 2013, the United States’s global economic hegemony is coming to an end through the folly of our banks, financial institutions, and politicians. The “great Holroyd building” is described as “an enormous pile of iron, glass, and blocks of stone at the corner of two streets, cobwebbed aloft by the radiation of telegraph wires” (89). That sounds pretty familiar, except that today such a building, for example the old Enron building in Houston before they went broke through fraud and greed, would have more glass and less visible iron and stone. The cobweb of telegraph wires would be replaced by invisible underground optic cables or by discreet satellite dishes. Nevertheless, Conrad’s circumstantial account of the determining role of the telegraph and of trans-oceanic cables in Sulaco’s affairs anticipates the role of global telecommunications today. 188

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Gould’s reaction to Holroyd’s speech about the way the United States will take over the world is a slight disagreeable uneasiness caused by a sudden insight into the smallness, in a global perspective, of the silver mine that fi lls his whole life. Holroyd’s “intelligence was nourished on facts,” says the narrator, and, oddly, says his words were “meant to express his faith in destiny in words suitable to his intelligence, which was unskilled in the presentation of general ideas” (85). This commentary is odd because Holroyd’s speech, it seems to me, expresses with great eloquence the “general idea” or ideological presuppositions of United States’s “exceptionalism.” I mean our presumption that it is our destiny to achieve imperialist economic conquest of the world, with military help when necessary. Holroyd’s grandiose conceptions are not all that solidly nourished on facts. Charles Gould, on the other hand, “whose imagination had been permanently affected by the one great fact of a silver-mine, had no objection to this theory [Holroyd’s] of the world’s future. If it had seemed distasteful for a moment it was because the sudden statement of such vast eventualities dwarfed almost to nothingness the actual matter in hand. He and his plans and all the mineral wealth of the Occidental province appeared suddenly robbed of every vestige of magnitude” (85). My own reaction to Holroyd’s speech is that chill or frisson I have mentioned as a reaction to Conrad’s prescience. It is also the reflection that United States global economic imperialism may already be coming to an end, like all imperialisms, as China will soon become the world’s largest economy, as Indian soft ware displaces Silicon Valley, as United States jobs flee by the hundreds of thousands to worldwide “outsourcing” and manufacturing (millions of jobs lost to China alone in the last few years), and as non-Americans, such as the Australian Rupert Murdoch, are coming to dominate the worldwide cable and satellite media. The triumph of global capitalism means the eventual end of nation-state imperialist hegemony. That includes the United States. We should make no mistake about that. Dick Cheney, as I said earlier in this chapter, had more power when he was CEO of Halliburton than he had as Vice President of the United States, in spite of all the mischief he did in the latter capacity. The American people could have refused to reelect him if they had chosen to do so, whereas as a CEO of a multinational corporation he was not subject to such inconvenient restraints. Somewhat paradoxically, one of the best ways to understand what is happening now in our time of globalization is to read this old novel by Conrad, Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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written just a hundred years ago. That is one answer to the question of literature’s “usefulness” these days. The way military intervention by the United States is necessary to secure and support its worldwide economic imperialism is indicated in one small detail in Nostromo. The narrator notes that at the climax of the successful secession and establishment of the new Occidental Republic of Sulaco, a United States warship, the Powhatten [a real American Navy ship, by the way, ironically named for a Native American chief], stood by in the offing to make sure that the founding of the new Republic did not go amiss. This parallels the historical fact that when Panama, through United States conniving, split off from Columbia after Columbia refused to approve the Panama Canal, American naval vessels stood by to make sure the split really happened and the Columbians did not try to take Panama back. It would be too long a tale to tell the whole story here of United States military and economic intervention, not to speak of covert action, in South America. Conrad’s Nostromo gives an admirable emblematic fictional example of it. Whether or not Conrad himself agreed unequivocally with Holroyd’s economic determinism is another question, just as it is questionable whether Conrad expresses without qualification his own radical skepticism in the Parisian dandy Decoud, “the man with no faith in anything except the truth of his own sensations” (254), as though he were a perfect “impressionist.” I think the answer is no in both cases. The biographical evidence, for example that provided succinctly by Cedric Watts, indicates that though Conrad learned a lot about South American history and topography from Eastwick, Masterman, et al., it was especially through his friendship and conversations with the Scottish socialist aristocrat R. B. Cunninghame Graham, descendant of the famous King of the Scots, Robert the Bruce (1274–1329), and through reading Graham’s writings, that Conrad achieved his understanding of the bad things Western imperialism had done over the centuries in South America. He more or less adopted Graham’s attitude toward these historical facts. As many distinguished critics, such as Edward Said and Fredric Jameson, have noted before, I conclude that Nostromo is, among other things, an eloquent and persuasive indictment of the evils of military and economic imperialism exercised by fi rst-world countries, especially by the United States, against so-called third-world countries everywhere. The reader needs to be on guard, however, against confusing analogy with identity. I have used 190 Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

words like “allegory,” “parable,” “fable,” “consonance,” and “uncanny resonance” to indicate that Nostromo is a commodious emblem of economic imperialism. It is not a direct representation of actual historical events. Nostromo is a fictional work. Historical events analogous to those it recounts have recurred from time to time in post-Renaissance world history. They always happen, however, in significantly different ways at different moments in history. Oil and gas, for example, have replaced silver as the preferred loot from third-world countries. New telecommunications—email, iPhones, and the Internet—have replaced the telegraph lines and undersea cables of Conrad’s day. That is a huge difference. The recent global financial meltdown depended absolutely on the use of computers and digitized trading programs, for example credit default swaps, derivatives, and micro-second execution of stock trades. The differences, we must always remember, are as important as the similarities. A parable is not a work of history. It is a realistic story that stands for something else in an indirect mode of reference. One might call each such a literary work a reading of history. Literature, to express this in Conrad’s own terms, is a way of using language in a mode that is “imaginary (but true).” The claim I am making is complex and problematic. I am sticking my neck out in making this claim in the way I do. It is impossible to do justice to the complexity in question in a single essay. A parable is not the same mode of discourse as an allegory, nor is it the same as an emblem, a paradigm, or a reading. Careful discriminations would need to be made to decide which is the best term for Conrad’s procedure in Nostromo of making an imaginary story “stand for” history. That little word “for” in “stand for” is crucial here, as is the word “of” in the phrases “parable of,” “emblem of,” “allegory of,” “paradigmatic expression of,” and “reading of.” What displacement is involved in that “for”? What is the force of “of” in these different locutions? What different ligature or separation is affirmed in each case? The differences among these “ofs” might generate a virtually endless analysis of Nostromo in their light. I have used a series of traditional words for Conrad’s displacement of “realist” narration to say something else. The multiplicity is meant to indicate the inadequacy of all of them. Nostromo is not exactly a parable, nor an emblem (though I just used that word), nor an allegory, nor a paradigm, nor a reading. Each of these words is in one way or another inadequate or inappropriate. A parable, for example, is a short, realistic story of everyday life Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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that stands for some otherwise inexpressible spiritual truth. An example is Jesus’s parable of the sower, in Matthew 13:3–9. Nostromo is hardly like that. All the other words I have used can be disqualified in similar ways. Nevertheless, it is of great importance not to read Nostromo as a straightforward “historical fiction.” Historical realities as Conrad knew them, primarily from reading, but also through conversations with Cunninghame Graham, not from direct experience, are used as the “raw material” for the creation of a fictive “world” that is “imaginary (but true).” Conrad’s own phrase is perhaps, after all, the best way to express the use of realist narrative techniques to create a place swarming with people and events that never existed anywhere on land or sea except within the covers of copies of Nostromo, and before that in Conrad’s imagination. The magnificent opening description of the sequestered province of Sulaco, cut off from the outside world by the Golfo Placido and by the surrounding mountains, is one way this isolation of Sulaco’s imagined (non)community is expressed in Nostromo. The second part of Conrad’s phrase, “but true,” argues that the fictive events that take place in Nostromo correspond to the way things really happened in Central America at that stage of its history, that is, the moment of United States imperialist and global capitalist interventions. The novel is “true to life.” The words “but true” suggest a claim by Conrad that this transformation of historical fact into a complex modernist narrative form is better than any history book at indicating the way history actually happens. History happens, that is, in ways that are distressingly contingent. History is “caused” by peripheral factors such as Decoud’s love for Antonia Avellanos or Nostromo’s vanity. Conrad’s phrase, “imaginary (but true),” is, after all, echoing, with his own modernist twist, what Aristotle said in the Poetics about the way poetry is more philosophical than history because “[history] relates what has happened, [poetry] what may happen.” The “modernist twist” is the implicit claim that the narrative complexities and indirections I have been identifying get closer to “what has happened” than “official” histories. Aristotle would probably not have approved of those complexities, any more than Plato, in The Republic, approved of Homer’s “double diegesis” in pretending to narrate as Odysseus. In spite of its narrative complexities, Nostromo’s indirect way of “standing for” the real South American history Conrad knew from books and hearsay also means that, mutatis mutandis, it is also an indirect way of helping to 192 Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

understand what is going on in the United States and in the world today, in 2014. That understanding would then make possible, it might be, responsible action (for example by voting) as a way of responding to what is going on. This, I am aware, is an extravagant claim for the social, ethical, and political usefulness of literature. I conclude also that Nostromo demonstrates, to my satisfaction at least, that all its notorious narrative complexities of fractured sequence, reversed temporality, and multiple viewpoints are not goods in themselves. Not telling a story by way of a single point of view and in straightforward chronological order can be justified only if, as is the case with Nostromo, such extravagant displacements or “dis-positions” are necessary to get the meaning across more successfully to the reader’s comprehensive understanding. The final twist in an account of Nostromo’s problematic genre is that my account of Conrad’s representation of how historical events actually take place must be modified further by recognizing that Nostromo is performative as well as constative. Nostromo is a speech act. Conrad claimed that Nostromo was a truer representation of history as it actually happens than any history book he had ever seen. “The historical part,” wrote Conrad in a letter, “is an achievement in mosaic too, though, personally, it seems to me much more true than any history I ever learned.” Nostromo is, after all, a work of fiction, a virtual reality, as I have emphasized. The words on the pages are the material basis of an internal theatrical or cinematic show, not a treatise on politics or on the economics of global capitalism. As is appropriate for its genre, Nostromo embodies imaginary historical events by way of what may be seen by the narrative eye and by way of the presentation of its imaginary protagonists’ beliefs and actions. Whatever effect the novel may have on its readers will be the result not only of a constative conveying of information about imperialism but also of a performative intervention generated by the imaginary narrative. This may even lead the reader to choose and act differently today in his or her present situation, for example by voting differently. That performative effect, which is the true social function of literature, is unpredictable in a given case. No determinable straight line exists between the novel taken as a speech act and the result of that speech act. Some readers may have their eyes opened by Nostromo to the evils of United States imperialism now as then. Others may see Conrad’s message as essentially a conservative one. They may even conclude (wrongly) that Conrad believes that lawless and unstable Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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places like Sulaco need a little intervention by the United States to set up a democracy like our own and to install law and order, so enterprises like the San Tomé mine (read Iraqi oil reserves) can be peacefully exploited for the good of the world (read the good of multinational oil companies and American consumers).

I D E O LO G I E S O F LO V E A N D WA R : P S YC H O D R A M A S O F I N T E R T W I N E D I S O L ATO E S I N N O S T R O M O

The previous section focused on Conrad’s extremely complex to-and-fro “mosaic-like” presentation of the events of history as a way of exposing capitalist imperialism in an imaginary example. The ideologies of imperialism, however, are of course embodied in the personages of the novel. Moreover, love both romantic and erotic is, for Conrad, also a crucial cause of the way history happens. This final section of this chapter investigates the novel’s psychodramas. Conrad’s Cinematic Vision My chief topic, the reader may remember, is the relation of individual to community, or lack of it, in Nostromo. I have already established that Sulaco is not a community at all in the ordinary sense of that word. It is at best a grotesque parody of a community, a non-community or an “unworked” community. The European invasions have seen to that. Historical events, I have said, are partly represented in Nostromo in terms of highly circumstantial visual images. An example, one chosen out of a great many, is the description of the changing of shifts at the San Tomé mine, cited earlier. These visions, as they might almost be called, are remarkably cinematic. They make the reader see, almost as vividly as if a camera eye had recorded the scene. Many of Conrad’s fictions have, it happens, been made into films. This has occurred twice already for Nostromo, once back in the 1920s as a fi lm and then again quite recently for television. Conrad’s novels and stories seem to invite such translation into the predominantly visual medium of cinema. Sometimes the text, with its careful notation of colors and shapes, almost reads like detailed directions for its fi lming, as in the following small example, one of a great many: “From the middle of the gulf the point of the land itself [of the Punta Mala] is not visible at all; but the 194 Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

shoulder of a steep hill at the back can be made out faintly like a shadow on the sky” (4). The camera eye is by no means entirely impersonal. The camera itself is an apparatus that receives light in certain ways. The cinematic image is framed and organized by all sorts of ideological, technological assumptions and manipulations by the director and the cameraman. The viewer has, moreover, been elaborately trained to interpret fi lmic visual images in certain ways. This happens partly by the way a given scene appears to an adept viewer as an allusion to some scene in an earlier fi lm that has now become a recognizable stereotype. Even so, and in spite of that, the actual film through which the projector light shines to put the image on the screen is, by however complicated a series of relays and manipulations, the record of light falling on the sensitive fi lm or, nowadays, on the digital apparatus. Beneath everything cinema is the indifferent and impersonal register by the camera eye of what Conrad and his contemporaries called “impressions.” Conrad’s text, though of course it is no more perfectly impersonal than a camera eye, nevertheless often attempts to come as close as possible, in what now can be seen as a period style. It is a historically dated mannerism, inaugurated by Stephen Crane and imitated later by Faulkner. The attempt is to give the impersonal record of just what was there to be seen, with minimal interpretation. Part of the function of this mode of presentation is to challenge traditional, monumental, or teleological versions of history. These are represented in parody form in Nostromo by Captain Mitchell’s retrospective account of the founding of the Occidental Republic of Sulaco and by recurrent notations of the way he sees things that he has been in the thick of as momentous historical “events.” However, as the narrative voice observes apropos of his presence in Mrs. Gould’s salons, he hasn’t a clue as to what is going on: And there was also to be seen Captain Mitchell, a little apart, near one of the long windows, with an air of old-fashioned neat old bachelorhood about him, slightly pompous, in a white waistcoat, a little disregarded and unconscious of it, utterly in the dark, and imagining himself to be in the thick of things. The good man, having spent a clear thirty years of his life on the high seas before getting what he called a “shore billet,” was astonished at the importance of transactions (other than relating to Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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shipping) which takes place on dry land. Almost every event out of the usual daily course “marked an epoch” for him or else was “history”; unless with his pomposity struggling with a discomfited droop of his rubicund, rather handsome face, set off by snow-white close hair and short whiskers, he would mutter: “Ah, that! That, sir, was a mistake.” (124–5) This passage is a good example of Conrad’s cinematic vision. He clearly had a vivid mental image of just what Captain Mitchell looked like, hair, whiskers, red face, white waistcoat and all, and wants to reconstitute that vision in the mind of the reader, along with Mitchell’s pompous incomprehension of history. The cinematic presentation suggests that “historical events” are not something abstractly political, but are always materially embodied in ways that can be registered on the senses, heard or touched or smelled, but especially seen. An example is the “flat, joyless faces” of the mine workers changing shifts. They look all the same to Mrs. Gould, “as if run into the same ancestral mould of suffering and patience.” Actually, the narrative voice tells the reader, they have skins of many different colors, “infinitely graduated shades of reddish-brown, of blackish-brown, of coppery-brown backs” that indicate their racial mixtures and that a cameraman should try to register (110–11). Conrad also gives by way of his cinematic specificities a good bit of support to his conviction that history is often made by sheer senseless accident. It just happens that the deposed dictator Ribiera rides into Sulaco on a dying donkey at the moment the rioting crowd is in the street at that spot. It just happens that the commandeered steamship from Esmeralda bearing the revolutionist Sotillo collides in the pitchdark with the lighter manned by Nostromo and Decoud and carrying the silver from the mine. It just happens that the stowaway on the lighter grabs hold of the steamship’s anchor as it slips by the lighter in the collision and is carried away with the steamship and so to his torture and death. It just happens that old Giorgio Viola mistakes Nostromo for an unwanted suitor of his daughter and shoots him dead.

Unique Subjectivities in Nostromo History is always materially embodied, often in grotesque accidents that may have unforeseen consequences. What happens, as a result, resists ab196

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stract generalization about what constitutes a “historical event.” Nevertheless, that embodiment is also materially determined, though also in ironic and disquieting ways, by the thoughts, ideals, imaginations, fantasies, and intentions, in short the “ideologies,” of the people who make history happen. Much of the “mosaic” text of Nostromo is taken up by investigations of the inner worlds of the various protagonists. The narrative voice has uncanny and telepathic access to these, as it centers on now one interiority and now another. It might be argued that because Conrad’s main goal in Nostromo is to show how history really happens, taking as his example an imaginary case of nation-founding and nation-building, he would naturally make his protagonists exemplary of the races, classes, and genders in Sulaco. Nostromo is a typical working-class Italian immigrant, a “man of the people”; old Giorgio is a typical Garibaldino; Charles Gould is a typical third generation English imperialist; and so on. No doubt some stereotyping of this sort happens, as in the anti-Semitism in the presentation of Hirsch as a cowardly, cringing Jew, or in a remark about Sotillo: “There is always something childish in the rapacity of the passionate, clear-minded southern races, wanting in the misty idealism of the northerners, who at the smallest encouragement dream of nothing less than the conquest of the earth. Sotillo was fond of jewels, gold trinkets, of personal adornment” (370–1). Sotillo is typical of the southern races, but his childishness takes the specific form of a fondness for trinkets. This kind of specificity or singularity is even truer of the chief protagonists. In essence each main character is atypical, singular. Subjective Isolation in Nostromo Edward Said was right. The whole long ending of the novel is like a working out of the interwoven themes of a Bach four-part composition. In this case, however, even more parts are woven in, one at least for each of the main characters and even for some of the lesser actors in this drama: Charles Gould, Emilia Gould, Nostromo, Decoud, Antonia, Giorgio Viola, Dr. Monygham, even Captain Mitchell, the villainous Sotillo, and the hapless Hirsch. The destiny of each main character is followed to its end in death or in some kind of stasis. Each life is presented in a complex interweaving of alternating motifs. Each one of these goes on and on. Each follows its own logic indefatigably and without apparent worry about the reader’s patience, again like a Bach invention. Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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Conrad, for example, extended considerably from the magazine version in T. P.’s Weekly to the first book version of the final episode of Nostromo’s courtship of the Viola daughters and his death at the hands of their father. In this final extended episode, the investigation of history in an imaginary example seems left far behind and almost forgotten. W. B. Yeats, speaking of his own experience as a poet and playwright, has, in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” succinctly named what has happened in this case with Conrad too: . . . and yet when all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me: Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of. It is a basic rule or law of Nostromo that the characters do not have direct access to one another’s minds. Each is isolated within himself or herself. Sometimes the characters guess right about one another on the basis of the evidence, but they cannot enter directly the mind of the other. The narrator has the sovereign power to do that. We readers therefore also do so by way of that strange species of imaginary telepathy I have already identified, something “unrealistic” and yet a fundamental a part of the conventions of realist fiction in the West. Each character, though impinged upon no doubt by the surrounding characters, is nevertheless a self-enclosed bubble or monad within the larger bubble that is the encompassing mind of the narrative voice. Conrad’s consistent characterization of each of the protagonists is that each is dominated by a secret obsession only partially glimpsed by the other characters. The word “secret” echoes through the “Author’s Note” as the best word to describe the way the characters are imprisoned within a single solitary incommunicable preoccupation that makes them what they are. What they are is separate singularities who have nothing in common but their singularity, their impenetrable difference from one another. In the “Note,” Conrad speaks of “the secret purposes of their hearts revealed amongst the bitter necessities of the time” (Note, 5), of “the secret devotion of Dr. Monygham” (Note, 5), and of Nostromo’s secret: “In his secret love and scorn of life and in the bewildered conviction of having been betrayed, of dying betrayed he 198

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hardly knows by what or by whom, he still is of Them [the People], their very own Great Man—with a private history of his own” (Note, 7). “Nostromo,” of course, means “our man” in Italian. Each protagonist has “a private history of his or her own.” These secret obsessions differ from what is usually understood by the term “ideology.” An ideology, though no less fallacious, is more public, more a matter of avowed beliefs, as in the willingness of many United States citizens today to affirm publicly that they believe the poor are just lazy and pampered by welfare handouts Charles Gould’s power over others lies in part in his English taciturnity. No one can never be sure what he is thinking. What he is thinking, with single-minded concentration, night and day, is how to secure safely the working of the San Tomé mine. In order to do this, he is willing to bribe everyone in sight, to organize a law-suspending revolution putting Ribiera in power as a dictator governing on the basis of what a passage in the serial version that was later cut calls “the Five-Year Mandate, which suspended the fundamental laws of the estate [sic], but at the same time aimed at keeping private ambitions from interfering in the work of economic reconstruction. Peace at home and credit abroad!” (cited in Watts, 53). Gould is also willing to be more or less “owned” and manipulated by the great American financier, Holroyd, to help fulfi ll the latter’s own aims of world conquest and the conversion of all South Americans to Protestant Christianity. Gould, you will remember, tells his wife that he pins his faith in material interests and in the power those interests have to establish law and order. In supporting the Ribierist revolution, in order to establish law he suspends law. We have had some experience of that lately, in the suspension of whatever law there was in Iraq before the invasion by the United States, or the so-called “coalition.” We promised the eventual establishment, sometime in the future, of Western-style law, after free elections, so our “material interests” in Iraq could be protected. Meanwhile Iraq was for many years after the invasion under martial law. Iraq was subject to the sovereign power of a foreign occupying country. In a similar way, the “terrorist attack” of 9/11 has justified the suspension, through the strangely named “Patriot Act,” of civil liberties and of the rights guaranteed under the constitution in the name of the War on Terror and in the name of Homeland Security. This has, alas, continued under Barack Obama’s presidency, with immensely enhanced electronic surveillance and data-gathering of United States citizens’ phone calls, emails, and “snail mail” by the NSA, or National Security Agency, as Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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well as increased killing of foreign citizens by drone strikes intended to kill suspected terrorists. Almost every day during the summer of 2013 brought new information about the extent of surveillance of United States Citizens. As President Bush repeatedly said during his Presidency, the United States is at war. This war, we were told, was going to last a long time. It was still going on in August 2013, just as had lasted the incommunicado detention, without access to lawyers, of our “war prisoners” at Guantanamo Bay, or as had lasted the treatment of those subject to “extraordinary rendition.” The latter phrase is a shorthand euphemism for detainees’ transportation to secret prisons in some foreign country where they can be subjected to interrogation by torture, or to just plain torture. These situations have been, to some degree, mitigated as this book goes to press. The War on Terror, logically, will last in perpetuity, as long as a single “terrorist” still exists, thereby putting the United States at war forever because there will always be more terrorists. We are in a permanent state of what Carl Schmitt called “exception.” This exceptional state is used to justify the suspension of law, of habeas corpus; of the right to a prompt, free, and open trial; of the right to free speech; of the right to read and write what we like; of the right to take any book out of the library or to open any website without knowledge by the police of what we are reading. To change this disastrous state of affairs would constitute nothing less than a revolution against our elected representatives, even if that revolution were to be carried out through the elective process. The powers given by the Patriot Act to the Department of Homeland Security have, paradoxically, made all United States citizens homeless. We are all treated as potential alien terrorists, under constant surveillance, without a homeland, without the security of the constitutional rights we once enjoyed, under law. Charles Gould’s Secret Obsession Charles Gould’s fanatical devotion to his mine leads him to be willing to blow up himself and the mine in order to keep it from falling into the hands of the Monterist revolutionaries. It also estranges him from his wife, whom he has inspired to love him and to follow him to Costaguana out of her deep admiration for his courageous idealism. The mine becomes like a great barrier of silver between them. He loves it more than he does his wife. Moreover, far from bringing unequivocal peace and prosperity to the new 200

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Occidental Republic of Sulaco, after the Monterists have been defeated and a new state with a new stable government established, the mine becomes the agent of a new economic tyranny. Both Dr. Monygham and Emilia Gould recognize this toward the end of the novel. They pass harsh judgment, presumably, though of course not certainly, with the concurrence of the discreet narrative voice. Dr. Monygham says, near the end of the novel: “There is no peace and rest in the development of material interests. They have their law and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and it is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and force that can be found only in a moral principle. Mrs. Gould, the time approaches when all that the Gould Concession stands for shall weigh as heavily upon the people as the barbarism, cruelty, and misrule of a few years back” (571). Emilia Gould later comes to agree with what Dr. Monygham says in a passage cited later in this section. Neither Dr. Monygham, nor Emilia Gould, nor the narrative voice, by the way, ever says anything about the environmental degradation and poisoning of earth and water caused by mining. Global warming was at that point an unknown thing of the future. Cedric Watts cites as commentary on the damning appraisals by Monygham and Emilia a passage from The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’ ” (cited in Watts, 71). Marx and Engels are arguing in this passage, with surprising conservatism only slightly touched by irony, that feudalism, however unjust and cruelly hierarchical, made possible communities of a sort. The rise of bourgeois capitalism has replaced all community ties with the cash nexus. Conrad’s presentation of the social situation in Sulaco is quite different. Marx and Engels are not, in this citation at least, speaking about global imperialist capitalism nor about the social structure of a colony like the imaginary Sulaco. Holroyd is not a member of the bourgeoisie, but an elite member of what we would call today the top 1 percent. Conrad shows that nothing like idyllic feudalism ever existed in Sulaco. For Conrad, it is not so much the cash nexus that cuts people off from one another as the impenetrable enclosure of each person in his or her secret subjectivity. Each person is focused on a hidden obsession. The Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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non-community of Sulaco presupposes the destruction by imperialist capitalism, military invasions, and ethnic mixing of any indigenous, homogeneous community. That unworking of community, however, is compounded by the secret life each person lives within the non-community. This isolation would apparently occur under any circumstances that the narrative voice can imagine. It is a given in Conrad’s fictions. A hidden private life cuts each person off from all the others and imprisons each in his or her singularity. This results in a non-community, a “communauté désoeuvrée,” of those who have nothing in common but the fact that each harbors a secret that each will carry to the grave. Historical events, for Conrad, are brought about by actions that are determined by the secret obsessions of individual persons. These actions, however, do not bring about what the actors intend. Their actions are wrested from them by the irresistible force of material interests and bring about disastrous unintended consequences. Conrad’s most eloquent expression of the way material interests appropriate the idealistic motives of those who think to use them for social good comes almost at the end of the novel by way of a passage giving in free indirect discourse Emilia Gould’s understanding of the way her husband’s devotion to the mine has destroyed their marriage: Incorrigible in his devotion to the great silver mine was the Señor Administrador! Incorrigible in his hard, determined ser vice of the material interests to which he had pinned his faith in the triumph of order and justice. Poor boy! She had a clear vision of the gray hairs on his temples. He was perfect—perfect. . . . There was something inherent in the necessities of successful action which carried with it the moral degradation of the idea. She saw the San Tomé mountain hanging over the Campo, over the whole land, feared, hated, wealthy, more soulless than any tyrant, more pitiless and autocratic than the worst government, ready to crush innumerable lives in the expansion of its greatness. He did not see it. He could not see it. It was not his fault. He was perfect, perfect; but she would never have him to herself. Never; not for one short hour altogether to herself in this old Spanish house she loved so well! (581–2) Charles Gould is a major, but by no means the only, example of the sad law in Nostromo that successful action morally degrades the idea. Gould’s secret obsession is to atone for his father’s miserable death by putting the mine back in working order and thereby installing the law and order that 202

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are necessary for the safety of material interests. The result is, by the implacable logic of material interests, a new tyranny in Sulaco, as Dr. Monygham and Emilia Gould both come to understand. It is not quite the case, however, that Conrad buys a Marxist notion of economic and materialist determinism. The founding of a new state in Sulaco is an inaugural performative if there ever was one, but it depends on a whole series of acts that are undertaken with quite other motives. The new state would not have come into being without those individual and secretly motivated acts that enter the material world and change it. The main characters are driven either to despairing, empty lives or to that universal end that awaits us all, death, not by the implacable working of global capitalism or by the impersonal working of material interests, but by the intersection of those with the secret obsessions that dominate the life of each. Of Charles Gould, for example, Conrad says in the “Author’s Note” that he is “the Idealist-creator of Material Interests, whom we must leave to his mine—from which there is no escape in this world” (Note, 5). In a similar way, those gringo ghosts, probably Americanos, in the desolate Azuera are chained, even after death, to the treasure that is perhaps hidden there, so the local folk who have created this fable believe (4–6). This inaugural fable echoes the way the characters in Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale” are destroyed by that root of all evil, cupidity, and also the way the “incorruptible Capataz,” Nostromo, is ultimately corrupted by the silver he steals. The value of silver lies primarily in its incorruptibility, in its resistance to rust, and in its inability to combine easily with other elements, though of course it may easily be amalgamated, with mercury for instance in oldfashioned tooth fillings. Incorruptible silver can be given value when minted into coins or when, in this novel, made into those silver buttons on his costume that Nostromo fancies and that are a sign of his boundless vanity. He cuts them off his coat in a public scene and gives them with lighthearted generosity to his current mistress. Charles Gould too is ultimately corrupted by the silver, as he recognizes in a rare moment in the novel when his silence is penetrated by the narrative voice and his thoughts are represented in a combination of free indirect discourse and direct report. His habitual British reticence and silence is his greatest political weapon. It makes him inscrutable to all those officials and rich people he must manipulate in order to get the mine going again. Nobody, except the narrator, knows what he is thinking at a given moment, not even his wife, and the narrator rarely Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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penetrates his silence. Gould’s imperious and imperial silence, along with his ruthless efficiency in running the Gould Concession, make him known everywhere in Costaguana as “el Rey de Sulaco,” the king of the “imperium in imperio,” which is the mine and therefore king of Sulaco, too. Gould just maintains an imperturbable silence, whatever happens. The failure of the Ribierist government, which he has stooped to establish, breaking his rule against political intervention, leads him to recognize that he has made a mistake in judgment and to condemn himself for that failure. The sight of a dying cargadore lying outside the entrance to his big house as he returns to it brings home to him his folly and the “irremediable folly” of his countrymen, as one absurd and bloody revolution follows another: Unlike Decoud, Charles Gould could not play lightly a part in a tragic farce. It was tragic enough for him, in all conscience, but he could see no farcical element. He suffered too much under a conviction of irremediable folly. He was too severely practical and too idealistic to look upon its terrible humors with amusement, as Martin Decoud, the imaginative materialist, was able to do with the dry light of his skepticism. To him, as to all of us, the compromises with his conscience appeared uglier than ever in the light of failure. His taciturnity, assumed with a purpose, had prevented him from tampering openly with his thoughts, but the Gould Concession had insidiously corrupted his judgment. He might have known, he said to himself, leaning over the balustrade of the corridor, that Ribierism could never come to anything. The mine had corrupted his judgment by making him sick of bribing and intriguing merely to have his work left alone from day to day. Like his father, he did not like to be robbed. (405–6) The reader will remember that Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, possibly echoed here, asserts that the tragedies of history are condemned to repeat themselves as farce, for example in the repetition by Louis Napoleon of Napoleon Bonaparte. Secrets Intertwined: The Irony of Iterated Epithets The narrator shows the reader how similar secret obsessions dominate each of the other main characters, and minor ones too, almost always in an ultimately destructive way. Each personage’s hidden life follows its own 204

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course like a given part in one of Bach’s inventions, more or less on its own and in counterpointed detachment from the others, just as another Gould, Glenn Gould, seems to have hands whose fingers act independently of one another, as each finger follows its own line of notes when he plays Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier or The Goldberg Variations. One evidence of this relative detachment of the characters from one another is the difficulty in deciding in what order to arrange a demonstration that each has a single hidden obsession. The order does not really matter, or at least I cannot see that it matters. So I shall put them down pell-mell, as they come to my mind, in the apparent disorder in which Conrad himself alternates in presenting the interiorities of the characters one after another in unpredictable order, and with a good bit of iteration, again like the return of different parts, motifs, melodies, figures, or themes in a Bach invention: Gould, Monygham, Decoud, Emilia, Nostromo, then Nostromo, Decoud, Antonia, Gould, Emilia, Monygham, and so on, until the death of each or the attainment of a fi xed immobility of solitude and secret despair. It is as true in Nostromo as it is in Heart of Darkness that “We live, as we dream—alone” (Heart of Darkness, page 82, edition identified in endnote 20). The themes of course, as with Bach, undergo modulation, development, changes in tempo, and variation as they return again and again and as they are intertwined with other themes. It is as though Conrad were exhausting bit by bit different ways of saying the same things about each of his characters. This repetition, again as in a Bach fugue or invention, takes place at the micro-level of phrases or epithets. Some of these are repeated many times. They become something like leitmotifs. Nostromo, for example, is called the “magnificent capataz de cargadores” again and again. The perpetual white cloud over the Golfo Placido is more than once said to shine like a bar of silver, ironically referring to the real silver from the mine. The last sentence of the novel is like a final chord or recapitulating sequence of notes. Linda Viola cries out into the night that she will never forget the dead Nostromo: “Never! Gian’ Battista,” in a repetition of the name her mother had used so often for Nostromo, for example in her last words just before she dies. The narrative voice, in an ultimate echo, says: “In that true cry of love and grief that seemed to ring aloud from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver, the genius of the magnificent capataz Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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de cargardores dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love” (631). Almost every phrase of this sentence repeats words or phrases the reader has heard before. The effect of this iteration is triply odd. It tends to freeze the characters and the scene in a permanent tableau. Nostromo is always, whatever he is doing, even after he becomes a thief and is no longer head of the longshoremen of Sulaco, the magnificent capataz de cargadores. He is always someone who is successful in conquests of treasure and love, just as the sunset over the Placid Gulf is the same day after day, with its emblematic white cloud, like a solid bar of silver. The second oddness is that this constant iteration moves the stylistic texture of the novel away from what we normally expect in a “realist” novel toward something closer to the echoing repetitions of poetry, as in the epithets of Homeric epic or the leitmotifs in a Wagner opera. Homer’s epithets, too, remain ironically attached to the persons they define even when they no longer literally apply, as Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin long ago recognized. Hector, in The Iliad, in a fine irony, remains “Tamer of Horses” even after he is dead (“Thus made they funeral for Hector, Tamer of Horses.”), just as Nostromo is already dead when he is called “the magnificent capataz de cargadores” for the last time. The example used by both Arnold and Ruskin is what Helen says to Priam, in The Iliad, when she is pointing out the various Greek heroes. She says she cannot see her brothers, Castor and Pollux. They too were born, as she and Clytemnestra were, from Leda’s eggs. She wonders if her brothers are too cowardly to show themselves, not knowing that, in the translation Ruskin gives, “them, already, the life-giving earth possessed, there in Lacedæmon, in the dear fatherland.” Arnold cites the same passage, with a different translation, as one of his characteristically ironic and pathetic “touchstones” in “The Study of Poetry.” The earth is still called “life-giving,” even though it has swallowed up the dead bodies of Castor and Pollux, in an act that is present in the word “sarcophagus,” which means “body-eating,” in Greek. “The poet,” says Ruskin, “has to speak of the earth in sadness, but he will not let that sadness affect or change his thoughts of it. No; though Castor and Pollux be dead, yet the earth is our mother still, fruitful, life-giving” (ibid.). The third odd effect of Conrad’s iterated phrases is the way they gradually call attention to themselves as language, reminding the reader that the whole world of Sulaco and all the people in it are performative effects of lan206

