Fantasies of Self-Mourning : Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite [1 ed.] 9789004390355, 9789004390348

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Fantasies of Self-​Mourning

Critical Posthumanisms General Editors Ivan Callus, University of Malta Stefan Herbrechter, Coventry University, UK Editorial Board Louis Armand, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic and University of New England, US Neil Badmington, Cardiff University, UK Manuela Rossini, University of Basel, Switzerland Sherryl Vint, University of Alberta, Canada Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK

VOLUME 2

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​cph

Fantasies of Self-​Mourning Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite By

Ruben Borg

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Crush Art, Untitled 03, 2003–​2008; black and white digital photograph mounted on black Sintra; 15 3/ 4 x 15 3/ 4 inches (40.0 x 40.0 cm). Courtesy of the Chris Marker Estate and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at http://​catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://​lccn.loc.gov/2018964051​

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. ISSN 1872-​0943 ISBN 978-​90-​04-​39034-​8 (hardback) ISBN 978-​90-​04-​39035-​5 (e-​book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To Carmen, Abraham and Stephen

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Nothing is stranger to man than his own image. Karel Čapek, R.U.R.

∵

Contents Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations x Introduction: Posthuman Modernism 1 1 Finitude 7 2 The Cybernetic Eye/​Dis-​organised Perspective 13 1

A History of Narcissistic Wounds 17 1 Realism at the Limits of the Human 22 2 The Resilience of the Dialectic 28 3 The Spurious and the Impossible 35 4 The Posthuman Event, a New Geometry of Concepts 41 5 Cyborgs, Androids, Thinking Machines: Rounding Up the Usual Suspects 47 6 Self-​mourning, an Event between Two Histories 62 2

The Apocalyptic Chronotope 69 1 On or about January 3, 1889 72 2 Apocalypse and the Ethics of the Limit 74 3 Secret Agency 80 4 Unattributed Life 89 5 Dying Better in Pirandello 95 6 The Spiritualist Temptation of Mattia Pascal 104 7 Posthuman Stakes 106

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Thinking Historicity with Trees 109 1 Genre, Gender, Generation 112 2 Growing Rings, Being Historical 122 3 Secret, Slow and Like the Intercourse of Lovers 133

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Funny Being Dead! Tragic and Comic Laughter 140 1 Arousing the Dead 142 2 Testament, Figure and Cliché 148 3 Two in One—​or, the Tell-​tale Foreskin 152 4 A Mad Juncture in the History of Spirit 157 5 A Brief History of Tragic and Comic Thought (Early Days) 159 6 “John Duffy’s Brother” 161

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7 8 9 10 11 12

A Brief History of Tragic and Comic Thought (Modernity) 164 Tragic Laughter: Beckett and Deleuze 167 Limits of the Dialectic 173 The Passage to the Limit 179 Pathos and Judgement 182 “Echo’s Bones” 191

Conclusion: Passivity of the Eye 196 Works Cited 201 Index 214

Acknowledgements This book has benefited from the generous feedback of colleagues and friends. My first interest in the posthuman was sparked by Ivan Callus, and refined over numerous conversations with him on the future of literary studies. Andrew Gaedtke and Benjamin Kahan inspired early attempts to bring posthuman theory into the orbit of modernism; their company remains an unforgettable highlight of my postgraduate years. Thanks are due my brilliant graduate students, past and present, especially Lasse Jensen who directed my attention to the work of Béla Tarr; and Noam Schiff and Yaeli Greenblatt whose keen instincts and critical intelligence helped hone my thinking about narcissism and the modern Irish novel over several years. Friends in the Flann O’Brien community helped with incisive feedback, both at conferences and in private conversation. I am indebted to the entire Flann crowd but must reserve a special thanks to Paul Fagan. Chapman to my Keats, Paul has enriched my life incalculably and I have sought in my writing to communicate some of the joy of talking about books and movies with him. That love of books and movies was first inspired and fuelled by my brother and my parents, to whom this volume is gratefully dedicated. Finally, I  could never hope to repay my professional and personal debt to Yael Levin who witnessed the ups and downs of a long, too long compositional process, listened to half-​formed ideas, and contributed pitch-​perfect advice. Her wisdom and warmth accompanied all stages of the work in progress. The research on fantasies of self-​mourning was made possible by the financial support of the Israel Science Foundation (grant 302/​08). Parts of the book appeared in an earlier form under the following titles: “Ethics of the Event: The Apocalyptic Turn in Modernism,” Partial Answers: Journal of Litera­ ture and the History of Ideas 9.1 (January 2011):  188–​201; “Putting the Impossible to Work: Beckettian Afterlife and the Posthuman Future of Humanity,” Journal of Modern Literature 35.4 (Summer 2012): 163–​180; “Reading Flann with Paul,” in Flann O’Brien:  Problems with Authority, edited by Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan, and John McCourt (Cork: Cork University Press, 2017); and “Beckett and Deleuze: Tragic Thinkers,” in Deleuze and Beckett, edited by Stephen Wilmer and Audrone Zukauskaite (London: Palgrave, 2015): 193–​206. I am grateful to the editors for permission to use these texts. And for license to use the art-work featured on the cover I should like to thank the Chris Marker Estate and the Peter Blum Gallery in New York.

Abbreviations BoM CN EB FL HG MP MoC MPTK O PoS R.U.R SA SF

Flann O’Brien, The Best of Myles Flann O’Brien, The Complete Novels of Flann O’Brien Samuel Beckett, Echo’s Bones Samuel Beckett, First Love Franz Kafka, “The Hunter Gracchus,” in The Complete Stories Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge Samuel Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent Flann O’Brien, The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien

Introduction: Posthuman Modernism

One thing about the cyborg that seems incompatible with a modernist sensibility, wholly at odds with the imagination from which it stems, is a propensity to wonder at the world. Wide-​eyed. Its gaze squares poorly with the self-​reflexive ironies of so much twentieth-​century writing. Even as a figure of materialist thought, it trucks with concepts like soul and afterlife; it invites questions, earnest questions, about the seat of conscience, the nature of individual memory, the twin gifts of death and birth. And yet, at the same time, there can be no doubt of its prominence within a mythology, and a critical discourse, by which modernism seeks access to these themes. A brief dialogue from Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. sets the agenda for a popular genre of twentieth-​century fiction. The scene finds Helena, the daughter of a powerful industrialist, visiting a robot factory. Čapek’s use of the word robot is closer in meaning to the current sense of android, a near-​perfect artificial replica of human life. At the factory we are introduced to Sulla, a machine so lifelike Helena is hard-pressed to believe it could be anything other than human. To convince his guest, the factory manager offers to pull the robot apart. And right away the conversation turns to the subject of mortality—​to death, not as a dour biological certainty but as a possibility, a right human beings and their simulacra may or may not possess. HELENA: You want to have her killed? DOMIN: Machines cannot be killed. (R.U.R 11) Helena’s shock at this predictable statement has always struck me as a false note (not least because in her impulse to protect Sulla she cannot help infantilising her). But while the action of the play suggests that her activism is ideologically motivated—​she earnestly believes that machines have souls and campaigns passionately on their behalf—​it is evident that the robot’s astonishing resemblance to a human being plays a decisive role in setting off her reaction. Shock is soon followed by pity. HELENA: Don’t be frightened, Sulla, I won’t let them hurt you! Tell me, darling, is everyone so inhumane to you? You mustn’t put up with that, do you hear? You mustn’t, Sulla. SULLA: I am a Robot.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004390355_002

2 Introduction HELENA: That makes no difference. Robots are every bit as good people as we are. Sulla, you’d let them cut you open? SULLA: Yes. HELENA: Oh, you are not afraid of death? SULLA: I am not familiar with it, Miss Glory. HELENA: Do you know what would happen to you then? SULLA: Yes, I would stop moving. (R.U.R 11–​12) The same questions, asked of a second robot, yield the same answers; not only are robots indifferent to their own death, they are also barred from feeling sorrow about the death of another. DOMIN: So you see, Miss Glory, Robots do not cling to life. They can’t. They don’t have the means—​no soul, no pleasures. Grass has more will to live than they do. (R.U.R 12) We encounter, here, the germ of an important trope in science fiction; and more than that, an ambitious stab at a singularly modernist idea. Time and time again, the interrogation of human nature in twentieth-​century narrative, the question of what may or may not be unique to human existence, will come down to this thought concept, and to the pathos it engenders—​a discourse on the soul salvaged from the wreckage of metaphysics, only mobilised with an awareness of the untimeliness of the moment, and the anachronism inscribed in the question itself. We may begin by disentangling three propositions on robot mortality tested out in Čapek’s scene. The first is that robots cannot be killed because they cannot lay claim to being alive. The second (and most banal) is that they have no concept of life and death since both are irrelevant to their experience; in this respect it would be more à propos to speak of working order and breakdown. Finally, death is a non-​reality to robots because it cannot affect them; they lack access to the appropriate emotional responses (fear, pity); this is also to say that machine-​existence is entirely devoid of tragic pathos. Or at least, it ought to be. In other words, though they can be dismantled, or materially undone, robots are excluded from mortality proper, an exclusion made on jural, as well as affective and cognitive grounds. We know that this condition will become a key issue in debates on the inalienable rights of nonhuman subjects. But it is also bound up with the problem of distinguishing humans from their simulacra, of being able to tell them apart—​original from copy, living from life-​like. The third thesis in particular strikes a familiar cord. As must be obvious to any

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reader of posthuman myths, narratives about robots, clones or cyborgs, the thematic exploration and dramatisation of tragic passions is an all but inescapable note in any human/​android confrontation. Examples are legion. Already in the Epilogue of R.U.R., with the robot revolution completed and the end of humanity well and truly nigh, we find machines aspiring to the secret of life, willing to die—​to give themselves up for dissection—​to hasten its discovery. The solution to Čapek’s apocalyptic plot is a humanist fantasy. All industrial experiments to recover the secret fail, but by some miracle two robots fall in love. They see the beauty of the world, and recognise that beauty in one another. Now death becomes a real loss to them, and when they offer to lay down their lives, not for science but for love, they are hailed as the beginning of a new cycle, the latter-​day Adam and Eve. If we are honest, the ending is a bit of a cop-out. But the basic coordinates of a modernist mythologising of the posthuman are in place. Let the robot’s gaze stand for the honing of a philosophical perspective from which to consider death not as a biological certainty but as a lost right—​to speak of one’s own passing in the order of denied possibility. Let it signal a reflection on the rights of simulacra; the opportunity of a naïve apprenticeship in birth and death; and a hard-​earned return to post-​apocalyptic moral innocence. The trope with which this book is concerned has everything to do with a conceptual and perspectival shift. An iconic scene from Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell captures it beautifully. Some twenty-​eight minutes into the film we catch up with Major Kusanagi taking a deep water dive. The sequence emphasises the weightlessness of her body seen floating amidst air bubbles; then the shot pulls back to show her rising to the surface to meet her reflection. We sense immediately that there is something quietly transgressive about this activity in that it is an expression of Kusanagi’s need for some quality time away from the noise of the world (as we learn later, this is something she does routinely to clear her head). That a cyborg should yearn for privacy is already a dramatic departure from the Čapekian precedent. It suggests a degree of freedom and individuation beyond one’s existence as a machine. A fully mechanised identity requires no personal time, no need for rest or recreation. But in this case the gesture is all the more poignant because it also indicates a desire to escape from connectivity. The hallmark of a cybernetic existence, and, more broadly, of a late twentieth-​century sociocultural template that conceives of identity as boundlessly extended into its environment, connectivity is the Major’s experience of a physical constraint, more so than her shell which is made of replaceable spare parts. To this cyborg, being always connected is what passes for an untranscendable body.

4 Introduction The crucial point I wish to emphasise is that Kusanagi’s fantasy of disconnection enjoyed during her brief time under water is also rendered as a fantasy of mortality by the semiotics of the scene. One shot of her floating upwards suggests a blissfully inert body, while the ending of the sequence tropes on the story of Narcissus, reversing the traditional mise en scène of the instant of self-​reflection. Where Narcissus looks down at his image reflected in the water, Kusanagi rises from beneath the surface and looks up to face her double. The shot echoes the film’s title sequence—​a montage of the assembly process leading to the cyborg’s emergence from a vat of chemical fluid (peacefully inert, once again). It is suggested, then, that going under water is a kind of willed repetition of the moment of birth. Yet the desire to be reborn, itself a recurrent motif in Oshii’s work, is inseparable from an intuition of one’s ability to die. A later conversation with Batou makes it clear that deep water diving is a high-​risk activity for cyborgs. BATOU: A cyborg who goes diving in her spare time! That can’t be right. How long have you been doing this? Aren’t you afraid of the sea? What if the floaters don’t work? KUSANAGI: Then I suppose I would die. Or maybe you’d dive in to save me … You don’t have to be here, you know. BATOU: I … So what’s it like to go diving? KUSANAGI: You’ve done the underwater training course. BATOU: I’m not talking about a damn pool. KUSANAGI: I feel fear, anxiety, isolation and darkness. Sometimes I feel hope …1 In other words, diving is Kusanagi’s attempt somehow to explore human emotions that are premised on the awareness of one’s mortality; to claim the possibility of tragic pathos for herself. Viewed alongside Čapek’s scenario, the scene attests to a non-​incidental connection between modernism and the posthuman. It is the argument of this book that its constituent tropes—​a discourse on death as precluded possibility; a reclaiming of tragic pathos for nonhuman experience; a rhyming of being dead with being born again; a restaging of the instant of narcissistic self-​ reflection; an unmooring of perspectival reality from the conceptual grammar of organic life—​mark out the signposts of an archetypal posthuman fantasy within modernist thought. 1 Mamoru Oshii (dir.), Ghost in the Shell (Chicago: Manga Entertainment Ltd., 1995). Film. dvd.

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The question of the relevance of the posthuman to modernist studies has risen to considerable prominence over the last five years. Earlier scholarship had focused primarily on individual writers, and the ways in which a specific dimension of their work might be seen to resonate with key posthumanist concerns.2 It is only recently that attention has shifted to a sustained interrogation of the affinities between posthumanism and the values that characterise modernism as a whole. Jeff Wallace locates the inaugural moment of posthumanism in a modernist adaptation of Nietzsche’s figure of the Übermensch, the image of an ethically transformed, self-​overcoming humanity.3 Derek Ryan, in turn, makes the case for a posthumanist reading of the ethics of twentieth-​century fiction, a project based on a subversion of anthropocentric models of representation, and a consequent recognition of the radical alterity, the irreducibility to knowledge, of the nonhuman other.4 My book buys into both positions. It assumes a shared philosophical legacy for modernism and posthuman theory, and acknowledges the ethical import of the latter in highlighting modernist challenges to inherited values and cultural norms.5 My focus, however, is on one recurring scene and what its staging, or its narrative elaboration, might tell us about this complicity. On this point I must confess to a degree of conceptual ambivalence. While I believe it is correct to speak of the relation between modernism and posthumanism 2 See, for example, Jeff Wallace, D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Ruben Borg, The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida (London: Continuum, 2007); Jonathan Boulter, Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2008); Derek Ryan, Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory:  Sex, Animal, Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); and Jean-​Michel Rabaté, Think, Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 3 Jeff Wallace, “Modern,” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, eds. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 41–​53. 4 See Derek Ryan, “Following Snakes and Moths:  Modernist Ethics and Posthuman ism,” Twentieth-​Century Literature 61.3 (2015): 287–​304. 5 Today the term posthuman theory lends itself to a broad set of concerns, ranging from new materialism to philosophical texts that thematise the interpenetration of embodied reality and digital information. Eminently posthumanist is the idea that human and artificial intelligence have become inseparable; but also, and with a growing urgency, the ethical questioning of subjectivity along the human-​animal divide. Phenomenology is crossed with cybernetics, media-​theory with neuroscience. And enabling this eclecticism, reining in its multiple forms, is an epistemic model that emerged in the wake of modern philosophical disruptions of humanism. Across the wide generic board, at some irreducible level of this protean discourse, the posthuman always testifies to a historical crisis, a break in the complex epistemological apparatus that sustained the idea of “human being” through the Enlightenment and the tail end of modernity.

6 Introduction as a dialogue between two likeminded projects, I also understand posthuman theory to be a product of modernism, a mythology or a conceptual grammar by which modernism thinks through some of the contradictions inherent to its historical moment. Adding to the critique of modern, humanistic values emphasised by Wallace and Ryan, my discussion will touch on the following points of convergence. 1. Both modernism and posthuman theory urge us to imagine the future of subjectivity alongside the supersession of certain models of experience bequeathed by modern thought. 2. Both share in the stakes of a new materialism at the same time as they engage in a discourse centred on life, affect and force. Simply put, posthumanism resurrects the singularly modernist intuition that vitalist rhetoric and materialist presuppositions must go hand in hand. 3. Both are invested in a critique of the concept of organicity, and the elaboration of a radically dis-​organised perspective. We recognise this theme in narratives that contemplate the separation of a cybernetic eye from a human body—​or, more precisely, call for a tearing up of the body understood as a discrete organic unit capable of synthesising desire and sense perception. Under this rubric, the cyborg might be viewed as the product of a modernist obsession with partial objects, with problems of passive synthesis and anarchic desire. 4. Finally, both inherit from modernity a present paralysed by the false promise of absolute knowledge. Modernism nurses this ideal in myths of total cultural recall, in its exercise of an encyclopaedic memory, and in the high premium it places on anthropological insight. Posthuman theory encounters it in the pipe dream of a pure, immaterial consciousness, a fantasy of immortality, of a digital transcendence of time and space, wherein reality is reimagined as infinitely replicable, shareable, or downloadable.6 Keeping these coordinates in mind, I want to claim that the posthuman fantasy fleshed out above is in fact a modernist topos—​and that it brings a cyborgian perspective to bear on a distinctively modernist preoccupation with the

6 As N. Katherine Hayles has argued, posthumanism is in fact called upon to counter this cybernetic fantasy by emphasising the co-​implication of the virtual and the material, and by insisting on the ideological pitfalls of models of subjectivity that flirt with disembodiment (cf., How We Became Posthuman:  Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics [Chicago: Chicago Press, 1999]). A detailed discussion of this claim in light of a twentieth-​ century critique of modernity is offered in Chapter 1.

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problem of historicity.7 This idea will be unpacked in two general directions: I will argue that modernism turns to the posthuman in its effort to mobilise a new concept of finitude; and further, that posthuman tropes feed into a mythology by which modernism reflects on the becoming inorganic of the self-​ regarding eye. 1 Finitude By turns a principle of ethical thought and a predicate of reality associated with abstraction, negation, decay or repression, the concept of finitude plays a decisive role in the self-​understanding of modernism both as a moment in cultural history and as a field of academic study. One of the thorniest issues to which scholars keep returning is that of an impossible periodisation. As many have argued,8 the very label, modernism, is fraught with temporal contradictions, at once inviting and confounding critical attempts to situate the project within a precise historical horizon. On the one hand is a deep-​seated distrust of cultural memory, and an association of the historian’s task with a betrayal of the vital, productive urgency of the now: how, then, does the twentieth-​ century avant-​garde conceive of its own historical present in relation to modernity, a modernity which it suspects already to be a thing of the past? On the other is the modernist belief in the ethical and artistic currency of modernism within contemporary discourse. Even as it brands itself as an apocalyptic time, modernism remains concerned with determining and controlling its future. An obvious entry point to these themes is the legacy of Kant, from whom modernity inherits the problem of reconciling a finite subjectivity (perspectival, affected, always determined by context and situation) with a potentially infinite order of creation. A  model of experience that is entirely dependent on acts of representation must somehow extend beyond the limits of representation to encompass the conditions that make experience possible. These 7 Throughout the book, I shall use this term in its narrow philosophical sense denoting not the historical actuality of people and events, but the historical character of objects within a phenomenological horizon—​the quality of being historical. 8 For instance, Jean-​Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainsville:  University Press of Florida, 1996); Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions:  The Meanings of Modern/​Modernity/​Modernism,” Modernism/​modernity 8.3 (2001), and “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/​Time Borders of Modernist Studies,” Modernism/​modernity 13.3 (2006); Marianne Thormählen, “Introduction to Rethinking Modernism” (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003); and Dougles Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, “Modernisms Bad and New,” Introduction to Bad Modernisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

8 Introduction challenges continue to shape the agenda of critical philosophy to this day. We hear them clearly echoed in two of the most prominent topics in post-​Kantian thought: the articulation of an evolutionary model of existence (or a model of becoming) in relation to history or life; and the problem of passive synthesis. On both counts, finitude names an original ability to be affected by the world—​and by dint of that passivity, to find a measure of irreducible freedom within. Recent scholarship suggests that the ethos of modernism is fundamentally melancholic.9 Sanja Bahun examines this theme most exhaustively and persuasively in relation to a set of semiotic procedures and challenges to the symbolic order marked by loss, fragmentation, and an awareness of inhabiting unstable borders reminiscent of the melancholic condition. Drawing on the symptomatology of melancholia, and its discursive signposts, Bahun describes the modernist chronotope as a folding of past experience into present, and a dissolution of the very boundary between subject and object, between interiority and exteriority.10 I  read the posthuman turn in modernist thought as a corrective of this diagnosis. If the figure of a melancholic modernism is meant to indicate a twentieth-​century fixation with an unsurpassable past, a failure to mourn the devalued ideals and bankrupt legacy of the Enlightenment, posthuman modernism signals a peculiar moment taking place both within modernity and in its wake—​modernism as the epoch’s awareness of having come too late to its own funeral. In this case too the present is experienced as an unsurpassable limit. Yet, as a rule, the modernist manner of thinking through this condition is characterised less by expressions of grief, than by a desire to reclaim finitude from its association with the work of the negative. When the style is mournful, it is so

9 10

See for example, Sanja Bahun, Modernism and Melancholia:  Writing as Countermourning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Anne Enderwitz, Modernist Melancholia: Freud, Conrad and Ford (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). “Discursively omnipresent and compulsively reconceptualized in modernism, melancholia also truly functioned as the psychoanalytic and symbolic emblem of the period. Modernists, of course, did not collectively suffer from melancholia […] and not all of them took on a ‘melancholic’ view of contemporary history. Yet, the discursive prominence of melancholia between 1850 and 1950 and the self-​conscious employment of the ‘melancholic symptom’ in art and literature of the period suggest heightened awareness of this borderline condition” (Bahun, Modernism and Melancholia, 5). And again: “the modernist chronotope is shaped by examination of the porous borders between, on the one hand, the internal and the external and, on the other hand, the past and the present, in the exact fashion in which these boundaries are challenged in the melancholic symptom” (Bahun, Modernism and Melancholia, 53).