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guage. This language has no literal referent. It creates the imaginary world to which it refers, in an act of autopoeisis. The iteration, furthermore, once the reader begins to notice its frequency, gradually empties the words of meaning until they become more and more like those senseless sounds that echo in Martin Decoud’s mind before he kills himself, or like mere material marks on the page, coquilles, or like those mistakes in English that Conrad makes, which I discussed earlier. Conrad’s “poetic” iterations are, it happens, one of the chief instruments of the irony that pervades his narrative style. As Laurence Davies has recently argued in a fine essay, Conrad, for better or for worse, is an ironic writer through and through. Adeptness in reading him requires a skill in reading irony, no easy accomplishment. The word “irony” recurs frequently in Conrad’s self-characterizations. An example is his description of The Secret Agent, in the “Author’s Note” of 1920, as based on the attempt to apply “an ironic method to a subject of that kind,” “in the earnest belief that ironic treatment alone would enable me to say all that I felt I would have to say in scorn as well as in pity.” The “Author’s Note” is itself ironic through and through, as, surely, is the subtitle of The Secret Agent: “A Simple Tale.” Ha! I would differ from Davies, however, in taking Friedrich Schlegel and Paul de Man as better cues for understanding irony, Conrad’s or that of any other writer, than Kierkegaard and D. C. Muecke, who are Davies’s authorities. Schlegel, and de Man after him, make it clear that the distinction between the alazon and the eiron, the dumb guy victim of irony and the smart guy master-ironist, is extremely tricky. They change places all the time, rather than being stable positions. No one is more the victim of irony, Schlegel said, than the person who thinks he or she has mastered it and is the smart guy. Another fundamental feature of irony is that it is a performative use of language. As de Man, somewhat surprisingly, puts it in “The Concept of Irony”: “Irony also very clearly has a performative dimension. Irony consoles and it promises and it excuses. It allows us to perform all kinds of performative linguistic functions. . . .” Conrad’s pervasive irony in Nostromo has the performative effect of bringing the narrator’s posture closer to Decoud’s. Davies’s essay ends by saying that Conrad’s irony is “fortifying,” rather than “decadent” or “paralyzing.” “Fortifying” would be another performative effect of ironic literary language. Davies means, I suppose, that Conrad’s irony fortifies the reader against being taken in by the various illusions with which his fictitious characters are bewitched. Irony, it may be, also Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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fortifies the reader to be able take without flinching the dismaying political and psychological insights his novels express. In addition, however, if irony has a performative as well as cognitive dimension, this means the pervasive irony in Conrad’s discourse gives it its power to change the reader’s political beliefs and actions. This happens, for example, through a pitilessly ironic revelation, in a fictive rendition such as Heart of Darkness or Nostromo, of the evils of imperialism, colonialism, and economic exploitation of “third world” countries by those of the “first world,” especially, these days, by the United States. The United States, however, was already Conrad’s target in Nostromo, by way of the truly sinister American fi nancier, Holroyd. The reader must remember, however, that those who believe they have mastered irony, for example, by knowing “what de Man really means,” are certain to be the victims of that irony, especially if they try to act on their presumed understanding. Nostromo does not by any means promise that we can ever be free of the sorts of ideologies and secret obsessions that doom the characters in the novel. Nostromo, after all, tells a story, the story of the founding of a new state, or rather, it tells, side by side, and in alternating segments, the stories of a group of isolated, secret consciousnesses as they participate, in ways that are always ironic and disjunctive, in the founding of a new state. All these stories in the end exist all at once before the narrator’s gaze, in a simultaneous spatial array, but, as with a musical composition whose development is latent in the initial juxtaposition of the several themes, that spatial array can only be revealed to the reader in words given bit by bit, in temporal segments, with many backtrackings, foreshadowings, and gaps in space and time. These constant time shifts function to spatialize time. Nostromo: Not Another Multi-Plotted Novel Like The Last Chronicle of Barset My initial choice of Nostromo was motivated by the sense that with so many characters and such a large “canvas” it would be a modernist version of the Victorian tradition of large multi-plotted novels, like Middlemarch or The Last Chronicle of Barset, whereas Lord Jim, for example, among Conrad’s novels, focuses single-mindedly on a single story, that of the titular hero. That difference might, I thought, make Nostromo, like its Victorian predecessors, a “model of community.” What could be more likely to 208

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be a community than the inhabitants of Sulaco, forced willy-nilly to share the same history? This hypothetical paradigm has turned out to be inapplicable to Nostromo. Not only is Sulaco a particularly fragmented and disjointed form of a non-community or unworked community, but also the stories Conrad tells do not in the ordinary sense constitute “plots.” Each character, rather, has a separate life-story that evolves, often toward a conclusion in death. Each life-story does this according to its own inner laws. Each is to a considerable degree separate from the life-stories of the others and from the surrounding disaggregated community. Each, nevertheless, is impinged upon and endures in his or her own way the “historical events” that occur in his or her lifetime in Sulaco. That, however, does not prevent each character from remaining more or less immured in his or her own secret and doomed to live out the private destiny that hidden obsession prescribes. For Conrad, a par ticu lar kind of painful isolation, even in the midst of others, is the human condition. That isolation is broken only, unbeknownst to them, by the pitiless clairvoyance of the narrative voice. That voice speaks to the reader for the characters’ hidden thoughts and feelings. It betrays their secrets to the world. Nostromo is, to a considerable degree, made up of separate segments in which nothing much in the way of forward moving action in some imaginary present takes place. In each segment, rather, the narrative voice hovers over the continually subsisting subjectivity and iterative way of life of one of the characters. The subjectivity is presented as a separate bubble or monad. A basic assumption is that a given character’s whole history is continually present to him or her as a major component of any present consciousness. One example out of many is the initial presentation of Old Giorgio Viola (31–6). This passage gives Viola’s whole past life and his present way of life in a totalizing portrait. The pages introducing Viola are something like what used to be called, in the Renaissance, a “character,” though with singularity and specificity rather than with the typifying generality of entries in Renaissance character books. Conrad is also a master of what Henry James called “scenic” presentation— that is, presentation of character through the give and take of dialogue. Examples are conversations between Charles Gould and his wife that punctuate the novel, or her interchanges with Dr. Monygham, or the dramatic scene of Sotillo’s interrogation of Hirsch under torture, whom he cannot Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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believe is telling the truth about what happened to the silver. Eventually, he shoots Hirsch while the latter is dangling by his arms from a rafter, when Hirsch spits in his face. This detail has its parallel in similar behavior by the imprisoned Garibaldi, though Garibaldi was not shot for his defiance. Even though Conrad and James inherit the same repertoire of narrative techniques, Conrad’s narrative procedure in Nostromo is near the opposite end of the spectrum from James’s formal strategy. An extreme example in James is one of his most formally rigorous novels, The Awkward Age. It was written just a few years before Nostromo and published in serial form in 1898–99. The Awkward Age consists almost entirely of dialogue. It has an absolute minimum both of narrator’s commentary and of what James calls “going behind,” that is, direct presentation of the characters’ subjectivities. In Nostromo, Conrad presents some dialogic scenes, as I have said, but the dominant narrative mode is an extravagant “going behind.” Form follows function, in fiction as in architecture. James’s goal in The Awkward Age was to dramatize the conflicts among people as they try to figure out what the other is thinking from what he or she says. Conrad’s goal in Nostromo was to show the way each person is isolated from the others and lives imprisoned in his or her own subjectivity. In Nostromo, a hidden single-minded obsession determines behavior for each character. That obsession clashes discordantly with the secret motivations of his or her fellows. Conrad, like James, chose the mix of narrative conventions most in consonance with what he wanted to show of the human condition. The Violas The characters’ isolation is easiest to see in some of the “minor” characters, that is, characters that are treated with less amplitude than that accorded the major characters. Old Giorgio’s wife, for example, dies in the midst of the Monterist revolution, just as Garibaldi’s wife had died in the woods from exhaustion during one of Garibaldi’s campaigns for freedom, and just as Conrad’s mother had died from the effects of the exile imposed by the Russian authorities on her husband, Conrad’s father, for his political activities. What even Teresa Viola’s husband does not understand about her, though Dr. Monygham glimpses it, is that she is secretly motivated by a love for Nostromo that is something more than motherly and by a fervent

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desire to have Nostromo become the husband of one of her daughters. “Old Giorgio,” the narrator says, was “in profound ignorance of his wife’s views and hopes” (281). Old Giorgio Viola himself, as the narrator never tires of telling us, is “an old Garibaldino” entirely preoccupied with his past as a soldier in Garibaldi’s revolutionary army fighting in Montevideo and then in Italy, by his adulation of Garibaldi, whose portrait hangs in his house, and by his grief that the cause of Italian and South American liberty has been betrayed by reactionary counter-revolutionaries: “This stern devotion to a cause had cast a gloom upon Giorgio’s old age. It cast a gloom because the cause seemed lost. Too many kings and emperors flourished yet in the world which God had meant for the people” (35). Holroyd Holroyd’s motives seem public enough. He wants to make his transnational company ever richer through global economic conquest. He also wants to spread Protestantism everywhere by establishing and endowing churches. He makes no secret of these goals. Why should he? What no one, not perhaps even Charles Gould, fully understands about him is his secret commitment to the San Tomé mine, to what the narrator repeatedly calls its “imperium in imperio,” its separate imperial sovereignty in the midst of the state sovereignty that through the vicissitudes of various revolutions rules Sulaco, but does not have sovereignty over the mine. The impossibility of controlling by political means “material interests,” particularly material interests organized globally, is one of the “lessons” of Nostromo of most relevance today, in our time of global economic imperialism. A striking example, a decade ago, was the difficulty of keeping the huge conglomerate corporation ADM (“Archer Daniels Midlands”), “supermarket to the world,” from becoming a criminal rip-off of world markets. The company conspired to fi x internationally the price of the food additives they make that are ingredients of many foodstuffs. Every bottle and can of carbonated drinks has some, as do most cattle feeds. The top executives from all around the world of the various companies involved met in places like a golf resort in Maui or the Mariott Hotel in Irvine, California. At those meetings they connived to fi x the worldwide prices of the essential

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food ingredient lycene and to carve up the global market for it. They formed a secret monopoly in restraint of trade, a criminal offense in the United States. Eventually, they were caught and fined, but only by a series of accidents involving a top executive of ADM who was a congenital liar and cooperated secretly with the FBI investigation, clandestinely taping those meetings, while lying to both ADM and the FBI. Holroyd is secretly committed not so much to the San Tomé mine as to his backing of Charles Gould and to his faith in Gould’s abilities. He keeps his business correspondence with Gould secret from his subordinates in his office, even though there is no particular reason to do so given that the investment in the silver mine is only a tiny fraction of the worldwide Holroyd enterprises. Holroyd is sovereign in his company. He can do what he likes with its money. Nevertheless, Holroyd lives a hidden imaginative life focused on the success of the mine, as Charles Gould understands perhaps better than anyone else. One passage presents in free indirect discourse Gould’s intuition about Holroyd’s secret, as well as the narrator’s direct and full knowledge: “The head of the silver and steel interests had entered into Costaguana affairs with a sort of passion. Costaguana had become necessary to his existence; in the San Tomé mine he had found the imaginative satisfaction which other minds would get from drama, from art, or from a risky and fascinating sport. It was a special form of the great man’s extravagance, sanctioned by a moral intention big enough to flatter his vanity. Even in this aberration of his genius he served the progress of the world. Charles Gould felt sure of being understood with precision [by Holroyd] and judged with the indulgence of their common passion” (421). In the end, of course, the mine wins out. It is flourishing at the end of the novel in the momentarily peaceful new state. The mine is now once more sending its constant flow of silver ingots up the coast to San Francisco and making the rich Holroyd and his company even richer. Holroyd’s imaginative investment has paid off, at least for the moment, though at the end of the novel the narrator reports that peaceful Sulaco and the smooth working of the mine are already endangered by labor unrest and by the beginnings of labor organization against the exploitation of the mine workers. This may lead ultimately, Conrad hints, to a new cycle of violent revolutions or perhaps to foreign invasions like the United States invasions of or interventions in Latin American countries. 212

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Pedrito Montero A savagely ironic and farcically comic version of the Conradian law that says each person is motivated by some hidden obsession is Pedrito Montero. He is the guerilla bandit who invades Sulaco on behalf of his brother’s take-over of supreme power in Costaguana. Though no one knows it, this miserable personage—greedy, lazy, stupid—is secretly living in a dream world. That absurd fantasy is motivated by popular histories he has read about the French Second Empire and by his desire to recreate its sovereign pomp for himself in Sulaco. This idea is so unlikely and so nutty that it has led everyone, including Charles Gould’s astute political agent in the Costaguana capital of Santa Marta, completely to misunderstand him by assuming that his motivations are sane. His ability to read did nothing for him but fi ll his head with absurd visions. His actions were usually determined by motives so improbable in themselves as to escape the penetration of a rational person. . . . [Pedrito Montero] had been devouring the lighter sort of historical works in the French language, such, for instance, as the books of Imbert de Saint Amand upon the Second Empire. But Pedrito had been struck by the splendor of a brilliant court, and had conceived the idea of an existence for himself where, like the Duc de Morny, he would associate the command of every pleasure with the conduct of political affairs and enjoy power supremely in every way. Nobody could have guessed that. (430–1) Conrad has great ironic fun with the wretched Pedrito, but a serious argument lies behind the fun. Pedrito exemplifies the way big political events that cause a lot of suffering are brought about by the absurd illusions of those who act to bring about those events. When he was president, George W. Bush, our Pedrito Montero, may have been motivated (who knows?) by an illusory image of himself, based perhaps on his playing of video games (which we know he did) rather than on reading light histories. He may have imagined himself as George W. Bush in a fl ight jacket, commander-in-chief of the world’s greatest military power, taking over the evil-doing countries of the world, one by one, until he reigns in sovereign supremacy over the whole shebang. In fact he was the mere tool of the “special interests” that paid for his campaigns. He was a blind agent of global capitalism and of a neo-conservative agenda whose ideology Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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he probably did not understand. Bush was in his illusions not all that different from Pedrito Montero. Of Pedrito’s strange and absurd secret dreams of “enjoy[ing] power supremely in every way,” like the Duc de Morny, dreams that nobody could have guessed, the narrator says: “And yet this was one of the immediate causes of the Monterist revolution. Th is will appear less incredible by the reflection that the fundamental causes were the same as ever, rooted in the political immaturity of the people, in the indolence of the upper classes and the mental darkness of the lower” (431). Far from holding that the effects of global imperial capitalism are straightforward and inevitable results of ideological mistakes, Conrad dramatizes the considerably more disquieting insight that worldchanging historical events happen by way of unpredictable and absurd secret obsessions that “nobody could have guessed.” Emilia Gould Emilia Gould’s secret is easy to identify. She loves Charles Gould with all her heart, loves him enough to have come with him to all the dangers and uncertainties of Sulaco and of her husband’s project to start up again the Gould Concession. Her secret is the deep sorrow of her gradual discovery that the mine has corrupted Charles Gould, that he loves the mine more than he loves her, and that the mine has come more and more to stand like a great wall of silver between them. All her compassionate care for the poor, the destitute, the old of Sulaco, and all her radiant kindness and gracious hospitality to the important people who come to her receptions, political and business associates of her husband, people it is important for him to have on his side, for the sake of the mine, are displacements of her frustrated love for her husband, her anxiety for what he has become and for the danger he is in. Of her forlorn solitude and estrangement from her husband she can of course say nothing to anyone. It is her version of the impenetrable secret each character in Nostromo carries locked within his or her breast. The last extended inward presentation of Emilia Gould shows her sitting motionless in her garden after hearing that her husband will spend the night at the mine. She sits lost in the desolation of her solitude. It is a solitude in the midst of people, servants, friends, all the comforts of a wealthy home, but it is as desolate as the literal solitude in his rowboat that leads Decoud to kill himself: 214

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Mrs. Gould’s face became set and rigid for a second, as if to receive, without flinching, a great wave of loneliness that swept over her head. And it came into her mind, too, that no one would ever ask her with solicitude what she was thinking of. No one. No one, but perhaps the man who had just gone away [Dr. Monygham]. No; no one who could be answered with careless sincerity in the ideal perfection of confidence. . . . An immense desolation, the dread of her own continued life, descended upon the first lady of Sulaco. With a prophetic vision she saw herself surviving alone the degradation of her young ideal of life, of love, of work—all alone in the Treasure House of the World. The profound, blind, suffering expression of a painful dream settled on her face with its closed eyes. In the indistinct voice of an unlucky sleeper, lying passive in the toils of a merciless nightmare, she stammered out aimlessly the words: “Material interests.” (582, 583) The Secret as a Linguistic Mistake I have used the Freudian word “displacement.” As modern structuralist Freudians such as Lacan have shown, the two key terms Freud uses for the dreamwork, condensation and displacement, correspond to two figures of speech, those porcelain dogs, chiens de faience, of modern rhetorical theory, as Gérard Genette calls them: metaphor and metonymy. In trying to satisfy her love and compassion for her husband by way of her compassion for the sufferings of the common people, Emilia Gould has made the linguistic mistake of taking a trope literally, in this case identifying two adjacent objects of compassion. What else can she do? Her capacity for love and compassion must express itself somehow. Nostromo can, like Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, be defined as an elaborate analysis through many different examples of the way person-to-person and person-to-community relations are governed by the penchant human beings have for making the elemental mistake of taking a fictive tropological identification as though it were literally true. It is like trying to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word “day.” This, according to Paul de Man, is the essence of ideology: “What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism.” Conrad says repeatedly that the characters’ obsessions are “illusions,” a different one for each person. What generates or constitutes those illusions? Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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The cause in each case is a different version of the aboriginal error of taking a figure of speech literally and then acting on that mistake, perhaps, most often, by uttering some performative speech act, like the Monterist pronunciamento of independence from the Blancos and the foreign exploiters, or like Decoud’s declaration of love for Antonia, or like a promise to do something, such as Nostromo’s promises to take the lighter full of silver to safety or to ride to Cayta to get Barrios to bring his troops by ship to turn the tide against the Monterist revolution. Dr. Monygham A striking example of this linguistic confusion is Dr. Monygham’s identification of Mrs. Gould and the mine. Dr. Monygham has two secrets. He was a military doctor in an English regiment before coming to Sulaco. His fi rst and primary secret is his hidden and undying shame at having, years before the primary action of the novel begins, betrayed his English code of honor by breaking under Guzman Bento’s crippling torture and “confessing” to a whole set of so-called crimes against the state that he had not committed. The abiding remorse for this self-betrayal has left him embittered and cynical, as unable as Decoud to believe that political motives can be other than selfish and fraudulent. He is disliked by the local people, considered to be loco, and to have the evil eye, as he limps around town with his medicine bag in his hand and a sneer on his face. Dr. Monygham’s second secret is much more recently generated. He admires and loves Emilia Gould with a hidden and hopeless passion. He will do anything to protect her. He sees her as the embodiment of the mine and acts to save the one by saving the other. He has identified part with whole, a synecdochic mistake, or he has confused one thing, Mrs. Gould, with what is beside it, the mine, a metonymy mistake: “As the dangers thickened around the San Tomé mine, this illusion [the mine ‘presenting itself’ in the person of Emilia Gould] acquired force, permanency, and authority.” This figurative transference, says the narrator, makes Dr. Monygham “extremely dangerous to himself and to others” (482). He is dangerous to himself and to others because it is always dangerous to act on the basis of assumptions that have no counterpart in the material world. An ideology, it may be remembered, is the confusion of a linguistic formulation with a real state of affairs, as Marx, Althusser, and de Man in 216

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their different ways aver. As long as my ideological aberration remains secret and I do not act upon it, all may be well, though my secret confusion might appear ridiculous or insane if it were revealed. If I act in the real world on the basis of my illusion, however, I may do much mischief because I have not seen the true state of things correctly. The possibility that he may act on his erroneous reading of the world is what makes Dr. Monygham extremely dangerous to himself and others. His strange mistake or illusion, identifying Emilia Gould’s safety with the safety of the mine, combined with his first secret, his shame at his dishonoring cowardice, motivates Dr. Monygham to play his part in the dramatic events that lead to the defeat of Sotillo and Montero. Singlehandedly, and with great difficulty, he persuades the now disillusioned Nostromo to try to recover his sense of himself by making his famous four-day ride to Cayta to tell Barrios the situation and to come back with him by boat to take over the town for the Separatists and Blancos, thereby saving the mine and, with it, Emilia. Even more dangerously, to himself and others, Dr. Monygham makes use of his evil reputation in the town to persuade Sotillo, who is maddened with greed for the silver that he believes must be still hidden somewhere, that he has come to betray Gould by telling Sotillo that the silver has been sunk in the harbor to be recovered later. The time Sotillo spends fruitlessly dragging the harbor, in increasing rage and frustration, gives Nostromo time to get to Barrios. It gives Barrios time to enter the harbor just as Sotillo is about to hang Dr. Monygham by the derrick on the afterdeck of his ship. The rope is around his neck. He is saved in the nick of time, in a highly cinematic scene. Dr. Monygham is lucky enough to live on in the new Republic still sustained by the hidden treasure of his secret love for Emilia, whereas those in the novel who attach themselves to literal treasure are not so lucky: “Dr. Monygham had grown older, with his head steel-grey and the unchanged expression of his face, living on the inexhaustible treasure of his devotion drawn upon in the secret of his heart like a store of unlawful wealth” (563). Th is sort of comparison between one secret and another occurs fairly often in the discourse of the narrative voice. In this case, Dr. Monygham’s living on the hidden treasure of his love for Emilia Gould is like Nostromo’s “getting rich slowly” as he recovers the silver one bar at a time from the island where it is hidden. Monygham’s role in the founding of the new Occidental Republic of Sulaco is a good example of the dismaying law defining what actually brings Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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about political events that Nostromo everywhere exemplifies. Dr. Monygham does not care a damn about creating the new state or about the silver mine. He loves Emilia. He wants only to save and protect her. This leads him to perform actions that have important unintended political consequences. His actions, based on a linguistic mistake, bring about a true historical event, the founding of a new nation state. Th is is a quite different account of politics from the one that we in the United States are taught, for example, about the founding of the United States. A group of heroic and courageous patriots, we are told, got together and signed the Declaration of Independence, as written by Thomas Jefferson and amended by others in the group of revolutionaries. Their single-minded goal was to establish a new democratic country, the United States of America. If Conrad is to be believed, political change does not happen that way. It is the result of a set of independent actions, each based on secret fallacies. The actors do not intend the result they achieve. Those actions bring about a political result through a series of more or less farcical accidents, contretemps, and misunderstandings. Linguistic Confusions That Have Results A similar analysis as that for Dr. Monygham can be made of the illusions of all the main characters. Gould, for example, has confused making the mine work efficiently with a dream of justice and prosperity. The two have nothing to do with one another. The good working of the mine is completely indifferent to the justice or injustice of the political order within which it operates. It does not need anything but the efficient working of its machinery of extraction. When Gould says he pins his faith on material interests and believes they will bring law, order, and justice at last to Sulaco, he confuses one kind of order with another. It is a tropological mistake. Decoud identifies the fulfillment of his love for Antonia, one way of making her happy, with another way of making her happy, that is, fulfilling her political hopes, modeled on those of her father, Don José Avellanos, by getting Sulaco declared an independent country. The two kinds of fulfi llment of desire are quite different, but Decoud confuses them. All of the characters’ secrets, their hidden primary motivating illusions, can be shown to be versions of this kind of error. Taking a farfetched metaphorical similarity seriously, Pedrito identifies the pomp of the Duc de Morny

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with the grandeur he thinks he can get as the ruler of Sulaco, that miserable, tiny, out of the way, insignificant province. That is why he is so bitterly disappointed and angry when he fi nds that the mob has totally trashed the Intendencia, leaving him to sleep on a camp bed, eat on a deal table, and sit on a hard wooden chair, not on the cushioned throne he had imagined. Nostromo is perhaps the most confused of the lot. In his vanity, he makes the elemental linguistic mistake of confusing the worth he has in other people’s eyes with his actual worth. It is the reverse of the error that attributes a value to the silver that it does not have in itself, but has only because other people invest it with the power to have exchange value or to be coined into money. Nostromo is, he thinks, what he is in other people’s eyes, as he rides around town on his gray mare in his silver-buttoned outfit accepting the adulation of all the populace and flirting in public with whoever is his mistress of the moment. He is the “incorruptible Capataz” and, though he is a Man of the People, he has performed many daring acts on behalf of the Blancos and for the rich foreigners who are exploiting Sulaco. Sulaco comes, after the Separation, to be called in an article in the London Times, so Captain Mitchell tells visitors, “the Treasure House of the World.” When the most dangerous and daring act of Nostromo’s life fails, or seems to have failed, in the supposed sinking of the lighter full of silver, and everyone thinks he is drowned, Nostromo swims alone back to shore to hide in the ruined fort at the harbor entrance. He then has an experience of disillusionment that changes his life. After fourteen hours of sleep, he wakens like the healthy animal he has always been and then, so to speak, falls for the first time into self-consciousness: Handsome, robust, and supple, he threw back his head, flung his arms open, and stretched himself with a slow twist of the waist and a leisurely yawn of white teeth; as natural and free from evil in the moment of waking as a magnificent and unconscious wild beast. Then, in the suddenly steadied glance fixed upon nothing from under a forced frown, appeared the man. (458) Now that his vanity cannot any longer be appeased by having his high opinion of himself reflected in the eyes of others, Nostromo suddenly becomes “nothing” in his own eyes. At the same time everything around him changes its aspect and becomes emptied of the meanings it once had:

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The thought that it was no longer open to him to ride through the streets, recognized by everyone, great and little, as he used to do every evening on his way to play monte in the posada of the Mexican Domingo; or to sit in the place of honor, listening to songs and looking at dances, made it appear to him as a town that had no existence. (463) Nostromo’s disillusionment takes the form of a sudden political conversion. He feels that he has been “betrayed” by the rich foreigners and that they have simply used him for their own ends without really caring about him at all. The narrator’s analysis of Nostromo’s change, which is no less than a total inner convulsion, goes on for many subtle pages, but the essence is given in an early passage in the sequence: The confused and intimate impressions of universal dissolution which beset a subjective nature at any strong check to its ruling passion had a bitterness approaching that of death itself. And no wonder—with no intellectual existence or moral strain to carry on his individuality, unscathed, over the abyss left by the collapse of his vanity; for even that had been simply sensuous and picturesque, and could not exist apart from outward show. . . . The capataz de cargadores, in a revulsion of subjectiveness, exasperated almost to insanity, beheld all his world without faith and courage. He had been betrayed! (466, 467) Central in the narrative voice’s account is its stress on the way Nostromo gains a new kind of subjectivity. He begins to think. His inner life almost begins to approach Martin Decoud’s exacerbated skepticism. Conrad’s goal in this segment is to explain how Nostromo the incorruptible (in this like silver) gets corrupted. He steals the silver, a bar at a time, from Great Isabel Island, getting rich slowly, after he realizes that with Decoud almost certainly dead no one but he knows where the silver is buried. Conrad’s desire to account for the transformation of a good man into a thief, the reader will remember, was the original germ of the novel. The whole enormous novel was written as it were backwards. Once Conrad transformed imaginatively the historical source in a truly bad man who has stolen a lot of silver into the idea of a good man who comes to do that, he had a lot of explaining to do and a lot of what might be called “contextualizing” and explanation of antecedent circumstances. As a result, the novel got longer and longer. The immediate explanation for the theft is that Nostromo loses his 220

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loyalty to the ruling class. This happens because he suddenly gains insight into the way he and the whole working class in Sulaco have been mercilessly exploited. Unlike Decoud, however, who loses all his illusions, Nostromo reconstructs his vanity, out of his disillusionment, differently from its original form. He now satisfies his vanity by his sense that he is betraying the rich as they have betrayed him. He speaks to Giselle of the theft as a “revenge” for his “betrayal” by the rich (604), though on his deathbed he says to Mrs. Gould, “I die betrayed—betrayed by—” “But,” says the narrator, “he did not say by whom or by what he was dying betrayed” (623). In fact he has become as much a slave to the silver as Charles Gould is. Nostromo’s slavery to the silver corrupts him in more than superficial ways. His vanity is still satisfied by the admiration of everyone, but for the first time he has a secret. That secret now makes his distinction from others, his singularity, but having this secret makes all his public behavior now a sham in his own eyes and takes all the joy out of it. The narrator says: A transgression, a crime, entering a man’s existence eats it up like a malignant growth, consumes it like a fever. Nostromo had lost his peace; the genuineness of all his qualities was destroyed. He felt it himself, and often cursed the silver of the San Tomé mine. . . . [The building of the light house on the Great Isabel] would kindle a far-reaching light upon the only secret spot of his life, whose very essence, value, reality, consisted of its reflection in the admiring eyes of men. All of it but that; and that was beyond common comprehension, something that stood between him and the power that hears and gives effect to the evil words of curses. It was dark. Not every man had such a darkness. And they were going to put a light there. (585, 586) The words “power” and “darkness” here refer to Nostromo’s ideological illusions, not to something in which the narrative voice believes. Nostromo, like Hardy’s Henchard, believes he “must be in Somebody’s hands.” The long coda of the novel dramatizes Nostromo’s courtship of Giorgio Viola’s daughters and his death at Giorgio’s hands when Giorgio mistakes Nostromo for an unwelcome suitor for his younger daughter. In this double courtship Nostromo finds the ultimate and ultimately deadly satisfaction of his vanity. He is loved, so he thinks, by both Linda and Giselle. He has his choice between them. Consistently in this novel, Conrad calls loving and Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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being loved another form of the illusion that all men and women must dwell in if they are not to suffer Decoud’s fate. Love can be “a most splendid of illusions,” but it can also be “an enlightening and priceless misfortune” (573). Emilia’s love for her husband, Decoud’s for Antonia, Viola’s wife’s infatuation with Nostromo, and Linda Viola’s passion for Nostromo are analogous to Dr. Monygham’s devotion to Emilia. None of these loves is satisfied or leads to happiness. Like Nostromo’s captivation by the silver, Dr. Monygham’s secret love-life makes him extremely dangerous to himself and to others, as do the loves of the other characters. Love and the silver are, it happens, metaphorically identified in the novel, in another example of the inveterate linguistic mistake that causes so much grief in this novel. Viola and his daughters have by the end of the novel become keepers of the newly built light house on the Great Isabel, which just happens to be the island where Nostromo and Decoud have hidden the silver. Just as Nostromo is supposed to be engaged to the elder sister, Linda, but actually wants to marry the younger sister, Giselle, in another metonymical substitution or displacement of desire, so he uses his apparent courtship of Linda as an excuse for going to the island both to meet Giselle secretly and, even more surreptitiously, to take away another few bars of the silver so he can go on getting rich slowly. The townspeople know he goes to the island, and they even know that he comes back often after midnight, but they mistakenly think he must be meeting Giselle. Old Viola mistakenly shoots Nostromo, whom he loves as a replacement for his son who had died in infancy. Viola shoots Nostromo in the dark because he takes him for the good-for-nothing “mozo,” Ramirez, who wants Giselle. This is another mistake in “reading the signs.” He is not so wrong after all because Nostromo is indeed after Giselle and is betraying his promises to Linda and to her father to marry Linda, not Giselle. What Nostromo really wants is neither girl. He wants the silver. He is as much a captive of the treasure as Gould is or as those dead-alive gringos on the Azuera are in the prophetic folk story told in the first chapter. The complex series of condensations and displacements of this last episode provides one more allegory of the way the lives of all the characters in Nostromo are what one might call allegories of reading, or rather of misreading. Whether it is dramatizing love or politics or the disastrous development of “material interests,” Nostromo is always really about reading—that is, it is about the “incorrigible” (582) penchant human beings have to take 222

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the sign for the reality and to act fatally on the basis of that mistake, or to make unjustified substitutions and posit unjustified equivalences. Nor is it possible, alas, to cure human beings of their illusions. If one is exposed another takes its place, just as the correction of one linguistic mistake is itself another linguistic mistake. Paul de Man elegantly formulated this disquieting feature of “ideology critique” in “Allegory of Reading” (Profession de foi): Deconstructive readings can point out the unwarranted identifications achieved by substitution, but they are powerless to prevent their recurrence even in their own discourse, and to uncross, so to speak, the aberrant exchanges that have taken place. Their gesture merely reiterates the rhetorical defiguration that caused the error in the first place. They leave a margin of error, a residue of logical tension that prevents the closure of the deconstructive discourse and accounts for its narrative and allegorical mode. (242) One resists believing what de Man says here. This is especially true of what he says about my “powerlessness” to avoid doing what I clearly understand is a mistake. Surely he must be wrong! Nevertheless, Conrad’s inability ever completely to untwist unwarranted identifications and expose illusions by a cool-headed analysis might account for the great length of Nostromo, or even for the length of this chapter, that tries to account for Nostromo. Both of us are trying, always unsuccessfully, to “get it right,” to do a complete untwisting. That, it may be, accounts for our use of different sorts of a “narrative and allegorical mode,” instead of crisp conclusive formulations. In the terms provided by my epigraph from de Man at the start of this chapter (another distressing counter-intuitive formulation; surely he must be wrong!), I have attempted to do poetics and hermeneutics, rhetorical analysis, and the recapitulation of meaning, at the same time. I have ended up, however, like de Man himself, primarily concerned with meaning, not with how meaning is expressed. I have done a bit of poetics here and there, but it does not mesh well with my hermeneutical account of Conrad’s meanings. Decoud I have left Decoud for last because he is perhaps the most powerful rendition of the theme that all the characters dramatize—that is, the fatality that Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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lies in belief. Decoud is initially presented as a total skeptic whose Parisian education has left him viewing all the commitments of his Sulaco countrymen with savage ironic scorn. He believes in nothing. Nevertheless, he has been enticed into returning home from Paris with the cargo of modern rifles that are decisive later on in Barrios’s easy defeat of the Monterists. His motivation is his memory of Antonia Avellanos, whom he knew when she was hardly more than a child being educated in Paris. She has inherited from her father, Don José, a fanatical idealistic commitment to the Blanco, that is, the conservative, cause. Decoud does not care a bit about the Blanco cause, but the one break in his skeptical detachment is his passion for Antonia. He imagines that if he can satisfy Antonia’s political aspirations by establishing Sulaco as a separate state then she will marry him and with him leave the wretched Sulaco for good. It is he who has supported the Blanco cause, though totally disbelieving in it, as the editor of the Sulaco newspaper, the Porvenir (the Future). He has repeatedly called Montero in the Porvenir a “gran’ bestia,” thereby making himself a man marked for execution if the Monterists take over Sulaco. That is why he flees with Nostromo in the lighter full of silver and why Nostromo leaves him behind on the Great Isabel after they bury the silver there. His life is in danger unless he hides himself. Before Decoud flees, however, he writes the Pronunciamento, which is the basis of the Separatist counter-revolution. He is the Thomas Jefferson of Sulaco, the author of its Declaration of Independence. It is he who first has the idea of separation and who succeeds in persuading Charles Gould, Dr. Monygham, Don José, Antonia, Emilia Gould, the chief railway engineer, and others that separation is the way to go. The irony is that he does not believe in separation or in any other political action. He just wants to marry Antonia and then leave Sulaco forever. He thinks successfully proclaiming separation is the best way to win Antonia. It is another case of displacement. This is another striking example in the novel of the way political consequences are brought about by actions that have entirely different goals. The separatist proclamation, authored by Decoud, is a felicitous performative, like the American Declaration of Independence. After Decoud’s death and the success of the separatist movement he is revered as the father of his country by everyone, including the perpetually bereft and forlorn Antonia, widowed without ever having been married. Decoud intended his speech act, the proclamation, to have one result, the winning of Antonia. 224

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Like many other speech acts in the novel, and like so many performative utterances in the real world, it misfires. A current example would be George W. Bush’s declaration at the beginning of May 2003 that hostilities in Iraq were at an end and the war was over (“Mission Accomplished!”), whereas the war kept on unabated, whatever he said. The United States had many more casualties after Bush’s declaration than in the period after the invasion began and before he said the war had accomplished its mission. (Note the quasi-religious term.) United States soldiers were still in 2013 being killed or wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Speech acts, such as Decoud’s proclamation, or Bush’s, have a distressing way of making something happen all right, but not what the one who uttered or wrote it intended. The extended account of what drives Decoud to suicide is one of the most powerfully dramatic episodes in Nostromo. As the narrator says, Decoud is killed by solitude. As day follows day and he is still left alone with the silver on the Great Isabel, eating little and sleeping almost not at all, Decoud loses all sense of his individuality and all sense of the reality of Sulaco affairs, even of his love for Antonia. Language ceases to have meaning and becomes a senseless material sound. Nothing is left but what the narrator sometimes, in fulfi llment of Conrad’s impressionist commitment, wants the reader to believe is all that is really there, pure meaningless sensations. The usual sense of one’s individuality, Conrad is showing, depends on being an active part of a community: Solitude from mere outward condition of existence becomes very swift ly a state of soul in which the affectations of irony and skepticism have no place. It takes possession of the mind, and drives forth the thought into the exile of utter unbelief. After three days of waiting for the sight of some human face, Decoud caught himself entertaining a doubt of his own individuality. It had merged into the world of cloud and water, of natural forces and forms of nature. In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part. Decoud lost all belief in the reality of his action past and to come. On the fift h day an immense melancholy descended on him palpably. He resolved not to give himself up hopelessly to those people in Sulaco, who had beset him, unreal and terrible, like jibbering and obscene specters. He saw himself struggling feebly in their midst, and Antonia, gigantic and lovely like an allegorical Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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statue, looking on with scornful eyes at his weakness. . . . He beheld the universe as a succession of incomprehensible images. . . . [T]he silence, remaining unbroken in the shape of a cord to which he hung with both hands, vibrated with senseless phrases, always the same but utterly incomprehensible, about Nostromo, Antonia, Barrios, and proclamations mingled into an ironical and senseless buzzing. (556, 557–8) Then, after Decoud weights his pockets with four bars of the San Tomé silver, rows his small boat out into the gulf, and shoots himself so that he sinks into the sea, the narrator comments: “A victim of the disillusioned weariness which is the retribution meted out to intellectual audacity, the brilliant Don Martin Decoud, weighted by the bars of San Tomé silver, disappeared without a trace, swallowed up in the im mense indifference of things” (560), just as Nostromo, a few sentences later, is described as “the magnificent capataz de cargadores, victim of the disenchanted vanity which is the reward of audacious action” (560–1). Both audacious thought and audacious action victimize and ultimately destroy those who perform them. If you want to go on living, you had better have some ideological illusions that make you like your neighbors. Those illusions, however, are extremely dangerous to you and to your neighbors, as in the case of Dr. Monygham’s love for Emilia Gould and his confusion of her with the silver mine. Just as Othello, for example, would have fared better had he been in Hamlet’s situation, or Hamlet in Othello’s, the situation in each case bringing out the tragic flaw, so another person, Nostromo for example, or Charles Gould, or Dr. Monygham, could have endured that solitude and silence in the midst of the Golfo Placido without yielding to it. Such a person would have been sustained by his sense of himself and by his secret obsession, whatever that might be. Decoud’s radical skepticism, so close to Conrad’s own, has no such consoling illusion. Therefore he is destroyed, or is driven to destroy himself. What happens to Decoud is striking confirmation that Conrad, like T. S. Eliot, believed that humankind cannot bear very much reality. We are kept in life only by some secret saving illusion that forms the ground or substance of each person’s selfhood or “individuality.” Alas, because, as their name implies, those illusions do not correspond to things as they are, they are in the end destructive, too, as destructive, almost, as Decoud’s exceptional entry into a state of mind almost without any illusions at all. 226 Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

Illusions, too, make men or women extremely dangerous to themselves and to others. Decoud’s suicide draws its importance, among the interwoven iterated “parts” in Conrad’s multipart invention, from the way it demonstrates that it is an error to believe that Conrad recommends a thoroughgoing skepticism and detached observation, “to look on and never make a sound,” as Heyst, the protagonist of Conrad’s Victory, says of his resolution to remain a spectator during his travels. Both Heyst and the narrative voice of Nostromo, of course, make lots of sounds in the way of words. Skepticism like Decoud’s is deadly. It leads to an ignominious and inglorious death that is in some ways farcical, absurd, whereas Nostromo’s death, for example, and even Señor Hirsch’s, and Teresa Viola’s, and Giorgio Viola’s, have something defiant and downright courageous about them. No Transcendent Ground in Nostromo The forlornness of the characters in Nostromo, the way each lives imprisoned in a private ideological illusion, is made even more forlorn by the almost complete absence, so far as I can see, of the “metaphysical” dimension that is so important in Heart of Darkness. The characters of Nostromo do not even have the somber consolation of having confronted a transnatural antagonist force. In Heart of Darkness, this antagonist is experienced as a mysterious personage hidden behind visible appearances, as an implacable force with an inscrutable intention that obscurely governs their lives. The characters in Nostromo have brought their trouble on themselves, collectively, or have been subject to those outside economic forces that Conrad calls “material interests.” All the “metaphysics of darkness” seems to have vanished from Conrad’s work in the few short years between Heart of Darkness and Nostromo. Decoud is driven to suicide by “solitude,” solitude total and absolute, not by a confrontation with some version of a spooky force such as the one that destroyed Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. Decoud comes to share rather in the superficial material vision the narrative voice has in the opening pages of the novel and throughout. The reader is left at the end of Nostromo back with the endless indifferent succession of days and nights, showers and sunlight, over the Golfo Placido. In an analogous “material vision,” today’s climate change is seen by many as inhuman, mechanical, without concern for the Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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future of the human species, or for any other organic species: coral, or fish, or migrating birds. If you shift to a worldwide civilization powered by coal, gas, and oil, that will put a lot of carbon dioxide and methane in the air. Global warming will inevitably follow, with melting glaciers, coastal flooding, wildfires, stronger and more frequent storms, and so on. The sad implication of Nostromo is that, for Conrad, at that moment of his writing at least, only some ideological illusion or other can hold my sense of my personality together and protect me from the suicide-inducing emptiness of what Conrad calls “solitude.” Conrad also shows, however, that the secret obsessions governing a given person’s decisions and behavior are also a kind of self-destructive madness. On the one hand, speaking of Nostromo, the narrative voice says, in an oracular generalization, “Each man [sic] must have some temperamental sense by which to discover himself. With Nostromo it was vanity of an artless sort. Without it he would have been nothing” (461), just as Decoud becomes nothing in the absence of his saving focus, his love for Antonia. On the other hand, such an obsession is a kind of madness. The narrative voice, for example, reports Emilia Gould’s thoughts about her husband, as she has come to understand him and fear for him. She watches him as he sits in abstraction, writing in his mind the letter he will send to persuade Holroyd that “the San Tomé mine is big enough to take in hand the making of a new state” (423): Mrs. Gould watched his abstraction with dread. It was a domestic and frightful phenomenon that darkened and chilled the house for her like a thunder-cloud passing over the sun. Charles Gould’s fits of abstraction depicted the energetic concentration of a will haunted by a fi xed idea. A man haunted by a fi xed idea is insane. He is dangerous even if that idea is an idea of justice; for may he not bring the heaven down pitilessly upon a loved head? The eyes of Mrs. Gould, watching her husband’s profi le, fi lled with tears again. (422) For Conrad, human beings are caught between two insanities, Decoud’s suicidal insanity of seeing everything with skeptical clarity, unsupported by any remaining egotistical illusion, as opposed to Gould’s insanity of being “haunted” by a fi xed idea, or Dr. Monygham’s dangerous confusion of the mine with Emilia Gould, or Nostromo’s vanity that reconstructs itself even after his disillusionment. Even an ideal of justice turns ultimately against the one who is haunted by it. Illusion destroys integrity, as Nostromo’s in228

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corruptible integrity is destroyed when his vanity fails him and he comes to think that the rich have used and betrayed him. For Conrad, in the end, history is not made by the implacable impersonal forces of global capitalism, but by innumerable individual acts, motivated most often by idealistic secret obsessions. These bring about changes that are absurdly incongruous with the intentions that motivate them. Edward Said, in his fascinating interview about Conrad, given just a few months before he died, after praising Nostromo with generosity and insight, marks out succinctly his difference from Conrad: Oh, I have a great contempt for such policy-intellectuals. [He means the sort of “experts” from the government or from conservative (or even liberal) think-tanks who are lobbyists or who appear on television or radio talk-shows.] I learned that all from Conrad. That if you get involved in the machine, as he calls it in a famous letter [to Cunninghame Graham, cited earlier], or, say, in something like the mine in Costaguana, there’s no escape. What you must try to do is to maintain division [I suppose he means some distance, some detachment]: of corruption; of power, leading to all sorts of dark places; and from becoming part of it oneself. And also to be able to do what Conrad did aesthetically, which is to stand outside and to say: Well, yes, those things are happening. But there are always alternatives. But the big difference between Conrad and me in the end—and this is true of Nostromo as well as Heart of Darkness—is that politically for Conrad there are no real alternatives. And I disagree with that: there’s always an alternative. (Conrad in the Twentieth-Century, 292) Said seems here to grant Conrad a belief that there are always non-political alternatives. Things might have turned out differently. It is just that for Conrad there are no political alternatives, just an endless series of fortuitously created corrupt and unjust regimes. Said, on the contrary, believed that there are always political alternatives—for example, ways to solve with justice the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict that Said was as completely invested in as old Giorgio Viola was in the lost Garibaldi cause. Such stubborn political optimism was one of Said’s most admirable traits. I agree that Conrad is different from Said. His reasons for being less optimistic are not that he cannot imagine political alternatives, but that any political alternative will, in his view, become corrupted and unjust, corrupted not by the Juggernaut of global capitalism as a form of historical Conrad’s Colonial (Non)Community: Nostromo

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or materialist determinism, but by the “incorrigible” flaws in human nature shared by those who have devised and carried out the alternatives. The chief flaw in human nature is the need each human being has to believe in some illusion to save himself or herself from the madness of suicide. Every such illusion, without exception, Conrad believed, also ultimately turns into some form of dangerous madness. It becomes a secret insanity dangerous to others, dangerous to oneself, as Nostromo’s frustrated vanity leads him to his death. Nostromo ultimately reveals itself to be not so much a political novel, as it is usually taken to be, as a psychological novel, or a novel about the way human psychology can be shown to determine political history through a series of absurd linguistic mistakes, when you get down to the fine grain of the way material events actually happen. Another, and final, way to put this would be to say that Nostromo is a covert rhetorical analysis. It is a deconstruction before the fact, in the guise of a psychological and political analysis, of the way interpersonal and political actions are governed by linguistic errors of which the actors are not aware and can only be made aware of by some form of suicidal insight. What they are, their secret singularities, is those errors. Radix malorum cupiditas non est sed lingua. Without language, however, human beings would be nothing. Language gives human beings the incorrigible habit of ascribing fictitious value to material things, of which ascription cupidity is one signal form. Without these linguistic mistakes or illusions, human beings would dissolve into that solitude and silence within which Decoud imagines himself suspended, as from a long cord hung from the sky over the Golfo Placido, before he shoots himself. Either way we human beings, according to the evidence provided by the narrative voice in Nostromo, have had it. Is it better not to know and to live on in an illusion that makes one extremely dangerous to oneself and to others, or is it better to know and to be led to a self-destroying emptiness, silence, and solitude? That is a hard judgment call to make, though Conrad’s people do not, of course, have the chance to choose with a clear head one or the other fate. Nor does Nostromo choose between them. It exposes pitilessly the consequences of happening to go either way. To return in conclusion to my topic of the individual’s relation to community: Neither of these ways is anything more than the non-relation of an inauthentic selfhood to an unworked community. That is true unless one 230

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judges, as one plausibly might, Decoud’s insight and literal sein zum Tode, being toward death, to be a hyperbolically ironic version, before the fact, of Heidegger’s resolute Dasein bent on fulfilling its “ownmost” possibilities of being and as a result dying its own death. I see no evidence, however, that Conrad had anything like Heidegger’s belief in a Being that is ground for everything, including the underlying ground for each person living with his or her fellows, each Dasein as Mitsein. For the Conrad of Nostromo there is only the immense indifference of things, the silence and solitude of the Golfo Placido and of the distant Cordillera.

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5 WAV E S T H E O R Y An Anachronistic Reading

The only intelligible language in which we converse with one another consists of our objects in their relation to each other. We would not understand a human language and it would remain without effect. By one side it would be recognised and felt as being a request, an entreaty, and therefore a humiliation, and consequently uttered with a feeling of shame, of degradation. By the other side it would be regarded as impudence or lunacy and rejected as such. We are to such an extent estranged from man’s essential nature that the direct language of this essential nature seems to us a violation of human dignity, whereas the estranged language of material values seems to be the well-justified assertion of human dignity that is self-confident and conscious of itself. —Karl Marx, Notes on James Mill, 1844 I propose to read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves not primarily in the context of philosophers or theorists whose work she knew or might have known but in the context of some present-day philosophical and theoretical writings. Do the six protagonists of The Waves form a community, or are they as alienated from one as Marx in my epigraph says we all are under capitalism? There are seven characters if you count Perceval, who never speaks. These personages have known one another since childhood. If they are a community, of what sort is it? In order to answer these questions, I must first take a close look at the novel. I must read it with care.

The Waves is mentioned twice in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. This occurs both times in association with one of the protagonists, Briony Tallis. Briony is a writer of novels. She is, it turns out, the putative author of the novel the reader is reading. The reader does not discover that until almost the end of the novel, in the surprise ending. It really was a surprise for me. The omniscient (or, rather, telepathic) narrator reports that when Briony was an aspiring young writer in nurse’s training during WWII, she dreamed of a new kind of fiction based on “thought, perception, sensations, . . . the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. . . . The novel of the future would be unlike anything in the past. She had read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves three times and thought that a great transformation was being worked in human nature itself, and that only fiction, a new kind of fiction, could capture the essence of the change” (A, 265). A little later in Atonement, the reader learns that Cyril Connolly, the celebrated editor of Horizon, has rejected Briony’s novella, but with a long encouraging letter (imaginary of course). Connolly is imagined to have warned Briony against writing like Woolf in The Waves. In real life, Woolf and Connolly met at a dinner party in 1934 and took an instant dislike to one another. The fictional Connolly writes the following to Briony, in his long letter of rejection: However, we wondered whether it [Briony’s novella] owed a little too much to the techniques of Mrs. Woolf. The crystalline present moment is of course a worthy subject in itself, especially for poetry; it allows a writer to show his gifts, delve into mysteries of perception, present a stylized version of thought processes, permit the vagaries and unpredictability of the private self to be explored and so on. Who can doubt the value of this experimentation? However, such writing can become precious when there is no sense of forward movement. (A, 294) Is McEwan’s characterization of what is essential in The Waves accurate and comprehensive? Does it cover all the ground? Does Woolf actually present consciousness as a river through time? Does The Waves lack a sense of forward movement? Does it present no more than crystalline present moments, one after another, in an exploration of perception, thought processes, and the private self? A river and a crystal are, by the way, incompatible

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figures. Which is it that Woolf presents, or is it both, like a wave that is also particles in the wave/particle theory of light? Does The Waves really register “a great transformation in human nature itself,” a transformation that requires new fictional techniques to represent the new human nature? It seems unlikely that, as Woolf famously says, “in or about December, 1910, human character changed.” In order to answer these weighty questions, I need to look carefully at the verbal texture of The Waves and at the actual narrative techniques Woolf uses. What does The Waves actually say or do? How does it say or do them? My word “do” here is an allusion to a philosophical work Woolf could not have known. Th is work is important for literary theorists today: J. L. Austin’s book on speech act theory, How To Do Things with Words. To borrow Walter Benjamin’s distinction in “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” made in order to ask these questions in a different idiom, what are The Waves’ Gemeinte (what it means) and its Art des Meinens (how it means)?

T H E O D D N A R R AT I V E CO N V E N T I O N S O F T H E WAV E S

Just what in The Waves’ Gemeinte and Art des Meinens needs accounting for anyhow? Anyone who has tried to read The Waves knows that its conventions are exceedingly peculiar. They are idiosyncratic, to say the least. I know of no other novel that uses just these conventions, not even among those by Woolf herself. Briony’s narrative in Atonement is not at all like The Waves. It uses a more or less conventional third person narrator who speaks in indirect discourse for thoughts, feelings, and experiences the characters had in a present that is now past. The Waves is not like that. It is made up of two sorts of discourse juxtaposed: the “interludes” and the “soliloquies” (her words) of the six characters at various times in their lives. The soliloquies are sometimes long, sometimes short. They are presented in no regular rotation. They just shift from one character to another, more or less unpredictably. Let me look a little more closely at these two quite different forms of language, one by one.

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T H E I N T E R LU D E S

The Waves is punctuated at intervals, beginning with the opening two paragraphs, by ten passages in italics and in the past tense “describing,” or, better, “invoking” the sun at ten times during a past day, from dawn to sunset, as it rose and set, illuminated the sea and shore, wakened flocks of birds, and illuminated the room of a house near the beach. The interludes also follow the course of a year. The same elements enter into each interlude, but in a different specification in each case, as the day and year progressed. This is something like Wallace Stevens’s “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” in which each stanza is another permutation of the verbal elements in the one before. Certainly Woolf’s interludes are highly “poetic,” in an everyday sense of that word, as are the soliloquies that make up most of the text, but I do not see that saying that gets the critic very far. She or he would still need to ask: “In what sense is Woolf’s style in The Waves poetic, and to what purpose is that style used?” Woolf in her diary says these interludes express “insensitive nature.” In another place, however, she speaks of the waves as spectral in relation to the everyday life of the characters: “The unreal world must be round all this—the phantom waves” (D, 140). The shift from past tense in the interludes to present tense in the soliloquies supports the idea that they belong to different incompatible or mutually exclusive realms. I shall return later to this issue. Here are some salient features of these interludes: Each of these entries ends with the waves crashing on the shore. The novel concludes with the last of these interludes, just one sentence: “The waves broke on the shore.” Much attention in these interludes is paid to colors. The Waves’s world is intensely colorful. Woolf’s descriptions have no personified narrator. They seem to be spoken or written by some anonymous power of language, perhaps by that “voix narrative (le ‘il,’ le ‘neutre’)” which Maurice Blanchot identifies in an essay still crucial for narrative theory, at least for mine. Each such passage is both “realistically” referential (though of an imaginary scene) and at the same time extravagantly figurative. These passages seem to have been Woolf’s attempt to do what Bernard, toward the end of his last soliloquy, says cannot be done: “But how describe the world seen without a self? There are no words” (204). “Like” is a key word in these italicized interludes, as in the soliloquies of the six characters, to which I shall turn below. What Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading 235

is within the fiction actually there is said to be like all sorts of unlikely other things, as in the following example, one among a great many: The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical [sic—could she have meant “fantastic”? What could “fanatical” mean in this case?] existence. A plate was like a white lake. A knife looked like a dagger of ice. Suddenly tumblers revealed themselves upheld by streaks of light. Tables and chairs rose to the surface as if they had been sunk under water and rose, filmed in red, orange, purple like the bloom on the skin of ripe fruit. . . . And as the light increased, flocks of shadow were driven before it and conglomerated and hung in many-pleated folds in the background. (79)

T H E S O L I LO Q U I E S

All the text between the interludes is made up of what Woolf calls “soliloquies.” One or another of the six characters speaks each of these: Bernard, Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, and Rhoda. The soliloquies are enclosed within quotation marks. “The Waves,” said Woolf in her diary as she was revising the text, “is, I think, resolving itself (I am at page 100) into a series of dramatic soliloquies. The thing is to keep them running homogeneously in and out, in the rhythm of the waves” (D, 153). Each soliloquy, this passage implies, would be like a wave gathering and then crashing on the shore, or perhaps contain a number of such waves. The wave figure does appear often in the soliloquies, as when Bernard, in his last soliloquy, says: “Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again. And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back” (210–11). The soliloquies come in no particular rotation. Some are very short. Others go on for pages, especially Bernard’s. The Waves ends with a forty-twopage soliloquy by Bernard in old age that recapitulates all the motifs and moments that have come before in the soliloquies of the six characters. Each soliloquy is enclosed in quotation marks. The speaker is indicated by the disembodied narrative voice that says, “said Susan,” or “said Louis,” and so on. These function almost like the directions in a printed play: “Hamlet: ‘To be or not to be, . . . .’ ” Woolf’s soliloquies differ from Hamlet’s, however, in that, with the exception, perhaps, of Bernard’s last long soliloquy, they are not said out loud. They are interior monologues, seemingly interminable inner 236

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voices speaking to themselves. Bernard is imagined as recapitulating his life in direct address to a stranger, the reader’s surrogate, whom he meets in a restaurant. Or perhaps he is only imagining that he is speaking to his tablemate. It is extremely unlikely that a stranger would listen silently for two hours as Bernard talks and talks. “Soliloquy” and “Interlude” are, of course, drawn from the terminology of drama and music, as when we speak of “Hamlet’s soliloquies” or of a musical “interlude,” that is, a separate piece inside the main work. Woolf does write at one point in A Writer’s Diary of the as yet unwritten The Waves as planned to be like a play: “That was to be an abstract mystical eyeless book: a play-poem” (D, 134). The difference, of course, is that a play is acted before the reader’s eyes and the soliloquies are spoken aloud, whereas The Waves is a written and printed text, like the printed texts we have of Shakespeare’s plays. Woolf’s soliloquies are entirely subjective. They are interior monologues, inner voices speaking to themselves. Though they are said to be “said,” they are never spoken aloud, a distinct peculiarity. The text of The Waves is not meant for performance on any stage. Here is one short example of the format of the soliloquies, as well as a typical simile: “ ‘The breath of the wind was like a tiger panting,’ said Rhoda” (89). Rhoda repeatedly speaks in her soliloquies of her fear that a tiger is about to spring. Each sequence of the soliloquies comes after one or another interlude and before the next one. Every soliloquy in a given sequence occurs more or less at the same time in the collective life of the characters, a day in their school life, a dinner party in a restaurant when they have grown up, a collective excursion to Hampton Court, and so on. These sequences follow all of the characters from early childhood through school time, to early adulthood, to maturity, to old age The stylistic texture of the soliloquies is more than a little bewildering. Though the soliloquies of each character are individualized, they all mix present thoughts and sensations with spontaneous memories that recur; extravagant figures of speech, often similes; anticipations of the future; recurrent fantasy motifs that are frequently present in more than one character’s mind or in the interludes. Examples are the image of “women carry ing red pitchers to the Nile” (201, and see 8 for the first example), or of a desert with pillars, or of a spike of sea-holly on the shore (189), or of turbaned men with poisoned assegais (54; 78; 100), or the phrases about the lady sitting at Elvedon, between two long windows, writing (maybe Woolf writing The Waves), Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading 237

while the gardeners sweep the lawn with giant brooms (12). Were real lawns ever swept in this way? Maybe in England. The reader sometimes has difficulty distinguishing one of these strata of language from the others. Is a given item “really there,” or is it just imagined? Gerald Levin has written about Woolf’s use of a musical form in The Waves. Its form is perhaps modeled on Beethoven’s late quartets, to which Woolf refers in her diary (D, 156). I suspect the musical analogy can be carried only so far, but the repetition with slight variation of phrases like the one about the women carrying red pitchers to the Nile, or like the one about warriors with poisoned assegais, functions like the leitmotifs in Wagner, or, better analogy, like the “little phrase” in Vinteuil’s septet that so entrances Proust’s protagonist in À la Recherche du temps perdu. The little phrase greatly moves “Marcel” when it recurs suddenly like a personal signature in an otherwise difficult piece of chamber music, a composition that has not been played before. We say, “Ah ha, there are those women with red pitchers again,” or, “There are those assegais again.” Because these motifs recur in different consciousnesses, however, they seem to have been “downloaded” from some universal database of phrases or images. I shall return to this implication. Here are two brief examples of the linguistic texture of the soliloquies, abstracted from much longer soliloquies. The first is “said” by Rhoda, the second by Bernard. I put quotation marks because Woolf always does: “My path has been up and up, toward some solitary tree with a pool beside it on the very top. I have sliced the waters of beauty in the evening when the hills close themselves like birds [sic] wings folded. I have picked sometimes a red carnation, and wisps of hay. I have sunk alone on the turf and fi ngered some old bone and thought: When the wind stoops to brush this height, may there be nothing found but a pinch of dust.” (146) “Sitting up late at night it seems strange not to have more control. Pigeon-holes are not then very useful. It is strange how force ebbs away and away into some dry creek. Sitting alone, it seems we are spent; our waters can only just surround feebly that spike of sea-holly; we cannot reach that further pebble so as to wet it. It is over, we are ended. But wait—I sat all night waiting—an impulse again runs through us; we rise, we toss back a mane of white spray; we pound on the shore; we are not to be 238 Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading

confined. That is, I shaved and washed; did not wake my wife, and had breakfast; put on my hat, and went out to earn my living.” (189–90) Each sequence of soliloquies is punctuated at the beginning and end, as I have said, by interludes of the sun’s progress through a day and a year. That progress corresponds to the course of the characters’ lives, in a figure as old as the sphynx’s riddle and no doubt older. A good example is the group of soliloquies that take place in the middle of the book during a dinner party the six characters have with a seventh older character, Perceval. Perceval has been the children’s idol at school. He is about to leave for India. This is one of a number of references to British imperialism in The Waves. In India, Perceval is killed in a fall from his horse. Perceval never says a word in the text. He never speaks his own soliloquies. He is a kind of absent center for the reader and, after his death, for the six characters. These soliloquies are an extremely odd way to tell a story. They are not, strictly speaking, soliloquies at all, because they are not spoken out loud. They are apparently meant to be representations in language of the interiorities of the characters at one time or another. One peculiar feature of the soliloquies is their eloquence. They are, for the most part, in complete sentences. They are full of elaborate figures of speech, remembered phrases, and images from earlier soliloquies, sometimes transferred by some magic from one character to another. No character, however, is shown as having full telepathic insight into what any of the other characters is thinking or feeling, only good intuitive guesses. Perhaps the most conspicuous stylistic feature of the soliloquies is their extravagant use of figures of speech. The figures are often similes. Almost as often, the figures are not similes but just asserted identities: “A camel is a vulture.” “Like” is a key word in The Waves, as I have said. Rhoda at one point reflects on “like” and on what is problematic about it: “ ‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?” (116). That is the big question all right. I shall return to the question of what, for Woolf, lies beneath the surface or at the absent, hidden, center. The immense number of little details that make up the stylistic texture of The Waves constitute a tropological system that solves challenges to effective referential representation. This is like this is like this and that is like that is like that. Saying a given emotion is like something in the sensory world solves the problem of representing emotions in words. Saying one thing is Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading 239

like another (“A plate was like a white lake. A knife looked like a dagger of ice.”) solves the problem of vividly representing external objects. Presenting the internal monologues of the characters as wavelike links the soliloquies to the interludes. The whole text is one im mense integument of figurative displacements. Here is Bernard musing about the Headmaster’s sermon in an early passage when the six characters are still at school. Bernard is perhaps closest to Woolf herself, but all six might be thought of as projected aspects of her interior life: “He [the Headmaster] has minced the dance of the white butterflies at the door to powder. His rough and hairy voice is like an unshaven chin. Now he lurches back to his seat like a drunken sailor” (26). And so on and on. Here is Louis on the next page: “My heart turns rough; it abrades my side like a fi le with two edges” (27). Here is Jinny three pages later, as she, Susan, and Rhoda look at themselves in the mirror in the hall of the boarding school they now attend: “I flicker between the set face of Susan and Rhoda’s vagueness; I leap like one of those flames that run between the cracks of the earth; I move, I dance; I never cease to move and to dance. I move like the leaf that moved in the hedge as a child and frightened me. I dance over these streaked, these impersonal, distempered walls with their yellow skirting as firelight dances over teapots. I catch fire even from women’s cold eyes” (30). And so on and on, in soliloquy after soliloquy, though with differences in the way figures are used from character to character. For all, however, tropes are employed as a basic resource of soliloquizing self-representation. These figures, saying this is like that, often in wild, unlikely, and unexpected comparisons (for example, “The camel is a vulture” [27]), are ascribed to the characters’ spontaneous soliloquies. They are also Woolf’s solution to the challenge McEwan has his protagonist Briony face as a young writer, as well as to the dilemma Marx names in my epigraph as a major feature of our alienation: “Actions she thought she could describe well enough, and she had the hang of dialogue. She could do the woods in winter, and the grimness of a castle wall. But how to do feelings? All very well to write, She felt sad, or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy?” (A, 109) Figurative language, catachresis to be exact—that is, the use of borrowed words to name what has no proper name—is Woolf’s solution to this problem. Neville, as the boys lie in the grass watching the older students play 240 Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading

cricket, reflects on Bernard’s exceptional ability to make “images,” “phrases,” and to run them together to make a story. The phrases that bubble up within Bernard are almost always figurative comparisons. Bernard is one of the writers among the six, Louis another, and Neville the third (all three of the male characters, in short), though their styles of writing are quite different. Bernard’s abortive writing is made up of extravagant phrases he keeps in a notebook, whereas Louis reads Catullus and writes in a crisp, precise classical style, and Neville writes poetry, apparently in a more modern style, though the reader is not given an example. A background of real or realistic events is always going on in each set of soliloquies as they are “said” at different times in the characters’ collective lives. Here is an example from what Neville “said” as the children lay in the grass watching the older school-boys play cricket: “But Bernard goes on talking. Up they bubble—images. ‘Like a camel,’ . . . ‘a vulture.’ The camel is a vulture; the vulture a camel; for Bernard is a dangling wire, loose, but seductive. Yes, for when he talks, when he makes his foolish comparisons, a lightness comes over one. One floats too, as if one were that bubble; one is freed; I have escaped, one feels. Even the chubby little boys (Dalton, Larpent, and Baker) feel the same abandonment. They like this better than the cricket. They catch the phrases as they bubble. They let the feathery grasses tickle their noses” (27). Note that “bubble” here is another extravagant metaphor. Comparisons lift the burden of the world, the weight of harsh reality. Saying this is like that or is like that other thing lightens things as they are. I suppose this happens by abstracting, “spiritualizing” things as they are, by shifting them to something fictive. One could just as well, however, and perhaps more accurately, say that these figures make the abstract or intangible, feelings for example, concrete. We all know how bubbles rise in a boiling pot, whereas feelings are notoriously elusive and impalpable, hard to define or convey in words, as Marx suggests in my epigraph and as McEwan’s Briony says to herself explicitly. On the next page Louis, in the group on the grass watching the cricket, reflects on the way these soliloquies are collected in some memory bank or reservoir where they go on happening and can be recovered and shared: The trees wave. The clouds pass. The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared. We shall not always give out a sound like a beaten gong [note here one more simile] as one sensation strikes and then Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading 241

another. Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens [a reference to one of the recurrent leitmotifs of the novel, the moment Jinny kissed Louis on the back of the neck when they were still small children]. . . . [O]ur ring here, sitting, with our arms binding our knees, hint[s] at some other order, and better, which makes a reason everlastingly. (28) I shall return later to this hint that some other and better order hides behind sensations, perceptions, events—such as Jinny kissing Louis on the nape of his neck. I do not know about you, dear reader, but though an interior voice speaks within me all the time, it speaks in fragmentary bits of language, incomplete sentences, with long or short silences between of unverbalized feelings and sensations. A major convention of The Waves is the extremely unrealistic assumption that all people, these imaginary people at least, speak to themselves all the time, with great poetic inventiveness and in polished prose. If we try to think of this as a supposedly realistic representation of interiority, it seems fabricated, factitious, highly stylized. I shall return further on to the strange presuppositions that justify this convention. The Waves is not so much a presentation of the famous “stream of consciousness” as an exceedingly implausible stream of interior Woolfian language. Maybe Woolf’s mind did work that way, turning everything into phrases most often made of figurative comparisons. I suspect that may have been the case. If so, it was a remarkable aspect of her genius. It seems implausible at first glance, however, to ascribe to six such different and more or less ordinary middleclass educated English men and women an ability to turn everything spontaneously and effortlessly into eloquent highly figurative language.

O N E S E R I E S O F S O L I LO Q U I E S U N D E R T H E M I C R O S CO P E

Let me now look in more detail at the linguistic texture of one series of soliloquies. I choose the series ending the episode at the dinner party for Perceval before his fatal departure for India. I say the series is “exemplary,” but I do not claim it is “typical” because no two are the same in form. The series shows how the soliloquies by each of the six characters have distinctive characteristics, for example the relative lack of figures and the relative directness or literality of language in Louis’s soliloquies. Any series of 242 Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading

soliloquies, long or short, from the beginning to the end of the novel would do as well as the one I select, though each would produce different analytical results. My choice is more or less arbitrary. Nevertheless, there are common denominators among all the soliloquies, which the soliloquy series I choose exemplifies quite well. The sequence I have in mind comes just as the dinner party for Perceval is breaking up. Perceval is about to take a cab and disappear forever because he dies in India, as I have said. The soliloquies seem to follow one another in the extended time of the fragile moment of unity at the end of the dinner party, though they possibly overlap or are simultaneous. No notation is given that would permit the reader to tell for sure. Except in the case of quite short soliloquies I abridge them for reasons of economy, but the serious reader should refer back to the full text. I pick up the sequence at the moment of a short soliloquy by Louis: “ ‘For one moment only,’ said Louis. ‘Before the chain breaks, before disorder returns, see us fi xed, see us displayed, see us held in a vice. But now the circle breaks. Now the current flows’ ” (102), and so on. The image of the chain is picked up from Susan’s soliloquy just previously, though no evidence is given that Louis knows this, although some collective narrative voice knows it, and the reader knows it. Susan said: “A circle has been cast on the waters; a chain is imposed” (102). Susan is thinking of the change made for all six by the fact that Bernard has just become engaged, but the figure of the circle or ring is used throughout this sequence (and elsewhere too) to name the circle of the six characters around Perceval as center, in a momentary community of six (or seven) that is about to be broken. At times, for example at one moment in the Hampton Court scene (162), the six characters internally say a sequence of quite short soliloquies in which one character picks up a phrase of metaphor the previous speaker has used. They do not, however, reflect on this or assert that they have telepathic access to the others’ minds. After Louis picks up the circle figure from Susan, he goes on to observe that their cohesion is breaking up as the dinner party draws to a close: “But now the circle breaks. Now the current flows. Now we rush faster than before” (102). The rest of Louis’s soliloquy describes this breakup in characteristically extravagant and highly figured language: “An imperious brute possesses them. The nerves thrill in their thighs. Their hearts pound and churn in their sides. Susan screws her pocket-handkerchief [her characteristic gesture]. Jinny’s eyes dance with fire” (102). Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading 243

Then comes a short soliloquy for Rhoda, ending in “Their eyes burn like the eyes of animals brushing through leaves on the scent of the prey. The circle is destroyed. We are thrown asunder” (102). Next follows a longish soliloquy for Bernard, as he looks around the restaurant and takes stock of the moment of togetherness that is just ending and then of his freedom in his separateness to look around and make stories of the people he sees in the restaurant, including his six friends, and including also the ever-silent Perceval: “Who and what are these unknown people? I ask. I could make a dozen stories of what he said, of what she said—I can see a dozen pictures. But what are stories? Toys I twist, bubbles I blow, one ring passing through another. And sometime I begin to doubt if there are stories. What is my story? What is Rhoda’s? What is Neville’s?” (103). The reader will see the way this last segment echoes Woolf’s own “said X’s” and “said Y’s,” and also her doubts, registered in diary entries as she was writing The Waves, about whether she could succeed in making stories by way of her strategy of soliloquies. By “story” I suppose she and Bernard mean a sequence with a beginning, middle, and end, a “plot” in Aristotle’s sense. What is the “plot” of The Waves? The reader must stand back pretty far from the local texture of the language to see the semblance of one. One would hardly read The Waves for the story. Next comes another soliloquy by Louis: “Now once more,” said Louis, “as we are about to part, having paid our bill, the circle in our blood, broken so often, so sharply, for we are so different, closes in a ring. . . .” (104). Jinny next begins her soliloquy with “Let us hold it for one moment . . . .” (104). Rhoda comes next with a revery that is characteristically solitary, detached, and more than a little idiosyncratic. It is apparently her imagination of what distant exotic parts of the world are like: “ ‘Forests and far countries on the other side of the world,’ said Rhoda, ‘are in it [she means the moment of their communion]; seas and jungles; the howlings of jackals and moonlight falling upon some high peak where the eagle soars’ ” (104). The contents of Neville’s version of the moment they share is much more mundane and literal: “ ‘Happiness is in it,’ said Neville, ‘and the quiet of ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. . . .’ ” (104). Then Susan: “ ‘Week-days are in it,’ said Susan, ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday; the horses going up to the fields . . .’ ” (104), and so on. Susan’s soliloquies tend to follow the rhythm of ordinary time and of nature. Then comes a longer (as usual) soliloquy by Bernard. He begins by asserting 244 Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading

that the future is in the present moment and beseeching the ever-silent Perceval to appreciate what he is leaving: “ ‘What is to come is in it,’ said Bernard. ‘That is the last drop and the brightest that we let fall like some supernal quicksilver [another “like” clause!] into the swelling and splendid moment created by us from Perceval. What is to come? I ask, brushing the crumbs from my waistcoat, what is outside? . . . We have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. . . . Look Perceval, while they fetch the taxi, at the prospect which you are so soon to lose’ ” (104–5). The reader may remember at this point that though the characters speak in the present tense, the narrator’s past tense (“said Bernard”) turns whatever the characters say into something they have already said, perhaps long ago. What they said has long since joined the innumerable congregations of past time. The impersonal narrator or narrative voice resurrects these past moments and brings them back into the present. It appears that once something has happened and has been turned into language, it cannot cease happening, over and over, all the time, in some strange somewhere. Rhoda then follows with another detached and, as usual, slightly peculiar soliloquy, complete with a strange simile. What she says seems to have nothing to do with the human contents of this present moment, unless she has looked up and accurately reports the London weather at just that time: “ ‘Peaked clouds,’ said Rhoda, ‘voyage over a sky dark like polished whalebone’ ” (105). Finally, Neville ends the sequence and the whole section: “ ‘Now the agony begins; now the horror has seized me with its fangs,’ said Neville. ‘Now the cab comes; now Perceval goes. . . . How signal to all time to come that we, who stand in the street, in the lamplight, loved Perceval? Now Perceval is gone’ ” (105). The Waves goes on and on like this, soliloquy after soliloquy registering episode after episode in the characters’ collective lives, punctuated by the interludes. For me, even after re-readings and prolonged familiarity with the text, it still seems an exceedingly strange way to organize a novel. The interlude describing in the past tense and in italics the sun at its zenith, indifferent to Neville’s suffering, follows immediately after Neville’s “Now Perceval is gone,” after a blank space on the page.