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incidentally. There is a tragic pathos to numerous posthuman myths; but, as often as not, posthuman modernism is steeped in the ironies of a bathetic, post-​apocalyptic imaginary. This call for a new concept of finitude finds expression in two seminal debates from the history of posthuman theory. The first takes the intersection of technology and life as its theme, and has its most incisive presentation in N. Katherine Hayles’s polemic against Hans Moravec, an appeal to materialist reason prompted by the remarkable advances in cybernetic and robotics research of the late twentieth century. Hayles famously considers a dream scenario dear to transhumanists, sci-​fi enthusiasts and theorists of artificial intelligence—​the idea that in some near future it should be possible to separate consciousness from its bodily casing, to reduce the sum of a human being’s identity to digital information, and thus to download it, store it, transfer it as needs be. The potential applications of this digital turn are endless, from teleporting (the dematerialisation of bodies in space) to an infinite extension of the human lifespan (the dematerialisation of bodies in time). But propping up the utopian ideal is a dangerous return to the naïve dualism of the Cartesian Cogito, a desire to be done with flesh, to overcome the inconveniences of embodied existence. Hayles’s suspicion of this scenario is well-​founded, and I  believe, as she does, that it is the defining mission of posthuman theory to engage critically with the ontological and ethical tensions it brings to light. I do confess, however, that I am never quite sure whether her main objection to the dream of digital immortality is (a) that it is a foolish quest, because reliant on a discredited conception of how mind interacts with matter, or (b) that it is a politically dangerous idea; worse than a pipe-​dream, a dystopia. How We Became Posthuman seems to make both arguments at the same time—​and if in doing so it sets the agenda for an entire critical movement it also reveals a conceptual hesitation at its core. The second debate turns on an interrogation of the concept of life as a foundation for ethical thought: life, rather than reason, providing the bedrock principle of a shared ethical existence, or a newly defined sense of commonality, between human and nonhuman being. Cary Wolfe traces the reception of this idea into posthuman studies by way of bioethics.11 Drawing on competing philosophical traditions (the moral, the analytic, and the deconstructive), he identifies a crucial shift in contemporary accounts of ethical responsibility, away

11

Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). See in particular Chapter 3, pp. 49–​98.

10 Introduction from a logic of inalienable rights and entitlements towards one of compassion or sympathy, an elementary understanding of life as co-​participation. At the level of broadest consensus, this sympathy corresponds to the intuition that “the key link between human and nonhuman animals as subjects of justice is not their agency but exactly the opposite: their shared finitude as embodied, vulnerable beings.”12 The texts gathered in this book explore precisely this finitude or passivity—​ a measure of life located on the opposite coordinates of human agency. But they do so by way of a reduction to the extreme. Thus, for instance, Wolfe (invoking Jeremy Bentham’s staple) notes that for the question of justice to evolve beyond the anthropocentric bias that has long determined its subject, the operative question must become “not ‘can they talk,’ or ‘can they reason,’ but ‘can they suffer?’ ”13 Assuming the extension of this argument to be a posthumanist investment in the mortality of all living things, the radical scenario engaged in the forthcoming chapters is “what if they cannot die?” Here we must consider an important fault line in posthumanist reflections on finitude. If replacing logos with life is a matter of widespread consensus for an ethical project that seeks to evolve past anthropocentrism, the determination of what it means to honour life remains a contentious point. As is often the case, the political dimensions of the question are inseparable from rhetorical considerations. In whose voice does one attempt to do life justice? What is the appropriate tone, the correct emphasis, the right emotional appeal? Taking issue with the discourse and agenda of bio-​power, Rosi Braidotti has criticised the tendency of much posthuman theory to consider life exclusively through the prism of death and loss, as though life itself, in its plenitude and generative power could never be given to ethical thought. This over-​emphasis on the horizons of mortality and perishability is characteristic of the ‘forensic turn’ in contemporary social and cultural theory, haunted by the spectre of extinction and by the limitations of the project of western modernity. […] We need to re-​think death, the ultimate subtraction, as another phase in a generative process …14 I think Braidotti’s intuition is right. There is something conceptually amiss, not to say lazy, in assigning value to life only when it is viewed in terms of its negation, when it is mortified and pitied. If the goal is to affirm life (not 12 13 14

Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism, 80. Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism, 81. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (London: Polity, 2013), 82.

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necessarily at the expense of logos, but in some recognition of its primacy), a focus on the positive, the urgent, the vital would seem to be de rigueur. My claim that posthuman modernism is not melancholic, despite the subject matter of the archetypal scene under investigation, has everything to do with this argument. Yet I am aware that the fascination with finitude persists in modern fiction and posthuman theory, not because writers and philosophers are creatures of habit, but because being of the limit is how a certain modernism engages the contingency of its historical perspective, and the peculiar belatedness of its moment. It will not do simply to affirm life in the abstract, without consideration of the here and now. On this point the state of the critical conversation finds itself split into two rival camps. A Derridean affiliation against a Deleuzian one; an appropriation of Nietzsche as a radical critic of cultural values vs an interpretation of the same body of work under the rubric of vitalism; a critique that attends to the primacy of linguistic structures against one that insists on life as a force of immanent or evolutionary becoming. My approach to the question of finitude aims to short-​circuit these dichotomies, which are distracting at best—​and, at worst, productive of false problems. Life must indeed be thought of as a propulsive force. And for this to happen it will be necessary to disentangle finitude from the idea of negation; passivity will have to be theorised not in opposition to power but as a peculiar articulation of the emergent (temporal) character of reality, the hidden work by which an event comes to light or something is given to experience. Though my position, as stated above, aligns with a critique of naïve fantasies of disembodiment, of digital freedom from flesh, and triumph over materiality, I do wonder sometimes whether the strenuous defence of finitude in these debates is not in fact a dogmatic gesture, and whether mortality is not being upheld as a paramount ethical value for its own sake. In tracing the issue back to its modernist roots I should like to acknowledge an important counter-​argument: that a suspicion of reality (as we know it) must always accompany posthuman thought; that there is real value to the thinking of sheer, unbridled impossibility, to the sense of unconditioned futurity which animates the roboticist’s dream. If embodied existence is to be preferred, in principle, to immortality, it cannot be in the name of human self-​mortification, or even realism. In the parable of a life that mourns its own ability to die, modernism stages a radical version of these debates, one that is neither utopian nor dystopian. In many ways the obverse of fantasies of digital immortality, scenes of self-​mourning grapple with familiar themes: embodiment, finitude, passivity. The examples gathered in this book do so, notably, without recourse to the

12 Introduction vocabulary of virtual reality, or the conceptual grammar of cybernetics; by insisting on life as an emergent force, by committing to a radical dis-​organisation of perspective, or by exploring an idea of historicity, a sense of being of the limit, that strains dialectical form. Many of my choices are deliberately low tech. In Chapter 1 I examine the impact of the fantasy on one of the mainstays of modern phenomenology, the presupposition that reality is rational and that its reason is revealed historically. Focusing on a scene from Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge—​ namely, the passage in which Michael Henchard’s suicide thoughts are interrupted by the appearance of his effigy in the water—​I consider the figure of an impossible event, an uncanny moment that obtrudes upon the order of rational experience and deranges reality. I then trace the dislocation of the concepts of the possible, the natural and the organic as they filter into a modernist imaginary (through the mediation of Hegel). In Chapter 2 I sketch out the coordinates of an apocalyptic chronotope associated with modernist fiction. I describe versions of this chronotope in Joseph Conrad, Luigi Pirandello and filmmaker Béla Tarr, linking the Nietzschean ironies traded in these texts with a modernist attempt to thematise the violence and the madness of the historical present, a time characterised by the debasement of Spirit and the betrayal of the values of modernity. Chapter 3 returns to the transhumanist conceit of an impossibly extended lifespan, and the anxieties occasioned by the prospect of surviving one’s own death. Focusing in particular on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, I consider her depiction of an asymmetrical relation between the time of human consciousness and the natural lifetime of trees, and I attend to a peculiar use of the verb to grow in her reflections on historicity. A  comparison with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo develops this theme by highlighting a connection between the film’s treatment of historical memory, a field traversed by ghostly and material traces, and Woolf’s insistence on growing as an uncanny, intensive movement in time,  material but not quite organic, pitched halfway between Spirit and ­Nature. Finally, Chapter  4 examines the relation between afterlife and laughter. I look at two Irish writers in whose work the fantasy of surviving one’s own death is a prominent motif: Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett. In particular, I compare their variations on the trope of the aroused cadaver, a grotesque, and necessarily bathetic, spectacle of posthumous sexuality. For both writers, the comic effect of the scene appears to be linked with the persistence, against all possibility, of an anarchic or unregulated movement of desire. In O’Brien, the cadaver’s arousal suggests a state of spurious at-​homeness in living-​death, a mockery of the empowerment and mastery afforded by his identification with

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the dead letter of the law; or, alternatively, it leads to a description of parodic bliss, a laughable, pitifully short-​lived instant of freedom and sexual euphoria. In Beckett the image is one of undesired potency—​paradoxically, an extreme case of impotence-​unto-​death. The effect of these strategies is analogous to a cyborgian dislocation of perspective. Providing the conceptual infrastructure for contemporary debates on embodied life and digital immortality is a series of modernist parables on force and passivity, on freedom as it intersects with impotence, agency with affect, desire with diminished being. 2

The Cybernetic Eye/​Dis-​organised Perspective

One of the most iconic adaptations of the scenario examined in this book, and a perfect example of a shared modernist and posthuman imaginary, is the death of Robot Maria near the end of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.15 The film tells a story of class struggle in a futuristic city run by rich industrialists. Freder, the son of the city’s leader, falls in love with Maria, a member of the working-​class who dreams of bringing the two worlds together with the help of a mediator. The robot is a simulacrum of the woman, an agent of chaos sent down to the workers’ underworld to discredit the real Maria and provoke an uprising. The plan almost succeeds. The scene in question occurs at the height of the action when the mob, believing Maria to be responsible for an act of sabotage that floods the lower city, chases her to the Cathedral square and burns her at the stake. At the point of death the figure reverts to its original robot appearance. As the crowd witnesses the change, the real Maria comes into view on the parapet of the Cathedral tower where she is pursued by Rotwang, a deranged scientist who believes she is his long lost love. The parallel montage sets up the reveal by rehearsing the prejudice thematised in R.U.R. Unable to fear for her life, Robot Maria laughs defiantly, perversely, even as she burns. Meanwhile the real Maria flees in terror. Of particular note is the manner in which the film plays out the conventions of its Doppelgänger premise opting to build up and resolve the confusion between Maria and her simulacrum through the mediation of the crowd’s gaze. The two Marias cross paths but never come face to face. They share no act of identification or self-​recognition. Their bodies register opposing emotions, but only the reaction shots of the crowd make narrative 15

Fritz Lang (dir.), Metropolis (Berlin: Universum Film, 1927; Restored, 2010). Film.

14 Introduction sense of their doubling. I have always found the choice disappointing. But I admit that it is well suited to the film’s clear-​cut political message. A direct mirroring of the real and the false Maria in the other’s gaze would have steered the resolution of the plot towards a murkier psychological interpretation, and the theme of social justice through political mediation would have been compromised in favour of an emphasis on the uncanny. That is to say, the encounter would have unsettled the real Maria’s organic sense of self. And, more troublingly, it would have brought her double to life at the last minute, granting the simulacrum a strange—​unwarranted—​power of self-​reflection.16 As it stands, the scene avoids casting doubt on a final distinction between the real and the spurious image, or between the organic and the inorganic body. For the dwellers of lower Metropolis, the resolution of the Doppelgänger plot rests on a correct determination of Maria’s virtue. But, from the viewer’s perspective, that judgement is never in question. The real investment of the film is in the integrity of the city, which is imagined as a disorganised collection of body parts.17 The Heart-​Machine produces power for the high rises, but after it malfunctions it turns into a phantasmagoria of Moloch, a gaping mouth

16

17

I am thinking, for example, of Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The season picks up right after the death of the series’ protagonist. Her side-​kicks have resumed the fight against the forces of evil, and have replaced Buffy with a robot replica in hopes of keeping the demon underworld from learning that the Slayer is gone. The Buffy-​bot means well, and fights well, but lacks the character and unpredictability—the human factor—of the original.  One night, during an alley scrape, the robot is injured. It malfunctions and, as news of the Slayer’s breakdown spreads, Sunnydale is overrun by a gang of demon bikers. Meanwhile, the real Buffy is brought back from the dead, and left to crawl out of the grave.  The scene I have in mind occurs when the Buffy-​bot is about to be dismembered by the demons, who have her tied to several bikes and are ready to drive off. At that very moment, a disoriented Buffy, her vision impaired by trauma and months of darkness, wanders into the robot’s line of vision, and the two Buffys share an instant of mutual recognition. Each sees herself in the other. For the robot, the encounter holds an image of hope, possibly an intuition of the real, living self she/​it never was. For the resurrected Buffy, it brings home an absolute loss of reality, the dismemberment of the body-​double reflecting the disintegration of the self. The rest of Season 6 will be spent mourning the stillness of the grave and working through this loss. Cf., Joss Whedon (showrunner), Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete Sixth Season. Especially “Bargaining: Part 2,” David Fury (writer) and David Grossman (dir.), Twentieth-​Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2004. dvd. For two different but highly informative readings of Lang’s cyborgian aesthetic, and its political implications, see R. L. Rutsky, “The Mediation of Technology and Gender: Metropolis, Nazism, Modernism,” New German Critique 60 (1993): 3–​32; and Matthew Biro, “The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture,” New German Critique 62 (1994): 71–​110.

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that chews up lines of helpless workers. Created for public consumption, the robot exists to incite the crowd to base emotions: lust in the elite and rage or despair in the lower classes. The purpose of its sacrifice is precisely to harmonise the body, to re-​organise it. Put another way, if the city functions as the moral, cyborgian subject of Metropolis, the crowd is its disembodied face looking out at Maria or Maria. As I  indicated above, the example of Metropolis commits us to a political interpretation of the same arguments on robot mortality brought to the fore by Čapek and Oshii. The moral import of Lang’s parable is easy to decipher: the death of the cyborg, coinciding with the real Maria’s survival and the reaffirmation of her virtue, is necessary to the healing of the city. I should clarify, at this point, that I am less interested in this dimension of the fantasy than in those elements of its staging, of the mise en scène, that return time and time again in twentieth-​century fiction, and that illustrate a shared modernist and posthuman fascination with a cyborgian reshaping of perspective. The works considered in this study tend precisely to confound or suspend judgement—​to delay a moral resolution of the plot—​focusing instead on a cybernetic movement of the eye, exploring acts of embodied, but not quite organic, self-​regard. Even in its low-​tech applications, without the mythology and pathos of a cyborgian future to sustain it, the scene of self-​mourning always entails a variation on Narcissus—​a story of the eye and the mirror, only re-​mediated, so that the instant of self-​recognition is premised on an impossible event. The theme of the eye is not the tragic impossibility of mastering the gap between ideal and actual experience, nor the restoration to health of a diseased body-​politic, but the emergence from quick matter of a perspectival reality—​and the formation, out of manifold sensations, of an embodied perception capable of serving as its ground. Stefan Herbrechter has defined posthumanism as “the cultural malaise or euphoria that is caused by the feeling that arises once you start taking the idea of ‘postanthropocentrism’ seriously.”18 The challenge that shapes this cultural moment, as he goes on to explain, is “to be able to think the ‘end of the human’ without giving in to apocalyptic mysticism or to new forms of spirituality and transcendence.”19 In the same spirit, the same suspicion of anthropocentric habits, I wish to highlight a second mission: to be able to think through the perspectival nature of reality, and the embodied character of experience, without

18 19

Stefan Herbrechter, Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 3. Stefan Herbrechter, Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis, 3.

16 Introduction presupposing the primacy of the human eye. Posthuman modernism stakes its claim on the indeterminate space between organic and inorganic life, attending to the investments of a still un-​synthesised body. For the cyborg, the eye is both I and eyeball. It serves the perceptions and narcissistic projections of the ego, but it also sees and desires on its own behalf.

Chapter 1

A History of Narcissistic Wounds The eye’s already there in things, it’s part of the image, the image’s visibility. Gilles Deleuze

∵ Common to a number of late 19th and 20th century texts is a recurring scene in which we recognise the makings of a distinctively modernist reflection on the historical present. Someone remembers having died already. The whole of reality is pitched on this impossible premise—​on the conceit of a consciousness that carries within it the memory of death. I mourn, not the loss of a loved one—​or not merely that—​but my own mortality, my ability or right to die … The object of this book is first to examine the scene in its distinctive formal and rhetorical features; consequently, to tease out its posthumanist implications; and finally, to employ the trope as an entry point into a series of texts that bring the conceptual toolkit of posthumanism to bear on questions of modernist ontology and modern historicity. Starting with the problem of predicating the historical character of an event that may well fall outside the order of historical experience—​situating our posthuman present within human history.1 Is the posthuman to be interpreted as a mere phase in the development of subjectivity? Does it come about in response to ethical and epistemological challenges inherited from the experience of human subjects? Or is it rather a new paradigm that renders the very use of words like “subjectivity,” “history,” and “experience” anachronistic? Two hypotheses suggest themselves right away: first, that posthumanity is always co-​implied with humanity, that from the outset it was a constituent part of the human character, possibly a function of the eminently human faculty of self-​supersession; and secondly, that

1 Our present; our history. Ours and not ours—​the anxieties invested in that personal pronoun (with its implications of community, belonging, shared experience) are woven deep into the rhetorical fabric of posthuman theory, particularly where it touches on historical and political articulations of subjective identity.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004390355_003

18 Chapter 1 a posthuman epoch set in, with historic consequences, once human history reached saturation point. Neil Badmington spells out the first hypothesis in Alien Chic, where he reads the figure of the alien in contemporary culture as a symptom of human anxieties vis-​à-​vis the posthuman within: In his fine book, High Technē, R. L. Rutsky suggests that ‘[a]‌posthuman subject position would … acknowledge the otherness that is part of us’, and I merely want to add that this otherness has always been part of ‘us’, parting ‘us’ from ‘ourselves’. Posthumanism, as I  see it, is the acknowledgement and activation of the trace of the inhuman within the human. In the end, absolute difference is abducted by differance (with an ‘a’). In the end, ‘Man’ secretes the other within. In the end, close encounters are constitutive, and invasion is inescapable. In the end, humanism finds itself a little alien.2 The relationship between posthumanism and human experience obeys, here, a peculiar logic. Let us note, first of all, that the posthuman is defined through an act (or a series of acts) by which “humanism finds itself …” It is a moment of self-​discovery and “acknowledgement,” where what needs to be acknowledged is mankind’s inherent other, an alien that differs from human beings no more than “humans differ from themselves.”3 Accordingly, self-​difference is viewed as a predicate of human nature, perhaps even a defining potentiality of the species. But there is no indication that it might be anything more than an abstract, immutable character trait. No indication, save for the anaphoric insistence that acknowledgement and self-​discovery must necessarily occur “in the end.” But what of the end as such—​what of the event in all its finality, as something that actually happened to humans? An event such as might consume history, the brute contingency of a traumatic encounter that leaves the human race altered forever, is no less germane to posthumanist thought than the logic exemplified in Badmington’s approach. And viewed in this context, the event in question could be nothing abstract; its power and its punctuality would need to be conceived side by side. Wanting to put a calendar-​date on the occasion—​January 3, 1889, say, or December 1910—​may be naïve. But the exercise does have its uses.

2 Neil Badmington, Alien Chic:  Posthumanism and the Other Within (New  York:  Routledge, 2004), 155. 3 Neil Badmington, Alien Chic, 129.