A R E T H E Y A CO M M U N I T Y ?

At this point I pause to ask: Does the group of seven personages in The Waves form a community? It would seem that it does. They have known Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading 245

one another since childhood. All come from the same social class and share similar assumptions and values. They maintain close personal relationships throughout their lives. Rhoda and Louis, for example, become lovers. Neville abjectly loves Perceval and hints are given that this love has been consummated. Bernard speaks of their togetherness in the scene of the dinner party as “something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time.” “Congregation,” as in “church congregation,” is a good synonym for “community.” “Congregation” can also name, however, a disaggregated bunch of people who just happen to be have been brought together, “dis” turned factitiously into “con.” The six are a congregation of separate consciousnesses. They are not shown to have genuine telepathic insight into one another’s minds, though the “narrative voice,” that says, “Jinny said,” “Bernard said,” and so on, seems to have effortless access to the characters’ secret consciousnesses and to know what their inner voices are saying at any time. Bernard in his final soliloquy, however, three times asserts that he is not one single person but a congeries of persons, all six of the main characters present together at once in a strange kind of community: “I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am—Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs” (196). Three pages later, apropos of imagining himself trying to persuade Rhoda not to kill herself: “In persuading her I was also persuading my own soul. For this is not one life; not do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, or Rhoda—so strange is the contact of one with another” (199). This issue appears once more six pages later, in the mode of uncertainty and interrogation: “And now I ask, ‘Who am I?’ I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Perceval is dead, and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As I talked I felt ‘I am you.’ The difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome.” (205) On the one hand, these passages show that Woolf did not need to wait for Derrida and other recent theorists to put in question the presupposition of the unity of the “I.” On the other hand, they show that Bernard at least 246

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experiences himself not only as multiple but as a multiplicity that can be defined as a strange kind of intimate community of the six characters. All six in one way or another, at one moment or another, experience this “mystic” community, to borrow Woolf’s somewhat puzzling word “mystic.” The word is used repeatedly in the diary to define the Waves project. I think she did not mean “mystic” in the sense we say Saint Teresa experienced mystic communion with God but rather to name the irrationality of what she believed about a secret place of order where everything that has happened goes on happening. Much emphasis is placed, in many of the soliloquies, on the characters’ sense of solitude and isolation. No one, they think, can possibly understand what it feels like to be this or that particular “I.” The answer to my question in this section depends a good bit on your definition of “community,” The evidence in The Waves is in any case contradictory. The characters in The Waves differ from one another as much as they are similar. They do not form a community of the traditional kind of living together, understanding one another, and sharing values, institutions, laws, manners, and assumptions. Such traditional a community is presupposed in novels by Anthony Trollope, for example The Last Chronicle of Barset, as my second chapter shows. Trollope fairly often shows one character knowing telepathically what another character is thinking and feeling. That clairvoyance is lacking, for the most part, in The Waves. I shall return later to the issue of community in Woolf’s novel.

W H AT T H E S O L I LO Q U I E S A R E A N D D O

The Waves, as you can see from the extended example just given, skips discontinuously from one soliloquy to another. No narrator’s language is given as transition, nor any objective narrator’s registration of setting or conversation, such as novels usually have. The text just jumps at a paragraph break from “Louis said” to “Susan said,” or whatever. Between a given set of soliloquies happening in sequence at a given time in the lives of the characters, and bracketed by interludes at each end, a total temporal gap occurs. Then a new sequence starts at a later time in the characters’ lives. It almost seems as though somewhere the endless interior speech of all the characters is going on happening, endlessly. Whoever or whatever says “said Bernard,” or “said Jinny” has chosen to tune in again from time to time on the Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading 247

characters’ interiorities, what they are saying to themselves. That seems like an extremely unlikely presumption, and it certainly goes against what McEwan’s imaginary Connolly says about Woolf’s focus on the crystalline moment of separate consciousnesses. Distinctive features of the soliloquies can now be identified: 1. Gradually, a fairly complete characterization of each personage is created in the reader’s mind by his or her soliloquies. Though each character has a unique and recognizable “character,” a constant theme in the soliloquies is each character’s sense that he or she is not one person, but many different incompatible persons. As I have said, the famous postmodern dissolution of selfhood is already a central theme in Woolf’s presentation of human interior life. Nevertheless, distinctive traits recur for each, in contradiction to the “I am many selves” motif: Louis’s shame at his Australian accent, his precision that makes him a good fi nancier, but that is accompanied by a creative inner life in which he says “I, now a duke, now Plato, companion of Socrates” (119); Susan’s love of her native countryside and her family’s farm in the country, her maternal gifts and gifts for homemaking; Jinny’s special talent for dressing and using her body to attract attention; she “sleeps around,” as some would say; Bernard’s untidiness, forgetfulness, along with an unusual openness to other people, even strangers, as indispensable sources for his bubbling phrases, and therefore a weakening of those phrases, since they are dependent on other people; Neville’s physical feebleness and his spontaneous and abject love for men, especially Perceval, but including in one place a boy he is imagined seeing passing in the street; Rhoda thinks, after Perceval’s death: “Neville, after staring at the window through his tears, will see through his tears, and ask, ‘Who passes the window?’—‘What lovely boy?’ ” (115); Rhoda’s suicidal shyness and fear of others, or of sudden emotional shocks, her inability to connect one moment to another. Rhoda does ultimately kill herself, as of course did Woolf, so one could claim that this aspect of Woolf’s inner life is projected into Rhoda. One soliloquy during the restaurant dinner is a good example of these features of Rhoda’s interiority, as well as of other features of the soliloquies’ stylistic texture. Rhoda has come shyly in to the restaurant where the dinner party occurs, trying to efface herself by hiding behind pillars and waiters as she comes zigzagging in. Eventually the reader is “tuned in” to a segment of what is going on in her consciousness as she sits eating with the other five and 248

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Perceval. Her soliloquy begins as follows: “ ‘If I could believe,’ said Rhoda, ‘that I should grow old in pursuit and change, I should be rid of my fear: nothing persists’ ” (93). Her phrasing here picks up the end of the soliloquy by Neville that just precedes hers. Neville said: “I am never stagnant; I rise from my worst disasters, I turn, I change. Pebbles bounce off the mail of my muscular, my extended body. [There is another bizarre metaphor!] In this pursuit I shall grow old” (93). After picking up telepathically, apparently without knowing it, Neville’s phrase about pursuit, Rhoda goes on to explain why this does not work for her. For her, Rhoda says, “One moment does not lead to another. The door opens and the tiger leaps” (93). This extravagant figure of the tiger leaping is Rhoda’s leitmotif. It occurs again and again in her soliloquies. That tiger expresses her fear of any sudden sensation, especially a sudden confrontation with other people. She goes on to say, speaking in imagination to her dinner companions, the other five characters plus Perceval: “You did not see me come. I circled round the chairs to avoid the horror of the spring. I am afraid of you all. I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do—I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces. I have no end in view” (93). That last phrase is, perhaps, an echo of Dryden’s “Momus,” in “The Secular Masque” (1700): “Thy chase had a beast in view.” The figure of the chase, in any case, comes from the vocabulary of fox-hunting. A little further on in her soliloquy, Rhoda says: “I do not know—your days and hours pass like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth green of forest rides to a hound running on the scent. But there is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. [That motif also recurs in Rhoda’s soliloquies.] I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.” (93) The reader will see how much annotation a given segment of just one soliloquy can call up and also the way the wild figures of speech open out into sometimes elaborated incompatible fantasy scenes, rapidly following one Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading 249

another, in this case fox-hunting, then foam on the beach, with moonlight on a tin can, sea holly, a bone, or a derelict boat, then caverns, corridors. Rhoda often sees an elaborate imaginary landscape over the shoulders or heads of the people she is with (see 99). Woolf’s six characters certainly do lead extravagant fantasy lives! These are usually triggered by some sensation in the real world they presently inhabit. That may be one reason the soliloquies are all in the present tense, though cast into the past by the “said X’s.” The text goes on and on throughout with the quite dense and complex linguistic texture of the examples I have given. The Waves requires slow reading, careful reading, at least two or three readings, with much looking before and after, if the reader is to follow just what is going on in a given passage. 2. Many of the important motifs that echo through the novel in inexhaustible repetition are already there at the beginning, for example Jinny’s kiss of Louis, or the image of a dead man in the gutter with his throat cut that is associated with an apple tree. 3. Many motifs or phrases occur in more or less the same words for more than one character. Jinny’s childhood kiss of Louis on the back of his neck, for example, floats from the soliloquy of one character to that of another, just as the phrase about “pursuit” is transferred from Neville to Rhoda. 4. All the characters, in one degree or way or another, as I have shown, live a vivid interior imaginary life. This is built on the spot on what is immediately sensed or perceived but instantly expands extravagantly into a fantasy world. The sudden shift from one fantasy to another means that the soliloquies have a high degree of discontinuity. The interiority of consciousness, for Woolf, is characterized by constant and unpredictable shifts. These are breaks in sequence that are abrupt alterations in focus. This is more the case for some characters than for others. Bernard’s soliloquies are to some degree rationally sequential, whereas Rhoda’s are conspicuously fragmented. 5. The soliloquies do tell a story, the story of the intertwined lives of these six fictive people as they progress from childhood to old age, with a pivot perhaps on the death of Perceval. 6. The inner lives of the characters in The Waves are shown to be wavelike, not like a stream. Those inner soliloquies rise to a climax as they proceed through time and then crash, like waves rolling in on a shore, as in Bernard’s “And in me too the wave rises; it arches its back” (211). 250

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W H O O R W H AT I S T H E N A R R AT I V E V O I C E ?

Just who or what is speaking in the italicized interludes, and from where and when? To whom or to what are the soliloquies addressed? Who or what is it, and speaking from where or when, who (or which) says, “said Bernard,” “said Jinny,” “said Susan,” and so on, once more for each soliloquy enclosed within its quotation marks. The reader is likely to think of these “said Xs” as written or spoken by Virginia Woolf herself. She, we know, made up all these words and wrote them down, revised them, typed them, and so on. A Writer’s Diary recounts the process in some detail in the entries written while she was composing The Waves. She even says of The Waves at one point in the Diary: “Autobiography, it might be called” (D, 139). Answering the questions posed above in that way would be, in my judgment, a big mistake, a copout. All six of the characters, it no doubt might be argued, are different aspects of Woolf’s own inner experience, dispersed among the six, or perhaps modeled on her sense of people she knew. Efforts have been made to identify the “originals” of the characters. Personal motifs from A Writer’s Diary reappear in the soliloquies of the characters, for example the frequently repeated phrase about a fin appearing out on the ocean surface or the image of the dead man and the apple tree. The fin appeared first in a diary entry written Thursday, September 30, 1926, when Woolf was just glimpsing what became The Waves, but was then still called The Moths: I wished to add some remarks to this, on the mystical side of this solicitude; how it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with. It is this that is frightening and exciting in the midst of my profound gloom, depression, boredom, whatever it is. One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none, I think. (D, 103) The word “mystical” as an appellation for The Waves and as a name for Woolf’s own deepest experience echoes through A Writer’s Diary, as I have said. Woolf claims at one point later in the Diary that in The Waves “I have netted that fin in the waste of water which appeared to me over the marshes out of my window at Rodmell [the Woolfs’ house by the sea] when I was coming to an end of To the Lighthouse” (D, 162). One example among several of this motif ’s appearance in The Waves comes near the end, in Bernard’s fi nal long soliloquy: “Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading 251

conviction of complete desertion, Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea” (201). I shall return to that fin later. Nevertheless, as with any other novel, the “narrator” is an invented personage or voice, like those of the characters. Woolf invents the sort of voice that could speak the interludes. She creates a spectral voice that says, “said Jinny,” and so on. The characters’ voices are fictional creations, too, with features from the “real world” transposed into that fiction. We all know that, especially if we have learned narrative theory, but it is easy to forget our narratological wisdom.

M Y I N T E R P R E TAT I V E H Y P OT H E S E S

Just what set of interpretative hypotheses will best and most economically account for the strange stylistic features of The Waves? Here, as in general, the reader needs to apply Occam’s razor and not invent unnecessary narratological features, nor fall back too easily on autobiographical explanations. The simplest answer to my question is that The Waves presupposes a vast impersonal memory bank that stores everything that has ever happened, every thought or feeling of every person. This data bank, however, is absent. It is not accessible to direct experience. The thoughts and feelings it stores, moreover, are always already turned into appropriate language, complete with figures of speech for sensations and feelings that cannot be said literally. Neville speaks ironically at one point of the way readers want a narrator to do even more than “wait for the thing to be said as if it were written” (140) He apparently thinks that doing that is enough for verisimilitude. I already hinted at Woolf’s theory of the memory bank, though with the reservation that it seems improbable, when I said earlier: “It almost seems as though somewhere the endless interior speech of all the characters is going on happening, endlessly.” Whoever or whatever says “said Bernard” or “said Jinny” has chosen, or has happened fortuitously, to tune in again from time to time on the characters’ interiorities, to what they have said to themselves and are still interminably going on saying in that absent “somewhere.” This, in my judgment, is what Woolf meant when she spoke repeatedly in her diary of the fundamental presupposition of The Waves as “mystical.” This “mysticism” appears in the way all the characters, in one way or another, have the intuition that they are floating on some absent center or some 252 Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading

silence that always just eludes their grasp. Louis early in the novel, when the protagonists are children sitting together in the grass, speaks, in a passage already cited, of the way “grass and trees . . . and our ring here, sitting, with our arms binding our knees, hint at some other order, and better, which makes a reason everlastingly” (28). “A reason everlastingly” is an odd phrase (reason for what?), but it makes sense if you think of it as a philosophical term, the equivalent of logos in Greek or Grund in German. This everlasting reason is the hidden ground of all thought and feeling. That fin on the waste of waters is one vivid expression of this absent realm that appears to the characters only in enigmatic, haunting hints and evanescent traces. “Something lies deeply buried,” says Bernard at one point. “For one moment I thought to grasp it” (112). This “worded memory bank” explanatory hypothesis would explain the odd alternation of tenses in The Waves. The past tense of the interludes about the waves breaking on the shore expresses the eternal pastness of everything stored in this data bank. There, as permanently past, everything that has ever happened goes on happening in rhythmic wave-like repetition, but turned into language, as in the last sentence of all: “The waves broke on the shore” (211). This also explains why that ghostly or uncanny narrative voice, a voice completely anonymous and impersonal, speaks in the past tense: “said Jinny,” “said Neville.” That voice must not be identified with Virginia Woolf, the author. In her diary, at a point when she is deciding on the rhetorical and narratological form her unwritten novel must take, Woolf says: “[S]everal problems cry out at once to be solved. Who thinks it? And am I outside the thinker? One wants some device which is not a trick” (D, 142). Just as Franz Kafka became a writer, as he says, when he replaced “I” with “he,” so Woolf solved the problem of voice in The Waves when she took on the role of that completely impersonal voice that says, “said Bernard,” or “said Susan,” and never one word more than that. Woolf herself is outside this voice busy making up the novel, or, as she says in the diary when she has just written the last pages, puts down on paper an anonymous voice that speaks within her: “I wrote the words O death fi fteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice or, almost, after some sort of speaker (as when I was mad); I was almost afraid, remembering the voices that used to fly ahead” (D, 161). The past tense of the narrative voice that says “said Bernard” is necessary because everything that Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading 253

has happened exists in the mode of having already happened. It originally happened for the characters, however, in the present, and so the soliloquies must be in the present tense. My hypothesis also explains how the characters use language, including figures of speech, borrowed from the language of others’ soliloquies. It is not that they are telepathic, but that each has unconscious access to the language of that universal memory bank. In a similar way, all the characters speak certain motifs drawn from that collective language: the phrase about the warriors with assegais, the phrase about the women going with pitchers to the Nile, the phrase about the fin in the waste of waters, and so on. In a passage in her diary written while she was planning Mrs Dalloway, Woolf speaks of digging caves beneath the characters, caves that meet in some hidden cavern: “[M]y discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment” (D, 65–6).

“A S K E TC H O F T H E PA S T ” A S CO N F I R M AT I O N

Does further evidence exist anywhere in Woolf’s writings that my hypothesis about The Waves is correct? A quite extraordinary pair of passages nearby to one another and coming early in “A Sketch of the Past,” one of the memoirs in Woolf’s autobiographical book, Moments of Being, does just that. In the first passage, Woolf is writing about the amazing vividness and immediacy of her memories. Her memories bring the past back to the present as though they were happening right now, before her eyes: “At times I can go back to St. Ives more completely than I can this morning. I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen.” She means, I suppose, that these vivid memories seem to be occurring outside her will and outside her body and brain. These memories are involuntary, to borrow a word from Henri Bergson’s memory theory. Bergson is often adduced as an influence on Woolf. To say, “though I am really making it happen” is ambiguous. It may mean that the memory of St. Ives is voluntary. I will myself to remember St. Ives. I want to remember St. Ives. Or it may mean that some mechanism in her 254 Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading

brain makes the memories happen involuntarily, as opposed to her sense that the memories are happening “independently.” If the latter is the case, however, Woolf is a spectator of something wholly outside herself and outside her control, like the images on a television screen. In any case, Woolf asserts that: “In certain favourable moods, memories— what one has forgotten—come to the top” (MB, 67). This adds the important feature of a prior forgetting. These are not events that remain, so to speak, on the surface of memory and that can be voluntarily remembered at any time. They have been forgotten completely. Now they suddenly “come to the top” and begin reenacting themselves as present occurrences in vivid detail before the mind’s eye. This recovery of the past is an essential part of the rhetoric of the soliloquies in The Waves. All the characters constantly bring up memories both good and bad, transformed into repeated phrases like Bernard’s “Leaning over this parapet I see far out a waste of water. A fin turns” (134). This motif is repeated a number of times in inexhaustible permutations. It even appears in one of the interludes: “as if a fin cut the green glass of a lake” (130). Here is an anachronistic analogue: present-day neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, brain specialists, and specialists in trauma have made good headway in locating where in the brain memories are stored and how even forgotten events once stored in the brain’s database may in various ways be called up. Often, as in studies of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by United States soldiers returned from Iraq or Afghanistan, the memories are of violence seen, done, or received that return involuntarily to haunt the sufferer and to cause anxiety, depression, and a proneness to domestic violence and even to suicide. Though Woolf may have suffered from that form of trauma Freud, following the medical science of his time, called “hysteria,” she asserts in these pages from “A Sketch of the Past” that the first two very early memories she calls up, or that are called up for her, were when they happened, and are when they spontaneously recur, experiences of “ecstasy,” of “rapture” (MB, 67). Woolf’s slightly later memories were traumatic in the Freudian or presentday neurological sense. The two mentioned are her shame at looking at herself in the mirror, a motif that recurs in The Waves, and her sexual abuse by her half-brother, Gerald Duckworth. She describes the latter in extraordinarily vivid detail. As in Freud’s analysis of the childhood sexual abuse by a close relative, often the father, which was suffered by the patients whose Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading 255

case histories are given in Studies in Hysteria, the full meaning of what was done to Woolf was not understood by her at the time, though it was instinctively resisted. Now she knows all about its meaning. It is amazing to me that Woolf had the courage to write this truly traumatic memory down in such detail. Freud would perhaps have claimed, as some recent Woolf scholars have argued, that this event was the origin of all her later psychological sufferings: There was a slab outside the dining room door for standing dishes upon. Once when I was very small Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this, and as I sat there he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking it— what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been strong, since I still recall it. This seems to show that a feeling about certain parts of the body; how they must not be touched; how it is wrong to allow them to be touched; must be instinctive. It proves that Virginia Stephen was not born on the 25th January 1882, but was born many thousands of years ago; and had from the very fi rst to encounter instincts already acquired by thousands of ancestresses in the past. (MB, 69) I find reading this passage moving. I include in what moves me the adult Woolf’s cool distancing of the “private” sexual invasion by universalizing it. Reading the passage is traumatic for me, too. One might call it “reader’s trauma.” In an apotropaic gesture, I try to put my trauma away from me by typing out the passage, just as Woolf may have hoped to do by writing her memory down. Woolf recognizes that the memories that come back to her so vividly, abruptly, and spontaneously, are of two kinds, ecstatic and traumatic. Both kinds are intense emotions. Both are often triggered by some resemblance in immediate sensation or perception to what happened in the past, as Freud says is the case with hysterical trauma. One kind is remembered as intense joy, ecstasy, rapture. The other is remembered as terror or distaste, as in her fear of her face in the mirror, or her memory of the abuse by Gerald Duckworth, or of her inability to step over a puddle or past a certain apple tree. 256

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One example of an ecstatic memory is of seeing a flower in the garden at St. Ives with spread out leaves that led Woolf to exclaim, “That is the whole” (MB, 71): “I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower” (MB, 71). Another example, the earliest of all, “is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St. Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. . . . It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive” (MB, 64, 65). Surely this last memory is the ultimate source of the interludes in The Waves. The waves crashing on the beach at St. Ives seem to have haunted Woolf’s buried memories and to have surfaced when she wrote The Waves. What Woolf says about memories in “A Sketch of the Past” is plausibly psychologistic. It makes sense to say that strong emotion at a given time, pleasurable or not, tags an event so that it recurs in memory ever after, time after time, in all its specificity. Woolf, however, draws quite remarkable conclusions from her experience of this return of repressed memories. These go well beyond any purely psychological explanation. Apropos of her assertion that in certain favorable moods, forgotten memories “come to the top,” Woolf says: Now if this is so, is it not possible—I often wonder—that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it—the past—as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There at the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug to into the wall; and listen in to the past. I shall turn up August 1890. I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start. (MB, 67) “Leave its trace” on what? Woolf’s answer is strong confirmation that my hypothesis about the soliloquies in The Waves is correct. For Woolf in that novel, once something has happened that is felt with great intensity, it goes Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading 257

on happening somewhere with an independent existence. Such events become like data stored in a hard drive, or, better still, like all the billions of fi les in the Internet that float around in cyberspace in innumerable backups, therefore without specific location. To retrieve these events one has only to “fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past,” just as I can listen in on iTunes to music that was recorded long ago. I can hear Glenn Gould, for example, brought back from the dead and playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations with fingers long since turned to dust. The anonymous and impersonal narrative voice of The Waves, which never says anything but “said Bernard,” or “said Jinny,” has plugged into an independently existing memory bank. That voice recovers at will a selection of the six personages’ dramatic soliloquies. They are all still taking place in the present tense, in an eternal repetition, over and over, without end. That includes all the intervening soliloquies that the narrative voice does not choose to pass on to the reader. Only a small selection is given. Is the narrative voice that says, “Bernard said” or “Rhoda said” the same voice that speaks the interludes? No way exists to tell for sure because the language of the interludes is completely impersonal. It might as well be the memory bank speaking, but the voice of the memory bank is also apparently what speaks “said Jinny” and “said Louis.” In both cases, the reader has been plugged in to the data bank by the words on the page. These words, by the way, the whole of The Waves, are available in an eBook for reading on a Kindle. I have that eBook in my computer’s hard drive. My anachronistic figures of hard drives and the Internet testify to the strange prescience of Woolf’s “fit a plug into the wall; and listen to the past.” Today we can do just that, as one could already with gramophone records in Woolf’s day. I claim that we should not resist the temptation to read old works in literature in the light of present knowledge and present technologies. It is going to happen anyway because we are children of our own time and of our own technologies, so why not take advantage of the insights these analogies afford? One fundamental feature of The Waves, however, is not accounted for in the passage from “A Sketch of the Past” I have been analyzing. This is the way all these memories reach the reader already turned into elaborate and highly figured language. It is as if they exist as always already turned into language. Woolf speaks not of language but rather of the way memories return as vision, like vivid images on a television screen, to adduce another 258 Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading

anachronistic analogue. A passage a few pages later in “A Sketch of the Past,” however, adds language to the paradigm as well as a quite extraordinary idea about a hidden and elusive order behind the surface of things. That idea appears intermittently, at important moments, in The Waves. Woolf has been talking about the way her capacity to receive shocks is what has made her a writer. One example of this “shock-receiving capacity” that “makes [her] a writer” (MB, 72) is given on the previous page. Woolf overheard at dinner her father or her mother say that Mr. Valpy (a temporary neighbor) has killed himself. This news becomes a traumatic shock only later, when intense despair is triggered by the sight of an apple tree in the garden: “The next thing I remember is being in the garden at night and walking on the path by apple tree. It seemed to me that the apple tree was connected with the horror of Mr Valpy’s suicide. I could not pass it. I stood there looking at the grey-green creases of the bark—it was a moonlit night—in a trance of horror. I seemed to be dragged down, hopelessly, into some pit of absolute despair from which I could not escape. My body seemed paralysed” (MB, 71). That trauma-triggering apple tree reappears more than once in The Waves, for example in Neville’s soliloquy when he has received the telegram announcing Perceval’s death: “I will stand for one moment beneath the immitigable tree, alone with the man whose throat is cut” (108). Woolf explains in “A Sketch of the Past” that life for her is, for the most part, “embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool” (MB, 70). She therefore dwells in “non-being” (MB, 70). Why does an unusual capacity to receive shocks that penetrate the cotton wool and to react hyperbolically to these shocks make Woolf a writer? “I hazard the explanation,” says Woolf, “that a shock is at once in my case followed my the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words” (MB, 72). Hidden order; some real thing or Ding an sich behind the phenomenal world—this is the language of metaphysics. Woolf goes on to add that: “It is only by putting it [the shock] into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading 259

a scene come right; making a character come together” (MB, 72). Woolf here speaks of the operation of literary composition as a performative enunciation, as a speech act in J. L. Austin’s sense. By putting a shock into words I turn pain into pleasure. It is a way of doing something with words. Just why putting a shock into words, thereby making it part of an explanatory pattern, should take away the pain is a little puzzling. Literary composition as pain-killer! This is a wonderful but somewhat problematic idea! I have mentioned previously, however, how writing a trauma down may be a way of dealing with it. Such writing down makes trauma reasonable. Woolf goes on to make this idea more plausible. It has sounded so far as if the creation of a pattern is all the constructive work of the author, the true maker. By putting a shock into words, I make it whole, by a kind of inventio or free invention. Now, in the climax of this passage, that formulation is suddenly reversed. Inventio as free invention becomes inventio as discovery, according to the other meaning of this antithetical word. Formulations that had stressed the performative power of literary language now regress to seeing that language as mimetic, representational, a tropological system. It is the exact opposite of the transition Paul de Man finds in Kant from constative or cognitive language to performative language as he shifts from the mathematical sublime to the dynamic sublime. The true world, Woolf now says, is always already a “pattern,” a work of art. The writer or composer or artist does no more than discover the already existing words or other signs that put emotive shocks in relation to this universal order. The artist is a copyist, not a creator. It is a striking reversal. “From this I reach,” writes Woolf, “what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art” (MB, 72). An extraordinary claim, echoing perhaps Mallarmé’s famous claim that the whole world exists to be turned into a work of art! The difference is that for Woolf the whole world is always already put into the words or other patterned signs of an all-inclusive work of art. An individual artwork, musical, literary or, by implication, graphic, does no more than reveal the truth about that hidden artwork. Writers, musicians, or artists exist only as temporary embodiments of this universal artwork we call the world. “Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet,” says Woolf, “is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; 260 Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading

certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock” (MB, 72). Amazing formulations! Th is sequence of sentences confi rms what I said about plugging into a vast hard drive or Internet-size database that is always already worded or patterned, not just existing as phantasmagoric memory visions. The Waves is made of segments of this database that are downloaded and put on the page to tell the stories of the six characters in the novel. Woolf emphasizes both in The Waves and in the passages I have cited from “A Sketch of the Past” the way access to this reservoir is intermittent and elusive. It takes a shock to open the door. Th is conception, says Woolf in the fi nal sentences about her conception of literature, “proves that one’s life is not confi ned to one’s body and what one says and does; one is living all the time in relation to certain background rods [“rods”? Is this a misprint? For what?] or conceptions. Mine is that there is a pattern hid behind the cotton wool” (MB, 73). Passages in “A Sketch of the Past” confirm the hypothesis I had reached inductively to account for the distinctive narratological and stylistic features of The Waves. A final evidence that I am right is the way all the characters in The Waves, to different degrees and in different ways, are haunted with the sense of a secret absent center to which they are attached and that they glimpse but cannot reach. It is a little as if the characters in a Victorian novel, say one by Trollope, were, absurdly, to become aware that their every thought and feeling is telepathically known by an “omniscient” narrator. The absent center in The Waves is expressed, for example, in Perceval’s empty chair after he has died, as well as in recurrent formulations, some of which I have cited. In one place Louis asserts, in a passage already cited: “The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared” (28). Reading The Waves, we share in them. We join the strange kind of (non)community that they constitute.

A N A LO G U E S F O R W O O L F ’S I D E A O F P LU G G I N G I N

Does anything at all like Woolf’s strange idea of an already worded reservoir of events of consciousness exist in any other philosophers, critics, or writers? I shall briefly adduce five, in chronological order, to assist the reader in understanding what Woolf asserts about that memory bank. Three of these five were impossible for Woolf to have known because they Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading 261

wrote after her death, but two (Husserl and James) were her contemporaries. Those two had ideas similar to her own, but different, that she might possibly have encountered. The five I’m referring to are: Edmund Husserl, Henry James, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Wolfgang Iser— unlikely bedfellows! Husserl in The Origin of Geometry had the strange notion of “ideal objects.” An example is the ideal triangle that exists before and after any inscribed triangles or any triangular objects, as their ghostly paradigm. James, in the Preface for the New York Edition of The Golden Bowl, asserts, by way of an extravagant figure of footsteps put on a field of untrodden snow, that the text of the novel pre-exists its writing down. He discovers this when he rereads the novel in view of rewriting it for the New York Edition. In rereading he compares the text with an ideal text that precedes any physical writing down and continues to exist thereafter. Blanchot wrote a brief text about The Waves. In “Two Versions of the Imaginary” (“Les deux versions de l’imaginaire”), and in “The Song of the Sirens” (“Le chant des Sirènes”), he asserts the existence of a dangerous realm of the imaginary, of the image, toward which narratives move at their peril as both what they are “about” and as what will destroy them. The Waves would exemplify in its own distinctive way this central Blanchotian presupposition. Iser, in The Fictive and the Imaginary (Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre: Perspektiven literarische Anthropologie), posits the existence of a third realm different from either the real or the fictive. He calls this “the imaginary.” The imaginary, he says, “is basically a featureless and inactive potential” in human beings for dreams, “fantasies, projections, daydreams, and other reveries” (Phantasmen, Projektionen und Tagträumen), as well as for activating fictions. To follow up my computer and Internet analogy, Iser’s imaginary is like an empty hard disk or database waiting to be fi lled with data. Derrida, finally, in “The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations” (Ponctuations: le temps de la thèse), asserts that his early thesis project was to bend Husserl’s concept of ideal mathematical objects to literature. “It was then for me,” says Derrida, “a matter of bending [ployer], more or less violently, the techniques of transcendental phenomenology to the needs of elaborating a new theory of literature, of that very peculiar [très particulier] type of ideal object that is the literary object, a bound ideality [idéalité ‘enchaînée’] Husserl would have said, bound in so-called ‘natural’ language, a non-mathematical 262

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or non-mathematizable object, and yet one that differs from the objects of plastic or musical art, that is to say from all of the examples privileged by Husserl in his analyses of ideal objectivity.” To distinguish among these five, particularly in the different roles of language in the “imaginary” realms they posit, and to identify their similarity and difference from Virginia Woolf’s idea that the whole world is a work of art, would be a long business. I conclude by stressing that for all six the ideality of the literary object is neither a standard Platonism nor a conventional religious concept, even though it is, in different ways for each, a modern version of the Platonic realm of Ideas and of the Christian Heaven. All, nevertheless, would agree with Woolf when she says, “certainly and emphatically there is no God,” though saying that does not ensure disbelief.

CO N C LU S I O N

I have proposed a reading of The Waves that focuses on the strange notion of a universal community stored in a magical database that preserves every human thought, feeling, and perception. I have briefly shown Woolf’s resonance in this with some other early twentieth-century authors. I also have shown that The Waves invites two contradictory readings between which it is impossible to decide. One sees the text as performative. The other sees it as constative. On the one hand, the database may be created by Woolf’s speech acts. On the other hand, her words may represent referentially an already existing database. The reader cannot confirm which of those models is the true one because the database remains absent. No direct access to it is possible. The magic plugin does not yet exist. Do I believe in the second of those models, that is, in Woolf’s strange theory of an all-inclusive database of the imaginary? I neither believe nor disbelieve. I only report what I have found. Jacques Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge” (Foi et Savoir) and Paul de Man’s essay on Rousseau’s Profession de foi have persuaded me that those who say they disbelieve cannot prevent themselves from believing. Knowledge does not forbid faith, nor cognition prevent the performative “I believe.” The Waves is a striking example of the true strangeness of literature and of ideas about literature, including representation of communities in fictions.

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6 POSTMODERN COMMUNITIES I N P Y N C H O N A N D C E R VA N T E S

I know that you are a rational being, and I see you in the form of a dog, unless this is done through the art that they call Tropelia, which makes one thing appear to be another. —Cañizares in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” We have met the enemy, and he is us. —Walt Kelley, Pogo My goal in this chapter is, by the art they call Tropelia, to make Cervantes’s “The Dogs’ Colloquy” appear to be a postmodern narrative, if there is such a thing. I also want to view postmodern communities in fiction in the light of a comparison with Cervantes’s great “exemplary novel.” Why would I want to make such a comparison? It is partly because I want to explore my doubts about the utility of the term “postmodern” when applied to narratives, beyond its function as a purely chronological designation. It is partly, also, because my perspective on “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is, after all, that of a postmodern person, if there is such a thing. Or rather, to tell the truth, I think of myself as a post-postmodern person, that is, a person of the age of globalization, of universal terror, and of cyberspace, the time of worldwide tele-techno-communications and the universal surveillance they facilitate. We are no longer postmodern. As a post-postmodern person, I am likely to see ways Cervantes’s great short story fits my own time and my own presuppositions about narrative. I may be able to see things in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” that early seventeenth-century readers might not have noticed or seen

as important. My slightly later temporal placement than the heyday of postmodernism may also give me some perspective on the so-called “postmodern condition.”

I N T E G R AT I N G “ T H E S E C R E T I N T E G R AT I O N ”

What are the presumed distinguishing features of a postmodern narrative? I shall take Thomas Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration,” from his book of early stories, Slow Learner, as an exemplary early postmodern narrative. I am aware that so-called postmodern narratives are extremely numerous and diverse. Any claim that a given text is “exemplary” begs some questions, to say the least. That is true of Cervantes’s “Exemplary Novels” (Novelas ejemplares) as well. Of what are they exemplary? In spite of those problems, I propose to show that “The Secret Integration” exemplifies many of postmodern narratives’ features as scholars have identified them. First, however, I must ask, “What is the postmodern condition?” This is the social condition, presumably, that postmodern narratives reflect or critique by bringing it to light in a story that deploys certain narrative techniques. A full bibliography would be extensive. I shall stick with some classic early books on the topic. For Jean-François Lyotard, the postmodern condition is characterized, among other things, by the absence or disqualification of any more or less universally accepted grand narrative. David Harvey stresses the political and economic changes from 1972 on, with concomitant changes in our experience of space and time. For Fredric Jameson, the postmodern condition is determined by economic factors and by concomitant cultural factors associated with late capitalism, or what he calls “the world space of multinational capital.” The postmodern condition, as the first sentence of his Postmodernism stresses, is also fundamentally a forgetting of history, while the “concept of the postmodern” is “an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.” To think historically is to investigate empirically present ideologies, what people believe out there in the real social and political world, not to think philosophically, according to Kant’s distinction between “metaphysics” and “transcendental philosophy.” To think historically would include, apparently, thinking about how architecture expresses the ideologies of a given historical moment because architecture is, for Jameson, so important an example of the postmodern. Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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For Jameson, the postmodern condition is one thing; postmodernism as a cultural and intellectual style, is another. The latter is an attempt to bring the postmodern condition out of hiding, into awareness. It should come to light as a consciousness of history in the present, or as a way of thinking the present historically. The distinction between the postmodern condition and postmodernism as a style of thought or making is an important one. The postmodern condition is a mute and unthinking forgetting of history within global capitalism. Postmodernism as an intellectual and aesthetic style is a way of thinking about the postmodern condition or of representing it in the arts, in what passes for philosophy, in theory, and in criticism. What, then, are the special features of postmodern narratives? I would alter Jameson’s categories a bit to list the following as the most salient and distinctive features of postmodern narrative: pastiche, that is, an incoherent mixture of styles from different periods; parody of previous styles; extravagant use of allusion; mixing of genres; depthlessness; lack of affect (or, I should prefer to say, a shift to that peculiar kind of ironic affect called “cool”); attenuation of the “omniscient narrator,” or, to put it more precisely, use of a telepathic narrator who does not pass judgment or proffer interpretation; discontinuity, that is, narration through short episodes separated by breaks; “preposterous” (in the etymological sense) time shifts by way of metalepsis, prolepsis, or analepsis, flashbacks and flashforwards; use of interpolated stories, usually told by one or another of the characters; abrupt changes or shifts in register or tone; a high degree of indirection, so that the real story is told offstage, as it were, by hints and innuendos, as a story beneath the story; a degree of hallucinatory anti-realism, or “surrealism,” or what has more recently been called “magic realism”: “magic” events are told in a straightforward “realistic” style; or, to put this in a slightly different way, an odd sort of half-ironic, but only half-ironic, persistence of the religious, the superstitious, the magical, the supernatural; an exuberant, hyperbolic use of comedy, farce, or anarchic social explosions; the use of one sort or another of a frame story that both controls, interprets, and at the same time ironically undercuts the story proper; a focus on the experience of outsiders or underdogs, the “wretched of the earth”; a sense of the community as turned against itself, self-sacrificially, or in a suicidal way, in what Derrida calls a process of autoimmune self-destruction; a problematic sense of what it means to make an ethical decision or to take ethical responsibility; some direct or indirect calling attention to problems of fictionality or 266 Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

virtuality, that is, a turning of the narrative back on itself to raise questions about its own mode of existence and its social function. All these features, as I shall show, are present in Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration.” The problem with designating them as distinctively postmodern is exemplified by what happens when you look at Cervantes’s “The Dogs’ Colloquy” in their light, as I shall also show. I am not denying that there are thematic and historical differences between the two stories. Each work is in a multitude of ways embedded in its own historical place and time. I am mindful of Jameson’s slogan: “Always historicize.” Nevertheless, if form generates meaning, as I think it does, big problems with the concept of “postmodern narrative” arise when you set the two stories side by side. Let me now demonstrate that as best I can, and then draw some conclusions. Terrorism in “The Secret Integration”? First, I shall offer a reading of “The Secret Integration,” taking it as an indubitably postmodern narrative that will establish, so to speak, a baseline, a measuring rod to set against “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” Lots of other examples could have been be adduced, for example Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Morrison’s masterwork exemplifies the features of the postmodern I have mentioned, but in somewhat different ways from Pynchon’s. Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration,” however, has the advantage of being shorter and simpler. “The Secret Integration” was published in 1964, a time early in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. It was a year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy (1963), four years before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968) and the widespread riots and demonstrations protesting segregation that followed. These led to the Civil Rights legislation that has changed the United States markedly, though we still in 2014 have a long way to go. “Equal opportunities” for women, African Americans, and Hispanics are not yet fully available, to put it mildly. A recent Supreme Court decision will set voting rights for African Americans and other minorities back to where they were decades ago. Pynchon’s story was first published in The Saturday Evening Post. That was a widely circulated American family magazine of the time. My middle class professional parents subscribed to it when I was a child, back in the forties. I read the stories in it. The frame story, if it can be called that, for “The Secret Integration” is Pynchon’s somewhat equivocal remarks about it in the Introduction of 1984 Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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to Slow Learner. Pynchon is sharply and ironically critical of his early short stories in that Introduction, though he also gives them a historical context. Those stories, he says, were his envious response as a young university-trained writer to the wider experience and scope of the “Beat” writers. How could he match Ginsberg or Kerouac? Pynchon also has a lot of harsh things to say about the immaturity of style in these early stories, about the wooden dialogue, about what he calls his “tin ear” for the way people really talk in the United States, about his disastrous attempts to write about things concerning which he knew little, and so on. He also, somewhat surprisingly, to me at least, says he was influenced by a misunderstanding of surrealism, based on college courses on the topic. Pynchon was a Cornell University undergraduate, like Harold Bloom somewhat earlier. Imagine having either in a class you were teaching! “A Secret Integration,” says Pynchon, was written somewhat later than the other four stories in Slow Learner. The latter were undergraduate apprentice efforts, while “The Secret Integration” was “journeyman” work. Pynchon admits to a grudging admiration for “The Secret Integration.” Nevertheless, he deplores the surrealist sequences and the decision to shift the locus from Long Island, where he grew up, to the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He had, even at the time of the Introduction, never even visited the Berkshires. He knew about them only through reading a volume put out in the 1930s by the Federal Writers Project of the WPA. “WPA” stands for Work Projects Administration. Th is was a Roosevelt New Deal government entity of the Great Depression that put the unemployed to work. You should write about your personal life, says Pynchon, not about some place you have never visited: “[T]he fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live. I hate to think that I didn’t, however defectively, understand this. Maybe the rent was just too high. [I guess he means this was too difficult to do.] In any case, stupid kid, I preferred fancy footwork instead” (21). Pynchon’s commitment to “realistic representation” seems complete and unabashed. In spite of these demurrers, Pynchon admits to a kind of grudging admiration for “The Secret Integration”: “. . . for the first time I believe I was . . . beginning to shut up and listen to the American voices around me, even to 268 Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

shift my eyes away from printed sources and take a look at American nonverbal reality. . . . [T]here are parts of it I can’t believe I wrote. Sometime in the last couple of decades, some company of elves must have snuck in and had a crack at it” (22). The effect of all this attractively self-deprecatory framing is that the reader of “The Secret Integration,” if she or he has read the Introduction first, approaches the story warily, from a distance, holding it at arm’s length as self-confessed “journeyman work.” I have mentioned the relatively straightforward commitment to mimetic realism in Pynchon’s introduction. You ought to reflect in words as accurately as possible your own experience of the world, of people and society. Note also that Pynchon carefully says nothing whatsoever about the subject matter or meaning of “The Secret Integration.” You are left entirely on your own as far as reading and judging the story goes. “The Secret Integration” tells the story of an adolescent “gang” of four boys who meet in solemn secrecy in a hideout in the basement of an abandoned mansion in the Berkshires as the “Inner Junta” fomenting a complex plot against the “institutions” and “schemes” of the adults around them. Their leader is a “boy genius” named Grover Snodd who is already attending college. “It tickled Grover,” the narrator says, “any time he could interfere with the scheming of grownups” (144). He hates the Tom Swift books. He sees them as an adult conspiracy to indoctrinate him in the virtues of capitalism, which indeed they are. The four boys are addicted to “practical jokes.” They especially have it in for the railroad, the school, and the PTA (Parent Teachers Association). They spend years meeting in secret, practicing “dry runs,” and planning. Their weapons are sodium stolen from the chemistry lab at school, which explodes on contact with water, and a diver’s suit with the aid of which one of the four has roiled up the water in the stream that feeds the local paper mill and shut down production for a week. One of the boys has also lobbed small bits of sodium by slingshot from a tree into a swimming pool at a big estate during a party there, with wonderfully satisfying results when the sodium explodes. They have succeeded in stopping a train by turning on green spotlights and having twenty-five kids in monster masks suddenly appear in the light to alarm the engineer when the train approaches. They are also recruiting grade school children to train for elaborately planned simultaneous attacks on the school, small “terrorists,” one might say. Their goal is to bring adult institutions to a halt. Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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At the present time of the story, the boys are planning for the third year of Operation Spartacus, named for the film, “the third dry run for the real uprising of the slaves, referred to only as Operation A” (155). Grover tells his uncomprehending fellow-conspirators that the “A” stands for “Abattoir” and, with chilling foresight, “Armageddon” (155). The adolescent gang that ran with such solemnity the United States during the George W. Bush regime, playacting as if they were adults, believed, some of them, that the end of the world was at hand. Such acts as the war in Iraq were, some people thought, benignly doing the Lord’s work and helping to bring on Armageddon, when the streets will run in blood and the saved will be rapt into heaven from a hilltop, preferably David’s mount in Jerusalem. Happily, we no longer hear much about these fantasies now, in 2014, though I doubt if they have vanished completely. Today we would call, only half-ironically, a group such as Pynchon’s gang of four a “terrorist cell.” They would get in big trouble with the Department of Homeland Security. Pynchon is remarkably prescient in identifying the gleeful deadly adolescent destructiveness that, along with their religious beliefs, motivates today’s terrorist groups, suicide bombers, and those youths who kill their fellow students, as in the Columbine school massacre, or, later, the man who shot seven of his fellow worshippers and then himself at a church ser vice, or, more recently still, a seventeen-year-old who shot his grandparents, seven people at his school, and then himself, or the even more recent Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. “Let’s see,” such a terrorist cell might say, “how can we bring down the World Trade Centers? That would be an attack on the prime symbol of global capitalism. How about using hijacked commercial airplanes? Great idea. Let’s start planning that.” After 9/11 Osama bin Laden was quoted as saying he was surprised the plot had worked so well. The difference, and it is a big difference, is that Pynchon’s adolescent terrorists, according to the narrator, know that they will never be able to bring themselves to commit real acts of violence against their parents or parent surrogates such as teachers or policemen. The telepathic narrator says this explicitly, in so many words. Note that I do not say “omniscient narrator.” The narrator speaks in free indirect discourse for what the boys know without quite admitting it to themselves, but he or it does not pass all-knowing sovereign judgment:

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They knew by now, their third year at it, that the reality would turn out to be considerably less than the plot, that something inert and invisible, something they could not be cruel to or betray (though who would have gone so far as to call it love?) would always be between them and any clear or irreversible step. . . . Because everybody on the school board, and the railroad, and the PTA and paper mill had to be somebody’s mother or father, whether really or as a member of a category; and there was a point at which the reflex to their covering warmth, protection, effectiveness against bad dreams, bruised heads and simple loneliness took over and made worthwhile anger with them impossible. (188–9) So much for Pynchon’s adolescent junta as an effective terrorist cell! The passage also plausibly explains why most rebellious children are, in Pynchon’s view at that time, eventually assimilated into the adult community, for better or worse. What is different in these post-postmodern days is the frequency with which the “clear or irreversible step” is taken and another massacre or terrorist act occurs. Community belonging seems no longer to have the force it seemed to have even in the time of Pynchon’s early stories.

Just Who or What Is Secretly Integrated? Matters are not quite so simple with this story, however. “The Secret Integration” can by no means be summed up as a story about growing up and joining the community. The title indirectly tells the reader that. The narration of the boys’ secret and ineffectual plotting against society is a cover for a quite different story about United States racism at that particular moment in its history. One episode, recounted as a flashback, narrates the boys’ encounter, in a hotel room, with an African American alcoholic jazz musician named Carl McAfee. The police eventually haul McAfee off to jail as a vagrant, even though he is sick from withdrawal symptoms. He has no money to pay for his hotel or for the bottle of whiskey he orders, in spite of the boys’ attempts to stop him. His story is a vivid example of the brutal and unjust treatment of African Americans by the police, then as now. More central to the story, however, is Carl Barrington, an African American kid. This boy, so it seems, has recently moved into the neighborhood. He is immediately accepted on an equal footing into the gang. The other

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boys are shown to be without racial prejudice. They rather admire Carl’s color and associate it “with all color”: “When Tim thought about Carl he always saw him against blazing reds and ochres of this early fall” (162). The boys’ spontaneous tolerance is explicitly opposed to the racism of the Tom Swift books. Grover deplores that: “You know this colored servant Tom Swift has, remember,” he says to the other boys, “named Eradicate Sampson. Rad for short. The way he treats that guy, it’s disgusting. Do they want me to read that stuff so I’ll be like that?” (145). The boys’ parents, on the contrary, along with almost all the other white middle class adults in the community, are frightened and appalled by the Barringtons’ arrival. They immediately start talking about “blockbusting” and “integration.” Tim overhears his mother making a violently abusive and threatening phone call to the Barringtons: “ ‘You niggers,’ his mother spat out suddenly, ‘dirty niggers, get out of this town, go back to Pittsfield. Get out before you get in real trouble’ ” (147). At the climax of the story, the boys walk Carl Barrington home after a junta meeting and find that their parents and other citizens have covered the Barringtons’ lawn with garbage. The boys identify the refuse as having come from their own homes. At this point, just before the end, the meaning of “The Secret Integration” seems clear enough. Jacques Derrida affirms that it is a law of communities in general that they are victims of the disease called “autoimmunity.” The communities’ immune system, developed to keep the community safe and pure, immune from invasion by dangerous outsiders, turns against itself in suicidal self-destruction. Derrida asserts, in “Faith and Knowledge,” that “the auto-immunitary haunts the community and its system of immunitary survival like the hyperbole of its own possibility. Nothing in common, nothing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of auto-immunity. . . . Community as com-mon auto-immunity: no community that would not cultivate its own auto-immunity, a principle of sacrificial selfdestruction ruining the principle of self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact), and this in view of some sort of invisible and spectral sur-vival.” Suicidal autoimmunity exists in two registers in “The Secret Integration.” It exists in a parodic and ultimately harmless form as the relation of the secret community of children to the adult community they plot to deconstruct. It exists in a more deadly serious form as United States racism, inherited 272

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from the evil of slavery. This endemic racism turns the boys’ parents in hatred against their own neighbors and fellow citizens who happen to be African American. The boys’ hidden community within the adult community, the story seems to be saying, has escaped this racism. It offers a model of a democracy to come, beyond the autoimmunitary, in the “secret integration” of their brotherly affection for Carl Barrington. Pynchon, in a characteristic play on words, draws an analogy between racial integration and the only meaning of the word integration the boy genius, Grover, at first knows. He knows it, as perhaps my readers do, as a term used in integral calculus for the division of a curve into infinitesimally small parts that can then be manipulated in various calculations: “What’s integration mean?” Tim asked Grover. “The opposite of differentiation,” Grover said, drawing an x-axis, y-axis and curve on his greenboard. “Call this the function of x. Consider values of the curve at tiny little increments of x”—drawing straight vertical lines from the curve down to the x-axis, like the bars of a jail cell—“you can have as many of these as you want, see, as close together as you want.” “Till it’s all solid,” Tim said. “No, it never gets solid. If this was a jail cell, and those lines were bars, and whoever was behind it could make himself any size he wanted to be, he could always make himself skinny enough to get free. No matter how close together the bars were.” “This is integration,” said Tim. “The only kind I ever heard of,” said Grover. (186–7) Racial integration, according to this somewhat strange analogy, makes the bars of the barrier between blacks and whites permeable, so that black people can always come through that barrier and be integrated, just as the boys have let Carl Barrington become a full-fledged member of their gang. This makes their junta a kind of ideal, visionary, utopian, messianic, egalitarian, classless community. Pynchon’s message appears to be that we should all be like these boys: “Out of the mouths of babes!” They have spontaneously made the correct ethical decision by accepting Carl, whereas their elders have acted in a deeply unethical and suicidal autoimmunitary fashion by rejecting the black family that has moved into their community. The community has acted like a body that develops antibodies, destroying its own organs or tissues, as in diabetes or arthritis. Derrida uses a metaphor drawn Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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from medicine that originally named a social relation. Criminals who take sanctuary in a church are immune from arrest. In a similar way, as Pynchon recognizes, the social relation of minority integration uses a term drawn from mathematics. Those lines in Grover’s graph, however, can be seen as bars of a jail cell, such as the one in which McAfee was imprisoned. Racial integration would allow him to slip through those bars. In both Derrida’s autoimmunitary and Pynchon’s integration a complex social structure is named, and perhaps can only be named, by way of a system of tropological displacements in which literal and figurative change places bewilderingly. This is a feature of ideologies, not of critical philosophy. Another such figure is the trope of the organically unified body. This has been a powerful political metaphor since Plato and Aristotle, as in “body politic.” That figure comes up in this story when Grover explains to the other boys the meaning of the word “coordination”: “It means your arms and legs and head all work together in gym, and it’s the same for us, in this thing, for a gang like ours, as it is for the parts of your body” (154). The Ghost in “The Secret Integration” Matters are not quite so simple in “The Secret Integration,” however. I have said that some use of the supernatural, of ghosts and revenants, along with “magic realism,” is a feature of postmodern narrative. Initially, the most obvious use of the supernatural in “The Secret Integration” is the story of the spectral seven foot booted and spurred cavalry officer with a shotgun who haunts the woods the boys must go through to get to their hideout in the ruined mansion. This ghost was the “fiercely loyal aide” (160) of King Yrjö, a refugee from a “hardly real shadow state” (160) somewhere in Europe. King Yrjö had arrived in the middle thirties, that is, in the time of Stalin in Russia and the rise of Nazism in Germany. He had bought the woods with a bucketful of jewels, so the story went. The boys both believe and do not believe in the specter. This is the correct attitude, since, as Derrida says in a seminar, if you really believe, then it is no longer a ghost: “They’d since been all over the place and had seen no definite trace of him, though plenty of ambiguous ones. Which didn’t disprove his existence, but did mean that they’d found the perfect place for a hideout. Real or make-believe, the giant cavalryman became their protector” (161). It is easy to dismiss the seven foot cavalry officer as a harmless collective adolescent fantasy. 274

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More difficult to account for, however, and more important, is the reader’s gradual (or sudden) discovery that Carl Barrington is also a fantasy, a phantom. I must admit that Pynchon fooled me. Carl is presented as much as a solid flesh and blood person as any of the other characters. That he turns out to be a ghost may remind the reader that the other boys are fantasies too, products of Pynchon’s imagination. The other three members of the gang go, out of curiosity, to look at the house into which the black family has moved. There they meet, “leaning against a steel street light,” a kid who “was kind of rangy and dark, and he was wearing a sweater.” He tells them, “snapping his fingers for it,” that his name is “Carl. Yeah, Carl Barrington” (187). Thereafter he acts like one of the gang, and is accepted by them as such. He has, for example, a sharp skill at dropping water balloons from an overpass so they hit right on the windshields of the cars beneath. He can manipulate Grover’s “ham” radio, and so on. Only at the end, in the scene when the four boys find the Barrington lawn covered with garbage, do the more or less covert previous hints climax in a revelation that Carl is a collective fantasy of the boys, a specter, a phantom. He is a fiction they have unconsciously made up. They let Carl go back alone in the rain to the hideout, realizing that they have broken the spell and will never see him again. They “took leave of Carl Barrington, abandoning him to the old estate’s other attenuated ghosts [such as that seven foot cavalry officer] and its precarious shelter” (193). Only as Carl leaves, at the very end of the story, does the narrator expose the deception on which the whole story turns: Everything Carl said, they knew. It had to be that way. He was what grownups, if they’d known, would have called an “imaginary playmate.” His words were the kids’ own words, his gestures too, the faces he made, the times he had to cry, the way he shot baskets; all given by them an amplification or grace they expected to grow into presently. Carl had been put together out of phrases, images, possibilities that grownups had somehow turned away from, repudiated, left out at the edges of towns, as if they were auto parts in Étienne’s father’s junkyard—things they could [not?] or did not want to live with but which the kids, on the other hand, could spend endless hours with, piecing together, rearranging, feeding, programming, refining. He was entirely theirs, their friend and robot, to cherish, buy undrunk sodas for, or send into danger, or even, as now, at last, to banish from their sight. (192) Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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This passage is a perfect description of the way ideological phantasms are created, that is, out of bits and pieces of the creators’ own imaginations and presumptions. An example would be the conservatives’ images, nowadays, of the lazy, good-for-nothing moocher or “taker” living on food stamps, unemployment insurance, and free medical treatment. Ghosts are intimately connected to ideology formations, as we know from Karl Marx’s The German Ideology and from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. An ideology formation is a ghost, something both there and not there. It is a spectral appearance that may nevertheless have decisive effects in the real social world, for example in votes to end food stamps or Medicaid for the poor. The careful, though perhaps naïve, reader (like me) at this point may go back in disbelief to see whether anything earlier prepared for the revelation that Carl is a ghost. Not one word in the narration suggests that Carl is not tangible and active, a physical presence. He is not transparent, for example, nor given to fading away before your eyes. He does not at all behave as a true specter should. The narrator says nothing, or almost nothing, to give the secret away. Carl is described, for example, without any apparent irony, as sitting quietly in school “in a seat in the corner that had been empty,” though it may seem to little odd to the reader that “the teacher never called on him” (188). That is because, the reader belatedly realizes, Carl is not there at all for the adults. That also explains the “funny look” (190) the lady behind the counter at the drug store gives them when they order “four lemon-limes with water” (190). For her only three boys are sitting at the counter. The reader may then start putting two and two together, for example noticing the way the adults, including Mrs. Barrington herself, are quoted as saying the Barrington’s have no children. An odd reported episode, in the string of achronologically presented episodes that may seem at first just a recounting at random of the wild things these adolescent boys have done, tells how two of the three boys, Tim and Étienne, the previous summer had hopped a freight to Pittsfield to go to a shop that sells the paraphernalia of practical jokes. There they bought two clip-on mustaches and two little tins of blackface makeup. Étienne, one of the gang, when asked why they were buying just those items, answered, “without thinking,” “We’re trying to resurrect a friend” (186). At that point the reader may remember that Mr. McAfee, the black alcoholic “vagrant” jazz player the boys have encountered in a hotel room, is named Carl and has a small mustache. Carl Barrington, the reader realizes, 276

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is the successful resurrection of Carl McAfee. The boys have invoked him, called him into existence as a more manageable version of the real thing. The boys can imagine Carl Barrington in any they like and as doing anything they like. Carl is their “robot.” The real thing, however, is the unmanageable alienation and otherness of black people in America, their experience of a dispossession and humiliation that white people can never really understand. The narrator stresses the way the boys’ encounter with Carl McAfee is traumatic for them, since it gives them “a hint . . . of just how lost Mr. McAfee really was” (183). The result of Tim’s encounter with Mr. McAfee is that his “foot felt the edge of a certain abyss which he had been walking close to—for who knew how long?—without knowing. He looked over it, got afraid, and shied away” (183). The boys’ resurrection of Carl McAfee as Carl Barrington is the form that shying away takes. Carl Barrington as Ideological Formation What is the reader to make of his or her discovery that Carl Barrington is not real at all, but an imaginary playmate? Carl is a phantom only the boys can see, something made up out of “words, images, possibilities that grownups had somehow turned away from, repudiated, left out at the edges of towns, as if they were auto parts in Étienne’s father’s junkyard.” Carl is the boys’ “friend and robot, to cherish, buy undrunk sodas for, or send into danger, or even, as now, at last, to banish from their sight.” Unlike Carl McAfee or the nasty, frightened, destructive, suicidal racial prejudices of their parents, Carl Barrington is entirely in the boys’ control. Carl, one might say, has only a verbal or ideological reality. The narrator stresses the mechanical way he is put together. He is fragmentary. He is a creature of bricolage. He is constructed as if from bits and pieces from a junkyard, things the adults have declared to be inassimilable debris, things that must be put outside the safe enclosure of the community, in order to keep the community pure, secure, immune, indemnified. The junk must be sacrificed, in a form of scapegoating. Black people in America are treated like such excluded and inassimilable debris or waste. This junk, nevertheless, has a way of persisting beyond its exclusion and forgetting. It survives its banishment. It returns like a ghostly revenant to haunt those who have excluded it. The boys put Carl Barrington together as a virtual reality out of these fragments, traces. In being constructed out of Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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discarded bits and pieces of words, images, and possibilities (one might call them “ideologemes”), Carl is something like “The Secret Integration” itself. The story is put together out of a seemingly random series of events presented out of proper temporal order. A meaning automatically or mechanically emerges from the juxtaposition. Of course Pynchon behind the scenes has cunningly constructed the story as a machine that will generate just that meaning in the right readers. So, however, have the boys’ “unconscious” secretly constructed Carl Barrington to satisfy certain desires. Both the story, as words on the pages, and Carl Barrington, as a character within the story, exhibit what Jacques Derrida calls “survivance,” not “survival,” but “surviving,” a kind of active/passive living on. Both are made of traces in the Derridean sense, the printed words in whatever copy of Slow Learner happens to fall into my hands, and evidence remaining of the community’s discarded cultural fragment: “phrases, images, possibilities that grownups had somehow turned away from, repudiated, left out at the edges of towns.” That detritus, however, ineluctably survives as the means of manufacturing Carl or of putting together the words of the story. Both survive as “dead/alive,” as phantoms, as the living dead. These stand ready to be resurrected whenever any reader breathes the breath of life into the story. Speaking, in the fift h of his last seminars, the second set on “The Beast and the Sovereign,” of the way Robinson Crusoe, the character, and Robinson Crusoe, the book, are buried alive and devoured alive, just as Robinson feared would happen to him, but nevertheless both survive, Derrida says: Now this survival, thanks to which the book bearing this title (Robinson Crusoe) has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated, fi lmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead. As indeed is any trace, in the sense I give this word and concept, a book is living dead, buried alive and swallowed up alive. And the machination of this machine, the origin of all tekhnè, and in it of any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each time a trace, however singular, is left behind, and even before we trace it actively or deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or other trace, well, this machinality virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the opposition of the living and the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The book lives its beautiful death. 278

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Or cette survie, grâce à laquelle le livre qui porte ce titre [Robinson Crusoe] nous est parvenu, a été lu et sera lu, interprété, enseigné, sauvé, traduit, réimprimé, illustré, filmé, maintenu en vie par des millions d’héritiers, cette survie est bien celle d’un mort vivant. Comme d’ailleurs toute trace, au sens que je donne à ce mot et à ce concept, un livre est un mort vivant, enterré vivant et englouti vivant. Et la machination de cette machine, origine de toute tekhnè, comme en elle, de tout tour, de chaque tour, de chaque re-tour, de chaque roue, c’est que chaque fois que nous traçons une trace, chaque fois qu’une trace, si singulière soit-elle, est laissée, et avant même que nous ne la tracions activement ou délibérément, une trace gestuelle, verbale, écrite ou autre, eh bien cette machinalité confie virtuellement la trace à la sur-vie dans laquelle l’opposition du vif et du mort perd et doit perdre toute pertinence, tout tranchant. Le livre vit de sa belle mort. This image of dead/alive survival of everything that has left its trace is incarnated these days in the Internet, as Derrida goes on to specify. He did not, however, anticipate explicitly the use now of the Internet and other metadatabases for wide-scale surveillance or spying, though he did recognize the power of the Internet for terrorist activities. It did not occur to him, apparently, that the United States might use that same power—for example, in the notorious use of computers to destroy Iranian uranium enrichment centrifuges. Today, corporations and our National Security Administration can resurrect at will any one of the billions of emails, phone calls, and website transactions our citizens in the home of the free have sent, made, or performed. The NSA, in principle, needs the approval of a secret court, the misleadingly named Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA, to go from the metadata base to actually opening the digital fi le of an email or a phone conversation. FISA, however, is apparently a rubber stamp. It evidently has yet to see such a request that it does not like. Such a secret court, moreover, is not appropriate in a democracy. I say “apparently” and “evidently” because FISA is secret and classified. Only hints and leaks have made it into public space. July 2013 news reports in The Guardian assert that the NSA’s Prism program, in warrantless spying, monitors directly, for example, with the connivance of Microsoft , Skype video conversations, and information stored in Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud. Microsoft now owns Skype. Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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To read a story, or to open an email or website or recorded telephone call, is to raise a ghost, and to revivify, re-spiritualize, call back as revenants, all the imaginary characters within that story, or all the real people in those Internet records, even the ones that are, like Carl Barrington, within the fiction of the story imaginary, phantasmatic, ghostly. To use the Internet or to send an email is to become oneself a ghost, perpetually surviving as dead/ alive in one or the other, or both, of the two enormous NSA database storage facilities. Communities in “The Secret Integration” What difference does it make to the meaning of “The Secret Integration” that Carl Barrington is a ghost, an unreal phantom or fantasy? Certainly, it seems to give the story a quite different meaning from the one I proposed earlier. Perhaps. I suggested that the story shows the boys as naturally without racial prejudice. They form a utopian community set against the autoimmunitary community of the adults. But does Carl’s unreality really disqualify that reading? “The Secret Integration,” I claim, is fundamentally duplicitous. It is open to being read in several contradictory ways. I do not see how the reader can make a choice among these readings that is unequivocally based on textual evidence. He or she can, however, and perhaps must, make an ethical choice or decision that one reading is more satisfactory than the others and ought to be promulgated, for the good of the community. In its duplicity “The Secret Integration” is like all ghost stories, which is one of the genres the story parodies. The meaning of the story depends on whether or not you believe in ghosts. It is impossible, however, to affirm persuasively that one either believes or disbelieves. If I say, “I don’t believe in ghosts,” it is easy to accuse me of denegation. I mean I fervently hope no ghosts exist. If I say I do believe in ghosts, however, that is a contradiction, because it would make the ghosts a certainty, no longer ghostly, that is, duplicitous, a matter of simultaneous yes and no, or neither yes nor no, neither life nor death. I must in the end say what Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe said of ghosts: “I don’t know whether I believe or not, or whether ghosts exist or not.” That is the attitude of the boys toward the phantom cavalry officer with a shotgun. They neither quite believe nor quite disbelieve. They think, however, that it is better not to take any chances (a species of Pascal’s wager), and they feel protected in their hideout by this existing/non-existing spook. 280

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During the time that the reader may still think that Carl is real, Tim, when he learns that “integration” means “white kids and colored kids in the same school,” says, “Then we’re integrated,” and Grover answers, “Yeah. They [the adults] don’t know it, but we’re integrated” (188). I suppose that is the meaning of the story’s title. Their integration of Carl into their gang is a “secret integration” because it exists only for them because the adults are not aware of Carl’s existence. That means the integration of Carl is, so it seems, entirely without purchase on the social order. It has no power to change anything. After the boys have “banished Carl from their sight,” Étienne asks Grover, “Are we still integrated?” and Grover answers, “Ask your father. . . . I don’t know anything” (192). That is the big question. Are they still integrated? Are they still integrated if their integration was with a phantom of their own making and if they have now banished their homemade robot? It is hard to know. I don’t know anything. A secret integration does not seem to be anything like a real integration. The story ends with the boys going back to their separate homes, to “hot shower, dry towel, before-bed television, good night kiss, and dreams that could never again be entirely safe” (193). Except for that last phrase, it would appear that the story ends with the assimilation of the temporarily rebellious boys back into family life and into their places in the adult community they will soon join. That community’s prejudices they will soon come to share. Pynchon does not sentimentalize the challenges to overcoming white Americans racial prejudice against their fellow black citizens whose forebears they brought (and bought) as slaves from Africa. The conclusion that “The Secret Integration” culminates with that insight would make the story moving in its sadness about the resistance to change of the United States segregation system that was in place in 1964. The final sadness is that much of that system still remains operative today, in 2014, though often as somewhat more secret segregation. The Last Word The last phrase of all in the story, however, gives a final twist. That twist allows a quite different meaning and force for the story from the one I have just expressed. The boys return home to “dreams that could never again be entirely safe.” Though Carl Barrington is a fantasy, a phantom, he is made of bits and pieces of excluded words, images, possibilities that survive in Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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the social junkyard outside the safe enclosure of the community. The boys have experienced and have become self-consciously aware of the reality of race relations in the United States both through their encounter with a victim of segregation, Carl McAfee, and through their witnessing of the rank racial prejudices and terror of their parents. Their secret integration, in its acceptance of Carl Barrington and spontaneous loving-kindness toward him, offers both the boys and the reader a model of the democracy to come, beyond race segregation and race prejudice. That is the goal toward which we all should work and toward which Pynchon’s story, in its own way, works. Even though Carl is an ideal construct, he is made of latent possibilities of amelioration still surviving at the edges of the community. The Civil Rights Movement and all the desegregation legislation and court decisions that followed have made the situation much better in the United States, though by no means yet perfect. Revelations of police brutality toward blacks in the United States have shown that, as has a recent Supreme Court decision (spring 2013) overturning a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. States will now be much freer to enact Voter Identification laws, move polling places, and perform racially motivated redistricting that will make it much harder for African Americans and other non-whites to vote or to have their votes count. Who can say whether or not “The Secret Integration” contributed in its own small way, nevertheless, to the movements that have been made toward the infinitely receding horizon of the democracy to come? How would this work? How can a work of fiction function not as superficial amusement and not as just a constative description of imaginary characters and their doings, but as a felicitous performative, a speech act, as a way of doing things with words that contributes to good social change? “The Secret Integration” itself gives clues to an answer. The story begins with an odd episode that does not seem to have much relevance beyond setting the stage for the antagonism between the boys and their parents. One of the boys, Tim, has a wart, which the doctor has treated by putting a red substance on it that glows bright green under ultraviolet light. He then tells Tim: “Ah, good . . . Green. That means the wart will go away” (142). Tim overhears the doctor in a lowered voice say that he has tried “suggestion therapy,” which “works about half the time” (142). He will use liquid nitrogen if suggestion therapy does not work. When Tim asks Grover what “sugges-

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tion therapy” is, Grover says it is “like faith healing” and that the treatment had no effect on the wart. “They’re trying to talk it away, but I just messed that up for them,” he says jubilantly. The color green, coded to stand for an illusion or trick that may have real effects, reappears later in the story, in a way that is characteristic of Pynchon’s elaborately concocted fictions. When the boys and their twentyfive recruited agents stop the train with “sickly green spotlights,” Grover says “something curious”: “I feel different now and better for having been green, even sickly green, even for a minute” (185). Green is the color of suggestion therapy, and this odd detail seems to celebrate the power of fictive suggestion, such as that exercised by “The Secret Integration” itself, to do good in the world. “The Secret Integration,” I argue, works by a species of suggestion therapy or faith healing. Just as the boys create the cavalry officer and Carl Barrington as virtual realities, phantoms, phantasms that are nevertheless effective in the boys’ world, so the words of the story on the pages of Slow Learner work as suggestion therapy to raise the ghosts of the characters, including Carl Barrington, in the minds of the story’s readers, just as do all works of fiction. The words survive the characters, or they are the means by which the characters indefinitely survive. The words make it possible for any reader to raise the ghosts of Tim, Grover, and the rest any time the book is opened by some reader and the story read again. From this perspective, Carl Barrington is no different from any of the other characters. He, too, is a virtual reality made of words. When the reader realizes that Carl is a fiction concocted by the boys, no more than a virtual reality, that reader may realize at the same time that the other characters have exactly the same kind of virtual reality. It is a reality created out of all the cultural fragments Pynchon has cleverly assembled so that the characters seem like “real people.” These fictive realities are indirectly exposed as phantoms by the revelation that Carl Barrington is a ghost, just as real and unreal as the booted cavalryman with a shotgun. That, however, does not keep these ghosts from having such effects as they do have on readers in the real world. Just as Carl Barrington tests the boys’ capacity for “integration,” so the story challenges the reader to behave toward those of other races as the boys do in the story. “The Secret Integration” poses an ethical challenge to the reader. It demands that he or she choose how to act toward fellow citizens.