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Freud famously identified three major events in modern history, three traumatic moments that brought about a failure of humanist self-​confidence, and that may effectively be seen to signal the beginning of humanism’s end. In the course of centuries the naïve self-​love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the center of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, though something similar had already been asserted by Alexandrian science. The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors, though not without the most violent contemporary opposition.4 Psychoanalysis is presented as the crowning moment in this sequence, dealing the “third and most wounding blow” when it belies the conception of a human being as a self-​possessed, self-​identical unit of experience; that is to say, when it proves that “the ego […] is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.”5 In what is, to all intents and purposes, a history of the ends of man, and simultaneously a story of posthuman origins, Freud threads together three events that plainly demonstrate the traumatic character of modern science. And psychoanalysis is cast as the most traumatic of the three, a scientific-​cultural event capable of diagnosing man’s terminal condition, but also responsible for actually bringing about his demise.6 This association of scientific method with trauma highlights one of the key paradoxes of modernist thinking about modern historicity. What could be 4 Sigmund Freud, “Fixation to Traumas—​The Unconscious,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. xvi, ed. James Strachey and others (London: The Hogarth Press, 1963), 284–​285; also qtd. in Neil Badmington, “Introduction: Approaching Posthumanism,” Posthumanism: A Reader, ed. Neil Badmington (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 6–​7. 5 Sigmund Freud, “Fixation to Traumas—​The Unconscious,” 285. 6 Derrida famously re-​inscribes this traumatic history within a materialist discourse on the end of history, and the clash of twentieth-​century ideologies. “For we know that the blow struck enigmatically in the name of Marx also accumulates and gathers together the other three. It thus presupposes them today, even if such was not the case in the last century. It carries beyond them by carrying them out, just as it bears the name of Marx by exceeding it infinitely.” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994), 98.

20 Chapter 1 more shocking to the entire system of values identified with modernity and the Enlightenment than the idea that scientific gains will only bring humanity closer to its end—​or that the history of science is in fact the story of a progressive weakening of human influence? However one might theorise modernity, and the privileged, anthropomorphic subject to whom the modern world is given (in his image and likeness), the idea that history and science can be hazardous to one’s health must seem impossibly perverse. Here the relevance of self-​mourning to modernism comes into clearer focus. Narratives premised on the conceit of mourning one’s ability to die emerge as culturally powerful fictions whenever historical consciousness is seen to have reached an impasse. Allegorised in the scene is an over-​extended moment, something akin to a life that has overshot its mark. A concrete literary example will help to clarify the point. The scene occurs in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), where, towards the end of the novel, a man is pictured standing on the riverbank, overcome by suicidal thoughts. While his eyes were bent on the water beneath there slowly became visible a something floating in the circular pool formed by the waste of centuries; the pool he was intending to make his death-​bed. At first it was indistinct by reason of the shadow from the bank; but it emerged thence and took shape, which was that of a human body, lying stiff and stark upon the surface of the stream. (MoC 227) I am aware of the counter-​intuitive nature of this example. On the face of it Hardy’s fiction is as far removed from the posthuman reader’s natural environment as any text; but this distance, this resistance to intuitive thinking, is precisely what validates it as a test-​case. Typically, in the scene of self-​mourning one is able to recognise the markings of a strange brand of narcissism, a variation on the classical myth that threatens to throw off-​balance everything one takes for granted about humanist paradigms of identification and self-​imaging. Hardy’s example shows how narratives of self-​mourning can offer a powerful (if reluctant) myth of posthuman origins even without the trappings of cybernetics and virtual reality. The turn to the posthuman is dramatised in both content and rhetorical effect. The scene reads as a philosophical parable about the limits of human experience. But, as an interruption of the generic conventions in which it is embedded it also testifies to the kind of event that posthumanism might be. It is, in short, an epistemic event in the making. The scene’s resonance with the myth of Narcissus is unmistakable. Gazing down at the water Henchard sees a floating body—​at first just a vague abstraction, scarcely defined save for the fact that it seems dead and, in some general

A History of Narcissistic Wounds

21

sense, human. The image (coupled with the episode’s melancholic register) perfectly translates Ovid’s tale into a modern realist framework, foregrounding the hero’s death-​instinct as the action’s primary motivating force. More difficult to account for is the introduction, within that same framework, of an uncanny element: In the circular current imparted by the central flow the form was brought forward, till it passed under his eyes; and then he perceived with a sense of horror that it was himself. Not a man somewhat resembling him, but one in all respects his counterpart, his actual double … (MoC 227) Henchard’s reaction registers a double shock. The hero’s vision of “himself” dead in the water disturbs the system of expectations set up by the conventions of realist fiction, and marks the intrusion, within reality, of an impossible event. But why exactly does the event pose an absolute challenge to human experience—​in what sense is it said to be impossible? Plainly enough, there is more to it than just one man’s anxiety at having had to visualise his own death (in themselves, acts of self-​representation are hardly foreign to human experience, no matter how shocking their content). Henchard’s insistence that what he sees in the water is not a resemblance but “his actual double” points to a radical break with the established order of reality—​or with what we would call, in a different register, the laws of the humanly possible. It is here that the first condition for a narrative of self-​mourning comes into view. At stake is the assumption that represented objects exist in an ontological dimension apart from actual beings. Henchard’s horror, in this particular case, comes from a perceived transgression of the ontological boundary that separates the world behind the mirror from the original in front of it. Sustaining that same assumption is a cluster of associations in which the concept of reality is implicitly equated with the realms of the natural and the possible. Hardy reinforces this associative network when he describes Henchard’s uncanny experience as a “supernatural” (MoC 227) occurrence for which “a natural solution” (MoC 229) needs to be found. Nature, possibility, and reality are thus yoked together as largely interchangeable concepts. Standing for everything that is already given to human experience, they name a world, an entire phenomenological paradigm, from which the event of the posthuman is intuitively excluded. In order to grasp the posthumanist significance of Hardy’s scene it is necessary first to take stock of the philosophical purchase of these concepts, to determine their complicity with humanist ideals and their centrality to a modern understanding of what I  have just referred to as human experience (or “the laws of the humanly possible”). The task of delimiting such an experience

22 Chapter 1 must pay homage to a realism of sorts—​by which I mean that it must commit to an interpretation of reality as coherent and self-​sustaining system. No matter how much faith is placed in the constituting power of subjects, or in the constructed character of phenomena, such systemic coherence is presumed whenever human experience is at issue. Reality is expected to conform to the idea that one has of it. It names the element of consistency, the total field of sense, in which all objects are embedded as objects of experience.7 1

Realism at the Limits of the Human

Simply put, Narcissus is the myth that best organises this entire philosophical grammar for modernity (whereas self-​mourning is the variation that unhinges that same grammar from reality—​that pulls human experience away from the order of possibility, and thus from its natural sense-​giving context). Ovid’s version of Narcissus is, in primis, a cautionary tale about the cruelty of unrequited love and egotistical desire. But it also doubles as a warning against the pitfalls of self-​knowledge. Tiresias’s prophecy announces its ironic purpose vis-​à-​vis the entire project of Socratic philosophy. Thus in Ovid’s version: The dark river nymph Liriope was the first to test [Tiresias’s] reliability and truthfulness. She was the nymph whom Cephisus once embraced with his curving stream, imprisoned in his waves, and forcefully ravished. When her time was come, that nymph most fair brought forth a child with whom one could have fallen in love even in his cradle, and she called him Narcissus. When the prophetic seer was asked whether this boy would live to a ripe old age, he replied: ‘Yes, if he does not come to know himself.’8

7 In making this claim I should like to co-​opt a very pertinent summary of the ethos of liberal humanism offered by Stefan Herbrechter (via a reading of Catherine Belsey). Herbrechter notes that “[i]‌t is the strange combination of empiricism, idealism and realism which constitutes theory’s [and posthumanism’s—​R.B.] main target.” Stefan Herbechter, “The Posthuman Subject in The Matrix,” The Matrix in Theory, eds. Myriam Diocaretz and Stefan Herbrechter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 255.—​I should clarify that “realism” is used here (and all through this chapter), not in the specialised philosophical sense that opposes it to “nominalism” but in its modern acceptation, as a concept aligned with representation, with naturalism, with holding a glass up to nature. 8 Ovid, Metamorphoses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 83.

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Narcissus’s entire psycho-​sexual history gravitates around this well-​rehearsed traumatic core. The rape of Liriope and the prohibition to know oneself, even the inability to reciprocate love, are all cases of the same central conceit: that to be human is to be out of sync with reality itself; that the most essential human experience, the most immediate and the most desired, is in fact impossible. When, at the end of the tale, Narcissus returns to the scene of his violent conception, he does so to fulfil Tiresias’s prophecy—​to affirm the coincidence of self-​knowledge and death. The moment lends itself to a slew of allegorical interpretations. Its appeal for modern thought, especially for the projects of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, is plain to see. It touches on the psychology of mourning and unattainable love. It deals with the mysteries of identity and explores the possibility of an authentic community with oneself. It speaks of a fascination with the nature of images and the power of death, and tells us that the two are inextricably linked. Narcissus weaves all of these themes together in a single figure: that of the self-​desiring gaze. But in his story, crucially, is also an ecological lesson, a parable that sees human experience caught in a double-​bind: being at once thrown into the world, always framed by its horizon, and being helplessly disconnected from it. From the outset, Narcissus’s desire is defined by this uneasy relation with nature. It would seem that the scene of self-​mourning merely pushes this ecological lesson to an extreme conclusion. It exaggerates Narcissus’s alienation. It magnifies his sense of being at odds with nature. And, most obviously, it emphasises death’s role in the construction of the myth. Henchard is so consumed by death, so drawn to it, that he cannot tell an image from a real thing. His error is the same as the one that brings about Narcissus’s demise. Yet a careful comparison of the two scenes also reveals a telling difference between them. Henchard’s encounter with death is actually a reversal of Narcissus’s experience. For the unloving, egotistical boy of Ovid’s tale, death is an instrument of poetic justice. It results in a magical unity of self with self, and in an instantaneous restitution of privilege to the natural order of things. By contrast, Hardy’s scene precludes any correspondence between the narcissistic image and reality. It alters the status of death, it rethinks death’s function in nature, and, by this gesture, voids reality’s claims to internal consistency. It is, in this respect, not simply a variation on a familiar phenomenological paradigm, but a perversion: an event for which a new paradigm must be conceived. Hardy’s break with realism is only temporary. The “supernatural” occurrence will in time receive a natural explanation. But, for the duration of the scene the break itself is absolute in the sense that it puts everything in question. Reality as a whole, as the pre-​condition of the maintenance of human experience, becomes unusable. It is no accident that Henchard’s suicidal intentions are

24 Chapter 1 stalled. Henchard is literally prevented from dying because, as far as he knows, for one fleeting but irreversible moment, he is already dead. And his inability to die leaves him utterly passive. The condition is shared (and in a sense explicated) by a host of characters from twentieth-​century fiction, classic self-​mourners for whom Henchard is an unlikely but striking precedent. One thinks of Kafka’s Gracchus, whose ferry took a wrong turn on the way to the world of the dead; or Witkiewicz’s Alexander Walpurg, who experiences his own consciousness as a straitjacket. Or, more pertinently for the focus of this book, of the numerous characters in Beckett’s fiction, whose passivity is dramatised as an inability to die completely. Henchard is of this crowd. Like Kafka’s lost hunter, the legendarily lazy Belacqua, or the madman of Witkiewicz’s asylum, he exists in a kind of limbo, a space of intersection between life and death, at once too late for one and too early for the other.9 Plainly enough, the paradigm shift associated with the turn to the posthuman would have to make this peculiar liminality its own. But before we are able to flesh it out, it is necessary to dwell a little on the theme of an absolute passivity, and to understand why self-​mourning entails a loss of reality as a whole. Why is the inability to die completely suffered as an absolute privation of power? Why is it not experienced as a species of immortality, as the liberation of pure mind from its physical limitations? The question goes to the heart of the debate on early cybernetic fantasies of disembodiment. As Hayles observes, in the ideology that sustains these fantasies “[t]‌he contrast between the body’s limitations and cyberspace’s power highlights the advantages of pattern over presence. As long as the pattern endures, one has attained a kind of immortality.”10 Hayles goes on to trace a vague causal link between the cultural bias towards disembodiment and posthumanist myths of ecological disadaptation, of being ill-​at-​ease in the world, reminiscent of Narcissus’s predicament broached above: In a world despoiled by overdevelopment, overpopulation and time-​ release environmental poisons, it is comforting to think that physical forms can recover their pristine purity by being reconstituted as informational patterns in multidimensional computer space. A  cyberspace body, like a cyberspace landscape, is immune to blight and corruption. 9

10

Cf., Franz Kafka, “The Hunter Gracchus” and “The Hunter Gracchus: A Fragment,” in The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 226–​234; Samuel Beckett, Echo’s Bones (London: Faber and Faber, 2014); Stanislaw Witkiewicz, The Madman and the Nun, and Other Plays (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968). Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 36.

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It is no accident that the vaguely apocalyptic landscapes of films such as Terminator; Blade Runner; and Hardware occur in narratives focusing on cybernetic life-​forms. The sense that the world is rapidly becoming uninhabitable by human beings is part of the impetus for the displacement of presence by pattern.11 Dematerialisation is contemplated, here, as an evolutionary response to a biological and ecological threat. But the scenario, Hayles argues, is at best naïve—​and at worst corrupt. It threatens a return to the dichotomy of ‘mind’ and ‘body’ that props up the liberal humanist project. It is a reversion from the gains of historical materialism. Most damningly, it labours under the misguided assumption that the Mind (or some version of it) is the true site of identity, that it has natural primacy over matter, and that the body is merely its accessory for being in the world—​a tool that can be exchanged should a more efficient (or more fashionable) one become available. Robocop and Terminator were never far from being repossessed as parables on human agency or metaphors for the endurance of human resolve. So too the posthuman subject viewed as a pure sequence of information, as the translation of thought into digital form, stakes its survival on the idea that technological instantiation is incidental to being; that some material form enables truth’s circulation in the marketplace, but doesn’t affect its nature. [O]‌ne could argue that the erasure of embodiment is a feature common to both the liberal humanist subject and the cybernetic posthuman. Identified with the rational mind, the liberal subject possessed a body but was not usually represented as being a body. […] If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality.12 A great deal hangs on the implied association between immortality and unlimited power. For Hayles the stakes are, first and foremost, ethical. Dreams of disembodied immortality are ethically objectionable because they deny the finitude of the subject—​which is to say that they afford the subject a megalomanic

11 12

Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 36–​37. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 4–​5.

26 Chapter 1 illusion of coinciding with the whole of being. To have unlimited power is to attain an absolute perspective. It is to hold the entire history of being in a single act of memory. It is also to eliminate difference, to preclude the possibility that something be external to oneself or resistant to one’s will. In the long run, disembodied immortality neutralises virtuality itself: the operations of a modal verb, the power of a technological invention or of an unforeseen event to affect reality. By inference, an ethically valid posthumanism would need to be attuned to the idea of its own finitude. More importantly, it would know itself to be empowered by its finitude; it would find, in the full acceptance of its mortality, a certain self-​defining potential (if this were not so, Hayles’s argument might be reduced to a mere call for technological self-​censorship). To embrace “the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power” is to promote a new understanding of death—​death as a source of power, or at the very least, as an empowering agency. The last twenty years have witnessed a sustained effort to theorise this version of the posthuman.13 Hayles’s insistence on posthuman embodiment has the indubitable merit of grounding posthuman identity-​politics in a concrete and highly particularised reality. Her attention to the material processes underlying informational exchange continues to act as a warning against universalising and homogenising tendencies in posthumanist thought. But the approach has had the additional effect of reclaiming the posthuman to the history of subjectivity. The posthuman is made thought-​friendly, history-​friendly, as its apocalyptic sting is strategically removed. As Hayles herself notes, it is only a “fraction of humanity” that needs to be threatened by this version of the posthuman, since only one of many possible models of subjectivity is effectively critiqued by it. In the last analysis “the posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human […] Located within the dialectic of pattern/​randomness and grounded in embodied actuality rather than disembodied information, the posthuman offers resources for rethinking the articulation of humans with intelligent machines.”14

13

14

In an earlier version of this argument, I advanced the claim that the relation between death and power in posthuman studies remained largely misunderstood. Cf., “Putting the Impossible to Work,” Journal of Modern Literature  35.4 (2012):  163–​180. Since then, the idea of reimagining the significance of death for posthumanism has come to some prominence, particularly in Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 286–​287.

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It is almost banal to point out that this version of posthumanism remains at bottom a politics of human identity. It features the posthuman as a propitious moment in the history of the human subject, a new ideological configuration of the old form, rather than an alternative paradigm. The suspicion, here, is that posthumanity’s ethical gains are not really its own; that embodiment and mortality are in fact borrowed criteria underwriting a borrowed ethics. Thomas Foster seems to be grappling with this issue when he speaks of a “key antinomy or unbridgeable gap that posthumanism has trouble thinking through.”15 He analyses this gap as an impasse “between the argument that posthumanism […] can be part of struggles for freedom and social justice, and the argument that posthumanism dismisses such struggles or even makes them obsolete.”16 While I reject the implication that only a politics of (subjective) identity can have social and ethical relevance, I do take on board his suggestion that posthumanist discourse today is torn between two irreconcilable projects—​only one of which operates under the assumption that the machinery of subjectivity, with all its epistemological guarantees, is out of date. The problem with the latter is that it works too much like a conjuring trick. If Hayles’s version of posthumanism historicises the posthuman by limiting the scope of its critique to liberal humanist politics (keeping it relevant, as it were, by playing it down as just another chapter in the history of the subject), the treatment of the posthuman as an entity with no subjectivist strings attached simply waves away the difficulty of thinking through the conditions of its historical existence. With a sleight of hand the posthuman is pulled out of history and turned into a pure rarefied object of thought. Expunging all references to the subject in posthumanist discourse is, in this respect, no less suspect than pretending subjectivity is still a viable concept. As Herbrechter points out, “[m]‌any posthumanisms forget that by renouncing or simply reinscribing subjectivity into the posthuman condition they are turning a blind eye to the very ambiguity of the subject’s subjectivation, the paradox of the liberal humanist subject par excellence.”17 The implication is that one cannot afford to be naïve about the death of the subject—​or about the logics of posterity and supersession at large. Humanism has a knack of perpetuating itself by thematising its own finitude, and the technology by which it posits itself in history is a great deal more complex than its posthumanist critique is generally prepared to admit. Herbrechter 15 16 1 7

Thomas Foster, The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xxvii. Foster, The Souls of Cyberfolk, xxvii. Herbrechter, “The Posthuman Subject in The Matrix,” 255.

28 Chapter 1 speaks to this effect of “the ‘unsurpassibility’ of the (human) subject,”18 which, propped up by the grammar of realism, becomes the last line of resistance of a certain discursive position readily identified with common sense: “This liberal humanist common sense is far from being dead, and it can still be seen to dominate the public sphere, regardless of how posthuman we may or may not have become, which makes the return to an unreflected humanism at the slightest hint of a crisis more than likely.”19 In other words, not only is the human subject unsurpassable because bound up with common-​sense models of human experience. It is also unsurpassable because humanism has already foreseen, and to some extent internalised its own finality. We always return to the subject at the slightest hint of a crisis because the subject has already called dibs on its own critique. It is perfectly fitting for posthumanism to exist in the unresolved tension between two arguments. A concept so thoroughly invested in the metaphorics of hybridity might be expected to run into aporetic reasoning as a matter of course—​one might even say naturally. Posthumanism cannot get underway if it does not take the “unsurpassability” of the subject seriously; and it cannot get underway if it does not take seriously the subject as an obsolete concept. The solution I wish to test here is to think about this paradox allegorically, to turn the impossible situation in which posthumanism finds itself, into an allegory of sorts. 2

The Resilience of the Dialectic

The emergence of a posthuman strain in modernism seems to me to be entirely bound up with this conceit, an instant in which, by accident or mutation, a spurious movement of the dialectic is substituted for the real deal. Recall that when Hegel posits the coincidence of reality and reflective consciousness, he does so by insisting on two main points: 1. First, that consciousness is a historical phenomenon. It is partial at the outset and must toil to achieve its own completeness in time. 2. Secondly, that the structure of human experience corresponds to a movement of self-​dispossession and self-​return. In other words, experience, following the historical-​ evolutionary programme of consciousness,

1 8 19

Herbrechter, “The Posthuman Subject in The Matrix,” 255. Herbrechter, “The Posthuman Subject in The Matrix,” 255.

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extends outside itself towards objects in the world, only in order to find itself in them. In light of these two principles Hegel is famously able to determine the goal of philosophy as the overcoming of the gap between subjective and objective knowledge. In the course of its evolutionary programme, Hegelian consciousness must come to understand itself as both the medium and the object of its investigations. But it must do so—​the orthodox, modernist reception of the Phenomenology turns on this idea—​by following a determinate path, an educational itinerary freed of accidents and contingencies. Hence the well-​worn formula that the task of philosophy is to write a kind of Bildungsroman, an ideal history of consciousness as it comes into its own, and catches up with its own self-​image. Recent scholarship has sought to revise this critical standard, underplaying the Bildungsroman elements in the Phenomenology in a bid to rediscover Hegel as the author of an open-​ended historical narrative. The move is sometimes premised on a strategic devaluation of the last chapter, dismissed as a disappointing formal gesture, superfluous to the book’s structure; or, alternatively, on a sustained reexamination of the form of the dialectic, towards a more nuanced understanding of the significance of negation in Hegel’s method. Fredric Jameson, for one, concedes that the temporal format of the Phenomenology is developmental (“The idea of maturation—​autonomy, responsibility, self-​government and the like—​is certainly one of the most influential ways in which Hegel and his contemporaries conceptualized the bourgeois revolution”),20 but warns against putting too much stock in the popular triadic formula that has become a shorthand for Hegelianism, and that risks turning “the historical movement of the dialectic into a banal and uplifting saga of inevitable progress.”21 More persuasively, Catherine Malabou argues for the resilience of the dialectic in contemporary thought by situating her own reading of the Phenomenology “at the intersection of two logics of negation”; between a classic form in which negation folds in upon itself and negates itself, and an extended, infinitely open movement is the dialectic’s potential for self-​renewal. “Clearly the dialectic has not disappeared. Rather, the fact is that dialectic, destruction and deconstruction circulate continuously, moving in and out of one another, continuing to transform each other today, just as they always have.”22 20 21 22

Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Verso, 2010), 17. Jameson, The Hegel Variations, 20. Catherine Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 5.