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Conclusions I claim to have shown how “The Secret Integration” exemplifies all the features of postmodern narrative I began by identifying. It has an ironically undercutting frame story. Its narrator does not, except rarely and ambiguously, exercise the right of authorial or narrational judgment. The supernatural or phantasmatic plays an essential role in the story. The story is to some degree about its own mode of existence and its own social function. It demands an ethical decision from its readers. The meaning of the story emerges from the juxtaposition of detached episodes presented out of their actual time sequence in the fiction. The story is a pastiche or parody of several different genres, all somewhat incoherently superimposed. It parodies beat narratives in the story Carl McAfee tells of his life. Pynchon’s introduction mentions the influence of surrealism as he misunderstood it at the time he wrote the story. Several other genres are explicitly alluded to. Several fi lms are mentioned, Spartacus, John Wayne’s Blood Alley, and an unnamed World War II movie the boys hear as a re-run coming in incoherent (and very funny) bits and pieces from TVs in suburban houses they pass one night: “. . . (splash, comical yell) Oh, sorry, sir, thought you were a Jap infi ltrator . . .”; “How can I be a Jap infi ltrator when we’re five thousand . . .”; “I’ll wait, Bill, I’ll wait for you as long as . . .” (168). “The Secret Integration” is a sophisticated ghost story, like Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” “The Secret Integration” is a parody of boys’ books, such as the Tom Swift books that are explicitly mentioned. Though it appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, the story is to some degree a subversive parody of the sorts of stories I remember reading in that magazine as a child. The ones I remember were much more sentimental, much more ideologically conservative, much more straightforwardly dedicated to white middle class “family values,” and to a set of ideological values typified by the famous Norman Rockwell paintings that appeared periodically on the covers of the magazine. Pynchon, it may be, put something over on the editors of The Saturday Evening Post, or perhaps they knew what they were doing and wanted something with more than usual bite to it, and more stylistic sophistication, in their pages. “The Secret Integration,” finally, confirms my claim that postmodern narratives, at least this one, dramatize fictional communities that are characterized by what Derrida calls self-destructive autoimmunitary (il)logic. It is logical because it makes sense as an inevitable 284 Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

happening. It is illogical because what is meant to protect us from foreign invasion turns against us, with disastrous results.

“ T H E D O G S’ CO L LO Q U Y ” A S P O S T M O D E R N N A R R AT I V E

I have apparently confirmed conclusively through investigation of one exemplary case that such a thing as postmodern narrative exists and that it has a set of distinctive, specifiable, stylistic, formal, and thematic features. The problem is that exactly the same set of features as characterize “The Secret Integration” can be found in Cervantes’s “exemplary novel,” “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” These features are no doubt present in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” in a somewhat different mix of quite different historical ingredients, but they are the same set nevertheless. “The Dogs’ Colloquy” was published in 1613, three years before Cervantes’s death and eight years after Don Quixote, Part I. Let me now show how the same features are present and how these determine the meaning and performative force of “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” Like “The Secret Integration,” “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is a framed story. In the latter the frame is set up in the previous exemplary novel, “The Deceitful Marriage” (El casamiento engañoso). The narrator of that story, Ensign Campuzano, tells his auditor, the Licentiate Peralta, that he has an even stranger tale to tell than the one he has just told, one that he does not expect will be believed and that he does not know whether he himself believes or disbelieves. Nevertheless, he is ready to swear that it really happened. He does not believe he was dreaming or mad. The issue of a fiction’s mode of existence and of the way its survival or revival depends on a willing suspension of disbelief when you read it is raised even before the story is told. A story is like a ghost. You can neither believe in it nor disbelieve in it. The issue of belief or disbelief is also central within the story itself, for example the question of whether you should believe or not in witches. “The Dogs’ Colloquy” then follows. It is presented as the manuscript that the ensign gives the licentiate to read for himself while the ensign rests. What is unbelievable in the story’s basic presupposition has already been identified in the frame narrative. Dogs do not talk and they do not have human intelligence. As Scipio, one of the two dogs, says, at the beginning of their colloquy, about their gift of speech: “[W]hat makes it all the more miraculous (milagro) is not only that we speak but also that we speak intelligently, as though we had minds capable of reason; yet we are so devoid of it that Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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the difference between brute beasts and man consists in this, that man is a rational animal and the beast is irrational [el hombre animal racional, y el bruto, irracional].” Th is initial “miracle” is an aporia because, in this fi rst of the complex echoes of classical wisdom that run all through “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” everybody since Aristotle knows that what distinguishes man from the other animals is that man has reason and speech, whereas the other animals do not. A dog, however, utters this piece of received wisdom. A dog ought not by nature be able to speak these words, much less understand them. Derrida’s seminars on “The Beast and the Sovereign,” by the way, are devoted, among other things, to putting in question this piece of received wisdom. It is an ideologeme that has reigned even down to Jacques Lacan. Derrida wants to deconstruct it, and thereby to disqualify whatever thinking depends on it, for example Heidegger’s in The Fundamental Principles of Metaphysics (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik). Heidegger says, over and over, as a leitmotif of these seminars, that the stone has no world, that the animal is poor in world, and that man is weltbilden, world-making. In the case of “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” however, one can say that the ideologeme about animals’ lack of reason and speech is not only put in question by having as the chief characters two eminently reasonable, charming, and eloquent dogs, but also at the same time finessed by having this happen in a fiction that only masquerades as fact. In a fiction one can do almost anything with words and get away with it, as long as it is done plausibly and consistently, and as long as readers can be got to believe in the fiction. One can even have dogs speak. Animals speak in an immense number of fictional works from Aesop down to Pogo. To believe in a fiction! What does that mean? It is like believing in ghosts. That was certainly the case for me with “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” I became, for the moment at least, someone who believed that dogs can speak. The frame story in both “The Secret Integration” and “The Dogs’ Colloquy” works to interpret the story for the reader, to undercut it ironically by “framing” it in more ways than one, and to raise questions about the nature and social function of fictions generally. If “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is an “exemplary tale,” one thing it is exemplary of is the way fictions work. “The Dogs’ Colloquy” presents a long line of bits and pieces of received wisdom uttered by the dogs and often attributed to some classical source or 286

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to Christian theology and ethics. The dogs spend much time debating philosophical and theological questions, arguing about “backbiting” and hypocrisy, and discussing what makes a good story. These arise in a way that is more or less relevant to the episode in the second dog’s life that he (Berganza) happens to be telling at the moment. These early sixteenth-century ideologemes correspond to the bits and pieces of popu lar culture, children’s book, films, TV movies, and news broadcasts, which are echoed in Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration.” Just as in Pynchon’s story, because Cervantes is not anywhere to be seen as an unequivocal presence in his tale, it is impossible to know how much irony or lack of it there is in having two dogs utter the commonplace assumptions and opinions of an educated person of 1613 in Spain. If a dog can say it, it must be true, or, it may be, on the contrary, if a dog can say it, it must be no more than an ideological fantasy, a received idea. It must be a baseless illusion repeated mechanically thousands and thousands of times, over and over, from generation to generation. Even dogs say these things, in a mechanical way, like barking. These interpolations in Berganza’s presentation of his life story take up much of the text and function powerfully as ironic challenges to received opinion of the time, though Cervantes could always, if challenged, have claimed that he meant these commentaries “straight.” The dogs utter them with straight faces, so to speak. The reader can learn a lot from “The Dogs’ Colloquy” about early seventeenthcentury Spanish cultural assumptions and ideology. Postmodern Cervantes I have said that a feature of postmodern narrative is the attenuation of the so-called “omniscient narrator” who can penetrate telepathically the minds and hearts of all the characters, speak for them, and pass judgment on them. Though such a narrator may be characteristic, for example, of Victorian fiction, for example work by George Eliot or Anthony Trollope, “The Dogs’ Colloquy” has no such narrator. The ensign has written down in dialogue or colloquy from what he heard the dogs say, but he did not have any direct access to their minds, nor do the dogs have such a telepathic or clairvoyant power. They pass judgment on the stories Berganza tells, but those judgments have no transcendent authority. No authority external to their intra-fiction judgments speaks. The dogs’ judgments may be right or they may be wrong. The reader is left, in the end, to judge for himself or herself, Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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on the basis of somewhat contradictory or ambiguous evidence, as is the case with Pynchon’s story. Another distinctive feature of postmodern narrative, I began by claiming, on Fredric Jameson’s authority, is its use of pastiche, parody, allusion, and a mixing of genres. “The Dogs’ Colloquy” already does all that with a vengeance. It is called a “colloquy,” El Coloquio de los perros, so it must belong to that genre. The word colloquio means conferencia or conversacion. In English, a colloquy is defined as “a conversation, especially one that is formal or mannered,” or as “a written dialogue,” from Latin colloquium, conversation. One thinks of Erasmus’s Colloquia, witty and entertaining fictional conversations by the great Dutch humanist of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. The subtitle of “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” however, is given in Starkie’s English translation as “The Dialogue Between Scipio and Berganza.” The Spanish original is Novela y coloquio que pasó entre Cipión y Berganza (Story and colloquy that took place between Scipio and Berganza). Starkie has introduced a word, “dialogue,” not present in the original Castilian. A dialogue is not quite the same thing in connotation as a colloquy. “Dialogue” makes one think of Plato. Though Plato’s dialogues often have an informal conversational quality, at least some of the time, they are more seriously focused on philosophical argumentation than most colloquies are. To call “The Dogs’ Colloquy” a dialogue is somewhat to skew it away from what Cervantes named his “novela.” “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is, in addition, a parody of a picaresque novel with a hilarious episode parodying pastoral romances. It is a supernatural story about witches, echoing Aesop’s beast fables, which are explicitly referred to in the frame narrative and again in the story itself (35/245, 58/260). It may be a covert prophetic allegory or Tropelia, saying one thing but meaning another. “The Dogs’ Colloquy” has elements of the confessional or of the testamentary, as picaresque novels, for example Lazarillo de Tormes, generally do. Lazarillo is before the court and must defend himself as best he can. That is the situation in which he recounts his life. Berganza’s narrative is a selfjustifying, self-exculpating account of a dog’s life. “The Dog’s Colloquy” is also throughout a satire of the follies and wickedness of mankind. The name for the instrument of Cervantes’s satire is a word repeated over and over in the story, deplored by both dogs, but spontaneously indulged in nevertheless: “backbiting.” “To backbite” is to slander someone behind his or her back. To backbite is difamar or murmurar in Spanish. 288

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Cervantes uses murmurar. A backbiter is a columniador or a murmurador. Spanish, alas, does not contain the marvelous pun in the English word “backbite.” The word sounds just like something a dog might do, bite back. The connection of the cynics with satire or with the expression of a generally dim view of mankind is made explicit at one point in “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” “Do you call slander philosophy?” Scipio asks Berganza. “So it goes. [¡Asi va ello!] Canonize, Berganza, canonize the accursed plague of backbiting [murmuración], and give it whatever name you please; it will cause us to be called cynics, which is the same as calling us backbiting dogs” (66/267). The cynics were a philosophical sect in ancient Greece founded by Antisthenes of Athens, who believed self-control to be the only means of achieving virtue. A cynic is someone who believes all men are motivated by selfishness, which the people in Berganza’s stories in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” certainly, for the most part, are. The word “cynic” comes from Latin cynicus, from Greek kunikos, “doglike, currish,” or, one might even dare to say, “given to backbiting.” On top of all that mélange of genres, as if that were not enough, “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is the story of a metamorphosis. It is modeled on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or, more closely, on Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. The dogs may be human beings who have been metamorphosed into dogs by witchcraft, by malign enchantment. What a mixture! What a pastiche of various genres of the time! In this incoherent mixing of genres and parody of them, “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is no different from “The Secret Integration,” even though the genres that are mixed are different. It is a feature of postmodern narrative, I began this chapter by saying, that such narratives tend to focus on marginal characters, on outcasts, on outsiders, on the wretched of the earth, on the disadvantaged, such as Toni Morrison’s American ex-slaves in Beloved, or Pynchon’s essentially powerless adolescents in “The Secret Integration.” Pynchon’s gang of boys thinks of their Operation Sparticus, the terrorist attack on adult institutions they plan, as the revolt of the slaves. To see and judge the normal, adult, dominant world from the perspective of ex-slaves or children is one version of what William Empson, in Some Versions of Pastoral, calls “pastoral.” Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, for example, is, for Empson, a version of pastoral, with “the child as swain.” In Cervantes’s “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” the dogs are swains. Their perspective from the bottom of the social scale, or Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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outside human society altogether, like the perspective of the picaresque hero, is essential to the dogs’ ability to expose and judge the cruelties, injustices, and hypocrisies of the human world. Just what form those bad behaviors take I shall shortly identify. Postmodern narratives, I said, for example Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration” or Toni Morrison’s Beloved, are characteristically made of a series of discrete episodes strung together in a line that is sometimes a-chronological. The meaning of the whole emerges, “mechanically,” “automatically,” from the juxtaposition of separate stories. That meaning is never explicitly stated. It is left to the reader to identify and evaluate. The reader must do that in what I would call an autonomous ethical judgment. Such a judgment is not all that easy to verify by citations from the text. Once more, “The Dogs’ Colloquy” already has this episodic structure. I count at least sixteen separate stories Berganza tells as he runs, more or less chronologically, through his various adventures and the various masters he has served. The series is discontinuous in the sense that strongly marked breaks divide each episode from the next. These breaks are often a “colloquy” between the two dogs about the meaning of the episode just recounted. The episodes are not connected in any essential way. They just happen to follow one another in Berganza’s life, fortuitously. Most often, Berganza, for one reason or another, flees one master and takes up with another master in a setting disconnected from the first, in a parody of picaresque fiction. The sequence, as Berganza narrates it, is driven by two recurrent motifs. The first is the dogs’ fear that when dawn comes they will lose the ability to speak, just as ghosts were, in Renaissance lore, said to fade at dawn, at cockcrow, as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hamlet is more or less exactly contemporary with “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” The second motif is Scipio’s repeated insistence that Berganza should stop digressing and get on with the straight and narrow line of his life-story, before dawn comes and he can speak no more. “I rather fear,” says Berganza at one point, “that when the sun rises we shall be groping in the dark, devoid of speech [faltándonos la habla]” (69/270). Scipio answers, “Heaven will arrange things better. Proceed with your story and do not stray from the path in needless digressions [impertinentes digresiones]. Only in that way will you quickly come to the end of it, no matter how long it may be” (69–70/270). The digressions are primarily those philosophical and cultural reflections I have identified already. “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is inhabited by a sense of urgency, as if the dogs were speak290 Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

ing against death, speaking to hold off death, like Cervantes himself, who died three years after publishing the Exemplary Novels, or like William Carlos Williams in “Asphodel That Greeny Flower,” or like Jacques Derrida in his final seminars, written when he may have known he had a mortal illness, or like all of us writers, who know that we are mortal, that we exist as Sein zum Tode, being toward death. One of the longest and most important of the episodes that make up “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” the story of Berganza’s encounter with the witch Cañizares comes near the end, but, as Berganza says, probably should have been told first. It should have been first because it tells, perhaps, the story of Berganza’s birth: “What I now wish to relate to you should have been told at the beginning of the story [al principio de mi cuento], as we would then have had no reason to wonder at finding ourselves able to speak” (89/285). Here is one example of the preposterous, or the cart before the horse, that I said was a feature of postmodern narrative, in the otherwise more or less chronological sequence of “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” The witch Cañizares tells Berganza that his mother was the witch Montiela, whose malicious, envious enemy, the super-witch Camacha, had enchanted her unborn twins so they were born as puppies and grew up as the dogs Scipio and Berganza. This story contradicts Berganza’s initial assertion that his parents “must have been” two mastiffs who worked for the butchers at the slaughterhouse (44/250). Autoimmunity in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” As I have said, a distinctive feature of postmodern narrative is that it pictures the community as autoimmunity in action, therefore as self-destructive. The community turns the institutions meant to protect the community, to keep it safe, immune, self-enclosed, indemnified, and exclusionary, against the community itself, in the breakdown of community. In both Morrison’s and Pynchon’s narratives, whites turn self-destructively against blacks in the racist United States. When a story is told as a string of unrelated episodes, such as Berganza’s recounting of his adventures with the various masters he has served, the reader looks for what the various episodes may have in common. The meaning of the story as a whole may emerge from this superimposition or sequential juxtaposition. This happens according to the narrative law that says what I tell you many times must be true or at least centrally important. What do Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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the various episodes of “The Dogs’ Colloquy” share? What common pattern emerges when you superimpose them on one another, like figured transparencies? I answer that “The Dogs’ Colloquy” brilliantly anticipates the concept of the community as an “auto-co-immunity,” to borrow Derrida’s neologism in “Foi et savoir.” I said this was a distinctive feature of postmodern narrative, but here it is in 1613! Let me exemplify this in a little detail, taking certain episodes as conspicuous dramatizations of this feature. The first episode tells how Berganza worked for a butcher in the slaughterhouse where he thinks he was born. The butchers should, one would think, be protecting the meat they slaughter, keeping it safe from thieves. Instead of that, they are the thieves. They steal the best cuts of meat for their mistresses or for selling it on the side. The same motif reappears in the second episode. Berganza takes up with some shepherds and becomes a sheepdog. His job is to protect the sheep from wolves. The shepherds themselves also have that as their primary responsibility. Berganza discovers that the shepherds, not the wolves, are killing the sheep and stealing the meat. They are killing them in such a way that it looks as if the wolves have done it. “ ‘God help me,’ said I [Berganza] to myself; ‘who can ever put down this villainy? Who will be able to bring it home to the people that the defense is guilty, the sentinels sleep, the trustees rob, and he who protects you kills you? [el que os guarda os mata]’ ” (55/258). In one of the digressive exchanges between the two dogs about backbiting, Berganza promises to bite his own tongue every time he is guilty of backbiting. Scipio says, “If that is the remedy you intend to use, I expect you will have to bite yourself so many times that you will be left minus a tongue and will thus find it impossible to slander [murmurar]” (61/263). This is a little miniature allegory of autoimmunitary (il)logic. The backbiter who bites others like a snarling cur ends up biting himself, just as the antibodies the immune system develops to protect the body from alien antigens turns, in autoimmune diseases, against itself. The biter bites herself or himself. The whole of “The Dogs’ Colloquy” manifests this logical illogic. Cervantes, in cynical and satirical backbiting, turns against the society of which he is a part, aiming to damage it by improving it, but endangering himself at the same time. Another brief episode is a splendid example of this self-destructive autoimmunitary (il)logic. It tells the story from Diodorus of “Corondas, a Tyrian” (more correctly: “Charondas of Thurii”), “who passed a law that no one 292

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should enter the national assembly in arms, on pain of death [so pena de la vida]” (69/269). He forgot his own law and entered the assembly with his sword on. He then promptly plunged the sword into his own body, becoming “the first to make the law and the first to break it and suffer the penalty [pagó la pena]” (69/269). This story anticipates current laws in the United States permitting or prohibiting the carry ing of concealed weapons in various circumstances. By the time the reader reaches this little anecdote, he or she may begin to suspect that Cervantes’s real target is not injustice, selfishness, or dishonesty in general, but that specific form of it in which the community or some member of it turns self-destructively back on itself rather than toward some outsider or external enemy. “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” says Pogo, in one of my epigraphs for this chapter. The rest of the novela is a cascade of further examples. Berganza takes up with a police officer who turns out to be in cahoots with thieves and prostitutes. The policeman cooperates with those he should arrest rather than protecting the community from these dangerous insiders/outsiders. Eventually, Berganza reveals the deception to his master’s superiors in a way that expresses the self-immunitary (il)logic in a physical action. When the “lieutenant corregidor,” or chief magistrate, orders him to run after a thief, Berganza turns on the real thief, his temporary owner: “I attacked my own master [mi proprio amo], and without giving him time to defend himself, I rolled him on the ground” (83/280). Several of the episodes in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” involve racial or ethnic minorities or the theme of money. These are obscurely analogous themes, because both are permutations of the community’s autoimmunitary (il)logic. Let me explain how. Just as the butchers and the shepherd are guardians of the community who instead of keeping it safe, damage it, so the monetary tricks played by the crooked policeman and his ilk in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” destroy confidence in financial bargains, exchanges, and contracts, as well as belief that people are what they seem. The well-being of the community depends on the security of this confidence, just as the value of money depends on faith in the monetary system. Once the falling US dollar causes the Chinese to lose faith in all those billions in apparent worth of United States bonds they own, we in the States will be in deep trouble. The Chinese will, however, be reluctant to sell at a huge loss because that would be another case of autoimmunitary (il)logic, like biting your own tongue, It is in the Chinese interest to maintain the value of the US bonds they hold. Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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The policeman in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” makes money out of innocent strangers by pimping for his mistress and then arresting and fining the hapless man who has bought his mistress’s favors. In another episode, he makes a deal with some criminals to allow him to seem to defeat six of them at once in a sword fight, like John Wayne in a movie gun battle. This fraud increases his own prestige immeasurably, that is, the faith people have in his prowess. This intended effect is worth every penny he pays the bravos to pretend to be defeated. In another anecdote, the crooked policeman is undone when two thieves in a complicated scheme sell the policeman a stolen horse. He is caught when the real owner appears. The policeman loses both his money and the horse. In the episode of Berganza’s sojourn with the Gypsies, he tells how the Gypsies, through another complex trick involving an ass with a docked tail that is fitted out with a tail of false hair, get a peasant to pay for the same ass twice over. All these stories involving financial cheating damage the community in an autoimmunitary way by destroying confidence in money transactions. This entails one form or another of an inflationary doubling that weakens the community by weakening its currency. One thinks of Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man, which is a subtle version of this theme. A lot of the people Berganza works for are confidence men. An example is the drummer who displays Berganza’s prowess as a circus performer and makes a lot of money from gullible citizens. All these episodes involve the theme of belief that is so important in “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” for example in the initial question about whether the licentiate, the ensign, and, implicitly the reader, can believe this story about talking dogs. If you can believe that, you might be likely to believe that the same donkey is two donkeys, when he has been fitted with a false tail. Credulity makes the world go round, but it also may lead to a sudden deflation when confidence is lost. The two episodes that deal with ethnic minorities in the Spain of that time exhibit autoimmunitary (il)logic in a different way. Berganza describes the Gypsies and Moors in ways that echo the most blatant racial and ethnic stereotypes. The Gypsies are portrayed as thieves and rascals, while the Moors are described in the same way as Jews are pictured in anti-Semitic stereotypes in, say, the United States today. Moors are portrayed as money-grubbers 294

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who starve themselves to save more money and will soon destroy the country by hoarding all its money. The similarity between anti-Moor propaganda in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” and anti-Semitism today is fascinating and unexpected, by me at least. In the United States today that stereotype of miserliness is not at all part of the image of Muslims we are taught. Muslims are rather portrayed as likely to be Islamic fundamentalists, members of international terrorist organizations, willing to commit suicide in Allah’s name, but not as penny pinchers. It is difficult to know from the story itself whether Cervantes shared the prejudices against Gypsies and Jews his imaginary character Berganza expresses, or whether he was attacking these stereotypes by showing that even a dog could believe them. Apparently he did to a considerable degree share these prejudices. Spain expelled the Jews in 1492, the year Columbus “discovered” America, so they were not around any more in 1613 to be hated and reviled. Cervantes, however, favored the expulsion of the Moors. They were expelled from Spain in 1609–11, just two years before the publication of Novelas Ejemplares. Were Jews, Moors, and Gypsies antigens or part of the native tissue of the body politic? These “ethnic minorities” were both inside Spanish culture, part of the larger national community, and at the same time outside it, other to it. In this they were a little like the dogs in “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” They were underdogs, one might say, like Cervantes himself, perhaps Spain’s greatest writer. Cervantes was a bankrupt jailbird who never escaped poverty, had experienced imprisonment in Spain and slavery under the Turks, and had wandered up and down Spain like Berganza or like a picaro. Gypsies, Moors, and Jews contributed greatly to Spain’s cultural diversity and richness. They were, to a degree, fellow citizens, part of the community. Traces of the Moors’ extravagant skill as architects are still visible in many places in Spain. The Alhambra is an amazing cultural accomplishment. It is spectacularly beautiful, by any standards. Jacques Derrida’s name is a Spanish Jewish one. By expelling the Jews, one might argue, Spain lost the chance to have Derrida as one of its native sons. Who knows how many other men and women of genius it lost in that expulsion of 1492? Gypsy music, stories, and other cultural accomplishments are of high quality. Spain has never fully recovered from the autoimmunitary damage it did to itself by expelling the Jews and the Moors, as well as by burning so many supposedly heretic Christians in the autos-da-fé of the Inquisition. “Auto” in this case means Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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“free act,” with an overtone of an act performed by the self, as in an autoimmune reaction. The heretics were supposed to condemn themselves in an “act of faith” that led to their public condemnation and burning at the stake. The episodes involving ethnic minorities count, therefore, as yet more examples of the suicidal autoimmunitary pattern I claim all, or almost all, of the episodes of “The Dogs’ Colloquy” share. That pattern emerges from a comparison or superimposition of the episodes by a reader who asks, “What do they have in common? Why did Cervantes choose to have Berganza experience just this par ticular string of picaresque adventures?” The Witch in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” I shall now account for the most complex and most problematic example of the autoimmunitary in “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” This is the episode of Berganza’s encounter with the witch Cañizares. It is the longest episode and surely the greatest, from a purely literary point of view. It is an amazingly wild and exuberant stylistic tour de force. Berganza is taken up by the matron of the hospital in Montilla, where his master, the drummer, is staying and where the drummer puts on a show of Berganza’s tricks to make money from the credulous multitude. The hospital matron, Cañizares, turns out to be a witch. She claims to recognize Berganza as the son of her now dead sister-witch Montiela. Her name, however, with its doggy prefi x “can,” as in canis and canine, and the way she addresses Berganza, suggest that she may be lying and that she may be Berganza’s mother herself. “Is that you, son Montiel? Is that you, perchance, son [hijo]?” (89/284–5) She goes on calling him “son” as she tells him the story of her life as a witch and those of her sister-witches, Montiela, whom she says is Berganza’s mother, and the great Camacha. Camacha was a kind of super-witch. She outdid all the others in diabolical knowledge and skill. Cañizares tells of witches’ Sabbaths and other forms of witches’ service to their master, the Devil. Her story is a tale within the main tale, an interpolated tale, such as those we still find today in Morrison’s Beloved or in Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration.” After telling Berganza her story (and what she claims is also the story of Berganza’s origin as a human being enchanted into doggy form), Cañizares strips herself naked, anoints herself, and falls into a trance. Berganza drags her out into the courtyard, where all the people of the hospital can see her disgrace, though they disagree about whether she is a saint in rapture (“Look, 296

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the blessed Cañizares [la bendita Cañizares] is dead. See how her penances have reduced her to skin and bone” [100/294]), or an anointed witch. They disagree also about whether or not Berganza is “a demon in the form of [en figura de] a dog” (100/295) who is tormenting the saintly Cañizares. Berganza runs away to escape being beaten as a brutal form of exorcism. That is the end of this episode. Berganza next joins a band of Gypsies in Granada, where Gypsies live in the hills even today. What is the reader to make of the Cañizares episode? It certainly shows that Cervantes had up-to-date knowledge about witches, including their punishment by the Inquisition. A footnote in the translation by Walter Starkie I am citing claims that Cervantes’s mention of the Inquisition’s treatment of witches is “a reference to the notorious Cave of Zugarramurdi in the Basque province of Guipuzcoa, where the aquelarre, or sabbat of witches, led to the celebrated auto-da-fé of Logroño in 1610” (319). “According to A. de Amezúa,” says Starkie, “Cervantes had read the famous Tratado de las Supersticiones y Medicinas by Maestro Pedro Ciruelo (Alcalá, 1530)” (319). The Cañizares episode is another example, along with the basic fiction that dogs can talk, of supernatural themes in “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” These are presented in a style of surrealism or magic realism that I said was characteristic of postmodern narrative. Did Cervantes believe in witches? Should we believe in witches in order to be good readers of “The Dogs’ Colloquy”? What does it mean to believe or disbelieve anyway? Is not a statement of belief perhaps performative, a speech act, rather than a constative utterance, as it seems on the face of it to be? I say, “I believe, credo,” and, lo, I come to believe. Or I say, “I do not believe in ghosts (or witches, or talking, rational dogs),” and, whether this is a denegation or not, saying so tends to reinforce my belief that I do not believe. Is it not the case that if saying “I believe” were a constative statement, it could in principle be proved true or false? That, however, cannot be done in this case any more than the statement “I love you” ( je t’aime), as Derrida argues, can be verified. It is a speech act, not a verifiable true or false statement. These questions are difficult to answer. The question of believing or not believing runs all through “The Dogs’ Colloquy” and in its frame story. In the latter, the ensign and the licentiate debate whether or not it is possible to believe that dogs can talk. Jesus says to Doubting Thomas: “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20:29). Certainly to believe in witches on Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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the basis of Cervantes’s imaginary account of them in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” would be to have faith in things unseen, attested to only in words, and in the words of a fiction at that. Whether or not these words are true remains undecidable. The same thing can be said of the question whether Cervantes believes or does not believe in witches. It is impossible to tell one way or the other from the text of “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. One can know for sure, however, that he was fascinated by his national community’s belief in witches and by the question of whether or not we should believe in them. The Supernatural in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” The Cañizares episode, moreover, closely connects the theme of belief to the largest-scale version of the community structure that I have claimed, following Derrida, is subject to autoimmunitary (il)logic. Within Cañizares’s interpolated tale, speaking of the witches’ Sabbath, she says, “Some people believe [my italics; hay opinion que in the original Spanish] that we do not go to these assemblies except in imagination, wherein the demon represents images of all those things that we afterward say had happened to us. Others believe that, on the contrary [my italics; otros dicen que no] we actually go the sabbat in body and soul, and for my part I believe [tengo para mí] that both opinions are true, since we don’t know when we go in one manner or the other because all that happens to us in imagination is revealed with such intensity that it is impossible to distinguish between it and reality” (94/289). This argument returns when Cañizares relates what happens when witches anoint themselves. The ointments are “so cold that they deprive us of all sense when we anoint ourselves with them, and we lie stretched out stark naked on the ground, and then they say we pass in imagination through all those things that we consider a real experience [nos parece pasar verdaderamente]. At other times, after we have finished anointing ourselves, we change our shape, as we believe [a nuestro parecer], and turn into cocks, owls, or ravens, and go to places where our master awaits us, and then we recover our own forms and enjoy pleasures that I shall omit describing, for they are of such a nature that I am ashamed to recall them, and my tongue shrinks from telling you about them” (97/292).

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This statement obeys a truly weird logic, if you think about it a little. How could both opinions be true, that these are real and imaginary experiences at the same time? One thinks at this point of Don Quixote’s mad illusions, his tilting at windmills as the proverb says. If experiencing something with great intensity makes it true, then if I read “The Dogs’ Colloquy” with great intensity, giving myself heart and soul to the fiction, it becomes true. Experiencing is believing. Good reading is therefore something like being in a witch’s trance. The ethical and religious objections to reading novels voiced from Cervantes’s time to our own days by moral and religious people, somewhat echoing Plato’s objection to poetry, have been based on this suspicion that literary works, especially novels, are the work of the dev il. They lead innocent readers out of the real world into a dangerous realm of enchanted fantasy. What such critics miss, of course, is that almost every fiction contains the ironic deconstruction of its own enchanting power. Certainly that is the case with “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” Cañizares’s story contains an implicit reflection on this issue. Camacha, when she admitted on her deathbed that she had enchanted Montiela’s twins and turned them into dogs, also gave Montiela the prophetic recipe for how to disenchant them or for when they will be disenchanted. They “would return to their natural forms,” she said, “when it was least expected, but . . . this would not happen till their own eyes should see the following.” She then says: The hour of their deliverance is nigh And their true shape they’ll find when they behold The proud brought low, the poor raised up on high, By a speedy hand that acts with courage bold. (288) Volverán en su forma verdadera cuando vieren con presta diligencia derribar los soberbios levantados, y alzar a los humildes abatidos, por mano poderosa para hacerlo. (92) I give the Spanish because it is somewhat unlike the four-line rhyming translation. Like all millennial prophecies, this one seems at first to mean “never,” or “not until the world comes to an end.” It is like Derrida’s prophecy

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of “the democracy to come” in being always in a perpetually receding future. Camacha’s prophecy differs from Derrida’s formulation, however, in imagining not a totally equalitarian community, a true democracy, but a spin of the wheel of fortune that will do no more than reverse the hierarchy of high and low. Then the poor will be in charge, not the proud, in a fulfi llment of the Biblical prophecy that the meek shall inherit the earth. That, however, as the dogs agree, has already happened. The wheel of fortune turns all the time in seventeenth-century Spain, and yet, as Scipio ironically observes, we are still dogs. Just whose is “the speedy hand that acts with courage bold” (mano ponderosa para hacerlo) is not easy to decide. God? Some heroic tyrant-slayer who will reverse the social order with a violent revolution, but perhaps become a tyrant himself? Cervantes does not say. Camacha’s promise remains ironic, enigmatic. “The hour of their deliverance is nigh” (presta: This Spanish word means “quick,” “prompt,” “rapid,” “ready.”). How “ready” is deliverance? This is like millennial prophecies that say, “Get ready! The end of the world is at hand.” It is always at hand, so near you can almost touch it, but also always future, an “in a minute, but not quite yet.” “Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today,” as Lewis Carroll puts it in Alice in Wonderland. Cervantes does not specify who will wield the “mano poderosa,” the powerful hand, or how ready we should be. What he does do, however, is to have the dogs comment on what is undecidable about this fortune telling and on the relation of that uncertainty to the issue of belief. The dogs also suggest, indirectly, how these uncertainties may tell the reader what sort of a text “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is and how the reader should perhaps read it. It is the one place in the text where the issue of genre comes up explicitly. Scipio’s Judgment After Berganza has finished his story of the witch Cañizares and is beginning to recount the episode of the Gypsies, Scipio interrupts him to pass judgment on the Cañazares episode, to “see if there can be any truth in this great lie [la grande mentira], which you seem to believe” (101/296). Scipio goes on to affirm unequivocally that “It would be very foolish to believe that Camacha could change men into brutes, or that the sacristan served her in the form of an ass for the number of years as she said he had. All these 300

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and similar tales are illusions, lies, or delusions of the dev il [apariencias del demonio: ‘diabolical appearances’ might be a better translation]” (101/296). This might be taken to suggest that “The Dogs’ Colloquy” itself, the story you are at that moment reading, is another diabolical appearance. We readers are lending, so to speak, the breath of life to those dogs, who are, after all, only words on the page. This is a highly equivocal act, perhaps even a diabolical one. Fictions have traditionally been suspected of being works of the dev il. Reading romances leads innocent young women astray. If such stories most likely are delusions of the dev il, Scipio has the task, nevertheless, of explaining why we should believe that Scipio and Berganza appear to be dogs, but can talk and have reason. “This is,” he says, “a strange and unparalleled case [caso espantoso y jamás visto]” (101/296). This is no explanation at all, since God, Cervantes might say, governs all, even the most singular event. Therefore this case too, strange as it is, must fall in some way under God’s providence. Scipio, wise dog, then shifts to the question of Camacha’s soothsaying prophecy. An extremely strange but crucial paragraph follows. I find this paragraph essential to understanding the story as a whole, if the reader extrapolates a bit from what Scipio says to apply it to the entire novella. Scipio begins by energetically disqualifying the validity of the prophesying verses: “What seem prophecies to you,” he says to Berganza, “are nothing but a fable [palabras de consejas: a conseja is a fable, story, tale or legend; ‘fable talk’ might be a more literal translation], or one of those old wives’ tales, such as the headless horse or the magic wand, which are told by the fireside on long winter nights” (102/296). The oddness comes in his explanation of why the prophecies are fables. If they were genuine, he says, they would already have come true, “ready at hand” would have become “now,” “unless, indeed, it is to be taken in what I have heard called an allegorical sense [se llama alegórico]” (102/296). Scipio then goes on to give a succinct and entirely accurate defi nition of allegory as it was understood from Dante and the scholastics on to Cervantes’s own time and beyond: “that is to say, a sense that is not the same as that which the latter [meaning the word of the prophecy] declares, but something else, which, though different, may resemble it” [el cual sentido no quiere decir lo que la letra (refiriéndose a la letra de la profecía) suena, sino otra cosa que, aunque diferente, la haga semejanza] (102/296). Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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What seems extremely odd, to me at least, is that the allegorical sense Scipio goes on to spell out looks like a more or less literal paraphrase of what Camacha has said. The paraphrase goes by way of an explicit reference to the commonplace image of the Wheel of Fortune. Those at the “summit of Fortune’s wheel” will be “beaten down at the feet of misfortune,” and low people will be “lifted up to the pinnacles of prosperity” (102/296–7). But this, says Scipio, has already happened and happens “at every step,” and yet we are still dogs. I do not see, for the life of me, how this differs from the straightforward, obvious, literal meaning of the prophecy, which says the dogs will become men when, as Starkie’s translation puts it, “they behold / The proud brought low, the poor raised up on high.” What is allegorical about this first reading Scipio proposes, taking allegory, as Scipio defines it, as “a sense that is not the same as that which the latter [the prophecy] declares, but something else, which, though different, may resemble it” (102/296)? Scipio goes on to say that the non-fulfi llment of the prophecy when taken in an allegorical sense means that “I conclude that Camacha’s verses are to be taken in the literal, not in the allegorical, sense [no en el sentido alegórico, sino en el literal]” (102/297). He then suggests that the literal meaning is just what he has fi nished saying is the allegorical sense, and that taking the verses literally “will not help us, for many times we have seen what they say, and we are still dogs, as you see” (102/297). I conclude that Cervantes is making fun of the distinction between literal and allegorical meaning. They come in the end to the same thing, and in either case what they prophesy was a deception: “Camacha was a false deceiver [burladora falsa], Cañizares an artful rogue, and Montiela a wicked and malicious fool” (102/207). Scipio then gives his own interpretation of the true meaning. This meaning does seem to be allegorical or at least metaphorical, in the sense that it uses an ironic figure not found in Camacha’s verses: “I say, therefore, that the true meaning is a game of ninepins [un juego de bolos], in which those that stand up are quickly knocked down and those that have fallen are set up by a hand that knows how to do so. Consider whether in the course of our lives we have ever seen a game of ninepins, and if, as a result, we have seen ourselves changed into men, if we are men” (102–3/297). It ought to take no more than a simple game of social nine-pins to change the dogs back into men, if the prophecy has prophetic force. Whatever meaning, literal, allegorical, or metaphorical is given to Camacha’s prophecy, it 302

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has not come true yet. That leaves in doubt even whether the dogs are actually enchanted men or not. So much for the great tradition of allegorical interpretation, as in medieval or Renaissance Biblical commentary, or in Dante’s “Letter to Can Grande,” or in Dante’s practice in La Divina Commedia! For the dogs, and perhaps for Cervantes too, the literal is the allegorical. The allegorical is the literal. The distinction breaks down. Whichever way you take the prophecy (and, by implication, the text of “The Dogs’ Colloquy”), you get the same result: a disqualification of any power literature might be thought to have to predict a better time coming or to bring that better time about. The sequence I have just been following is a marvelous example of Cervantes’s destructive irony against the orthodox doctrines about witches and allegories and magic metamorphoses he may appear to be following. He makes wonderfully funny nonsense out of these doctrines. Neither I nor the reader, however, should forget Friedrich Schlegel’s warning that it is just those who think they understand irony who are, inevitably, its most helpless victims. The upshot of Scipio’s discussion about allegory, a little lesson in how to read, is, it appears, that we had better take “The Dogs’ Colloquy” at face value, as the fiction it manifestly is. We had better not make fools of ourselves by trying to apply to it the sophisticated tools of literary interpretation. It means what it says. It has no prophetic or apocalyptic value. It is a story about a couple of really nice talking dogs. Believe in it or not, as you wish. What’s Exemplary About “The Dogs’ Colloquy”? “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is an exemplary tale in that it exemplifies an apparent powerlessness of literary fictions. Cervantes’s pervasive irony would seem to suspend the possibility of giving the story a verifiable univocal meaning. That might lead a reader, mistakenly, to think this means the story can have no performative effect. It cannot be a way of doing things with words. Irony is, after all, as Friedrich Schlegel said, “permanent parabasis,” a perpetual suspension of univocal meaning all along the line. Or, it might be said, irony is the suspension of the willing suspension of disbelief that is necessary to breathe life into the words on the page. It is important, however, at this point to distinguish between cognitive uncertainty and performative effect. Just because irony suspends cognitive certainty in a given literary text does not mean that text may not be performatively Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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efficacious. The text’s cognitive uncertainty may even be the condition of its power as a felicitous speech act. “Irony,” says Paul de Man in a counterintuitive promise/premise about irony, “also very clearly has a performative function. Irony consoles and it promises and it excuses. It allows us to perform all kinds of performative linguistic functions which seem to fall out of the tropological field, but also to be very closely connected with it.” The reader might take the gentleness with one another, the patient forbearance, the loving kindness toward one another of the two dogs, as exemplary of true friendship as it ought to exist in the human world. The ironic ethical superiority of these two dogs over their masters functions as a promise: “If we could just become like Scipio and Berganza . . . .” The tolerance and affection that the four boys in Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration” show one another, though one of them is an African American, illustrate another such powerful utopian model and ironic promise: “If we can just become like Grover’s gang of four . . . .” “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). Cervantes’s dogs form an ideal community of two. They therefore serve as a model, an exemplum, of how we ought to behave in Mitsein, being together, with our neighbors. Their story promises that if we become like Scipio and Berganza an ideal community will ensue. Pynchon’s gang of boys is another such model. The two stories are allegorical after all. I am not through even yet, however, with “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” I have claimed that the episode of Cañizares is the most extravagant example in the whole story of autoimmunitary community (il)logic. How is this? I answer that if you happen to believe in witches, the relation between the dev il and his servants, wizards, witches, and heretics, on the one hand, and God, with his legions of angels and pious believers, on the other, is the largest and most inclusive version imaginable of autoimmunitary (il)logic. Cervantes ascribes to Cañizares knowledge of a good bit of sound theological doctrine about the mystery of evil and about the possibility of “justifying the ways of God to man,” as Milton puts it, in spite of the power of the Dev il and of evil generally. Like Gypsies, Moors, and other minorities within the Spanish national community, witches are both inside and outside the enormous community made of God’s whole creation. Why has God allowed these antigens into the worldwide body politic, so that they now form part of its intimate tissue? This issue includes the copresence of God and the dev il in the created world. The answer is that God, in order to be prop304

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erly worshipped and obeyed, that is, voluntarily, had to give angels and human beings freedom to obey or not. They had to have freedom to fall if they chose, while God foresaw that many would fall. Witches are a good example of that cosmic situation. Cañizares says she knows perfectly well that she is doing wrong. She knows that she will most likely be damned for following her master the dev il, but she chooses evil anyhow. “The habit of sinning,” says Cañizares, “becomes a second nature, and being a witch invades a woman’s flesh and bloodstream. . . . Thus the soul is unstrung and spiritless, and cannot rouse itself to embrace any good thought at all. It lets itself become engulfed in the abyss of its own misery [sumida en la profunda sima de su miseria] and does not care even to grasp the hand that God in His pity continually holds out to it. I have one of those souls that I have described to you. I see all, and I understand all, but as worldly delights keep my will chained, I have been, and shall always be, bad [siempre he sido y seré mala]” (97/291–2). Video melior, deterior sequor, as Ovid says in the Metamorphoses: “I see the better, I follow the worse.” Though the dev il is part of the total economy of creation, he is powerless to do any evil or to lead his followers to do evil without God’s permission. God remains omniscient and omnipotent. Since He has permitted human beings and the fallen angels to do evil, knowing beforehand that he will punish them with all the agonies of hellfire, one could say the whole creation obeys an autoimmunitary (il)logic. God turns against part of His own creation to punish it with damnation, just as antibodies in an autoimmune reaction turn against parts of the body itself to destroy it. This is the drama of those great Renaissance paintings of the Last Judgment, the division of the saved from the damned, the sheep from the goats. Cañizares’s theological knowledge on this point is impeccable and entirely orthodox. The dev il, we know, is good at quoting scripture. Speaking of the way witches are said to murder little children at the dev il’s instigation, and the question of why the dev il would do that, because the children, being sinless and baptized, will go straight to heaven, Cañizares says: . . . he may do it for the sake of the untold grief he causes the parents by killing their children. But what is of more importance to him is to make us repeatedly commit such a cruel and unnatural crime. And all this God allows because of our sins, for without His permission, I have seen by experience, the devil cannot hurt an ant [no puede ofender el diablo a una Postmodern Communities in Pynchon and Cervantes

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vez hormiga]; and this is so true that when on one occasion I requested him to destroy a vineyard belonging to an enemy, he told me he could not even touch a leaf of it, for God would not allow him to. This will enable you to understand when you become a man that all the misfortunes that befall men, kingdoms, cities, and villages, and sudden deaths, shipwrecks, and falls—in fact all the losses termed disastrous—come from the hand of the Almighty and by permission of His sovereign will; and all the evils that are called crimes are caused by ourselves. God is without sin, from which we may gather that we are the authors of sin, framing it in thought, word, and deed; and God permits all this because of our sinfulness, as I’ve said before. (96/290–1) God in His infinite wisdom and goodness permits sin, knowing beforehand that he must punish it. He must send to damnation one part of his creation. It is a spectacular example of autoimmunitary community (il)logic. Even at the largest scale this logic repeats itself, as though there could be no conception of community without it. It seems as if this logic constrains even God, or at least constrains the most profound and orthodox conceptions of God that the Bible and all the greatest Christian theologians have expounded through the centuries. For Cervantes to have the witch Cañizares express this orthodox doctrine is perhaps the ultimate irony of “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” Surely Cervantes did not mean the reader to believe what a selfproclaimed and self-condemned witch says? Or did he?

Conclusions What conclusions may I now draw from my juxtaposition of Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration” and Cervantes’s “The Dogs’ Colloquy”? I draw three: Definitions of postmodernism in literature by way of formal and structural features tend not to be valid because they can be shown to characterize earlier literary works, too. No doubt, an adept reader can easily tell, from thematic elements, from décor, from place names, and so on, whether he or she is reading Pynchon or Cervantes, even if Cervantes is read in English translation, but the repertoire of available narrative techniques is remarkably the same in both the exemplary tales I have interpreted.

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It would follow that this set of narrative techniques has not changed all that much since Cervantes. One way to define Cervantes’s greatness is his mastery of those techniques already, at the very beginning of what today we call the history of the novel. I conclude from this that definitions of period styles in literature, and even period names in literary history generally, are highly problematic, always to be interrogated and viewed with suspicion.

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CODA

My chief goal in this book has been to present comprehensive rhetorical readings of eight novels with special attention to the ways community or its lack is presented in each work. In the course of doing this, I claim also to have shown, though in a different way in each chapter, how the presumption that every community must submit to autoimmunitary (il)logic has wide and provocative relevance for understanding the presentation of communities in works of fiction from Cervantes to Pynchon and beyond. What is happening in the United States and worldwide today, moreover, indicates that this self-destructive community behavior is not just a fiction. It operates, alas, with dismaying force, in the real social and political worlds. Three specific examples among many are: 1) the refusal to do anything serious to mitigate the anthropogenic global warming that threatens the survival of the human species, 2) the Patriot Act (Orwellian name!), the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and the National Security Agency (more Orwellian names), which, in the guise of protecting us against intruders, turns universal surveillance by the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA against all United States citizens, and 3) the recent Supreme Court decision in the United States that nullifies an essential part of the Voting Rights Act, thereby opening the door to the disenfranchisement of millions of potential minority voters.

NOTES

1 . T H E O R I E S O F C O M M U N I T Y: W I L L I A M S , HEIDEGGER, AND OTHERS

1. Raymond Williams, Keywords, Revised ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 75–6. 2. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 96–107, 165–81, 197–221. Page numbers in the text refer to this edition. 3. Wolfram Schmidgen, in a brilliant, original, and learned recent book, tells a somewhat different story from Williams’s. (See Wolfram Schmidgen, EighteenthCentury Fiction and the Law of Property [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]). Smidgen places eighteenth-century English fiction against its “backgrounds” in actual social conditions of that time and place. For Smidgen, however, the determining factor was land-owning, owning of “immobiles,” already well in place for centuries, as regulated by British common law, even as the new capitalist economy of “mobiles,” such as stock shares and other investments, was beginning to take over and to require regulation by new laws. Schmidgen takes issue with J. G. A. Pocock’s influential interpretation of the relation of land-owning to community in eighteenthcentury England. See J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). A huge secondary literature has studied these issues—for example, work by Fredric Jameson, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard, to list just three scholars. My setting Williams against Heidegger is not meant to be inclusive but as an expedient to establish two clear alternative paradigms as a basis for my readings of some nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels. 4. Here are references to some of these: Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962); Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (Frankfort am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983);

Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Random House, 1983); Jean-Luc Nancy, Être singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996); Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000); Georges Bataille, L’Apprenti Sorcier du cercle communiste démocratique à Acéphale: textes, lettres et documents (1932–39), ed. Marina Galletti; notes trans. from Italian by Natália Vital (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1999); Maurice Blanchot, La communauté inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983); Maurice Blanchot, The Inavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988); Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986); Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Giorgio Agamben, La comunità che viene (Turin: Einaudi, 1990); Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, La religion (Paris: Seuil, 1996); Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002); Julián Jiménez Heffernan has presented in “Togetherness and Its Discontents” an admirably inclusive account of Western ideas of community from Hobbes through Hegel, Marx, and Tönnies down to Nancy and others in the present. He does this in a long, brilliant, and learned introduction to a collection of fourteen essays by various scholars from Córdoba and Granada in Spain entitled Into Separate Worlds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Their essays are about community in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century fiction in English. One valuable point is that in the novels they discuss, characters are sometimes shown as belonging to multiple (imaginary) communities at the same time. 5. See Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925)—for example, Chapter IV, “The Eighteenth Century,” and Chapter VI, “The Nineteenth Century.” 6. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962), 211, henceforth BT, followed by the page number; ibid., Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1967), 167, henceforth SZ, followed by the page number. 7. For an extended discussion of Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories of community, see the opening chapter of my The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3–35. 8. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. II, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago: Uni310

Notes to pages 7–17

versity of Chicago Press, 2011), 8–9; ibid., Séminaire: La bête et le souverain, Volume II, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (2002–2003) (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 31. 9. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 87; also in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 51; ibid., “Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison,” in La Religion: Séminaire de Capri sous la direction de Jacques Derrida et Gianni Vattimo, ed. Thierry Marchaisse (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 69. I have discussed Derrida’s thinking about community in For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). 2 . T R O L LO P E ’ S T H E L A S T C H R O N I C L E O F B A R S E T AS A MODEL OF VIC TORIAN COMMUNIT Y

1. “Perhaps one is a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading [ein Lehrer des langsamen Lesens]. . . . —this art does not easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers [sie lehrt g u t lesen, das heisst langsam, tief, rück- und vorsichtig, mit Hintergedanken, mit offen gelassenen Thüren, mit zarten Fingern und Augen lessen],” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Preface,” Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 5, trans. slightly altered; ibid., “Vorede,” Morgenröte, Vol. III of Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 17. 2. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, ed. David Skilton (London: Penguin, 1996), 153. Henceforth AA, followed by the page number. 3. Henry James, Roderick Hudson, The Novels and Tales, 26 vols. (Fairfield, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971–79: a reprint of the New York Edition), 1: vii. 4. Note again the occulted masturbatory figure, of which I doubt Trollope was consciously aware, any more than he was about the implications of novel writing as sitting with the pen in his hand. The terms “habit” and “dangerous mental practice” reinforce the implications. 5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968); for private languages see 258 ff. An enormous amount of philosophical literature about the question of private language of course exists. For two essays, see A. J. Ayer, “Can There Be a Private Language,” and Moreland Perkins, “Two Arguments Against a Private Language,” in Wittgenstein and the Problem of Other Minds, ed. Harold Morick (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 82–96; 97–118. 6. See Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); ibid., Das Fiktive und das Notes to pages 17–30 311

Imaginäre: Perspektiven literarische Anthropologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). “Charting literary anthropology,” by the way, is not a literal translation of the German subtitle, which means “perspectives on literary anthropology.” I have discussed Iser’s book in the first annual Wolfgang Iser lecture, given in Konstanz in July 2011: “Should We Read Literature Now, and, If So, How? Transgressing Boundaries with Iser and Coetzee,” now out as a small volume from the University of Konstanz Press. 7. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 11. I have elsewhere investigated at length de Man’s theory of ideology in “The Resistance to Theory.” I read de Man’s idea of ideology in the context of Marx’s The German Ideology, to which de Man explicitly refers. See my “Reading Paul de Man While Falling into Cyberspace: In the Twilight of the Anthropocene” (forthcoming in a book coauthored with Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook). 8. In “Self Reading Self: Trollope,” The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 89. 9. Sigmund Freud, Lecture XXIII, “The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms,” in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Part III, 1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1963; Vintage Random House reprint, 2001), 375–7. 10. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words, 2nd ed., ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 11. These are reprinted in Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1969), henceforth CH, followed by the page number. 12. Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, intro. Sophie Gilmartin, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 861, henceforth indicated by page numbers only. 13. See Nicholas Royle, “The ‘Telepathy Effect’: Notes toward a Reconsideration of Narrative Fiction,” The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 256–76; also available in Acts of Narrative, ed. Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 93–109. 14. See my For Derrida (New York, Fordham University Press, 2009), 104–5. 15. Jacques Derrida, seminar given in Paris December 2, 1992, my trans., used by permission of the author, from a computer fi le in my possession that he gave me. Because a computer fi le does not have fi xed page numbers (since its format may be altered), I cannot give a page reference. The discussion of the sentence “je t’aime” continued in the seminar of December 9, 1992. Both sessions may be consulted in the Derrida Collection at the Critical Theory Archive in the library of the University of California at Irvine. Derrida, by the way, resisted to the end any Husserlian half-escape from my isolation within my own ego. In his last seminars, on The Beast 312

Notes to pages 30–42

and the Sovereign, he expressed this resistance forcefully, apropos of a discussion of Robinson Crusoe: Between my world, the “my world,” what I call “my world”—and there is no other for me, as any other world is part of it—between my world and any other world there is fi rst the space and the time of an infi nite difference, an interruption incommensurable with all attempts to make a passage, a bridge, an isthmus, all attempts at communication, translation, trope, and transfer that the desire for a world or the want of a world [mal du monde], the being in sickness of the world [l’être en mal de monde] will attempt to pose, to impose, to propose, to stabilize. There is no world, there are only islands. (Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. II, trans. Geoff rey Bennington, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011], 9, trans. slightly altered; ibid., Séminaire: La bête et le souverain, Volume II, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud [2002–2003] [Paris: Galilée, 2010], 31.) 16. Gianni Vattimo, La società trasparente (Milan: Garzanti, 1989); ibid., The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press; Cambridge: Polity, 1992). 17. See, among much other work, my Illustration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 18. Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright 1913), 120. 19. See my “Unworked and Unavowable: Community in The Awkward Age,” Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 106–8, for a discussion of Gyp’s narrative techniques. 20. Maurice Blanchot, “La voix narrative (le ‘il’, le neutre),” in L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 556–67; ibid., “The Narrative Voice (the ‘he,’ the neutral),” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 379–87. Given what Blanchot argues in this essay about “the neutral,” a better translation of “il” in this case, would be “it,” though the word can mean both “he” and “it.” 21. Jane Austen, Emma, R. W. Chapman edition, intro. Lionel Trilling, Riverside Editions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 261–2. 22. Ibid., 268–9. William Cowper (pronounced “koo-per”) (1731–1800) was an eighteenth-century English poet and hymnodist. Austen cites a line from Book IV, “The Winter Evening,” of Cowper’s widely read poem, The Task (1784). 23. For a discussion of this disagreement and the complex interaction of the various texts involved, see my For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 33 ff. Notes to pages 42–68 313

24. I have discussed in Black Holes this strange pattern of falling in love without knowing it or being able to remember the moment of its inception, as it is strikingly dramatized in Trollope’s Ayala’s Angel (1881). See J. Hillis Miller, “The Grounds of Love: Anthony Trollope’s Ayala’s Angel,” in Black Holes, with Manuel Asensi’s J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 185–311, odd-numbered pages. 25. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervillles, New Wessex ed., Paperback (London: Macmillan, 1974), 107–8. 26. CH, 302. 27. See “The Grounds of Love: Anthony Trollope’s Ayala’s Angel,” 297, 299 for one example of gradual change in a Trollope heroine. 28. See endnote 14. 29. Jacques Derrida, “Limited Inc a b c . . . ,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Limited Inc (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 91–2. 30. “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen,” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (http://www.gutenberg.org/fi les/ 5740/5740-pdf.pdf, 162, accessed April 13, 2013). 31. “The Courts of Assize, or assizes, were periodic criminal courts held around England and Wales until 1972, when they . . . replaced by a single permanent Crown Court” (http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Assizes, accessed April 13, 2013). 32. For a brilliant extended working out of an alternative set of assumptions, based on Paul de Man’s writings, especially on de Man’s way of reading Kant on the sublime, see Claire Colebrook’s long essay, “The Geological Sublime,” forthcoming from the Open Humanities Press, along with essays by Tom Cohen and myself, in The Twilight of the Anthropocene. Few theorists have had Colebrook’s courage and percipience to follow out the implications of de Man’s writings for understanding and responding to our situation today (catastrophic climate change, financial meltdown, fallacious anthropmorphism of Gaia or “Mother Nature,” and so on). Here are some challenging sentences almost at the end of her essay: Alternatively, de Man’s ‘material sublime’ would shift sublimity from the quickening of the subject’s powers, and would seem to de-activate or paralyze thinking. It would be a sublime without Idea. It would also be a sublime without Latour’s to-be-composed public, and without Derrida’s other. Such a sublime would be aesthetic in de Man’s sense not because it has to do with art and composition, but because it would propose a mode of seeing without sense or teleology. Why, outside of literary theory would one want to exacerbate Latour’s problem of the absence of a public? Surely we want enabling notions, and ways of making our world manageable? Only a restriction into a narrow disciplinary frame of high theory (and de Man high theory at that) would 314

Notes to pages 75–92

warrant such a strategy, and it is precisely that disciplinary myopia that—it might seem—has done nothing to help the practical task of facing twentyfi rst century crises. But I would argue quite the contrary: what is required is neither the connectedness of composition, nor the hyper-ethical investment in the absolute singularity of every person’s world. It would only be with impersonality—when it is not the face, affective force or empathetic life of the other—that sublimity might be approached, and the approached may no longer be moral or ethical but pragmatic. What if we could look at all forces with the eye that is not detached from “the world” but is confronted with decomposition, fragmentation and detachment tout court. There would be no other, no humanity, no “us” deemed immediately worthy of survival, but the question would then finally be posed: what calls to be saved? Is saving, surviving, and living on a prima facie value? (cited from manuscript)

3. INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNIT Y I N T H E R E T U R N O F T H E N AT I V E

1. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (New York: Random House, 1971), 144; henceforth “Millgate,” followed by the page number. 2. Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 342. 3. See my “Prosopopoeia in Hardy and Stevens,” in Alternative Hardy, ed. Lance St. John Butler (London: MacMillan Press, 1989), 110–27. 4. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, New Wessex Edition (London: Macmillan, 1974), 35; henceforth, page numbers in parentheses. 5. J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 52–3, text slightly modified. 6. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 242. 7. I thank Rosemarie Morgan for sending me this citation from the first edition. 8. Rosemarie Morgan informs me that the phrase in question appears in E. B Tylor’s Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1871). Though these volumes are not listed in the Max Gate cata logue of Hardy’s books (http://www.library.utoronto.ca/fisher/hardy/hardy cataz.html, accessed May 30, 2013), Hardy may nevertheless have known Tylor’s book. Most likely he just made up the phrase as a pseudo-Biblical formulation. Tylor may also have been a source for the term or the idea of “fetichistic.” 9. The word, Rosemarie Morgan tells me, is used in August Comte’s Religion of Humanity to name a characteristic of Comte’s first stage in his three-stage theory of the development of human culture. The book is not, however, in the Max Gate Notes to pages 92–9 315

library cata logue, though two other books by Comte are. See http://en.wikipedia .org /wiki/Law_of_three _stages (accessed June 1, 2013): “Fetishism—Fetishism was the primary stage of the theological stage of thinking. Throughout this stage, the primitive people believe that inanimate objects have living spirit in it, also known as animism. People worship inanimate objects like trees, stones, a piece of wood, volcanic eruptions, etc.” 10. J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970). 11. See http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Cupid _and _Psyche, accessed May 15, 2013. 12. See Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. G. Cox (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970) for a selection of the early reviews. Henceforth “Cox,” followed by the page number. 13. See Walter Pater, Greek Studies (London: Macmillan, 1910), 100: “But there are traces of the old temper in the man of to-day also; and through these we can understand that earlier time—a very poetical time, with the more highly gifted peoples—in which every impression men received of the action of powers without or within them suggested to them the presence of a soul or will, like their own—a person, with a living spirit, and senses, and hands, and feet; which, when it talked of the return of Kore to Demeter, or the marriage of Zeus and Here, was not using rhetorical language, but yielding to a real illusion; to which the voice of man ‘was really a stream, beauty an effluence, death a mist.’ ” 14. I have commented in detail on this recurrent solar drama in “Prosopopoeia in Hardy and Stevens,” listed in endnote 3. 15. For a reproduction of these on facing pages, see my Topographies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 22, 23. 16. Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy: 1840–1928 (London: Macmillan, 1965), 220. 17. Hermann Lea, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex (London: Macmillan, 1913). I am deeply grateful to Rosemarie Morgan, the President of The Thomas Hardy Association, for expert help with this and with other queries. I am also grateful to Ian Rogerson, with whom she consulted about the photographs. I have obtained the eText version of Lea’s book, complete with the book’s 240 photographs, 9 of which illustrate Lea’s chapter on the “originals” of places in The Return of the Native. The Anniversary Edition reproduces four of these. The eText costs less than ten dollars and puts into PDF format the definitive book on these originals. 18. Thomas Hardy, Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences, ed. Harold Orel (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1966), 169. 19. Timothy O’Sullivan, Thomas Hardy: An Illustrated Biography (London: Macmillan, 1975), 85.

316 Notes to pages 99–135

4 . C O N R A D ’ S C O LO N I A L  N O N  C O M M U N I T Y: N O S T R O M O

1. In Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 88. 2. Henry James, “The New Novel,” in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 147. 3. Joseph Conrad, “Note,” Nostromo (New York: The Modern Library, 1951), 1. All references to Nostromo are by page numbers to this edition, with “Note” added for citations from that. The “Note” is paginated in Arabic numbers and then the pagination begins again for the novel proper. I have used this edition because it reprints the first book version and has some passages Conrad later cut. 4. See Cedric T. Watts’s succinct account of Conrad’s sources in “A note on the background to ‘Nostromo,’ ” in Letters to Cunninghame Graham, ed. Cedric T. Watts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 37–42. A fuller account is given in Cedric T. Watts, Joseph Conrad: Nostromo (London: Penguin, 1990), 19–51. For other accounts of Conrad’s sources and his uses of them, as well as for a few of the multitudinous readings of Nostromo as well as of Conrad and imperialism, see, for example, Eloise Knapp Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963); Avrom Fleishman, Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967); Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Ian Watt, Joseph Conrad: Nostromo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Peter Lancelot Mallios, “Untimely Nostromo.” Conradiana 40.3 (2008), 213–32; Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1983); Stephen Ross, Conrad and Empire (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004). 5. See C. T. Watts, Joseph Conrad: Nostromo, 21, and his footnote there to John Halverson and Ian Watt, “The Original Nostromo: Conrad’s Source,” Review of English Studies (New Series, X, 1959), 49–52. 6. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record (London: Dent, 1923), 98, henceforth PR, followed by the page number. A Personal Record is in the standard Dent edition in the same volume as The Mirror of the Sea, but with separate pagination. 7. “An Interview with Edward Said,” conducted by Peter Mallios, in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Mallios, and Andrea White (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 293. 8. Eloise Knapp Hay, “Joseph Conrad and Impressionism,” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34, no. 2 (Winter, 1975), 139. 9. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (London: Dent, 1923), vii, x. 10. Benita Parry, “The Moment and Afterlife of Heart of Darkness,” in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century, 39.

Notes to pages 139–51 317

11. Robert Hampson, “Conrad’s Heterotopic Fiction: Composite Maps, Superimposed Sites, and Impossible Spaces,” in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century, 121–35. 12. Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 165. 13. See my “Philosophy, Literature, Topography: Heidegger and Hardy,” in Topographies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 9–56, especially 26–9. 14. Henry James, The Ambassadors, The Novels and Tales, 26 vols. (Fairfield, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971–79: a reprint of the New York Edition), 21: 3. 15. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, The Novels and Tales, 19: 3. 16. Henry James, The Golden Bowl, Novels and Tales, 23: 3. 17. Joseph Conrad, Almayer’s Folly (London: Dent, 1923), 3. 18. Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea (London: Dent, 1923), 3, henceforth MS, followed by the page number. The Mirror of the Sea is in the standard Dent edition in the same volume as A Personal Record, but with separate pagination. 19. Andrzej Warminski has written a brilliant and already classic essay on this phrase in its context. See Andrzej Warminski, “ ‘As the Poets Do It’: On the Material Sublime,” in his Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For De Man (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 38–64, henceforth “Warminski,” followed by the page number. Warminski’s essay is inspired by Paul de Man’s “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 70–90, henceforth AI, followed by the page number. More recently, Claire Colebrook has returned once more to Kant as read by de Man in order to argue that the proper attitude in these days of catastrophic climate change is a material sublime that sees nature as fragmented, mechanical, and indifferent, as against personifications of Mother Nature. See Colebrook’s superb extended essay, “The Geological Sublime,” forthcoming from the Open Humanities Press in Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller, The Twilight of the Anthropocene. “Such a sublime,” says Colebrook, “would be aesthetic in de Man’s sense not because it has to do with art and composition, but because it would propose a mode of seeing without sense or teleology. . . . What if we could look at all forces with the eye that is not detached from ‘the world’ but is confronted with decomposition, fragmentation and detachment tout court” (Colebrook, 103–4). 20. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, in Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories (London: Dent, 1923), 93. 21. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1979), 10: 196; ibid., Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 110–11, translation slightly altered. 22. Tom Cohen has written powerfully in analysis and defense of de Man’s “materialism” in “Toxic assets: de Man’s remains and the ecocatastrophic imaginary (an 318

Notes to pages 152–65

American Fable),” in Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller, Theory and the Disappearing Future (London: Routledge, 2012), 89–129. 23. Cited AI, 81, by de Man from Kant, Logic, Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 6: 457. This is the edition of which I have used the paperback version of 1979, referred to in endnote 21. 24. See Gérard Genette, “Discours du récit,” in Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 65– 278; ibid., Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin, foreword Jonathan Culler (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980). The best interpretation of Conrad’s work from a narratological perspective is Jakob Lothe, Conrad’s Narrative Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 25. See Nicholas Royle, “The ‘Telepathy Effect’: Notes toward a Reconsideration of Narrative Fiction,” The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 256–76; also available in Acts of Narrative, ed. Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 93–109. 26. See Lothe, Conrad’s Narrative Method. 27. See endnote 2. 28. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Random House, 1983). 29. See endnote 4. 30. See Chapter 1 for a discussion of Williams on community. 31. Joseph Conrad, Letters to Cunninghame Graham, 57. 32. Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986), 11; ibid., The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 1, trans. modified. 33. The text has “roots,” as does the Dent edition, but surely that is a misprint for “roofs.” “Palm-leaf roots” doesn’t make sense. 34. Aristotle, Poetics, 1451b, in Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts, critical text, trans., and commentary, S. H. Butcher (Dover, 1951), 35. 35. F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition, first published in 1946, makes a strikingly similar claim for the relevance of Nostromo to understanding the history of Leavis’s own time. Speaking of “Charles Gould’s quiet unyieldingness in the face of Pedrito’s threats and blandishments,” Leavis says this episode “reinforce[s] dramatically that pattern of political significance which has a major part in Nostromo—a book that was written, we remind ourselves in some wonder, noting the topicality of its themes, analysis, and illustrations, in the reign of Edward VII [1901–1910]” (Leavis, 218). I owe this reference to Jeremy Hawthorn. I am no Leavisite, but am, nevertheless, happy to find myself in agreement with Leavis about Nostromo’s perennial relevance, though I do not agree with Leavis’s implied admiration for Gould’s political ideology. Leavis, moreover, would no doubt have had little sympathy with my insistence on the way Nostromo is “parabolic,” that is, “imaginary (but true).” Notes to pages 165–93 319

36. Watts, 68. Watts cites George M. Barringer, “Joseph Conrad and Nostromo: Two New Letters,” Thoth, X (Spring 1969), 20–24. The quotation is from p. 24 in Barringer’s essay. 37. W. B. Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” ll. 27–32, The Variorum Edition of the Poems, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 630. 38. John Ruskin, “The Pathetic Fallacy,” Modern Painters, III, location 2,926 of Kindle (with images) eBook, http://www.gutenberg.org /ebooks/38923, accessed August 10, 2013. 39. Laurence Davies, “ ‘The Thing Which Was Not’ and The Thing That Is Also: Conrad’s Ironic Shadowing,” in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, 223–37. 40. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (London: Dent, 1923), xiii. 41. Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, 165. 42. Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory,” in The Resistance to Theory, 11. 43. Conrad underlines this word by repeating it several times in the passage speaking for Emilia Gould’s sadness toward the end of the novel: “The word ‘incorrigible’— a word lately pronounced by Dr. Monygham—floated into her still and sad immobility. Incorrigible in his devotion to the great silver mine was the Señor Administrador,” and so on (582). “Incorrigible” names the impossibility of curing people of their ideological infatuations either with someone they love or with “material interests.” 44. Joseph Conrad, Victory: An Island Tale (London: Dent, 1923), 176. 45. Decoud succeeded in this better than did Conrad himself, who, absurdly or perhaps unconsciously/deliberately, botched his suicide attempt in 1878. He was in despair over debts he could not repay. He shot himself in the chest, durch und durch, through and through, as his Uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski wrote in a letter, without damaging his heart or any other vital organ (Watts, 8). If his aim had been “better” we would not have Nostromo or Lord Jim or Heart of Darkness, or any other of Conrad’s fictions. That would be an irreparable loss about which we would know nothing. 5 . WAV E S T H E O R Y: A N A N A C H R O N I S T I C R E A D I N G

1. Ian McEwan, Atonement (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), henceforth A, followed by the page number. 2. http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Cyril _Connolly, accessed June 16, 2013. 3. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1923), in The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (London: The Hogarth Press, 1950), 91. 4. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed., ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 320

Notes to pages 193–234

5. See Walter Benjamin, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” in Illuminationen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1955), 61. Harry Zohn’s translation as “intended object” and “mode of intention,” with its phenomenological use of the word “intention” to express the orientation of a word toward its referent, is a little misleading. See “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 74. For a discussion of this distinction and a claim that meaning and mode of meaning (hermeneutics and poetics) are not complementary, see Paul de Man, “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’ ” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 86–8. 6. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), 98–102. 7. Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: The New American Library [Signet], 1968), 148, henceforth D, followed by the page number. 8. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London: The Hogarth Press. 1963), 211; further references to The Waves will be by page numbers only. 9. Maurice Blanchot, “La voix narrative (le ‘il’, le neutre),” in L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 556–67; ibid., “The Narrative Voice (the ‘he,’ the neutral),” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 379–87. As I have said in an endnote in Chapter 2, given what Blanchot argues in this essay about “the neutral,” a better translation of “il” in this case, would be “it,” though the word can mean both “he” and “it.” 10. Gerald Levin, “The Musical Style of The Waves,” in Virginia Woolf: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 215–22, reprinted from The Journal of Narrative Technique 13, no. 3 (Fall 1983). 11. See http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/secular-masque (accessed June 12, 2013), line 77. 12. I thank Jessica Haile for calling my attention to these passages. 13. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1985), 67, henceforth MB, followed by the page number. 14. See Paul de Man, “Kant and Schiller,” Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 137. Here is part of that page: “. . . the relation between them, between the mathematical and the dynamic, is a discontinuity. It is not a dialectic, it is not a progression or a regression, but it is a transformation of trope into power, which is not itself a tropological movement, and which cannot be accounted for by means of a tropological model. You cannot account for the change from trope to performative, you cannot account for the change from the mathematical sublime to the dynamic sublime in Kant—I argued at least [in ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,’ ibid., 70–90]—you cannot account for it according to a tropological model.” Notes to pages 234–60 321