30 Chapter 1 The impossible relation to death I describe in the scene of self-​mourning is not only a fraught moment in Hegel’s historical narrative, but also a syncopation that trips the progress of ideal history, and puts a strain on its underlying developmental logic. Hegel’s posthumanist afterlife begins with an interrogation of the concept of organic development, and a revision of its prominent role within the dialectic. [I]‌n the child’s progress through school, we shall recognize the history of the cultural development of the world traced, as it were, in a silhouette. This past existence is the already acquired property of universal Spirit which constitutes the Substance of the individual and hence appears externally to him as his inorganic nature. In this respect formative education, regarded from the side of the individual, consists in his acquiring what thus lies at hand, devouring his inorganic nature, and taking possession of it for himself. (PoS §28)23 The method described here—​the challenge of a universal education—​is to absorb (to “acquire” and “devour”) the inorganic elements in one’s developmental history; and thus to transform inherited knowledge into mastery, making fully internalised habits out of blunt facts (whereupon culture becomes second nature). The operative metaphor, famously, is one of ingestion, digestion and growth. But, regarded from the side of universal Spirit as substance, this is nothing but its own acquisition of self-​consciousness, the bringing-​about of its own becoming and reflection into itself. (PoS §28) The notion of a universal mind that brings about its own becoming is of the utmost methodological importance in that it provides Hegel’s narrative with a measure—​an internal sense, so to speak—​of its own validity. Consistently, the criteria Hegel invokes to test the soundness of his method are those of interiority (or inherent logic) and organic unity. By these terms, and the metaphysical values they imply, consciousness is originally distinguished from sense-​certainty; we are able to know what consciousness is and to know that it is properly at work. (Early on, it is possessive, attentive, curious vis-​à-​vis the 23

Unless otherwise noted, all references are to A. V. Miller’s 1977 translation of the Phenomenology, with standard paragraph numbers (§). Occasional comparisons to Baillie’s translation will be cited in-​text as PoM (with page numbers followed by the corresponding § reference from Miller).

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world. But this curiosity is found to be philosophically worthless if it is not regulated by the ideals of inherent and organic development.) As Alexandre Kojève would explain, knowledge for Hegel is truly philosophical and absolute when it is “present at its own birth and contemplates its own evolution.”24 Beyond the facile objection that being present at one’s own birth is no great feat, the idea is meant to weld together the two principles set forth above: that consciousness evolves historically and that its most characteristic operation is to lose itself in reality only to return to itself in reflection. By enjoining consciousness to witness its own birth and contemplate its own evolution, Hegel projects this double movement (of self-​transcendence and self-​return) onto the stage of universal history. Self-​presence may never again be conceived as a natural datum, or a biological matter of fact. It is to be earned. And human history achieves its goal when its beginning, its middle and its end are unified in an act of totalising interiorisation—​an act of memory as “taking in” (Erinnerung); but also, crucially, a final moment of self-​recognition that faces consciousness with its mirror-​image. In this connection it is important to grasp the precise significance of the organic for Hegel’s method. While it names an important scientific criterion, organicity stands in a complex relation to the project of culture. Hegel defines it as a simple unity and an inner, purposive movement, analogous to the unity and the movement of the Notion. Organic existence, he writes “is this absolute fluidity in which the determinateness, through which it would be only for an other, is dissolved” (PoS §254). The qualities invoked here (simple unity, inner purposiveness, fluidity of movement) delineate the terms of Hegel’s humanism. In particular, the notion that organic life involves a suspension of determinate relations orients the individual mind towards its universal ideal and ensures the passage from subjective experience—​which is by definition partial, and always determined in relation to other objects—​to absolute knowledge. The “simple unity” (PoS §254) of an organic being, precisely understood as a movement towards self-​sufficiency and complete independence from external relations, is what Hegel has in mind when describing the progress of culture from an individual to a universal perspective: organic being, subsuming as it does all partial characterisations, is akin to the self-​determining movement of Spirit. If not a process of interiorisation, it describes an internal teleology, a constant wholeness independent of external determinations. At issue in this formula is Hegel’s understanding of nature as pure self-​externality, at

24

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 173.

32 Chapter 1 the greatest possible remove from the inner life of Spirit. If the ideal of history is a consciousness that gives itself its own self-​consciousness, nature must be defined as a state-​of-​becoming unregulated by that ideal: life without self-​ determination. The implications for an ethics of subjectivity are worth fleshing out. Hegel builds on the idea that natural phenomena are always determined by objects outside themselves. To take a classic example, we may assume that the changes in a piece of melting wax are not autonomous but the effect of a nearby source of heat. To understand the phenomenon one must look outside the piece of wax, to the fire. And to know what determined the fire, one must look at the agents that kindled it, whether deliberately or by accident. Animal life is comparatively more self-​determined—​but not quite self-​determined enough since an animal’s actions are always reducible to a need or a hunger to which it is enslaved.25 The animal appears to move of its own accord, but it cannot be said to act with a truly free purpose. In this context, the concept of self-​externality is for Hegel synonymous with that of restricted freedom. Neither the wax nor the animal can be held responsible for the actions they take or the changes they undergo: their freedom is partial at best. Consciousness, by contrast, is able to determine its reality independently of natural impulse or external circumstance; and in this power, Hegel would argue, is the condition of all ethical life. “Whatever is confined within the limits of a natural life cannot by its own efforts go beyond its immediate existence […] Consciousness, however, is explicitly the Notion of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself” (PoS §80). The rhetoric of life and death employed here sets up natural existence as a negative moment in the life of Spirit; nature is bracketed as a limit to be overcome. The animal, the machine and the inanimate object all partake of this limit in as much as they are not self-​determining. (In this sense nature might be defined as the totality of things excluded from the project of self-​ determination.) Spirit, on the other hand, is able to preserve itself by continually transcending its limit. Only by going beyond its immediate existence does it stay faithful to itself. Hegel will return to this idea time and time again: that true philosophical thinking determines itself and desires its own reflection. It seeks to overcome the gap between subject and object and to maintain reality in accordance with 25

The attention to animal ethics in recent posthumanist discourse is indicative of the bankruptcy of this premise in contemporary thought. Yet, as I shall argue below, certain ethical implications co-​implied with the opposition of human culture and animal life continue to resonate even in contexts where the opposition is explicitly interrogated.

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its conceptual representation. And in so doing, it realises itself as an internally regulated (organic) process. By contrast, in the scene of self-​mourning Narcissus’s drama of self-​recognition is violently disengaged from the parameters of the humanly possible. A face stands facing its double, an identity is affirmed, but the event carries no philosophical purchase. The moment effaces reality by tainting it with incoherence. It puts the very concept of reality at risk when the illusion of an organic, self-​determined correspondence between knowing subject and known object is replaced by the sense that what makes human experience possible, in the first place, is a disjuncture in the structure of existence, an event that cannot itself be experienced. Self-​mourning, then, begins with something of an impossibility, a shock to the system. The encounter with one’s own reflection sets up a relation to self that is grounded in the impossible experience of one’s own death. It is tempting to dismiss this impossibility as merely empirical. I cannot experience my own death simply because reality, as I know it, doesn’t work that way. But the stakes are actually higher. The impossible experience that is self-​mourning breaks with more than “reality as I know it”: it disables reality as a legitimate concept in the dialectic. It ruins it for thought, knocks it out of order, so that the very project of philosophy (as Hegel conceives it) breaks down—​and with it, humanity’s guardianship over the history of being. Recast as a Hegelian parable, Hardy’s take on the Narcissus myth shows precisely this breakdown. For Hegel the moment of self-​recognition signals the triumph of philosophy; it is where consciousness masters death and attains absolute knowledge. In Hardy that same moment is grotesquely carnivalised. Henchard’s encounter with his narcissistic double voids ontological categories, levels them: subject bleeds into object, nature into figure, and the resulting (un)reality is what marks the scene as impossible—​that is to say, not merely marvellous or fantastic, but philosophically ruinous. Two excerpts from the Preface to the Phenomenology fully express philosophy’s embarrassment. The first touches on the relation between the concept of reality and consciousness; it equates reality with the self-​reflexive movement by which consciousness comes into its own, successfully mediating subjective and objective knowledge. Thus in Baillie’s translation: Spirit is alone Reality [Das Geistige allein ist das Wirkliche]. It is the inner being of the world, that which essentially is, and is per se; it assumes objective, determinate form, and enters into relations with itself—​it is externality (otherness), and exists for self; yet, in this determination, and in its otherness, it is still one with itself—​it is self-​contained and self-​ complete, in itself and for itself at once. (PoM 86/​§25)

34 Chapter 1 The equation of Spirit and reality is of course a mainstay of Hegel’s idealism. It expresses Hegel’s presupposition that reality is essentially rational, and that, as such, it exists entirely for consciousness. Simply put, “Spirit is alone Reality” because reality needs the constant work of Spirit to be actualised—​it needs a rational Mind to maintain it, to keep it current and in progress.26 Hegel’s reference to “the inner being of the world” is intended to emphasise this point. Wirklichkeit cannot be a reality of dumb contingencies and disconnected facts. It is not the reality of phantom pains, or of delusions without cause and consequence. It is reality as a whole, organic and coherent, always capable of making sense by conforming to its rational concept. By the same token, what is excluded from the history of consciousness ought also to be excluded from the order of reality. It is but a negative moment in the progression of science, a moment of madness or falsity that is actualised only when it is overcome. We may appreciate why Hegel points to death as the most emblematic of these excluded moments. (“Death, as we may call that unreality, is the most terrible thing, and to keep and hold fast what is dead demands the greatest force of all” [PoM 92–​93/​§32].) Death has to remain an unreality, in the Hegelian system, because consciousness is inherently unable to sustain it as an actual event. In order to realise death, to actually experience it, consciousness would have to accept its own finitude. It would have to acknowledge its own inability to fully determine itself. And this, as we have seen, is against its nature, against the very definition of Bildung provided in the Preface. A history of consciousness in which death has been actualised would be, quite literally, at variance with its own concept. It would constitute not the inner being of the world but the absolute limit of the Mind’s evolutionary potential: reality as inassimilable otherness, as a step beyond one’s boundaries, without the possibility of re-​integration or return. Within this allegorical framework, the impossibility of self-​mourning reads specifically as the scandal of an antithesis that will not be removed—​of a reality that cannot be put to good use by consciousness. With the intrusion of death into the order of actual experience, reality itself passes into the realm of the impossible.

26

Notably, A. V. Miller’s translation renders Wirkilch as “the actual” and Unwirklich as “non-​ actuality.” Thus Baillie’s “Spirit is alone Reality” becomes “The spiritual alone is the actual” (PoS §25); and his “Death, as we may call that unreality” becomes “Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality” (PoS §32).

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3

35

The Spurious and the Impossible

We may grasp the issue more fully by approaching Hegel’s argument from the opposite end, as in a mirror-​image. As consciousness goes about its quest for absolute knowledge, as it strives to come into its own, it finds everything it needs already in itself, reflected within the logic of its historical programme. Everything it needs—​which is to say, both the object of its enquiry and the proof of the validity of its enquiry. Now, if we inquire into the truth of knowledge, it seems that we are asking what knowledge is in itself. Yet in this inquiry knowledge is our object, something that exists for us; and the in-​itself that would supposedly result from it would rather be the being of knowledge for us. What we asserted to be its essence would be not so much its truth but rather just our knowledge of it. […] But the dissociation, or this semblance of dissociation and presupposition, is overcome by the nature of the object we are investigating. Consciousness provides its own criterion from within itself, so that the investigation becomes a comparison of consciousness with itself … (PoS §§ 83–​84) Consciousness comes to be viewed, here, as the meeting point of empirical reality and ideal truth. Uniting being-​in-​itself with being-​for, it short-​circuits Kantian dichotomies (at least in theory) and fashions itself as both the guarantee and the record, both the condition of possibility and the realisation, of a total comprehension of the world. However, such faith in the possibility of total knowledge also flattens the world somewhat. Fredric Jameson is right to insist that Hegel’s solution to the Kantian challenge describes a two-​dimensional reality: “that beyond as which the noumenon is characterized now becomes something like a category of thinking (along with the limit itself). It is the mind that posits noumena in the sense in which its experience of each phenomenon includes a beyond along with it; in the sense in which the mirror has a tain, or the wall an outside.”27 If it were not for Hegel’s understanding of death as a virtual limit, a line to be constantly transcended and overcome—​if not, that is, for Spirit’s ability to constantly interiorise its own finitude—​philosophy might be reduced to an endless, goalless activity of mirror-​climbing. Even so, the assumption that all 27

Jameson, The Hegel Variations, 29.

36 Chapter 1 will be made explicit in good time cannot help but reduce the totality of objects to a mere reflective surface: “appearance becomes identical with essence” (PoS §89), phenomenality with truth, reflection with interiority. It is at this very instant that consciousness understands itself to be co-​extensive with reality as a whole. We may appreciate, here, how closely Hegel’s system comes to resemble its evil twin, a philosophy of surfaces, of shadows and simulacra; and thus, how fine are the partitions that separate absolute reason from madness, chief among these, the opposition between a virtuous and a spurious deployment of the notion of infinity. The tendency of Hegelianism either to subsume its fiercest opposition, or to approximate it so closely as to become almost indistinguishable from it, has been noted by several commentators. Derrida makes the point most famously in Writing and Difference, first through a comparison with Levinas (“Violence and Metaphysics”); then again via a reading of Bataille (“From Restricted to General Economy”).28 Both essays turn on the intuition of a strange moment in the labour of the negative, an odd refraction by which it is somehow identified with the absolute—​a self-​sufficient, self-​serving negation, infinite movement without its anchor in the finite.29 It will be useful to dwell on this dimension of dialectical thought a while longer with a view to testing an unsurpassable limit, a boundary-​line beyond which the logic of the Phenomenology is unable to advance. The most systematic exploration of this boundary is that attempted by Gilles Deleuze whose entire philosophical project is advertised as an uncompromising anti-​Hegelianism, a thought devoted to the simulacrum as a powerful, productive force. 28

29

Jacques, Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 79–​153; and “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, 251–​277. “In this language, which is the only language of Western philosophy, can one not repeat Hegelianism, which is only this language coming into absolute possession of itself? […] the only effective position to take in order not to be enveloped by Hegel would seem to be, for an instant, the following: to consider the false-​infinity (that is, in a profound way, original finitude) irreducible” (“Violence and Metaphysics,” 119). And in the second essay: “Only the accent on simulacrum and subterfuge interrupt the Hegelian continuity of [Bataille’s] text. […] The blind spot of Hegelianism, around which can be organized the representation of meaning, is the point at which destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure, so radical a negativity—​here we would have to say an expenditure and a negativity without reserve—​that they can no longer be determined as negativity in a process or a system” (“From Restricted to General Economy,” 258–​259). 

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The simulacrum is the instance which includes a difference within itself […] all resemblance abolished so that one can no longer point to the existence of an original and a copy. It is in this direction that we must look for the conditions, not of possible experience, but of real experience. It is here that we find the lived reality of a sub-​representative domain.30 Here too, evolution proceeds as an image-​making mechanism (like a consciousness that gives itself to itself). Only in this case we are faced with a principle of image-​production wherein divergence, rather than resemblance or faithful representation, is the ontogenetic rule. The entire system is in stark contrast to the standards that have characterised mimetic ontologies since Plato. The image is the form and the matter of evolutionary change. It drives repetition and puts it to work. But it does so without presupposing a prior identity in that which repeats. Every act of repetition bears the mark of a new and utterly unique moment—​the power of false images to betray their own origin. And the simulacrum provides at the same time the living memory and the archival record of this power: “Things are simulacra themselves, simulacra are the superior forms, and the difficulty facing everything is to become its own simulacrum.”31 Alain Badiou famously points to this idea as the cornerstone of Deleuze’s ontology. It grounds his doctrine of immanence and substantiates his insistence that Being is always real, always at one with itself, always affirming itself even as it enacts a history of radical self-​differentiation:  “From the point of view of the dynamic power of Being, there is no admissible reason for beings to resemble anything more essential than themselves. They are an immanent production of the One, and not at all images governed by similarity.”32 And elsewhere:

30 31

32

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 69. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 67.—​For an extended discussion of this issue I refer the reader to Deleuze’s essay “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy,” appendix to The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), especially 261–​265; see also commentaries by Daniel W.  Smith, “The concept of the simulacrum:  Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism,” Continental Philosophy Review 38 (2005): 89–​123; and Nathan Widder, “The Rights of Simulacra: Deleuze and the Univocity of Being,” Continental Philosophy Review 34.4 (2001): 437–​453. Alain Badiou, The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis:  University of ­Minnesota Press, 2000), 44.

38 Chapter 1 Deleuze, in order to hold to the postulate of univocity, which is the condition for deciding on life as a name of being, must pose that all things are, in an obscure sense, signs of themselves; not of themselves as themselves, but of themselves as provisional simulacra, or precarious modalities, of the power of the Whole. But if something is a sign of itself and its dimension as sign is indiscernible from its being then the following two statements are equivalent: everything is life, everything is sign.33 If we accept this argument, a Deleuzian reading of Hegel might not seem too farfetched. As soon as Life/​Being is equated with reality-​as-​a-​whole, and both are unpacked as a virtual totality of self-​repeating images, it becomes tempting to conclude that Hegel’s consciousness and Deleuze’s simulacra fulfil the same ontological function. Everything is included in the mechanism of immanent production that we associate with the self-​movement of the Hegelian concept and with the power of the false. Put differently, Life, which produces and preserves itself in copy after false copy, occupies the same intermediate space between subject and object as consciousness when it gives itself its own self-​consciousness. But, to be sure, the comparison does not hold up to very detailed scrutiny. As a wholesale explanatory theory of human experience Hegel’s thought is pitched at the furthest possible point from Deleuze’s, and remains, in all but the most casual sense, utterly incompatible with the latter’s anti-​mimetic (pro-​simulacral) stance. That being said, it is necessary to push Hegel’s system against its Deleuzian limit, precisely in order to understand how the fantasy of mourning one’s own death comes to thematise an impossible moment within the programme of ideal history;34 to appreciate why the scene is so germane to modernist reflections on historicity, why it is so thoroughly connected with 33 34

Alain Badiou, “Of Life as a Name of Being, or, Deleuze’s Vitalist Ontology,” trans. Alberto Toscano, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 10 (2000), 198. Catherine Malabou and Slavoj Žižek provide excellent examples of this type of comparison. See in particular Malabou’s “Who’s Afraid of Hegelian Wolves” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996): 114–​138; and Žižek’s Organs without Bodies (New York: Routledge, 2004). For an in-​depth discussion of Žižek’s book, and more broadly of the comparison between Hegel and Deleuze developed therein, see Daniel W. Smith, “The Inverse Side of the Structure,” Criticism 46.4 (Fall 2004): 635–​650; Eleanor Kaufman, “Betraying Well,” Criticism 46.4 (Fall 2004): 651–​659; and Žižek’s own response to his critics, “Notes on a Debate: ‘From within the People’,” Criticism 46.4 (Fall 2004): 661–​666. See also the opening section of Nathan Widder’s “From Negation to Disjunction,” Deleuze Studies 3.2 (2009): 207–​230.

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this specific moment in the history of consciousness, and yet so unthinkable—​ the very embodiment, for consciousness, of an impossible event. Ultimately, what sets the Phenomenology firmly apart from its vitalist double, or from any ontology of the virtual, is precisely Hegel’s belief that the organism is maintained through a constant work of Erinnerung. In other words, that the basic activity of consciousness is to internalise, to grow by dint of memory and absorption. It is this rule that aligns the programme of rational history with the Enlightenment ideal of self-​determination. That it also describes a work of mourning almost goes without saying.35 Mourning is the relation that consciousness, which wants to be entirely self-​ determined, keeps towards its past. The very concept of a historical consciousness, of a universal Mind that completes itself in history, requires mourning as a constant work of self-​maintenance. As Brent Adkins explains, “[f]‌or the Phenomenology to be successful, Hegel must show how neither death nor others are external to the movement of consciousness. Both must be introjected into the movement of consciousness so that all of its negations are contained within it.”36 Erinnerung, in this sense, is mourning at its purest—​interiorisation as the pure form of universal history. But as we weave together this chain of co-​implicit terms (the historical programme of consciousness; the work of mourning; the modern subject’s right to self-​determination), we must ask what kind of death is a death that has already been internalised. What concept of finitude does it impose on ethical and ontological thought? And further: what happens when the work of interiorisation has reached a phase of complete self-​reflexivity and the work of mourning is itself positioned in front of its own mirror? The first question is of course rhetorical. A death that is in principle already mourned is not a real event. And yet it is the only death possible for a completely self-​determined being:  that is to say, for the ideal subject of human history and for the hero of a certain version of posthumanism. The second question repeats the first but turns its answer inside out. One must reckon with 35

36

Catherine Malabou has written extensively on the connection between mourning and dialectical thought. See, in particular, her articles, “History and the Process of Mourning in Hegel and Freud,” Radical Philosophy 106 (2001): 15–​20; and “Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Diacritics 37.4 (2007): 78–​86; and the two book-​ length studies, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic (London: Routledge, 2005), and Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing. On mourning in Hegel’s philosophy, see also Andrew Cutrofello’s “The Blessed Gods Mourn: What is Living-​Dead in the Legacy of Hegel,” The Owl of Minerva 28 (1996): 25–​38. Brent Adkins, Death and Desire in Hegel, Heidegger, and Deleuze (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2007), 88.

40 Chapter 1 another type of death, a very real death, unsurpassable and altogether alien. Traditionally, psychoanalysis assigns a pathological status to this event, associating it with melancholia. But the double of mourning I am trying to describe here is not quite melancholia. Derrida speaks more pertinently of “two experiences of mourning,” one turned towards preserving the past, and one towards forgetting. These two experiences must eventually denote a single operation, namely, the work “of an originary mourning, of a possible mourning as that which is impossible.”37 To us, the main interest of this formulation is in the way it exposes, at the heart of the Hegelian metaphorics of interiority (and organicity) a deep-​seated concern with the impossible as a historical force. If mourning is the work by which reality-​as-​a-​whole maintains itself (in conformity with its own image), self-​mourning, as an impossible event, puts the humanly possible in contact with its outside. In terms of our earlier comparison, Hegelian consciousness and the Deleuzian simulacrum would differ from each other as these two types of mourning: the one co-​extensive with the humanly possible, the other with a history that puts the impossible to work. In this paradoxical thinking of the impossible as a historical force, we begin to think of the posthuman not as a subject but as an event. The relation that the posthuman keeps with human history is an impossible relation in precisely the sense signified by Derrida’s two experiences of mourning. It scarcely needs mentioning that the concept of the impossible at issue here is not a dialectical negation of the possible. Nor should an impossible event be mistaken for an unreal one, though I have gone to some lengths to characterise self-​mourning as an embarrassment to reality. Crucially, any attempt to put the impossible to work must think of it as lacking nothing of reality. For if the impossible did lack something of reality, it could never be an event. Indeed it might be dismissed as a mere flight of fancy, and as such, it would only reinforce, by way of simple subtraction, the order of pre-​established possibilities. Such a view would foreclose history to the workings of the virtual; it would cancel out the very condition for the emergence of new technologies and the creation of unforeseen futures. On this score, Derrida invites us to explore “the place of a thinking that ought to be devoted to the virtualization of the event by the machine.”38 Note 37 38

Jacques Derrida, “Preface. A  Time for Farewells:  Heidegger (read by) Hegel (read by) Malabou,” in The Future of Hegel:  Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic (London:  Routledge, 2005), xxxix. Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 135.

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how the strange symmetry of this sentence folds the task of thinking and the work of virtualisation into each other in order to endow the machine with enormous philosophical responsibility. Such a task, then, would correspond “to a virtuality that, in exceeding the philosophical determination of the possibility of the possible […] exceeds by the same token the classical opposition of the possible and the impossible.”39 At stake in this formulation is precisely a posthumanist view of technology as that which opens the Hegelian dialectic to a space of utter indeterminacy—​virtualisation as the work that opens reality to the workings of the impossible, as the very entry point of the impossible into the field of total possibility. Virtuality, technology, and the machine: no serious treatment of the posthuman can avoid engaging with these concepts. Yet I suspect if certain versions of posthumanism underestimate (or downplay) the radical nature of the posthuman turn, it is because they fail to see how an impossible event can operate in history: they mistake the impossible for the unreal. And in so doing, they misunderstand the role of futurity and of technology in theorising the posthuman condition. The counter-​argument is simple enough: impossibility characterises any event in which reality diverges from itself. We see its mark whenever history is derailed towards an unexpected future, or when nature is re-​programmed through technological invention. Only, from a posthuman perspective, such events are reality’s inaugural moments; they are conditions of possibility. History is always being thrown off-​course, and the natural state is never given. 4

The Posthuman Event, a New Geometry of Concepts

My argument, in sum, is that the impossibility allegorised in self-​mourning shapes the moment of posthuman self-​reflection; and consequently, that a strategic interpretation of impossibility—​or the version of futurity implied in that interpretation—​orients the most important issues in posthuman thought. The question is never whether the posthuman is a being of the future. Even when historicised, or spoken of in the past tense, posthumanity retains an unmistakably futural character in relation to human history. The moot point is whether a posthuman future was always a possibility for human beings, whether man always had it in him, as it were, to turn out this way. 39

Derrida, Without Alibi, 135.—​For an excellent commentary that puts this excerpt in a posthumanist perspective by reading it alongside parallel issues in systems theory, see Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?

42 Chapter 1 Implicit in this question is a restatement of the constitutive impasse of posthumanism, and an opportunity to think through the dead-​end that defines the posthuman now. As we have seen, the discussion opens in at least two directions: a critique of realist grammars and an analysis of temporal forms. In the first instance, I propose in this section to examine the effects of an impossible event upon the conceptual cluster of reality, possibility and nature, and, by observing how those concepts are repurposed, to interrogate the credentials of the posthuman as a self-​reflexive subject. In the second, I wish to situate that event between two histories with a view to understanding its evolutionary character. A brief return to the critical history of posthumanism will suffice, for a start, to identify an overwhelming temporal contradiction at the heart of the debate: that the posthuman is already with us even as it remains to come. We have already diagnosed this contradiction as a key feature of “our” historical self-​awareness as posthuman beings (or subjects). We should now consider how it determines the self-​understanding of posthumanism as an academic field, a discipline, with real purchase on the contemporary world. The notion of contemporaneity is never innocent, and must seem all the more suspect when applied to the posthuman now. The very term “posthuman” derives its currency from a variety of competing contexts and temporal signifiers. Anachrony, hybridity, are the recurring themes of introductions and programmatic essays; they haunt every text in which the discipline attempts to define itself or to shape its own future. Donna Haraway sets the tone with the following definition: a cyborg, she writes, is “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”40 Badmington recalls that the origin of his interest in the posthuman can be traced back to “[his] parents’ decision to allow [him] to watch weekly episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man.”41 In the posthumanist’s library, the image of a man given for dead, rebuilt from scratch, crippled yet technologically enhanced, resonates effortlessly with allegorical writings aimed to unsettle the assumption of a universal human standard or to revise the anthropocentrism of received historical forms. By the same token, an agent who is the sum of his spare parts, who is, quite literally, identified by his price tag, is also the prototype of a new, emancipatory concept of citizenship. Whatever the uses of a word that can mean so many different things to different thinkers, posthumanism brings home ever so clearly the ability of

40 41

Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149. Neil Badmington, Posthumanism: A Reader, xi.

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certain avant-​garde historical formations to traverse discourses and hybridise identity. Barely a creature in its own right, the posthuman is best described as a patchwork of borrowed qualities, or a highly dynamic, even volatile, discursive field. Hayles speaks of “a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-​ informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.”42 In other words, hybridity is not just a matter of disparate parts fitted into a less than organic whole. The weld of flesh and chrome, of living form and technological supplement is itself no more than a stylised image—​a figure. It abstracts an idea, and casts the posthuman into a physical type. It establishes a standard. But it also stands for the mismatch of categories across which posthuman reality is always distributed. Presence and futurity, actuality and virtuality, the realms of society and fiction: figured in the hybrid is the uneasy overlap of all these elements. In the final analysis, the distributed character of posthuman reality is why the posthuman is always exceeding possibilities, why it must always find itself projected outward, unmoored from the historical moment it somehow claims as its own. Appearing some 20 years after Haraway’s “Manifesto,” a special issue of Comparative Literature Studies devoted to the posthuman shows an expanding field with entries ranging from an analysis of the role of information-​technology in the global market and in Japanese cyberpunk novels, to a reading of the co-​implication of human agency and technology in Edgar Allan Poe, via a discussion of affect in three cinematic works and of mimetic strategies of identification in the performance of video-​game narratives. Once again this variety of themes and media gives us a sense of the vastness of the topic at hand. It also brings into relief the problem of referring to “the posthuman” as an object or an organism, as the member of a species or a generic type. Introducing the special issue of cls, Hayles notes that [t]‌aken as a group, the essays point not so much to consensus as to common sites where contestations to determine the future of humanity are especially intense. […] It is too soon to say where these engagements will end. Perhaps the only clear conclusions are that the future of humans will increasingly be entangled with intelligent machines, and that embodiments will still matter in some sense, however virtual or cyborgian they become.43 42 43

Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3. N. Katherine Hayles, “Refiguring the Posthuman,” Comparative Literature Studies 41.3 (2004), 316.

44 Chapter 1 The chief implication of Hayles’s argument, here, is that the variety of contexts in which posthumanism plays itself out coincides with a variety of possible posthuman futures. It is by focusing on the future as a site of multiple possibilities that the posthuman begins to be thought: The posthuman, these essays suggest, cannot and will not mean only one thing. Posthumans are likely to be as complex and diverse, as historically and culturally specific as humans have been. Whatever the future, we can be sure that it will not be simple.44 As it is indeed too soon to say, one can do little more than speculate. The future, Hayles suggests, will not be simple; but it is sure to bring some details into proper focus. We must imagine a range of potential developments from which history will eventually pick the most fitting posthuman outcome. In alternative to this notion, the future may be thought of as an ideal time for the posthuman to reveal itself, a propitious but perpetually deferred moment in which posthumanity will be expected to come into its own. And, by direct implication, it may also be construed as a metonym for the essentially inscrutable character of the species, a veil behind which the posthuman face typically hides. While these readings do not fully exhaust the commitment of posthumanism to some kind of experience of a time to come, they do enough to bring to attention two important matters: first, that if there is such a thing as posthuman self-​identity, it cannot be grasped except as a temporally distributed truth; and secondly, that this truth’s temporal distribution is not self-​evident, not a given but a construct. It is therefore necessary, in attempting a definition of the posthuman, to decipher the temporal project in which posthuman narcissism is originally caught up, to analyse it as one would analyse a myth or a work of speculative history. This task seems all the more urgent once we observe that in the passage quoted above Hayles refers not to a posthuman future but, more precisely, to a “future of humanity” in which the posthuman ought to become increasingly recognisable, that is to say more and more like itself. Posthumanity’s time to shine, then, just like its ethics, may not even be its own. A sustained reflection on humanity’s posthuman future needs to take this discrepancy into full account. The structural anachronism that lies at the heart of any discourse on the posthuman, the temporal paradox that makes the project of posthumanism both extremely current and still not ripe enough to grasp in verifiable detail, is precisely indicative of the resistance of (post)human 44

Hayles, “Refiguring the Posthuman,” 316.

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being to any logic of contemporaneity or self-​presence—​indeed to the very notion of historical existence as a process of self-​determination, self-​fulfilment or coming into one’s own. Without a correct analysis of this discrepancy we could not hope to understand the sense in which posthuman being realises itself in a human future. We would be unable to characterise the posthuman either as a fictional prospect for humanity, or as an infinitely deferred relation of the human with itself, or even as an utterly unprecedented phase in the history of being. Much less could we reconstruct the event in which such a prospect might be realised or in which such a phase could be said to emerge. It is, amongst other things, a problem of translation. The difficulty of mapping out the specific temporal project encoded in posthuman being, of grasping what it means for the posthuman to be futurally determined, overlaps with that of understanding how a “culturally specific” posthuman future would (if at all) be accessible to human experience. Viewed as part of an evolutionary continuum, posthumans share a genetic past with human beings. In a very concrete sense, they emerge from within a human world. But they must leave that world behind. To theorise the event of the posthuman, to comprehend the posthuman as an event, is also to come to grips with this logic of evolutionary supersession. Intuitively, evolutionary discourse may be seen to compete with the apocalyptic imagery prevalent in numerous posthuman myths. But in fact, the peculiar eventuality of the posthuman compels us to think of evolution and apocalypse as co-​implied. Evolutionary discourse affirms temporal continuity and privileges versions of becoming, myths of gradual genetic reprogramming, over the sense of an irreparable rupture in time. And here too, the notion of a “possibility” to be fulfilled or transgressed is key. Bruce Clarke, for example, concludes Posthuman Metamorphoses with the observation that “humanity […] will earn its continuation only by metamorphic integration into new evolutionary syntheses.” Within this narrative, the posthuman fits the role of a “human metamorphosed by reconnection to the worldly and systemic conditions of its evolutionary possibility.”45 Foster, in turn, speaks of “contemporary posthumanist impulses to intervene in and direct what would have once been a process of natural selection, in order to accelerate human potential for differentiation and (self)modification.”46 Note that the phrase pits two types of evolutionary work against each other: natural selection takes evolutionary possibilities as given in advance (in nature), whereas the human potential for

45 46

Bruce Clarke, Posthuman Metamorphoses:  Narrative and Systems (New  York:  Fordham University Press, 2008), 196. Foster, Souls of Cyberfolk, 6.

46 Chapter 1 differentiation, itself a given, opens the field to some degree of indeterminacy in the exercise of human agency. Only a third term, acceleration, registers a disruption of the natural order that coincides, in effect, with the posthuman event. Where it intervenes in evolutionary processes, the posthuman event marks an uncanny intersection of technology and nature. It introduces difference not from within a field of given possibilities, but in excess of that field. Nature b­ ecomes more than natural, the organism more than merely organic. Most ­importantly, for the purpose our discussion, the event makes the very ­realisation of genetic possibilities dependent on the workings of the impossible. H. G. Wells provides the argument with a powerful illustration: It often seems to be tacitly assumed that a living thing is at the utmost nothing more than the complete realization of its birth possibilities, and so heredity becomes confused with theological predestination. […] We overlook only too often the fact that a living being may also be regarded as raw material, as something plastic, something that may be shaped and altered, that this, possibly, may be added and that eliminated, and the organism as a whole developed far beyond its apparent possibilities.47 Germane to both nature and culture, no less real to one or the other, the impossible event short-​circuits the dialectical opposition that sustains the Hegelian system. Technological invention is found to be inherent in natural selection, a constitutive factor and a guarantee of the plasticity of living forms. To be sure, technology’s role in this process is not reducible to any practical application, to this or that particular instance of technological use. Rather, the power of technology, the significance of a technological experience, emerges in precisely the kind of event that folds nature and the impossible together. As Callus and Herbrechter have argued, the posthuman does not need technology though it remains a technological formation through and through. It is simply “that which reconfigures the actual and the possible once human potential is reengineered and new orders instituted (whether by technology or otherwise).”48 Or if you will, it is what puts the impossible to work as human 47 48

H. G. Wells, Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, eds. Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 36.—​A portion of this quote is also discussed in Foster, Souls of Cyberfolk, 6–​7. Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter, “Introduction:  Did Someone Say Cy-​Borges?” Cy-​ Borges: Memories of Posthumanism in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges, eds. Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2009), 35.

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possibilities are re-​engineered—​and therein lies the key feature of its technological determination. By this last definition, the evolutionary character of the human/​posthuman relation may be conceived alongside the sheer irruptive power of the posthuman turn. The rhetoric approximates that of Foster’s argument. But the emphasis is on the inventive thrust of the now, on the moment’s futural origin, rather than its position in an evolutionary continuum. If the posthuman can indeed be understood as an acceleration of human potential, if we are able to adopt this definition without qualms, it is because we recognise an original impossibility at work in reality, in nature, in the possible itself. 5

Cyborgs, Androids, Thinking Machines: Rounding Up the Usual Suspects

I should like, at this point, to test the re-​articulation of reality, possibility and nature in self-​mourning against the evidence of two classic titles from the posthuman canon: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell.49 Staple posthumanist scenarios such as the downloading of human memories onto an artificial consciousness, the progressive humanisation of machines, or the discovery of a cybernetic reality behind the phenomenal world thematise, often explicitly enough, the changing role of “nature” and “reality” in marking out an authentically human experience. They describe worlds, increasingly less unfamiliar ones, in which the natural and the technological order interpenetrate, in which the real and the virtual bleed into each other and the very distinction between an inner and an outer dimension of experience becomes untenable. In Haraway’s words, the posthuman is the moment in which “nature” is unmasked as “one of culture’s most startling and non-​innocent products.”50 Cyberpunk and tech-​noir classics provide the thesis with a widespread appeal. But a posthuman questioning of nature—​ specifically, of the legitimacy of the nature/​culture divide—​has accompanied modern philosophy from the very start. (Forcing the issue somewhat, we might imagine that Descartes himself joins the ranks of classic posthumanist 49

50

Throughout this book I view cyborgs and androids as members of a single commonwealth, and I use the two words more or less interchangeably. Because cyborg better captures the ontological stakes of the discussion, it is the more frequent term. Strictly speaking, there are no cyborgs in Blade Runner, and replicant or even android would be the correct nomenclature; but the ontology, and the ecology, are indeed cyborgian. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 109.

48 Chapter 1 thinkers when he writes: “[w]‌e are not sufficiently accustomed to thinking of machines, and this has been the source of nearly all error in philosophy.”51 In a sense the posthuman is nothing if not the emergence of this truth into historical self-​consciousness. It is an urgent rethinking of machines that leaves the distinction between nature and culture unhinged.) Central to posthuman myths is the assumption that there is no such thing as a blunt, unchangeable reality—​that the whole of reality is subject to natural and technological processes at one and the same time. The idea is reflected in the barely functional, decadent ecology, and the attendant urban aesthetic, that are highly recognisable tropes of Cyberpunk narratives. Two scenes from Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell showcase the point with remarkable precision: the first, from the film’s pre-​title sequence, finds the main character, Motoko Kusanagi, surveying a cityscape perched on a high ledge. As she prepares to dive backwards into the reality behind her, she deploys a thermoptic stealth cloak that causes her figure to fade into the background. The shot provides a perfect visual metaphor for the fusion of flesh, technology and environment implicit in the film’s ecology. The effect of the camouflage is to render Kusanagi’s body as a flat semi-​transparent surface, an image superimposed onto other images. [Fig. 1.1] The second scene comes about thirty minutes into the film, right after an intense action sequence, and a shootout, followed by a soulful conversation between Kusanagi and her partner about the trials and the dangers of being a cyborg. The plot is put on hold for three and a half minutes and gives way to shots of everyday life, in which we experience the city as a jumble of objects new and old, shiny and murky. The camera indulges in the urban setting, shifting from article to random article: a shabby back-​alley, a pensive dog, pedestrians, a bit of flotsam, street-​signs, a wall covered in old poster bills, but also digital advertisements, and the window of a high-​end fashion store. As the rain picks up, a line of stylised figures with yellow umbrellas crosses the length of the frame. There is something hypnotic about the slow pace and the apparent aimlessness of the series. The gaze comes to rest on a rippling puddle, then on dingy old houses cramped with air-​conditioning sets, alongside glitzy shopping districts and mannequins that look more at ease in the world, more at home, than the people outside. Here the setting is used to foreground a pastiche of poorly integrated social and cultural markers. The city is the main character; it lives. But as it moves into the foreground it takes on the very qualities of hybridity that we associate 51

René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations (London: Penguin 1968), 44.

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Figure 1.1 Mamoru Oshii, Ghost in the Shell – Camouflage

with the cyborg.52 Organic spaces seem to encroach on inorganic forms; the genuine and the fake become indistinct. The wired body is visually alluded to in the shots of protruding cables, of shabby, unconcealed pipes jutting out of abandoned buildings, and in the image of an entire neighbourhood swallowed up by scaffolding. A comparison with the production design of Blade Runner is inevitable. Much has been written about the distinctive urban aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece from its insistence on Asian iconography, to the oppressive contrast between crowded, rain-​soaked exteriors and desolate interiors; and again, from the recycling of famous Los Angeles landmarks (the Bradbury, and the Pan American Building) to the construction of a 1940s, noirish landscape retro-​fitted with incongruent elements. Paul Sammon details the eclectic combination of architectural motifs including “characteristics of Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo’s Ginza district, London’s Piccadilly Circus, and Milan’s business area as well”;53 Wong Kin Yuen speaks of “a near-​future city characterized

52

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For G. H. Curti, Oshii’s landscape reflects the idea of the city as a form of collective memory, an “autonomous” organism, with its own degree of complexity. “Despite the common belief that the city is merely a sum and totality of human constructs, the city, like the Puppet Master, strives and endeavors in its own way with a certain level of active autonomy and vitality.” G. H. Curti, “The Ghost in the City and a Landscape of Life: a Reading of Difference in Shirow and Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell,” Society and Space 26.1 (2008), 97. Paul M. Sammon, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (New York: Harper, 1996), 101.