15. I have elsewhere discussed in greater detail all five. For Husserl and Derrida, see J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida and Literature,” in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 66– 68. For Henry James, see J. Hillis Miller, Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 157–60. For Iser and Blanchot, see J. Hillis Miller, “Literature Matters Today,” in SubStance, Issue 131, vol. 42, no. 2 (2013), 26–31. 16. Edmund Husserl, L’origine de la géométrie, in Jacques Derrida, Introduction à “L’Origine de la géométrie” de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962); ibid., The Origin of Geometry, trans. David Carr, in Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 157–80. 17. Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1971), vol. 23 of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (Reprint of the New York Edition of 26 vols.) (Fairfield, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971–79), xiii–xiv. 18. Maurice Blanchot, “Le temps et le roman,” in Faux Pas (Paris: Gallimard. 1943), 282–6; ibid., “Time and the Novel,” in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 248–51. 19. Maurice Blanchot, “Two Versions of the Imaginary,” in The Gaze of Orpheus and other literary essays, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 79–89; ibid., “Les deux versions de l’imaginaire,” in L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 266–77. 20. Maurice Blanchot, “The Song of the Sirens,” in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1–24; ibid., “Le chant des Sirènes,” in Le livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 7–34. 21. Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, trans. David Henry Wilson, Wolfgang Iser, et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); ibid., Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre: Perspektiven literarische Anthropologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). 22. Iser (1993), xvii; not present in the German “Vorwort.” 23. Iser (1993), 3; Iser (1991), 21. 24. Jacques Derrida, “The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations,” in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug & Others (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 116; ibid., “Ponctuations: le temps de la thèse,” in Jacques Derrida, Du droit à la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 443. 25. Jacques Derrida, “Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison,” in La Religion: Séminaire de Capri sous la direction de Jacques Derrida et Gianni Vattimo, ed. Thierry Marchaisse (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 9–86; ibid., “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 42–101. For de Man, on belief see his “Allegory of Reading (Profession de foi),” in 322 Notes to pages 261–3

Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 245: “If, after reading the Profession de foi, we are tempted to convert ourselves to ‘theism,’ we stand convicted of foolishness in the court of the intellect. But if we decide that belief, in the most extensive use of the term (which must include all possible forms of idolatry and ideology) can once and forever be overcome by the enlightened mind, then this twilight of the idols [a reference to the title of a book by Nietzsche] will be all the more foolish in not recognizing itself as the first victim of its occurrence.” 6. POSTMODERN COMMUNITIES I N P Y N C H O N A N D C E R VA N T E S

1. This chapter is a revision, expansion, and reorientation of a lecture that was originally given in Córdoba, Spain, at a conference celebrating the four-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote, Part One in 1605. The conference was focused on one of Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels, “The Dogs’ Colloquy” (El Coloquio de los perros). I thank Julián Jiménez Heffernan and Paula Martín Salván for the invitation and for many kindnesses. My paper was subsequently revised, translated into Spanish by María Jesús López Sánchez-Vizcaíno, and published as “El Coloquio de los Perros Como Narrativa Posmoderna,” along with many other papers from the conference. My essay appeared in La Tropelía: Hacia el Coloquio de los Perros, ed. Julián Jiménez Heffernan (Tenerife; Madrid: Artemisaediciones, 2008), 33–98. My translator called the readers’ attention in notes to a number of places where the translation by Walter Starkie I used missed nuances of the original Spanish, for example the translation of presta (“ready”) as “nigh.” I have incorporated most of her comments in the present revision and have changed my readings to fit the Spanish original more closely. I have also incorporated phrases from the original here and there in my citations to give the flavor of Cervantes’s Spanish. 2. Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner: Early Stories (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985). Future references to this text will include page numbers only. 3. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 4. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 5. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 54. 6. Jameson, ix. 7. For this difficult distinction in Kant, see Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 70–3. “Metaphysical principles state why and how things occur . . . . Transcendental principles state the conditions that make occurrence possible at all . . . . Ideologies, to the extent that they necessarily contain Notes to pages 263–5 323

empirical moments and are directed toward what lies outside the realm of pure concepts, are on the side of metaphysics rather than critical philosophy” (71, 72). Most literary and cultural study, insofar as it is “historical” in the Jamesonian sense, is in the realm of what Kant calls “metaphysics,” not in the realm of “critical philosophy.” 8. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 82, 87; ibid., “Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison,” in La religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 62, 69. 9. Jacques Derrida, “Fift h Session: February 5, 2003,” in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoff rey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 193. 10. Jacques Derrida, “Cinquième séance. Le 5 février 2003,” in Sémimaire La bête et le souverain II (2002–2003), ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, Ginette Michaud (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 193. 11. See Derrida, 2011, 131: “Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment on, is a living-dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, a bookstore, in cellars, urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of a Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by reanimating it. . . .”; Comme toute trace, un livre, la survivance d’un livre, dès son premier instant, c’est une machine mort-vivante, survivante, le corps d’une chose enterrée dans une bibliothèque, une librairie, dans des caveaux, des urnes, noyée dans les vagues mondiales d’un Web, etc., mais une chose morte qui ressuscite chaque fois qu’un souffle de lecture vivante, chaque fois que le souffle de l’autre or l’autre souffle, chaque fois qu’une intentionnalité la vise et la fait reviver en l’animant. . . . (ibid., 2010, 194). Derrida’s word “machine” here is important. The survivance of a book or other trace happens mechanically, for example by way of those monster programs and servers that collect the NSA’s metadata, or, for that matter, the information collected in the same mechanical way about our choices and tastes by Amazon or Google for “targeted marketing” purposes. 12. See Eric Lichtblau, “In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.,” New York Times (July 7, 2013). See also the four essays gathered under the rubric of “The End of Privacy: What we have to fear from the new surveillance state,” in The Nation (July 8/15, 2013). 13. Miguel de Cervantes, “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” in The Deceitful Marriage and Other Exemplary Novels, trans. Walter Starkie (New York: The New American Library [Signet], 1963), 247; ibid., “El coloquio de los perros,” in Novelas ejemplares (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1997), 40. Henceforth page numbers only, with the Spanish first, followed by the English. 324 Notes to pages 265–86

14. Derrida’s wonderful discussion of why the phrase “je t’aime” (I love you) is a performative utterance, not a constative one, ran through the third and fourth seminars of the sequence on “Témoignage or Attestation [Witnessing]” given in Paris in 1992–3. I heard Derrida give the English version in Irvine as a single two-hour lecture in the spring of 1993. He gave me a disk of the whole seminar sequence at that time. So far as I know, this seminar has not yet been published in either French or English, but I am told an illicit text is circulating in cyberspace. I discuss this seminar briefly in several places in my For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 37, 38, 153, 172. 15. See Friedrich Schlegel, “Critical Fragments,” no. 108: “To a person who hasn’t got it [irony], it will remain a riddle even after it is openly confessed. It is meant to deceive no one except those who consider it a deception and who either take pleasure in the delightful roguery of making fools of the whole world or else become angry when they get an inkling that they themselves might be included,” in Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow, Foreword by Rodolphe Gasché (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 13; Wer sie [ironie] nicht hat, dem bleibt sie auch nach dem offensten Geständnis ein Rätsel. Sie soll niemanden täuschen als die, welche sie für Täuschung halten, und entweder ihre Freude haben an der herrlichen Schalkheit, alle Welt zum besten zu haben, oder böse werden, wenn sie ahnden, sie wären wohl auch mit gemeint (“Kritische Fragmente” in Kritische Schriften [München: Carl Hanser, 1964], 20). 16. Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, 165.

Notes to pages 297–304 325

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INDEX

Abraham, 14–15 Agamben, Giorgio, 7, 16, 176, 310n4; The Coming Community, 310n4; La comunità che viene, 310n4 Althusser, Louis, 13–14, 43, 216 Anderson, Benedict, 7, 310n4, 319n28; Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 310n4 Anidjar, Gil, 324n8; Acts of Religion, 324n8 Apocalypse Now, 149 Apuleius, 101; “Cupid and Psyche,” 101; The Golden Ass or Metamorphoses, 101 Aristotle, 19, 108, 134, 153, 165, 192, 244, 274, 286, 319n34; Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts (S. H. Butcher), 319n34; “The Discovery,” 108; Poetics, 134, 192, 319n34 Arnold, Matthew, 206; “The Study of Poetry,” 206 Asensi, Manuel, 314n24; J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading, 314n24 Austen, Jane, 1–2, 62–4, 92, 108, 115, 313n21; Emma, 62–4, 313n21, n22 (characters in Emma: Emma, 62–5; Frank Churchill, 62, 64–5; Mr. Dixon, 62; Mr. Elton, 62; Jane Fairfax, 62, 65; Mr. Knightly, 62, 65; Harriet Smith, 62, 64); Persuasion, 62 (character in Persuasion: Anne Elliot, 62) Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words, 92 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 149, 151, 197, 205, 258; The Goldberg Variations, 205, 258; Well-Tempered Clavier, 205 Barnes, William, 93

Barringer, George M., 320n36; “Joseph Conrad and Nostromo: Two New Letters,” 320n36 Bataille, Georges, 7, 16, 176, 310n4; L’Apprenti Sorcier du cercle communiste démocratique à Acéphale: textes, lettres et documents (1932–39), 310n4 Baudrillard, Jean, 309n3 Benjamin, Walter, 139, 234, 321n5; “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” 234, 321n5; Illuminationen (Hannah Arendt), 321n5; “The Task of the Translator,” 321n5 Berthoud, Jacques, 317n4; Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, 317n4 Bible, 15, 98, 107, 183, 306 Blackwoods Magazine, 38 Blanchot, Maurice, 7, 16, 53, 176, 235, 262, 310n4, 313n20, 321n9, 322n15,nn18–20; The Book to Come, 322n20; La communauté inavouable, 16, 310n4; “Les deux versions de l’imaginaire,” 322n19; L’Entretien infini (The Infinite Conversation), 313n20; L’espace littéraire, 322n19; Faux Pas, 322n18; The Gaze of Orpheus and other literary essays, 322n19; The Inavowable Community, 310n4; “The Song of the Sirens,” 322n20; “Le temps et le roman,” 322n18; “Time and the Novel,” 322n18; “Two Versions of the Imaginary,” 322n19; “La voix narrative (le ‘il’, le neutre),” 53, 313n20 Bloom, Harold, 268; Virginia Woolf: Modern Critical Views, 321n10 Bush, George W., 3–4, 152, 184–6, 200, 213, 214, 225, 270 Butler, Lance St. John, 315n3; Alternative Hardy, 315n3

Carroll, Lewis, 289, 300; Alice in Wonderland, 289, 300 Cervantes, Miguel, vii, xi, 10, 264–5, 267, 285, 292–3, 295–307, 323n1, 324n13; “El Coloquio de los perros” xiii, 288, 323n1; The Deceitful Marriage and Other Exemplary Novels, 285, 324n13; “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” xiii, 264, 267, 285–306, 323n1, 324n13 (characters in “The Dogs’ Colloquy”: Berganza, 290–301, 304; Camacha, 291, 296, 299–302; Cañizares, 264, 291, 296–306; Montiela, 291, 296, 299, 302; Scipio, 285, 288–92, 300–4); Don Quixote, 285, 291, 323n1; Exemplary Novels (Novelas ejemplares), 265, 291, 323n1, 324n13; “The Secret Integration,” 265–74, 278, 280, 290, 304, 306 Cheney, Dick, 297, 152, 187, 189 Ciruelo, Pedro, 297; Tratado de las Supersticiones y Medicinas, 297 Cohen, Tom, 312n7, 314n32, 318n19, 318–19n22, 322n15; Jacques Derrida and the Humanities, 322n115; Theory and the Disappearing Future, 319n22; “Toxic assets: de Man’s remains and the ecocatastrophic imaginary (an American Fable),” 318n22; The Twilight of the Anthropocene, 318n19 Colebrook, Claire, 164, 312n8, 314n32, 318n19, 319n22; “The Geological Sublime,” 164, 314n32, 318n19; Theory and the Disappearing Future, 319n22; The Twilight of the Anthropocene, 319n22 Comte, August (Religion of Humanity), 315n9 Conrad, Joseph, ii, ix, xi, xii, 8, 10, 139–84, 187–98, 201–31, 317nn3–9,14, 318n11, 318nn17–18, 318n20, 319nn24,26,31, 320nn36,38,40,43–45; Almayer’s Folly, 318n17; Chance, 139, 174; Heart of Darkness, 144–5, 149, 161–2, 171, 205, 208, 227, 317n10, 318n20, 320n45 (character in Heart of Darkness: Marlow, 143); Nostromo, vii, xii, 139–231 (characters in Nostromo: Antonia Avellanos, 146, 177, 178, 192, 197, 205, 214, 216, 218, 222, 224, 224, 228; Barrios, 216–17, 224, 226; Captain Mitchell, 177, 195–7, 219; Don José, 224; Garibaldi, 210–11, 229; Giorgio Viola, 178, 196–7, 209–10, 221–2, 227, 229; Giorgio’s wife, 210; Giselle, 221–2; Guzman Bento, 172, 216; Heyst, 227; Holroyd, 152, 175, 186–90, 199, 201, 208, 211–12, 228; Linda Viola, 148, 205, 222; Martin Decoud, 145–6, 177, 179–81, 190,

328

Index

192, 196–7, 204–5, 207, 214, 216, 218, 220–31; Dr. Monygham, 148, 175, 181, 197, 198, 201, 203, 205, 209–10, 215–18, 222, 224, 226, 228, 320n43; Nostromo, 145–6, 152, 157, 175, 178–9, 196–9, 203, 205–6, 210–11, 216–17, 219–22, 224, 226–9; Pedrito Montero, 171, 213–14, 216, 218, 319n35; Ramirez, 222; Sr. Hirsch, 197, 227; Teresa Viola, 210, 227; Viola’s daughters, 198, 221); Letters to Cunninghame Graham, 319n31, 319n31; Lord Jim, 8; The Mirror of the Sea, 318n18; The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 317n9; A Personal Record, 147, 317n6; The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, 320n40; Typhoon, 140–1; Victory: An Island Tale, 320n44; Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories, 318n20 Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, 229, 317nn7,10, 318n11, 320n39 Cox, R. G., 316n12; Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, 316n12 Crane, Stephen, 151, 195 Cunninghame Graham, R. B., 141, 145, 169, 177, 181, 190–2, 229, 317n4, 319n31 Davies, Laurence, 320n39; Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, 320n39; “ ‘The Th ing Which Was Not’ and The Th ing That Is Also: Conrad’s Ironic Shadowing,” 320n39 Defoe, Daniel, 16; Robinson Crusoe, 16 De Man, Paul, 32, 96–7, 100, 139, 153, 164–7, 170, 207–8, 215–16, 223, 260, 263, 304, 312n7, 314n32, 315n6, 317n1, 318nn12,19,22– 3, 320nn41–2, 321nn5,14, 322n25, 323n7, 325n16; Aesthetic Ideology, 318nn12,19, 320n41, 321n14, 323n7, 325n16; Allegories of Reading, 315n6, 323n25; “Allegory of Reading (Profession de foi),” 322n25; “The Concept of Irony,” 153, 207, 318n12, 320n41, 325n16; “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’ ” 139, 321n5; “Kant and Schiller,” 321n14; “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” 164–5, 318n19, 321n14, 323n7; The Resistance to Theory, 312n7, 317n1, 320n42, 321n5; “The Resistance to Theory,” 312n7, 320n42 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 7, 12, 16–17, 41, 68, 82–3, 92, 110, 176, 246, 262, 266, 272–9, 284, 286, 292, 295–300, 310n8, 311n9, 312n15, 313n15, 314nn29,32, 322nn15–16,24–25, 324nn8–11,

325n14; Acts of Religion, 310n4, 311n9, 322n25, 324n8; “The Beast and the Sovereign,” 278, 286, 310n8, 312n15, 324n9, 313n15; “Cinquième séance. Le 5 fevrier 2003,” 324n10; Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (Introduction à “L’Origine de lagéométrie” de Husserl), 322n16; Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 (Du droit à la philosophie), 322n24; “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” 17, 263, 272, 311n9, 322n25, 324n8; “Fift h Session: February 5, 2003,” 324n9; “Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison,” 292, 311n9, 322n25, 324n8; Limited Inc., 83, 314n29; The Politics of Friendship, 176; La religion, 310n4, 324n8; La Religion: Séminaire de Capri sous la direction de Jacques Derrida et Gianni Vattimo, 322n25; Specters of Marx, 276; “Témoignage or Attestation [Witnessing],” 325n14; “The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations” (“Ponctuations: le temps de la thèse”), 262, 322n24 Dickens, Charles, 22, 51; Bleak House, 22; Mr. Turveydrop, 22; Oliver Twist, 51 Eastwick, Edward B., 141, 145, 177, 190; Venezuela, 141 Eliot, George, 1–3, 32, 104, 107, 115, 287; Adam Bede, 2 (characters in Adam Bede: Adam, 2; Daniel, 2; Felix Holt, 2; Hetty Sorrel, 2; Maggie, 2); Daniel Deronda, 3; Middlemarch, 3 Eliot, T. S., 226 Empson, William, 289; Some Versions of Pastoral, 289 Engels, Friedrich, 201; The Communist Manifesto, 201 Erasmus, 288; Colloquia, 288 Faulkner, William, 173, 195 Flaubert, Gustave, 8; Madame Bovary (character), 8 Fleishman, Avrom, 317n4; Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, 317n4 Foreign Languages and Culture Teaching and Research, xiii, 18 Forster, E. M., 175; Howard’s End, 175 Freud, Sigmund, 11, 33, 35, 40, 74, 91, 100, 215, 255–6, 312n9, 325n15; Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 33, 312n9;

“The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms,” 312n9; The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 312n9 Gilmartin, Sophie, 21–2, 312n12 God, 12, 14–15, 40, 59, 69, 71, 74, 96–8, 117, 138, 147, 188, 211, 247, 261, 304–6 Gulliver’s Travels, 144; Captain Gulliver, 144 Hamblen, H. E. (Frederick Benton Williams), 142; On Many Seas: The Life and Exploits of a Yankee Sailor, 142 Hampson, Robert, 151, 159, 317n4, 318n11; Conrad in the Twenty-First Century, 318n11; Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, 317n4; “Conrad’s Heterotopic Fiction: Composite Maps, Super-imposed Sites, and Impossible Spaces,” 318n11 Hardy, Florence Emily, 316n16; The Life of Thomas Hardy: 1840–1928, 316n16 Hardy, Thomas, ix, xi, 1–3, 6–8, 7, 10, 78, 93–101, 104–38, 150, 154, 161, 221, 315nn1–2,4,8; Alderworth, ix, 120, 123, 128; Bloom’s End, ix, 122; The Complete Poems, 105, 315n2; “The Convergence of the Twain,” 108 (character in “The Convergence of the Twain”: Trevelyan, 26); Jude the Obscure, 7, 133, 144 (character in Jude the Obscure: Jude Fawley, 7); The Mayor of Casterbridge, 143; Personal Writings: Prefaces, 316n18; Poems 1912–13, 94; The Return of the Native, ix, 2, 7–8, 10, 93–101, 104, 107, 110–11, 121, 122, 138, 150; Shadwater Weir, ix, 110, 120, 124, 132 (characters in Shadwater Weir: Clym Yeobright, 2, 7, 93–94, 104–10; Diggory Venn, 109, 113, 127–8, 130–1, 134; Eustacia, 94, 101, 105–7, 109; Wildeve, 15, 94, 102, 105–6, 108–9, 113, 119, 124–5, 127–9, 131, 133–4; Mrs. Yeobright, 104, 106–7); “A Sketch Map of the Scene of the Story,” ix, 96, 111; “A Story of a Man of Character,” 143; Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 78, 109, 131; The Warden, 26 (character in The Warden: Mr. Harding, 19, 26, 35–6, 82, 88); The Writings of Thomas Hardy in Prose and Verse, 121–4 Harvey, David, 323n4; The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, 323n4 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 21, 23 Hay, Eloise Knapp, 151, 159–60, 317nn4,8; “Joseph Conrad and Impressionism,”

Index 329

Hay (cont.) 317n8; The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study, 159–60, 317nn4,8 Heffernan, Julián Jiménez, xii, xiii, 310n4, 323n1; Hacia el Coloquio de los Perros, xii, 323n1; “Togetherness and Its Discontents,” 310n4 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 166, 310n4 Heidegger, Martin, 7–16, 28, 42 92, 104, 110, 115–16, 125–30, 132, 135–7, 140, 165, 171, 176, 231, 28, 309, 309nn3–4, 310n6, 318n13; Being and Time, 309n4, 310n6; The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 7, 16, 310n4; Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, 7, 286, 309n4; Sein und Zeit, 7–8, 13–14, 309n4, 310n6 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 8, 164–5 Homer, 206; The Iliad, 206 (characters in The Iliad: Castor, 206; Clytemestra, 206; Hector, 206; Helen, 206; Pollux, 206; Priam, 206) Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 14, 141 Husserl, Edmund, 41–2, 92, 262–3, 312n14, 322nn15–16; Cartesian Meditations, 41; Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, 322n16; The Origin of Geometry, 262; L’origine de la géométrie, 322n16 Isaac, 15 Iser, Wolfgang, 30, 262, 311n6, 312n6, 322n15, 322nn21–23; The Fictive and the Imaginary, 30, 262, 311n6, 322n15; Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre: Perspektiven literarische Anthropologie, 30, 262, 312n6, 322n15 Jacobs, Carol, and Henry Sussman, Acts of Narrative, 312n13 James, Henry, 3, 20, 23, 51–2, 139, 142, 154–5, 173–4, 209–10, 262, 284, 311n3, 313n9, 317n2, 318nn14–16, 322nn15,17; The Ambassadors, 154, 318n14; American Writers, 317n2; The Awkward Age, 52, 210, 313n19; The Golden Bowl, 155, 262, 318n16, 322n17; “The New Novel,” 154, 317n2; The Novels and Tales of Henry James, 311n3, 318nn14–16, 322n17; Roderick Hudson, 20, 311n3; A Small Boy and Others, 313n18; “The Turn of the Screw,” 284; The Wings of the Dove, 154, 318n15 Jameson, Fredric, 175, 181, 190, 265–7, 288, 309n3, 323nn5–6; Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 323n5

330

Index

The Journal of Narrative Technique, 321n10 Joyce, James, 150 Kafk a, Franz, 150, 253 Kant, Immanuel, 160–7, 170, 260, 265, 314n32, 318nn19,21, 319n23, 321n14, 323n7, 324n7; Analytic of the Sublime, 170; The Critique of Judgment, 162, 170, 318n21; The Critique of Practical Reason, 170; The Critique of Pure Reason, 170; Kritik der Urteilskraft, 318n21; Werkausgabe, 318n21; Logic, Werkausgabe, 319n23 Keats, John, 101–2, 138; Endymion, 138; Ode to Psyche, 101 Kennedy, John F., 267 Kierkegaard, Søren, 15; Fear and Trembling, 15 King, Martin Luther, 267 Lacan, Jacques, 68, 110, 215, 286 Latour, Bruno, 309n3, 314n32 Lawrence, D. H., 2, 115 Lea, Hermann, 120; Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, 120 Leavis, F. R., 319n35; The Great Tradition, 319n5 Levin, Gerald, 238, 321n10; “The Musical Style of The Waves,” 321n10 Levinas, Emmanuel, 92, 176 Lichtblau, Eric, “In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.,” 324n13 Lingis, Alphonso, 7, 310n4; The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, 310n4 Lisse, Michel, Marie-Louise Mallet, Ginette Michaud, 312–13n15, 324n9; The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, 324n9; Sémimaire: La bête et le souverain II, 313n15 London Times, 31, 219 Lord of the Rings, 150 Lothe, Jakob, 319n24; Conrad’s Narrative Method, 319n24 Lyotard, Jean-François, 265, 323n3; The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 323n3 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 150, 260 Mallios, Peter Lancelot, 317nn4,7; Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, 317n7; “An Interview with Edward Said,” 317n7; “Untimely Nostromo,” 317n4

Marchisse, Th ierry, 311n9; La Religion: Séminaire de Capri sous la direction de Jacques Derrida et Gianni Vattimo, 311n9 Marx, Karl, 5, 7, 96, 99, 153, 201, 203–4, 216, 232, 240–1, 276, 310n4, 312n7; The Communist Manifesto, 201; Das Capital, 153; Eighteenth Brumaire, 204; The German Ideology, 96, 153, 276, 312n7; Notes on James Mill, 232 Masterman, G. F., 141, 145, 177, 190; Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay, 141 McEwan, Ian, 233–4, 320n1; Atonement, 233–4, 320n1 (characters in Atonement: Briony Tallis, 233; Cyril Connolly, 233) Melville, Herman, 294; The Confidence Man, 294 Miller, J. Hillis, 312n8, 314n24, 318n19, 319n22, 322n15; Black Holes, 314n24; The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz, 310n7; “Derrida and Literature,” 322n15; The Ethics of Reading, 312n8; For Derrida, 311n9, 312n14, 313n23, 325n14; “The Grounds of Love: Anthony Trollope’s Ayala’s Angel,” 314nn24,27; “Individual and Community in The Return of the Native: A Reappraisal,” xi; Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James, 313n19, 322n15; “Literature Matters Today,” 322n15; “Philosophy, Literature, Topography: Heidegger and Hardy,” 110, 318n13; “Prosopopoeia in Hardy and Stevens,” 315n3, 316n14; “Reading Paul de Man While Falling into Cyberspace: In the Twilight of the Anthropocene,” 312n7; “Self Reading Self: Trollope,” 312n8; “Should We Read Literature Now, and, If So, How? Transgressing Boundaries with Iser and Coetzee,” 312n6; Theory and the Disappearing Future, 319n22; Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, 110, 316n10; “Thomas Pynchon’s ‘The Secret Integration’ as Postmodern Narrative,” xiii; Topographies, 111, 315n5, 316n15, 318n13; The Twilight of the Anthropocene, 314n32, 318n19; “Unworked and Unavowable: Community in The Awkward Age,” 313n19 Millgate, Michael, xi, 93, 107, 315n1; Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, xi, 93, 315n1 Morgan, Rosemarie, 315nn7–9, 315n17 Morrison, Toni, 267, 289–91, 296; Beloved, 267

Nancy, Jean-Luc 7, 16, 28, 42, 92; Being Singular Plural, 42, 310n4; La communauté désoeuvrée, 16, 310n4, 319n32; Être singulier pluriel, 310n4; Identity: Fragments, Frankness, 327; The Inoperative Community, 310n4, 319n32 New York Times, 324n12 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18, 97, 311n1, 323n25; Kritische Studienausgabe, 311n1; “Preface,” Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, 311n1 O’Sullivan, Timothy, 316n19; Thomas Hardy: An Illustrated Biography, 316n19 Ovid, 289, 305; Metamorphoses, 289, 305 Parry, Benita, 317nn4,10; Conrad and Imperialism, 317n4; “The Moment and Afterlife of Heart of Darkness,” 317n10 Pater, Walter, 101, 104, 151, 316n13; Greek Studies, 316n13 Plato, 102, 164, 192, 248, 263, 274, 288, 299; The Republic, 192 Pocock, J. G. A., 309n3; Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century, 309n3 Poe, Edgar Allan, 110; “The Purloined Letter,” 110 Proust, Marcel, 140, 150, 215; À la recherche du temps perdu, 215 Pynchon, Thomas, vii, xi, xii, 10, 264–78, 281–4, 287, 289, 291, 304, 306–7, 323n2; “The Secret Integration,” xii, 265–74, 278, 280–90, 296, 304, 306 (characters in “The Secret Integration”: Carl Barrington, 271–3, 275–83; Carl McAfee, 271, 276–7, 282, 284; Étienne, 276, 281; Grover Snodd, 269–75, 281–3, 304; Tim, 272–3, 276–7, 281–3; King Yrjö, 274); Slow Learner: Early Stories, 265, 323n2 Review of English Studies, 317n5 Rogerson, Ian, 316n17 Ross, Stephen, 317n4; Conrad and Empire, 317n4 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 96, 129, 131, 167, 263; Profession du foi, 96, 223, 263, 322n25 Royle, Nicholas, 40, 173, 310n4, 312n13; Acts of Narrative, 312n13, 319n25; “The ‘Telepathy Effect’: Notes toward a Reconsideration of Narrative Fiction,” 312n13, 319n25; The Uncanny, 312n13, 319n5

Index 331

Ruskin, John, 206, 320n38; Modern Painters, 320n38; “The Pathetic Fallacy,” 320n38 Salván, Paula Martín, xiii, 323n1 Sánchez-Vizcaíno, María Jesús López (trans.), xii, 323; “El Coloquio de los Perros como Narrativa Postmoderna,” xii, 323; La Tropelía: Hacia el Coloquio de los Perros, 323 Saturday Evening Post, 267, 284 Schlegel, Friedrich, 207, 303, 325n15; “Critical Fragments,” 325n15 Shakespeare, William, 85, 313, 237, 260; Hamlet, 85, 226, 236–7, 290 (character in Hamlet: Hamlet, 85, 236, 157, 236–7); Othello (character), 226; Two Gentlemen of Verona, 131 Smalley, Donald, 312n11; Trollope: The Critical Heritage, 312n11 Socrates, 248 Sophocles, 8, 19; Oedipus (character), 1–8, 15; Oedipus the King, 19, 134 Spartacus, 284 Spectator, 110 Starkie, Walter, 288, 297, 302, 323n1, 324n13 Stevens, Wallace, 235, 321n6; The Collected Poems, 321n6; “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” 235 Substance, 322n15 Tom Swift books, 269, 272, 284 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 1, 71, 310n4 Triana, S. Perez, 141; Down the Orinoco, 141 Trollope, Anthony, vii, ix, 10, 18–30, 34–40, 42, 46–54, 56–60, 62–92, 104, 108, 128, 157, 247, 287, 311nn2,4; An Autobiography, 19–21, 23–4, 30–1, 33, 35, 47, 49, 57, 68, 83, 311n2, 312n12; Ayala’s Angel, 75, 314nn24,27; He Knew He Was Right, 26 (character in He Knew He Was Right: Trevelyan, 26); The Last Chronicle of Barset, vii, ix, 18–30, 32, 35, 39, 43, 45–7, 50, 52, 54, 57–8, 62, 66, 70–1, 77–8, 84, 91–2, 208, 247, 312n12 (characters in The Last Chronicle of Barset: Adolphus Crosbie, 54, 69, 77–9, 83–4, 92; Mrs. Arabin, 66, 89; Dobbs Broughton, 19, 57, 79–82; Mrs. Broughton, 80–1, 83; Clara Van Sievers, 80; Dean Arabin, 60, 89; Grace Crawley, ix, 19, 22, 39, 45, 54–64, 69, 71–7, 81, 89, 91–2; Reverend Crawley, ix, 19–22, 26–2, 32, 39, 42–5, 50, 54, 68–70, 73–7, 82, 84–92; Mr. Dale, 88; Mrs. Dale,

332

Index

54, 69; Dalrymple, 80–1; George Walker, 39, 44, 85–6, 88; Archdeacon Grantly, 55, 63, 82, 89; Major Grantly, 19, 22, 31, 37, 44–5, 54–6, 60–4, 69–79, 83–4, 91–2; Mrs. Grantly, 37, 55, 76; Johnny Eames, 19, 22, 54, 68, 76–84; Lily Dale, 19, 22, 39, 54, 64, 68, 77, 79, 83–6, 91–2; Madalina Demolines, 80, 83; Mary Walker, 39–40, 43–4, 66; Mrs. Proudie, 19, 22, 35–6, 38, 54, 63–4, 76, 82, 86, 89; Mr. Septimus Harding, 19, 26, 35–7, 82, 88; Mr. Toogood, 66, 84, 86, 89–90; Mrs. Walker, 61, 74, 76); The Prime Minister, 26 (character in The Prime Minister: Duke of Omnium, 26); The Small House at Allington, 78, 84 (characters in The Small House at Allington: Johnny Eames, 78; Lily Dale, 84); The Warden, 26, 31 (character in The Warden: Mr. Harding, 19, 26, 35–6, 82, 88) Trollope: The Critical Heritage (Donald Smalley), 312n11 Tyler, E. B., 315n8; Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, 315n8 Wagner, Richard, 97, 206, 238; Götterdämmerung, 97 Warminski, Andrzej, 164, 167–8, 170, 318nn12,19, 321n14, 323n7; Aesthetic Ideology, 318nn12,19, 321n14, 323n7; Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For De Man, 318n19; “ ‘As the Poets Do It’: On the Material Sublime,” 164, 318n19 Warren, Robert Penn, 145 Watt, Ian, 317n4; Joseph Conrad: Nostromo, 160–1, 317nn4–5; “The Original Nostromo: Conrad’s Source,” 317n5 Watts, C. T., 145, 159–61, 190, 199, 201, 317nn4–5, 320nn36,45; Joseph Conrad: Nostromo, 317n5; Letters to Cunninghame Graham (ed.), 317n4; “A note on the background to ‘Nostromo,’ ” 317n4 Weber, Samuel, 311n9, 314n29, 322n25, 324n8; Acts of Religion (trans.), 311n9, 322n25, 324n8; Limited Inc., 314n29 Whitehead, Alfred North, 8, 310n5; Science and the Modern World, 310n5 Williams, Raymond, 1–10, 15–17, 80, 94, 114, 125, 135, 178, 309nn1–3, 319n30; The Country and the City, 1, 3–4, 7, 178, 309nn2–3; “Enclosures, Commons and Communities,” 1; Keywords, 309n1; “Knowable Communities,” 1; “Wessex and the Border,” 1

Wilson, Keith, 11; Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate, 11 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 15, 29, 84, 311n5, 314n30; Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, 314n30; Philosophical Investigations, 29, 311n5; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 84 Wittgenstein and the Problem of Other Minds (Harold Morick), 311n5; “Can There Be a Private Language” (A. J. Ayer), 311n5; “Two Arguments Against a Private Language” (Moreland Perkins), 311n5 Woolf, Virginia, xi, xii, 10, 150, 13, 175, 232–40, 242, 244, 246–61, 263, 320n3, 321nn7,8,10; “Mr. Bennett and Mrs.

Brown,” 320n3; The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays, 320n3; Mrs Dalloway, 175, 254 (characters in Mrs. Dalloway: Bernard, 235–53, 255, 258, 318n21; Jinny, 236, 240, 242, 244, 246–53, 258; Louis, 236, 240–50, 253, 25, 261; Neville, 236, 240–1, 244–53, 259; Perceval, 232, 239, 242–50, 259, 261; Rhoda, 236–40, 244–50, 258; Susan, 236, 240, 243–8, 251, 253); Moments of Being, 254, 321n13; “A Sketch of the Past,” 254, 259; To the Lighthouse, 251; The Waves, 232–9, 242, 244–5, 247, 250–62, 321nn8,10, 321n13; A Writer’s Diary, 237, 251, 321n7 Wordsworth, William, 164–5

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Commonalities Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics. Translated by Rhiannon Noel Welch. Introduction by Vanessa Lemm. Maurizio Ferraris, Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces. Translated by Richard Davies. Dimitris Vardoulakis, Sovereignty and Its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence. Anne Emmanuelle Berger, The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender. Translated by Catherine Porter. James D. Lilley, Common Things: Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Atlantic Modernity. Jean-Luc Nancy, Identity: Fragments, Frankness. Translated by François Raffoul. Miguel Vatter, Between Form and Event: Machiavelli’s Theory of Political Freedom. Miguel Vatter, The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society. Maurizio Ferraris, Where Are You? An Ontology of the Cell Phone. Translated by Sarah De Sanctis. Irving Goh, The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject. Kevin Attell, Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction. J. Hillis Miller, Communities in Fiction.