50 Chapter 1 by decadence, anarchy and fantasy on the one hand, and a mistrusted, hypertech reality on the other”;54 and Vivian Sobchack describes a city that is “literally exhausted—​generating that strange blend of hysteria and euphoria that comes with utter fatigue.”55 Possibly the most famous element of this decadent topography is the addition of ornate, pudgy columns to the elegant silhouette of the Bradbury—​squat architectural forms that scar the building’s façade, weigh it down, and reimagine it as a palimpsest of poorly integrated styles. The future, for all its gadgets, its flying cars, only seems to have gotten clunkier. Here we are able to glimpse the radical potential of a cyborgian ontology. To say that organic life and inorganic matter exist on a single plane—​to grant them equal dignity, equal status—​is to challenge a long-​standing philosophical bias: that some things are more real than others; specifically, that objects are more real than their representations and that what is found in nature is more real than what is found in images. The empowerment of the simulacrum at issue in so many posthuman myths coincides precisely with a desire to query the assumption that things exist in varying gradations of reality—​in other words, that one could ever predicate the reality of something to a greater or lesser degree. At this juncture, it is necessary to go over some of the more obvious critical scenarios promoted by the film’s reputation as a genre-​founding work. I wish to take note, first of all, of a striking discordance between the radical nature of Blade Runner’s ecology and perspectivism, and the conservative bent of its tragic, pathetic humanism; and while I do not propose to say anything new about the film’s well-​known position on the rights of simulacra, the status of real vs fake memories, and the paranoid tropes that return in so much posthuman mythology, it is useful to rehearse these tropes precisely in order to highlight the simultaneously conservative and radical attitudes at issue in cyberpunk. There is perhaps no better-​loved image of the posthuman condition, no moment more charged with cult-​status potential, than the scene in Blade Runner in which Deckard explains to Rachel that her most intimate childhood memories are in fact an implant, a set of fake experiences programmed by the Tyrell Corporation and grafted onto her consciousness to provide the illusion of emotional depth.56 The poignancy of that moment is in its dramatisation 54 55 56

Wong Kin Yuen, “On the Edge of Spaces: Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, and Hong Kong’s Cityscape,” Science Fiction Studies 27.1 (2000), 1. Vivian Sobchack, “Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban Science Fiction Film,” East-​West Film Journal 3.1 (1988), 15. The scene’s status as a posthuman classic is sanctioned by Donna Haraway, who refers to Rachel as the image of an entire “cyborg culture’s fear, love, and confusion” (Simians, 178).

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of Rachel’s devastating loss. It is not just a matter of personal status (signalled by the demotion from human to android), but an undoing of reality itself, an experience that tears all experience up from its ground. The full extent of the loss emerges as Deckard begins to wonder whether he himself might be a replicant, in other words, as he realises (and the audience with him) that if Rachel’s memories could have been fake without her knowing it, there is nothing to guarantee the authenticity of his own past. Rachel’s crisis becomes Deckard’s doubt and the doubt spills over to corrode the very distinction between reality and fabrication—​or, what is the same thing, between organic and artificial life. Let us remember that Deckard’s mission in the film is the policing of this very boundary. It is also, significantly, a job at which he is extremely skilled, but which he can never really bring to completion. The enduring power of Blade Runner as a posthuman narrative is in its earnest exploration of this ironic premise. And yet, alongside this parable, and somehow in stark contrast with its own challenging perspectivism and its cyberpunk ecologies, the film also shows its conservative hand in the nostalgia for an organic relationship to death. It is the impossibility of such a relationship that determines the story’s pathos. Two details help us shed further light on the matter. The first, mentioned already, revolves around the idea that Deckard is himself a replicant without knowing it—​an interpretive gamble that has gained a lot of credit over the last twenty years. In a number of interviews Ridley Scott has stated that he did in fact conceive of Deckard as a replicant, despite Harrison Ford’s protests and belief to the contrary. It should be said that the film offers no conclusive proof on the issue, though new scenes added to the director’s “final” cut (2007) are intended to reinforce Scott’s view.57 The decisive clue, according to the film’s director, is provided by the unicorn motif, which emerges first during a reverie, signalling Deckard’s innermost thought, and then returns in the form of an origami left on his doorstep. Deckard picks it up to the sound of Gaff’s voiceover: “It’s too bad she won’t live! But then again, who does?” Regardless of the weight one is willing to grant this piece of evidence, it is interesting to note that the disagreement between Scott and Ford repeats Deckard’s internal conflict, and extends the commonplace theme of the noir detective’s self-​alienation beyond the film’s fictional universe, to the paratextual level of composition and production. The second irony is suggested by the semantics of the word “retirement.” In Blade Runner to “retire” someone is code for killing a replicant. But at the 57

Ridley Scott (dir.), Blade Runner. Four Disc Edition. Disc 1: The Final Cut (Warner Home Video, 2007). dvd.

52 Chapter 1 start of the narrative it is Deckard who is retired. The point is rather heavily underscored in an expository scene that was deleted before the film’s release: I didn’t know anything about Holden getting wasted at the Tyrell Corporation. Why should I? I was retired. Holden was my replacement. I quit after my wife left me. She went off-​world with some guy who made a fortune in the Colonies. I thought I’d have a shot at being human again. I’m Deckard, Blade Runner. Retired. At least … I thought I was retired.58 Even without the deleted scene, the significance of Deckard’s coming out of retirement for one last impossible mission is hard to miss. Deckard’s inability to fulfil his task—​to keep humans and replicants at a safe distance—​is a consequence of the abyssal doubt upon which his entire reality is founded—​a doubt that extends to his status as a living being.59 It goes without saying that this irony is not just a rhetorical effect. It is the wringer through which the concepts of nature and reality are put. To appreciate how pervasive these ironies are in the film’s conceptual makeup it may be helpful to compare the scene of Rachel’s crisis to an analogous moment from another cult classic: Neo’s awakening to “the desert of the real” in The Matrix. The similarities between the two sequences are formal as well as thematic. Both build up towards an epiphany that gives way to a character’s emotional meltdown; and in both cases this meltdown functions as the film’s epistemological ground. All that remains, after everything is called into question, is the authenticity of the characters’ response: a spontaneous expression of grief or despair at finding out that reality, as one knew it, is a massive computer-​generated conspiracy. Where the two films differ is in their confidence that the moment of authentic self-​relation can also be a moment of emancipation from doubt and from death. Having decided to take the red pill, Neo is guided out of the matrix, past his mirror-​image, to a space where he is able to distinguish clearly between the 5 8 59

Ridley Scott (dir.), Blade Runner. Disc 2: Bonus Materials (Warner Home Video, 2007). dvd. For a reading of Blade Runner that covers many of these issues see Richard Pope’s “A Cyborg’s Testimonial: Mourning Blade Runner’s Cryptic Images,” Film-​Philosophy 12.2: 1–​ 16.—​Although the focus of Pope’s reading is on the figure of Roy Batty, and though his article does not refer to the ironic implications of Deckard’s “coming out of retirement,” his treatment of the relation between Deckard and the Nexus 6 fully tallies with my understanding of the film’s posthuman ironies: “Roy mourns, and we are invited, in turn, in the turn, to mourn Roy. Whereas the other replicants relied on their photographs as guarantors of their histories, Roy does not, being content to give his memories without any certainty that they will be, in (the) turn, accepted. While Leon and Rachel are overtly

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simulated reality of the matrix (“the world that you know”) and actual reality (“the world as it exists today”). His exchange with Morpheus upon first opening his eyes is instructive: NEO: Am I dead? MORPHEUS: Far from it.60 Once Neo recovers from the initial shock, his ability to see the unreality of the matrix becomes a simple matter of freeing the mind, of learning to exercise its power. The implication is that to the fully realised human consciousness, as theorised by the film, the discreteness of ontological categories remains an absolute given. The real and the fake stand in opposition to each other, as do life and death, the latter being construed as the privative mode of the former. In this respect, the challenge with which Neo is presented must be seen to repeat the challenge facing all philosophers in the mimetic tradition: that of looking beyond a “world that has been pulled over [his] eyes to blind [him] from the truth.” Simulacra may have become a great deal more convincing than in Plato’s time, and their powers of deception more sophisticated, but reality retains the same ontological privilege.61 By contrast, Blade Runner’s ironies are calculated to maintain the real and the fake in an undecidable relation. Rachel’s moment of self-​knowledge brings no transcendence towards a higher truth or a more real reality. And if the

60 61

melancholic, photographic, Roy is mournful, cinematic. We watch a frozen Deckard begin to mourn, and we with him—​Roy” (“A Cyborg’s Testimonial,” 14). Lana and Lilly Wachowski (formerly Larry and Andy Wachowski) (dirs.), The Matrix (Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2008). DVD. While the film has inspired a wide variety of theoretical engagements, its ontology strikes me as inescapably banal. If the plot shines a light on the power of simulacra, it is only to condemn this power as oppressive. Readings that try to gesture beyond this bias, or to complicate it somehow, tend to do so by applying old grammars and old solutions to new mythologies: invariably a return to Platonism or Neo-​Platonism (in some cases mediated by Badiou), or a creative misreading that confirms the power of Platonism to pre-​empt its critique. For a selection of titles in this vein, see Elie During, “Is there an Exit from ‘Virtual Reality’? Grid and Network—​From Tron to The Matrix,” in The Matrix in Theory: 131–​150; Salah el Moncef bin Khalifa, “The Matrix Trilogy and the Triumph of Virtual Reason: Territorialized Topoi, Nomadic Lines,” in The Matrix in Theory: 227–​247; Stefan Herbrechter, “The Posthuman Subject”; Sarah E.  Worth, “The Paradox of Real Response to Neo-​Fiction,” In The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real, ed. William Irwin (Chicago:  Open Court, 2002):  178–​187; and David Weberman, “The Matrix: Simulation and the Postmodern Age,” in The Matrix and Philosophy: 225–​ 239. For a more critical view of the film’s intellectual pretensions, see Andrew Gordon, “The Matrix: Paradigm of Postmodernism or Intellectual Poseur? (Part 2)”, in Taking the

54 Chapter 1 truth appears to humanise her, it is not in a manner that suggests the overcoming of her limits and the realisation of an unsuspected potential. Even in self-​knowledge, death and doubt remain primary. They continue to ground any standard of authenticity, to provide the basis for any possible relation to oneself and to the world. Death as the ground of experience, then, rather than a limit to be outgrown, is what marks Rachel as paradigmatically posthuman. The juxtaposition of these two sequences repeats our earlier comparison between the Hegelian logic of Erinnerung and its impossible Deleuzian double. The absolute loss suffered by Rachel and, in a more devastating fashion, by Deckard founds a theory of the posthuman subject by predicating reflection itself on a moment of self-​externality—​reflection folds consciousness outward. Ridley Scott weaves this idea deep into Blade Runner’s visual texture. Every shot reinforces the conventions of a post-​apocalyptic ecology: the absence of natural light and the hybrid architecture against which the action is set speak of a denatured reality,62 a world altogether stripped of systemic (or organic) wholeness. If the Hegelian Mind can evolve into absolute knowledge, if it can synthesise disparate elements into an organic whole, it is because it comes upon its object with the privilege of hindsight. The urban imagery of Blade Runner works as a perfect visual correlative of a consciousness that has missed its historical mark. [Fig. 1.2] The scene at Tyrell’s pyramid, in which Rachel is introduced, brings the point home by overturning a famous philosophical allegory. The owl of Minerva, cued by artificial shades, carries the past along in its flight. It heralds Rachel’s appearance and hovers (visually as well as thematically) over her very first conversation with Deckard: RACHEL: Do you like our owl? DECKARD: It’s artificial? RACHEL: Of course it is. DECKARD: Must be expensive.

62

Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix, ed. Glenn Yeffeth (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2003): 102–​123; and for a quick summary of competing critical positions see Damian Cox and Michael P. Levine, “Ontology and The Matrix,” in Thinking through Film: Doing Philosophy, Watching Movies (Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2012): 65–78. For a pertinent reading of the film’s “layered” architecture see Marshall Deutelbaum, “Memory/​Visual Design:  The Remembered Sights of Blade Runner,” Literature/​Film Quarterly 17.1 (1989): 66–​72. For a discussion of the film’s scenography in terms of “tech-​ noir” poetics see Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space:  The American Science Fiction Film (New York: Ungar, 1987); and R. L. Rutsky, High Technē: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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Figure 1.2 Ridley Scott, Blade Runner – The owl of Minerva

Later, when Batty confronts Tyrell and gouges his eyes out in an overt allegory of deicide, it looks back upon the scene and blinks the shutter of its eye at the camera, as if to ground historical reflection in a false present. The image inscribes the power of the simulacrum at the heart of the Augenblick. Philosophy’s moment, the instant of self-​recognition, comes unhinged. Several other details in the film contribute to this reading, most notably the motif of the eye which dominates the narrative from first to last.63 The film famously opens with a panoramic view of Los Angeles 2019 (referred to as “Hades” in Fancher and Peoples’ original script): “We are MOVING TOWARD the Tyrell Corporation across a vast plain of industrialization, menacing shapes on the horizon, stacks belching flames five hundred feet into the sky the color of cigar ash.”64 The sequence is twice intercut with a full frame close-​up on a blue eye. The film script specifies it is Holden’s but the shot makes it impossible to establish this with any certainty. Indeed, some commentators have speculated that the eye might belong to Roy Batty.65 Or it might well be a double of the camera itself, the shot’s visible counterpart.

63

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This motif has received much critical attention, and while the examples I reference here must be well-​known to fans and scholars, it is useful to resituate them within the context of this Hegelian (or post-​Hegelian) allegory, and, more broadly, the theme of a narcissism premised on the impossible. Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, Blade Runner Original Script. Available online at http://​www.dailyscript.com/​scripts/​blade-​runner_​shooting.html See for instance Amotz Zakai, “The City, Eyes and Christ,” Blade Runner Insight (12 March 2001). https://br-insight.com/library/city-eyes-and-christ/​. Web. Accessed on 17th September 2009.

56 Chapter 1

Figure 1.3 Ridley Scott, Blade Runner – Wide-eyed

In its impersonality the eye is both a mirror and a reflected object. We can see what it sees (the cityscape reflected in the iris), but most of all we see it, an object looking back at us. As a reflective surface it serves to ground the narrative in a kind of objective viewpoint. As an object it is strangely disembodied, a spectacular piece of surveillance equipment, a part abstracted from any organic whole. This eye perceives yet belongs to no one; it remains unclaimed, faceless, marking no individual point of view. [Fig. 1.3] One is reminded of the title sequence to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in which the eye is once again abstracted from the human face—​only in Hitchcock’s case the effect is one of depth. The camera moves in towards the eye, and from behind the iris emerge Saul Bass’s animated spirals, a stylisation of bottomless interiority. Scott’s opening seems to homage Hitchcock’s masterpiece, and simultaneously to reverse the spatial implications. The eye is not a window to an abyss but a reflective surface. Depth is turned outward.66 Other eyes in the film follow the same logic, the most obvious example occurring when Roy Batty and Leon visit the Eye Works laboratory to find out the whereabouts of their maker. Here the eye is overtly imaged as an engineered (and replaceable) piece of equipment, a spare part. The scene cuts from the street to a cold interior where Chew is admiring one of the parts under a microscope. At his back we see the two replicants entering the lab. The exchange that ensues is among the most memorable of the entire picture.

66

This intertextual link is all the more tempting when one considers the thematic prominence of living death in Hitchcock’s masterpiece. I  elaborate on this point in Chapter 3.

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BATTY: Morphology? Longevity? Incept dates? CHEW: Don’t know, I don’t know such stuff. I just do eyes, ju-​, ju-​, just eyes … just genetic design, just eyes. You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes. BATTY: Chew, if only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes! The scene offers yet another twist on myths of self-​recognition. On the one hand, it highlights the unhinged perspectivism which grounds the replicant’s brave new world; on the other, it connotes a nostalgia for organic models of experience and unified perspective. Roy Batty’s intention is to claim ownership of his own memories by testifying to the uniqueness of what he has seen. The eyes may well not be his own. But the impressions are so personal (“if only you could see what I’ve seen …”; “I’ve seen things …”), one wants to believe in a measure of authentic selfhood, a pure and irreducible interiority.67 In the best humanist tradition the truth of an incommunicable experience—​the authority of the eye-​witness—​is depended upon to transcend the technē. And yet all the while it is apparent that the replicant’s bid for authenticity is nothing more than an impossible yearning. Even as Chew insists that he is merely a technician, that he knows nothing of the protocols that regulate the other’s life, Leon hovers in the background strewing manufactured eyeballs around the place. Ostensibly his purpose is to intimidate; but in fact he cannot help reminding us of a reality already overrun by genetically engineered body-​parts.68 More pertinent, still, the empathy test by which blade runner units are able to determine whether a subject is human or machine renders the eye as an autonomous organ, separable if not quite disconnected from the rest of the body. Recalling the close-​up from the opening sequence, the Voight-​Kampff device zooms in on the subject’s eye (first Leon’s, then Rachel’s), abstracts it and projects it onto a screen. It is important to note that the test is only capable of betraying the difference between a human and a replicant by detecting involuntary responses to standard questions.69 In this sense the eye is less a unique 67

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This is hard for a fan to admit but the famous “tears in rain” speech is weak—​a cheap concession to a sentimental muse. The film takes a stab at a last minute intuition of an authentic replicant conscience based on the Kantian sublime. Two things fill the mind with ever-​increasing wonder and awe: “attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion,” and “C-​beams [that] glitter in the dark.” On this point see also Richard Pope’s observation that “[i]‌n the presence of the one who made his eyes, Roy testifies to the singularity of his, to the events they witnessed” (“A Cyborg’s Testimonial,” 13). This is to say that there is no question of an empathic relation between the cop and the subject of his interrogation, no transference between analyst and analysand. Empathy is tested positivistically on the basis of a stimulus response to a fixed set of questions.

58 Chapter 1

Figure 1.4 Mamoru Oshii, Ghost in the Shell – Reverse Narcissus

marker of identity (a readable print) than a symptom. Magnified and handed over to interpretation it becomes an image among images. [Fig. 1.4] Ghost in the Shell reprises this motif most obviously in the deep-​water diving sequence alluded to in the Introduction (with Kusanagi rising from the bottom of the sea to meet her reflection on the surface of the water); but also, and to subtler effect in the repeated focus on mirrors and glass windows that constantly seem to place Kusanagi on the wrong side of a reflected reality—​for instance, outside an interrogation room during the questioning of a suspect who is told that his memories have been artificially implanted by the Puppet Master; and on the canal, as Kusanagi catches sight of what appears to be her double sitting in a café. The effect of these scenes is to affirm a narcissistic pairing (camera/​eye) as the films’ epistemological ground; and, at the same time, to disable the self as an object of narcissistic identification. In the absence of a fully integrated identity (a human face, a body), reflection yields a relay of images, an image-​ making mechanism self-​projected onto the world. This mechanism is precisely what Deleuze has in mind when he jettisons the concept of the imaginary in favour of a cinematic reorganisation of reality.70 If for Hegel images are forms by which reality exists for consciousness, the cinema, as Deleuze sees it, is how images learn to realise themselves. “The 70

In deference to Bergson, who distrusted all things mechanical, Deleuze distinguishes between mechanism and machinism. Such a distinction is admittedly in play here, but I prefer to think of the two processes as co-​implicated, and thus, effectively indissociable.

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identity of the image and movement leads us to conclude immediately that the movement-​image and matter are identical. […] The material universe, the plane of immanence, is the machine assemblage of movement-​images […] it is the universe as cinema in itself, a metacinema.”71 The claim is no more hyperbolic than the idealist paradigms it is meant to critique. The eye retains the privilege accorded it by phenomenology. But as the image guarantees its own reality, reality itself is released from its dependence on subjective experience. The eye is de-​subjectified; the image becomes cybernetic and the world is made film: “I’m not sure the notion [of the gaze] is absolutely necessary. The eye’s already there in things, it’s part of the image, the image’s visibility […] the eye isn’t the camera, it’s the screen.”72 And a few pages later: “It’s questionable whether the notion of ‘the imaginary’ […] has any bearing on cinema; cinema produces reality.”73 In other words, a cinematically produced reality dispenses with the problem of the gaze because it needs no consciousness to authorise it, and no interiorising movement to preserve it in time. The identity of eye and screen implies that the image is its own ground. It moves itself and temporalises itself. Something of this groundlessness, to be sure, is implied in Blade Runner’s pairing of camera and eye. The motif signals a short-​circuiting of phenomenological dichotomies even as it takes on the trappings of a narcissistic relation. Only here the work of consciousness is redistributed onto a simultaneously technological-​and-​organic substrate that is co-​extensive with reality itself. In lieu of a mind that assimilates its own representations, or a consciousness that grows organically into its own self-​image, reality is imaged as a techno-​organic hybrid: Erinnerung turned inside out.74 In due course, I shall want to look at some of the historical conditions that account for the emergence of this paradigm (see Chapter  2). At this stage I  merely wish to observe how Blade Runner, construed as a coming-​out-​of-​ retirement narrative, resituates the debate on posthuman subjectivity within

71 72 73 74

For that reason, I shall use the term mechanism throughout the book, allowing it to reverberate with un-​policed connotations. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-​Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 59. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–​1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 54. Deleuze, Negotiations, 58. I am tempted to add here that the cyborg finds its historical origin in the cinematograph, that it is a quintessentially cinematic product. But in a sense, Deleuze’s theory of the image also makes the cyborg redundant. Or rather, the cyborg, standing in for a posthuman version of subjectivity, offers a not-​too-​unfamiliar model of experience, a manageable compromise on the way to a fully realised cinematic world.

60 Chapter 1 an ecological framework—​by which I  mean, a concept of world, and also a species of realism—​founded on an impossible relation to self. The idea resonates strongly with contemporary discussions of the posthuman subject—​ most obviously, with Foster’s claim that the posthuman entails a “redefinition of the space of subjectivity and the undoing of interiority.”75 At issue for Foster is the interpretation of technology as a constitutive factor of subjective identity (rather than an instrument or an accessory). But for our purpose, it is also instructive that his rhetoric suggests a drama of interrupted mourning: “Posthumanism emerges when technology does in fact ‘become me’, not by being incorporated into my organic unity and integrity, but instead by interrupting that unity and opening the boundary between self and world.”76 Here, however, it is important to dispel the implication that the self-​ awareness of the cyborg, the existential pathos written into its later cult-​ narratives, can be reduced to a form of melancholia. The determination of self-​mourning as an impossible experience—​a moment of self-​relation premised on the impossible—​far exceeds the understanding of melancholia as a pathological variant of “normal” mourning. Self-​mourning is not a failure to mourn properly (an inability to acknowledge loss and assimilate it in a healthy manner), but an allegory of the Hegelian impossible taking effect in reality. Let us recall that Freud originally distinguishes between mourning and melancholia by contrasting two quite similar psychic processes, both triggered by the loss of a loved object, and characterised as a turning away from reality. The crisis is presented in a mixture of economic and topographic metaphors. As soon as the ego registers the demand for a radical re-​organisation of its topography/​economy, it internalises the lost object within itself. Only in mourning the move is temporary and serves to hold the object in check until all investments are safely withdrawn and reinvested. The final goal is to absorb losses and resume a life of healthy libidinal attachments. In melancholia, by contrast, incorporation serves to deny the reality of loss. The loved object is entombed inside the ego and the loss remains undigested. The result is an inversion (literally, a turning inward) of desire that stunts growth and fixates the ego onto an image of the past. Unaware that the loss has occurred, unable to metabolise it, the melancholic subject suffers helplessly, and without the benefit of knowing why. Thus, “[i]‌n mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”77 75 76 77

Foster, Souls of Cyberfolk, 9. Foster, Souls of Cyberfolk, 10. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. xiv (1957), 246.

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These reflections may be traced back to an earlier essay “On Narcissism,” a watershed text in Freud’s career, and the beginning of a radical revision of his theory of instincts. The study posits the formation of an early libidinal charge directed towards the self, a primary narcissism already in play in the original moment of subjective individuation. Freud’s intuition is that as the child develops normatively it learns to redirect its ego-​libido outward, but a fund of the original energy survives in adulthood and comes to orient all object choices.78 The assumption that a narcissistic economy orients all love-​object choices leads him to equate desire itself with the work of identification, and, at the same time, sets up subjectivity as a fundamentally nostalgic (or elegiac) structure. If all object-​oriented libido is at bottom reducible to a displacement of primary narcissistic attachments, the inclusion of a lost object in the subject’s psychic topography is merely an intensification of habitual identificatory processes—​ an act of self-​maintenance. From this perspective, the all-​important difference between mourning and melancholia is that in the former reality is acknowledged even as the work of identification goes on (the work of mourning repairs the subject’s relation with the world), whereas in the latter reality is perceived as a threat to identity and must therefore be denied. At issue, then, is the subject’s ability to effect a return to reality—​or, what is the same thing, the ability to reconcile the work of identification with reality’s demands. In light of this distinction, we may articulate the difference between melancholia and self-​mourning over three points: 1. In melancholia the loss of a loved object is denied; in self-​mourning my own death is actualised. 2. Melancholia turns narcissistic energies inward; self-​mourning turns subjectivity inside-​out.

78

But what is true of the individual is also true of the human genus at large. The analogy between the life of an individual and the development of human culture recurs in Freud with the usual implications for ideal history: “In [primitive peoples] we find characteristics which, if they occurred singly, might be put down to megalomania: an over-​ estimation of the power of their wishes and mental acts, the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, a belief in the thaumaturgic force of words, and a technique for dealing with the external world—​’magic’—​which appears to be a logical application of these grandiose premises [sic]. In the children of to-​day, whose development is much more obscure to us, we expect to find an exactly analogous attitude towards the external world. Thus we form the idea of there being an original libidinal cathexis of the ego, from which some is later given off to objects, but which fundamentally persists and is related to the object-​cathexes much as the body of an amoeba is related to the pseudopodia which it puts out.” Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. xiv (1957), 75.

62 Chapter 1 3.

Melancholia describes an inability to mourn successfully; self-​mourning mourns impossibly—​puts the impossible to work. The gap between being unable to work with reality and putting the impossible to work allows us to appreciate why the posthuman is not merely another version of subjectivity, or even a chapter in the history of the subject, but an altogether new formation—​something best thought of as an event. In Hegelian terms, such an event might describe the interpenetration of Spirit and Nature, or the conjunction of reality (Wirklichkeit) with its limit:  but a conjunction without synthesis and without transcendence. I speak of interpenetration and conjunction without synthesis as I spoke earlier of hybridity. A conjunction that preserves the absolute alterity of the terms it joins, that does not negate finitude or overcome boundaries, would have to perform a dual operation: it would have to join and disjoin at the same time. It would have to inhabit the in-​between of Spirit and Nature, to mark some kind of co-​existence between them without privileging the self-​preserving power of the former. Such an event would be a moment of sheer indeterminacy. We have seen that posthuman ethics (more specifically, posthumanist ethics of subjectivity) are generally unwilling to let go of the ideal of self-​ determination—​but perhaps such a move is precisely called for to avoid falling back into the same humanist positions propped up by the dialectic of Spirit and Nature. It falls to the posthuman to exist in the indeterminate moment between these two states:  between the power of an organism to carry itself past its inherent limit and the embeddedness of objects in the actuality of that limit; conjunction and disjunction. Embracing this hesitation as an ethical imperative, the posthuman becomes historical even as it understands itself to be self-​external. Its lot, in this sense, is to experience the in-​between of Spirit and Nature as an opening in which reality plays itself out whole. 6

Self-​mourning, an Event between Two Histories

Self-​mourning, to be sure, allegorises this sheer indeterminacy, which will not be reabsorbed into the economy of an ideal history. Since by its very nature the scandal of experiencing one’s own death marks a relinquishing of any form of internal teleology, the “indeterminacy” referred to here must remain incommensurate to any ethical system based in the idea of a purely self-​ determined act. Yet neither can the posthuman event be a simple case of historical or technological determinism. The examples considered in this chapter, different as they are, invariably return to this quandary. How to assign a measure of internal

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freedom to a being without interiority? And how to ensure that indeterminacy is not swallowed back into the march of self-​determined reason? We recognise this concern in Blade Runner’s noir aesthetic and in the heavy irony of bringing Deckard out of retirement at the beginning of the film, leaving him, as the scene in Captain Bryant’s office emphatically informs us, with “no choice.” We shall encounter it again in Beckett, especially in the Trilogy and in the shorter prose works from “Dante and the Lobster” and “Echo’s Bones” to “First Love,” and the stories published with Texts for Nothing. As for our earliest example, from The Mayor of Casterbridge—​an element of sheer indeterminacy takes hold at the level of rhetoric and competes with the doctrine of inexorable fate so often associated with Hardy’s tragic plots. I have already commented on the psychological impact of the scene of self-​mourning, the shock to Henchard’s sense of reality and the staying of his suicidal intentions. Rhetorically, this moment is foreshadowed by a strategic use of neither/​nor clauses at several junctures in the novel. The instances are too many to list in full, but the following selection will suffice to give the sense of a recurrent motif: already in Chapter 1, the country road on which Henchard and Susan are first seen travelling is described as “neither straight nor crooked, neither level nor hilly, bordered by hedges, trees, and other vegetation, which had entered the blackened-​green stage of colour that the doomed leaves pass through on their way to dingy, and yellow, and red” (MoC 4). Later, the same neither/​nor logic is transposed onto the field of character relations, and comes to qualify both Henchard’s interest in the opposite sex (“philandering with womankind has neither been my vice nor my virtue”; MoC 61), and Elizabeth Jane’s first response to Farfrae’s attentions (“Elizabeth neither assented nor dissented”; MoC 73). But the most explicit anticipation of the scene of self-​mourning occurs in Chapter 19 when, having learnt that Elizabeth Jane is not his daughter, Henchard walks down to the river bank and muses on the cruel irony of his situation, “the scheme of some sinister intelligence bent on punishing him” (MoC 97). The description of the river and its environs leaves no doubt as to the thematic resonance between the two episodes. We are told that [a]‌bove the cliff, behind the river, rose a pile of buildings, and in the front of the pile a square mass cut into the sky. It was like a pedestal lacking its statue. This missing feature, without which the design remained incomplete, was, in truth, the corpse of a man, for the square mass formed the base of the gallows, the extensive buildings at the back being the county gaol. In the meadow where Henchard now walked the mob were wont to gather whenever an execution took place, and there to the tune of the roaring weir they stood and watched the spectacle. (MoC 97)

64 Chapter 1 Here Henchard becomes aware of a compulsion to complete the picture by putting himself in the missing corpse’s place; and it is at this point that Hardy has recourse to the neither/​nor formula: He went on past the cottage in which the old local hangman had lived and died, in times before that calling was monopolized over all England by a single gentleman; and climbed up by a steep back lane into the town. For the sufferings of that night, engendered by his bitter disappointment, he might well have been pitied. He was like one who had half fainted, and could neither recover nor complete the swoon. (MoC 98) This is not yet self-​mourning, though the indeterminacy that belongs to self-​ mourning is already fully expressed in the wonderful image of Henchard’s half-​fainting. It remains for us to ask how we might square this moment with the logic of the later scene in which Henchard does experience his own death, in which, that is, the defining operation seems to be not “neither this nor that” but “both at the same time.” I  wish to emphasise, with regard to this point, that what is renounced in Hardy’s neither/​nor formula is not just a pair of opposing states—​neither conscious nor unconscious, neither alive nor dead—​but the very possibility of deciding between them. Choice itself is held in abeyance. And since choice names the most fundamental freedom of consciousness as well as a paradigmatic moment in the rational determination of reality, its suspension here may be interpreted as a correlate of a more general disabling of the dialectical movement of thought: whereupon reality as a whole is laid open to incoherence and unreason. We are able, at this point, to explore a connection between ethical concerns and the discourse of genre. The question of genre, taken in its broadest sense, is the question of a work’s participation within a formal category. Before anything else, generic markers provide (or are expected to provide) parameters of formal correctness. In a related sense, they are indexes of the typicality of a work, of its tendency to conform to a rule or a formal specification (this is especially evident with musical forms such as the fugue or the sonata). But in instances of mimetic art, particularly in narrative fiction, that specification must also entail an understanding of what is deemed to be fitting within the fictional world. The uncanny double in the urban gothic narrative, the flying car in the futuristic tale, the implausibly elaborate evil-​machine in the revenge tragedy—​in the proper context these are not eccentricities but recognisable (even familiar) elements. To speak of genre, in this particular sense, is to

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invoke the criterion of artistic decorum; formal correctness is precisely what is proper to context. The study of genre is necessarily bound up with this kind of paradigmatic thinking. It always puts the work in relation to a model; but also in relation to a horizon of possibility, and, ultimately, to the prescriptive power of law. As Derrida points out, “genre” always entails an imperative, the delineation of a limit, and thus a commandment of sorts: As soon as the word “genre” is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind:  “Do,” “Do not” says “genre,” the word “genre,” the figure, the voice, or the law of genre.79 And again, a page or so later: Thus, as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity. […] This normative position and this evaluation are inscribed and prescribed even at the threshold of the “thing itself,” if something of the genre “genre” can be so named.80 Following this line of argument, I want to suggest that the subversion (or suspension) of generic forms deregulates a work, sets it adrift of its legal and ethical mooring. Critics have not failed to remark on the generic complexity of The Mayor of Casterbridge. Dale Kramer identifies two competing yet complementary rhythms at the heart of the novel’s tragic action, one dealing with large-​scale historical changes, and the other charting Henchard’s personal tragic course. Richard Nemesvari speaks of “Hardy’s radical mixture of conflicting genres and his manipulation of narrative voice [which] disconcerted a readership accustomed to the unified effects of Victorian realist fiction.”81 And, more recently, he describes Hardy’s “most consistent novelistic method” as the “technique of generating generic expectations within his fiction, only to then subvert those expectations by introducing contrasting and at times contradictory

7 9 80 81

Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980), 56. Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” 57. Richard Nemesvari, “Romancing the Text:  Genre, Indeterminacy and Televising Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” in Thomas Hardy on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 170.

66 Chapter 1 genre discourses into his narratives.”82 Most pertinently, for the purpose of this discussion, Leona Toker reads the novel in light of its carnivalesque energies, tracing a direct formal link between elements of setting or mis-​en-​scène and the transgression of personal and social boundaries at issue in the carnival. Here too, the ethical implications of Hardy’s literary craft cannot be overlooked. Thresholds and crossings are integral to the ethical thrust of the work and none more pointedly than the stone bridge that serves as “the setting for Henchard’s aborted suicide.”83 With regards to the issue of Henchard’s moral agency, and specifically those aspects of his personality that contribute to his tragic, larger-​than-​life fate, Toker refers to the interplay of two opposing poles—​“a life drive and a death drive”84—​between which the character’s will oscillates violently. My reading of The Mayor of Casterbridge takes this analysis fully on board and expands on the implication that the stone bridge (like the old gallows) stands as the middle-​ground between life and death, quite literally a monument to their conjunction. However, I should like to gesture beyond an interpretation of the setting as symbolic reinforcement of Henchard’s precarious situation or as an external correlate of the contradictions in his psyche. No doubt it is that too. Yet what interests me in Hardy’s use of the neither/​nor motif, as in the scene of self-​mourning, is the way in which it shifts our focus away from character in order to emphasise the power of the middle-​ground itself. It designates a state of suspension which is more than subjective, certainly more than psychological—​and which opens onto a key aspect of the novel’s ethical discourse. We might identify it with nature itself (a staple of Hardy scholarship), with the stone-​bridge and the river and the whole South Wessex topography, provided these are conceived as timeless and elemental forces rather than parts of a mood-​setting backdrop. In the same way that the old disused gallows haunts Henchard’s present with the memory of all its dead, perhaps even with an image of death at its most anonymous, so too the neither/​nor formula seems to want to pull the novel away from its purpose as a history of human choices, towards that of a narrative of elemental haunting. It is in the figure of a haunting and haunted nature that an element of indeterminacy is inscribed within the folds of Hardy’s plot. 82 83 84

Richard Nemesvari, “Genres are not to be mixed. … I will not mix them: Discourse, Ideology, and Generic Hybridity in Hardy’s Fiction,” in A Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Keith Wilson (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2009), 102. Leona Toker, Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 133. Toker, Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction, 136.

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Let us consider once again the mood that seizes Henchard as he enters that liminal space: “He was like one who had half fainted, and could neither recover nor complete the swoon.” Nothing could be further removed from an ethics of subjective agency. The event is charged with indeterminacy, but this indeterminacy cannot be redeemed by an act of individual freedom. It certainly has no bearing on the question of Henchard’s self-​determination. Simply put, one does not choose whether to swoon or to regain consciousness. It is, rather, a hesitation in nature, one that finds Henchard quite passive, weightless as it were, as if caught in mid-​air and held still—​preserved in that half-​way gesture between total collapse and recovery. The image may be seen to function as a perfect correlate of the Beckettian narrator’s inability to finish dying. This, then, is the kind of indeterminacy at issue in self-​mourning; not the hesitation of a self-​possessed consciousness, but that of reality itself caught between Spirit and Nature. And it is in this sense, precisely, that I speak of self-​ mourning as an event. If Henchard’s actions can be construed as a constant, violent oscillation between competing drives, as Toker argues, the event in question records a still moment, an interval of indeterminate time that does not measure narrative action but preconditions it. And while this indeterminacy is itself narrativised, most notably through Hardy’s deployment of the neither/​ nor motif, the very choices that drive the action forward are put on hold by its recursive movement.85 The narrative foreshadows this type of event, keeps hinting at its peculiar logic, till its insistence threatens to take over the plot and to hijack its realist ethos. Frederick R. Karl speaks pertinently of Hardy’s experimentations with “a different kind of realism”; one that requires “a new type of protagonist and a new way of developing scenes.”86 To this effect, he identifies, at key moments in The Mayor of Casterbridge, a tendency towards stylisation and symbolic abstraction, as if the conventions of the supernatural fable were continually rubbing

85

86

For a different take on the ethics of choice in Hardy, see H. M. Daleski, Hardy and Paradoxes of Love (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997). As this book argues, Hardy’s novels typically face their protagonist with a choice between two love interests, granting some measure of autonomy at the outset then fleshing out the tragic consequences when the choice is invariably a poor one. In this reading characters appear to be fully responsible for their choices; yet I do not regard Daleski’s position to be incompatible with mine. Daleski himself analyses numerous moments of what I am calling “suspended choice” in Hardy, likening these scenes to Joycean epiphanies. In his case too, it is the dilemma itself that exemplifies the structure of a narrative event. Frederick R. Karl, “The Mayor of Casterbridge: A New Fiction Defined,” in The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed. James K. Robinson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 367.

68 Chapter 1 up against those of the traditional Victorian novel. The following commentary provides significant contextual support to this claim: Hardy once wrote that ‘Coleridge says, aim at illusion in audience or readers—​i.e., the mental state when dreaming, intermediate between complete delusion (which the French mistakenly aim at) and a clear perception of falsity.’ In this ‘suspension of disbelief,’ Hardy found a way of both raising the implausible to a philosophic system and demonstrating that art is a ‘disproportioning’ of reality.87 My argument, in sum, is that the scene of self-​mourning operates on realist grammars in much the same way. It works to destabilise the novel’s generic integrity. It charges the action with an indeterminacy that puts the very rules by which consciousness operates in doubt. As we have seen, when Henchard recognises himself in the effigy—​“Not a man somewhat resembling him, but […] his actual double” (MoC 227)—​reality is indeed disproportioned; and the resulting horror is that of a mind thrown into the reality of its own mirror image, forced, in that moment, to conceive of its own death as an actual event. Reading allegorically: self-​mourning is neither a stage in the Bildungsroman of consciousness nor an accident in a chain of externally determined occurrences; it refuses the experience of the living present as it does the mechanical repetition of disjointed bits of time. Ultimately, its power consists in embracing both options at once, in being simultaneously conjunctive and disjunctive; organic and material; alive and dead. Here the conjunction itself comes unhinged. If “neither/​nor” signals a break with dialectical systems, opening onto a space in which the whole of reality is able to unfold between dialectical terms; “both-​at-​the-​same-​time” sets up a new type of relation, a boundary line or point-​of-​overlap in which nothing less than the impossible is put to work.

87

Karl, “A New Fiction Defined,” 367.

Chapter 2

The Apocalyptic Chronotope I then realized that there was a sort of link (or knot) between Photography, madness, and something whose name I did not know. Roland Barthes

∵ Béla Tarr’s stark masterpiece The Turin Horse begins with a brief anecdote from Nietzsche’s later years, related in voice-​over against a black screen, and bearing only a tenuous, paratextual relation to the rest of the action. The story functions as a frame, amplifying the Nietzschean themes explored in the work, at once orienting interpretive efforts and opening them up to figurative readings (think of the Homeric paratext in Ulysses, only better), pulling away for a moment from the confining world depicted onscreen. In Turin on January 3, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the door of Number Six, Via Carlo Alberto, perhaps to take a stroll, perhaps to go by the post office to collect his mail. Not far from him, or indeed very removed from him, a cabman is having trouble with his stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the cabman—​Giuseppe …? Carlo …? Ettore …?—​loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng and puts an end to the brutal scene of the cabman, who by this time is foaming with rage. The solidly built and full-​moustached Nietzsche suddenly jumps up to the cab and throws his arms around the horse’s neck sobbing. His neighbour takes him home, where he lies still and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words: “Mutter, ich bin dumm,” and lives for another ten years, gentle and demented, in the care of his mother and sisters. Of the horse, we know nothing.1 The action picks up from that last line, with a long take of the horse—​but we only assume it is the same animal—​carting its master home on a dusty road. The camera follows their journey past the point of fatigue (the horse’s, the 1 Béla Tarr (dir.), The Turin Horse (New York: Cinema Guild, 2012). Film. dvd.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004390355_004

70 Chapter 2 owner’s, ours), roughly five minutes of agonising progress against a fierce wind. Then another long take shows the man and his daughter unbridling the horse and manoeuvring it into the barn while the windstorm continues to rage. Next, they are indoors; we watch the man changing clothes, but he cannot do so without the daughter’s help as his right arm is paralysed. They sit down to eat, and once again we notice the bad arm and the difficulty of every single action (the potato is too hot and scalds the man’s good hand). And so on … each sequence is imbued with the weight of real time, and each gesture with the pain of hard Sisyphean labour. And of the horse, by the end, we still know nothing. From the beginning we are made aware of a stylistic discrepancy between the horse’s backstory (full of affect, anecdotal colour, even drama) and the bleak, almost empty present inhabited by the two human figures. It is tempting to see this irony as an invitation to reflect on the human/​animal divide. But this is not to say that the film undertakes to fill in a gap in our knowledge of the horse’s world, that it speaks for the horse, or that it seeks to tell its story. In point of fact, the horse is not really the main focus of the film, and even the crucial scene in which it refuses to work, eat or drink, ostensibly a politically charged moment, is viewed from the perspective of the farmer and his daughter as a symptom of generalised malaise, a sign of the beginning of the end for the two human characters. More radical, and more artistically demanding than any desire to identify with the animal, is the film’s acknowledgement of the inaccessibility of its world, of which we continue to know nothing. The film takes this avowed ignorance of the other as its narrative premise, and sets out to explore, from the perspective of an absolute not-​knowing, a new relation between time and narrative understanding: knowing nothing as a narratological counterpart to the philosopher’s gentle, demented silence. It is not that the horse is richer in world than his human companions, but that it remains inscrutable. And before long, its suffering contaminates all that comes into contact with it. In the frame anecdote, it is metonymically transferred onto Nietzsche himself, a ten-​year stupor, launched by four words of pathos-​laden self-​criticism; while in the rest of the film, we see the same passivity re-​inscribed in futile, quotidian gestures and day-​to-​day portents. Tarr himself describes the film as “an anti-​Creation story,” but insists that its take on the end times is deliberately low-​key. “Somehow it’s attempting to show a very simple—​‘okay, we are doing our daily life.’ That’s all—​in a very quiet and very silent way.”2 The six days narrated in the film, each one announced by a title 2 Matt Levine and Jeremy Meckler, “Listening to the World: A Conversation with Béla Tarr,” Walker Magazine (March 2012). Web. Accessed 16th October 2016. https://walkerart.org/magazine/bela-tarr-turin-horse

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Figure 2.1 Béla Tarr, The Turin Horse – The oil-lamp

card, are thus a reversal of the first six days of Genesis. Entropy is what moves the plot forward, if that is the right verb. But the enduring power of the film is in its poetic exploration of the time of this quiet apocalypse. Two features, in particular: 1. on the one hand, a grinding routine. Yet there is a subtle precision to the way in which actions repeat, and the variations are beautifully choreographed; 2. on the other, the evidence of an increasingly recalcitrant reality. The defining quality of matter in the film is that it resists human use. One by one things stop working: the stubborn horse, the barn-​door, the clothes, the scalding potato, the empty water well, the oil-​lamp … The series concludes with the onset of darkness, unannounced and unmomentous, a simple exhaustion of the oil-​lamp’s will to work. [Fig. 2.1] But even that note is sustained, as if to stress that the darkness must be lived through, that it is part of the action. The screen is black for three minutes or so. Meanwhile the wind can still be heard hissing in the background; with only a few lines of dialogue to underscore the moment: DAUGHTER: What is all this? FATHER: I don’t know. Let’s go to bed. DAUGHTER: Even the embers went out. FATHER: Tomorrow, we’ll try again.

72 Chapter 2 The obduracy of objects, the fearsome power of nature, the advancing entropy—​it is true that these are all signs of some sort, but their sense must by necessity remain obscure (the father’s answer to the question of their meaning is absolutely spot on: “I don’t know. […] Tomorrow we’ll try again”). All we are able to make of this apocalypse is the beginning of a new relation between time and finitude, or between nature, passivity and work. That is to say, in the strange combination of daily routine and terminal time is the germ of a radical materialist moment (and perhaps another precedent by which to understand the posthuman turn in twentieth-​century thought). 1

On or about January 3, 1889

Indeed, one of the recurring temptations of posthumanist discourse, as I argued in Chapter 1, is to claim that the posthuman has always been with us, a shadowy presence haunting human history from the start. The strength of this approach is that it empowers a radical critique of humanism. It invests posthuman myths with historical currency, and lends their subject, as it were, a human face. Its danger, paradoxically, is that losing somewhat of its disruptive quality, of the fiercely unthinkable character of the new, the spectre is transformed into a cosy abstraction, a mere thought experiment, or worse, a meta-​historical concept. For Jean-​Michel Rabaté, many of the formative antinomies of modern historicity may be traced back to an image from Chateaubriand: that of a memoirist “who imagines himself posthumous”3 in an effort to contain or coordinate the unruly temporalities of his autobiography. The autobiographical aspect is important, here, not because modernism is especially interested in the mysteries of personality, but because of the temporal relations the image sets up. The anachronism of a memoir written from beyond the grave captures the tensions inherent in a modernist theory of tradition; we are given to think the truth value of an impossible deixis, to rely in good faith on a falsely dated signature. The resulting picture is one of a “haunted modernity […] that is by definition never contemporaneous with itself,”4 a modernity that is seen always to inhabit a threshold space, looking to the authority of the past and the innovation of the future simultaneously.5 3 Jean-​Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 3. 4 Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity, 3. 5 Alongside Rabaté’s ground-​breaking study, I wish to single out Helen Sword’s Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), an important historicist work on the

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I wish to abstract two key ideas from this analysis: first, that in modern experience the now is conceived as the site of a violent, disjunctive relation to the past, a disjunction that is somehow also invested with emancipatory power; and secondly, that any attempt to historicise the posthuman, to traffic in calendar dates and punctual, documented events, must reckon with the ghostly effects that characterise the modern writer’s self-​inscription in history. In a sense, modernism emerges at the precise moment in which consciousness becomes aware of the now as just such a disjunctive relation. On this point Rabaté’s argument may be seen to echo Paul de Man’s concept of literary modernity. For both thinkers modernism is coextensive with a paradoxical desire. The modern experiment is born of an anti-​historical impulse, a will to break free from the past; but even as it obeys this impulse it finds that the break can only be realised as part of a deliberate, self-​conscious historical project. Modernity invests its trust in the power of the present moment as an origin, but discovers that, in severing itself from the past, it has at the same time severed itself from the present.6 De Man’s first move, in trying to unpack this paradox, is to rehearse the argument by which Nietzsche places the spirit of modernity in opposition to history, aligning it with a propulsive, future-​oriented drive. To this effect he speaks of “an ability to forget and to live without historical awareness”;7 and, a few pages later, of “a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.”8 In turn, this experience of time as a force of historical ungrounding invests modernist thought with an anarchic charge. It associates avant-​garde experimentation with the most temptingly ahistorical of concepts, a concept we might fall back on when attempting to characterise forces that unfold beyond ideological critique, beyond moral or aesthetic appropriation: life. It is in the modernist dalliance with the spirit world; Shane McCorristine’s Specters of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-​seeing in England, 1750–​1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) on the psychological and techno-​scientific dimension of spectral phenomena between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth; and Luke Thurston’s Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism (London: Routledge, 2012) on the figure of the ghost as constitutive of the tension between modernist and late Victorian models of selfhood and alterity. 6 Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” Daedalus 99.2 (1970), 390. 7 De Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” 387. 8 De Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” 388–​389.

74 Chapter 2 name of life that the order imposed upon time by meta-​historical narratives must be rejected. In the name of life, or, what is the same thing, in the name of an open-​ended, anarchic movement of time. But such a movement is not so easily separated from history. At the very moment in which it sets up the opposition between life and history, modernism realises its own powers of retrospection, and confronts its own irreducible subjection to processes of historical becoming. As soon as modernism becomes conscious of its own strategies—​and it cannot fail to do so if it is justified […] in the name of a concern for the future—​ it discovers itself to be a generative power that not only engenders history, but is part of a generative scheme that extends far back into the past.9 Thus modern art cannot help but bear witness to an original violence that inheres to its historical existence. To be a modernist is to be intensely aware of one’s place in tradition; and at the same time, to experience this awareness as crisis. A sense of being at history’s end cleaves the present whereupon, in the combination of anarchic time and total memory, historical identity is simultaneously preserved and destroyed. The past becomes alien and threatening (as in psychoanalytic narratives) or spurious (as in the monumental works of Eliot and Joyce). It fails, in any case, to provide a credible ground for thought. 2

Apocalypse and the Ethics of the Limit

When I speak of the self-​inscription in history of the modernist avant-​garde, I wish to call to mind precisely this convergence of discourses: an anti-​historical impulse that sustains itself by defining the now as a violent, disjunctive relation to the past (severing, forgetting, wiping out), and an ideal that translates this disjunction into an open-​ended, insoluble dialectic between anarchic time and history. Before resuming the discussion of self-​mourning as an allegory of the posthuman event, I should like to dwell a while longer on this discursive nexus. Starting, for convenience, with the former. Not just a discourse of ends, but of endings writ large, of finality considered on a global scale—​a certain apocalyptic strain is indissociable from twentieth-​century thought about the ethics of temporality, even where, as in the case of Derrida, the discourse is viewed with suspicion. As Elana Gomel has shown, the apocalyptic chronotope is characterised by an internal contradiction, in that it expresses in narrative form—​a form that is 9

De Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” 390.

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inescapably temporal—​a desire for the end of time itself.10 While the mythology has shaped the imagination of writers and philosophers for centuries, modern versions continue to follow a simple formula, always unfolding as a two-​part sequence of destruction and renewal modeled, allegorically, after the myth of Tribulations and the thousand-​year reign prophesied in The Book of Revelation. By this two-​part structure the apocalypse reveals its ideological bias. It affirms the ascendancy of space over time, and suggests that history can be redeemed through a definitive effacement of temporal relations. The apocalyptic plot separates time and space by linking the former to the horror of the Tribulations and the latter to the perfection and quietude of the millennium. Any narrative chronotope, as Bakhtin points out, represents the “indissoluble unity” of time and space. The apocalyptic chronotope is an exception; it breaks this unity and sets time and space against each other.11 Gomel teases out the ideological pitfalls implicit in this narrative structure through a reading of J. G. Ballard’s Four Elements Quartet. Traditionally, the apocalyptic plot domesticates time by framing its destructive energies within a Millenarian narrative. The hyperbolic violence marking the end of history is followed by reassuring images of some timeless, or extra-​temporal, outcome. In this sense, apocalyptic myths are always narratives of survival. Their subject is the vanquishing of time by a meta-​historical perspective. The privilege accorded to Millenarian order over the “horror of Tribulations,”12 amounts to a spatialisation of time, and, consequently, to the affirmation of a stable, homogeneous reality. But in Ballard’s version of this chronotope, the ascendancy of space over time, of ultimate order over temporary discord, is exposed as a false ideological construct. Time retains its ruinous trait, and if the narrative is slowed down almost to a standstill, it is to render an image of history in ruins, to suspend history in an unresolved relation to its own end. “It is not the intimations of the millennium but precisely its radical rejection that constitutes the ethical and political thrust of Ballard’s work. Just as narratively the Quartet deconstructs the apocalyptic chronotope by laying bare its formal devices, so ideologically it undermines the salvationist scheme of universal destruction by taking it to the extreme.”13 10 1 1 12 13

Elana Gomel, “Everyday Apocalypse: J. G. Ballard and the Ethics and Aesthetics of the End of Time,” Partial Answers 8.1 (January 2010): 185–​208. Gomel, “Everyday Apocalypse,” 188. Gomel, “Everyday Apocalypse,” 188. Gomel, “Everyday Apocalypse,” 197.

76 Chapter 2 The ethical stance promoted here consists in emancipating time from meta-​ historical narratives. But we must wonder whether the argument does not in fact substitute one nightmare of history for another—​the violence of Millenarian peace for the notion of time as pure self-​consuming desire. In what sense is the commitment to historical discord, to the anarchic (and potentially endless) violence of Tribulations, more ethical than the appropriation of history by, say, the religious right? The question returns, under one guise or another, to lend any discussion of modern historicity its ethical urgency. At stake, as we shall see, is an understanding of ethical freedom predicated upon a certain experience of the reality of time, and of its finitude. While I agree with Gomel’s general assessment of the ethical implications of apocalyptic narratives, I want to focus on a version of the apocalyptic plot that is substantially different from the one Gomel associates with the postmodern desire to destroy time. My hypothesis is that the disjunctive energies thematised by modernist avant-​garde writing in fact transform the apocalyptic experience into a genuinely temporal one by serialising it—​that is to say, by bringing about a shift in perspective that complicates the relation of time to its limit. I  would argue that the recurrence of apocalyptic tropes in modernism coincides with a desire to revive time, to reaffirm its reality and its power, when it forces us to rethink the concept of the limit. It recalibrates the very function of limitation and highlights a gap within the historical subject. Notably, this gap spells both finitude and freedom for the individual: on the one hand, it guarantees subjective agency through the openness of a future that is not-​yet-​given; on the other, it puts identity in crisis, marking the self with an originary self-​difference and weaving into the very fabric of life a sense of inexorable mortality. In this sense, the gap is also an inherent limit or constitutive boundary. There can be no ethics without an acknowledgement of this limit, that is to say, without an awareness of the partiality of one’s own perspective. The violence of Tribulations, as analysed in Gomel’s discussion of the apocalyptic chronotope, is a structural equivalent of this inherent limit, this power of death in life that predates and preconditions all subjective experience—​ even subjective agency. Here too, time is anarchic and destructive (as death is for the self); but it is also generative (as self-​difference is of the future). Derrida addresses this ambiguity when he speaks of a temporal paradigm that dislocates self-​presence and puts time itself “out of joint.”14 Appropriately enough,

14

The quotation from Hamlet is an important motif in Derrida, recurring in several texts, most notably in A Taste for the Secret and Specters of Marx.

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his writing on this theme is permeated by images of haunting, of ghostly apparitions and uncanny doubling. Less intuitive, perhaps, but just as significant, is that it also draws on a metaphorics of war: There is polemos when a field is determined as a field of battle because there is no metalanguage, no locus of truth outside the field, no absolute and ahistorical overhang; and this absence of overhang—​in other words, the radical historicity of the field—​makes the field necessarily subject to multiplicity and heterogeneity.15 In the absence of an overarching concept, or an ideal aesthetic form, history itself becomes a clash of discourses, a Babelian experience—​its logic one of discord and equivocation. On the one hand, it is this logic that makes war possible. But on the other, such an experience also allows for the proliferation of tongues and of diverging futures, for the loss and the gain that go on simultaneously in the work of translation. Simply put, a system that contains all losses, that absorbs every error in peaceable efficiency, cannot live, cannot truly engage the future, unless it begins to de-​systematise itself. And such work of de-​systematisation is the violence that time enacts upon the form of time, or upon the historical subject. The persistent ethical power of the apocalypse within modernist thought is nowhere more evident than when Derrida references Babel. Even as he expresses his impatience with the rhetoric of revelation and with the Millenarian desire it connotes,16 Derrida recognises in Babel the possibility of an apocalyptic discourse that will not be reduced to a cheap proclamation of the end: Nothing is less conservative than the apocalyptic genre […] By its very tone, the mixing of voices, genres and codes, apocalyptic discourse can also, in dislocating destinations, dismantle the dominant contract or concordat. It is a challenge to the established receivability of messages and to the policing of destination, in short to the postal office or the monopoly of posts.17

15 16 17

Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001), 12. For an incisive commentary see Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbechter, “The Latecoming of the Posthuman, Or, Why ‘We’ Do the Apocalypse Differently, ‘Now’,” Reconstruction 4.3 (2004). Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” Oxford Literary Review 6.2 (1984), 29–​30.

78 Chapter 2 Derrida’s position, here, has everything to do with the problem of describing a structure of revelation, a type of truth event, if you will, that continues to bear within it traces of the volatility of the now—​of chance and error. Such an idea of the end would not purport to restore time to the health of an unadulterated present. It would appeal at once to our sense of the uniqueness of the now and of its infinite repeatability. We return by this route to an understanding of modernity as the uncanny experience of being non-​contemporaneous with oneself. For Derrida, as for Rabaté, the violence that time enacts upon the form of time corresponds to an unmooring of temporal relations from the present. The ethical consequences of this gesture cannot be overstated. When time unfolds outside the purview of an apperceiving subject, in excess of the maintenance work with which the subject of phenomenology is entrusted, it becomes a force for indeterminacy, the realisation of the indeterminate itself. This perspectival shift, which has time doubling up on itself, calls for a disambiguation of the now and the present.18 As distinct from the present, the now is a pure relation: it marks the boundary between the present and the future, between the present and the past. In and of itself this idea is nothing new; the determination of the now as a boundary (or a limit) goes back at least as far as Aristotle. But in modernity the issue takes on a decidedly ethical valence. If a key debate of twentieth-​century thought, from Heidegger to Levinas, to Jean-​Luc Nancy and Alain Badiou, turns on the way in which the relation between finitude and the infinite is conceptualised; and if the now crystalises that relation in real time, then surely a modern ethics of temporality, most of all one that is charged with an apocalyptic tone, must begin by addressing the question of how to interpret the concept of the limit—​as a limitation, a prohibition, a paternal “no,” or as an extremity, a frontier, the natural habitat of the avant-​garde. Apocalyptic discourse bristles with ethical potential precisely because of the ambiguity that attaches to the concept of the limit. At its most radical it bears witness to what Nancy calls “a finite thinking,” a movement of thought that endures its own finitude not as a negative state to be transcended, or a law to be transgressed, but as an immanent horizon, at once real and infinitely receding, within which thought is always already embedded. Such a concept seeks to put thought in relation to the infinite; but, crucially, it does not admit of the infinite as being outside or beyond its horizon. A finite thinking, Nancy writes, is “always surprised by its own freedom and by its own history, the finite history that produces events and sense across what is represented as the 18

For an extended discussion of the now in Derrida see John Protevi, Time and Exteriority: Aristotle, Heidegger, Derrida (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1994).

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infinity of a senseless process.”19 In this respect, the modernist determination of the now as a limit presupposes the embeddedness of thought within the world, an awareness of being always already shaped by context; but it also signals an inexhaustible openness to the other: “we find ourselves at the inflection of an end whose very finitude is the opening, the possible—​the only—​ welcome extended to another future.”20 Approaching the same set of concerns from a Bakhtinian perspective, Daphna Erdinast-​Vulcan speaks of ethical subjectivity as being “forever positioned on borderlines,” and identifies this condition with the “self-​projection of the subject ahead of itself in time.”21 But we must not mistake being thrown ahead of oneself as a privilege enjoyed by the subject—​an ability or, worse, a prerogative. In this respect, Erdinast-​Vulcan’s reference to “self-​projection” might be deceptive. It is not as if the subject in question were in control of its excesses, or as if it were the author of its own projections. Given that assumption, time would once again have to be construed as ancillary to subjective identity, an ideal form shaped by subjective (aesthetic) activity rather than a real evolutionary force. Crucially, for the modernist tradition I am trying to characterise, the subject does not position itself ahead of itself in a liminal and excessive point in time, but finds itself thrown there. Its ethical freedom is indeed made possible by a logic of excess and disjunction; but these are pre-​subjective attributes, predicates of time itself. One is subjected to them. Just as human freedom clashes with the notion of divine providence and demands the rejection of teleological forms, being-​thrown exposes an all-​ important contradiction in the modern (post-​Enlightenment) conception of subjectivity. It questions the assumption that we can be full authors of our own history; in other words, it belies the fantasy of self-​determination that stands as the ideal goal of the modern historical subject.22 19 20 21 22

Jean-​Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 15. Nancy, A Finite Thinking, 15. Daphna Erdinast-​Vulcan, “Borderline Subjectivity: The Futurity of the Present in Bakhtin’s Work,” Partial Answers:  Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas  8.1 (January 2010): 169–​83, In a similar vein, consider Jean-​Luc Nancy’s discussion of ethical freedom as an unprogrammed, unpredictable relation to finitude, an openness that remains irreducible to choice (where Heidegger speaks of “being thrown” Nancy’s key term is, once again, “surprise”): “It is a question neither of choice nor of constraint. The issue is that existence as such is purely offered to time—​which means to its finitude—​and that this offering, this presentation that comes before any presence, this coming-​forth that only comes up unexpectedly, is existence in withdrawal from essence or from being. Its surprise does not let it ‘choose.’ […] it exposes existence as an infinite generosity to time’s finitude (as an infinite,

80 Chapter 2 John le Carré captures the issue memorably in a scene from The Russia House. Bartholomew “Barley” Scott Blair, a world-​weary middle-​aged publisher, is approached by the British secret service and pressured into carrying out a mission on Russian soil. The following exchange takes place as a team of English and American agents try to overcome his reluctance with a string of platitudes: “It comes down to this,” said Ned. “It’s crude and un-​English but I’ll say it anyway. Do you want to be a passive or an active player in the defence of your country?” Barley was still hunting for an answer when Walter supplied it for him, and with an air of finality that brooked no contradiction. “You’re from a free society. You’ve got no choice,” he said.23 Le Carré’s joke attacks the empty rhetoric invested in the fight for freedom when this is left in the hands of bureaucrats and ideologues. But the same contradiction is at issue in ethical models that build on the ideals of free will and subjective agency—​the injunction to be free, to be absolutely self-​determined becomes an inflexible command that strains subjectivity itself. You must choose freely; you have no choice. The challenge of modernism is to think through this paradox: to imagine some species of ethical possibility outside the framework of a fully self-​determined subjectivity. 3 Secret Agency It is telling that Gomel’s most striking example of the ethical tensions inscribed in the apocalyptic plot is taken from the modernist canon. Apocalypse, Gomel writes, is “a conspiracy against history; an attempt to defeat death by violence. Perhaps the best representation of the apocalyptic mindset is the terrorist group in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent who plot to murder time by blowing up the Greenwich Observatory.”24 A plot to murder time by hastening the end of history—​Gomel’s comment focuses on the Millenarian overtones of this idea, interpreting the bomb outrage at the heart of Conrad’s narrative as a symbolic assault on chronology itself. Yet the image beautifully captures the anarchic, Babelian potential of apocalyptic discourse even as it appears

2 3 24

unexpected coming-​up in finite presence).” Jean-​Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 117. John le Carré, The Russia House (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 119. Gomel, “Everyday Apocalypse,” 185.

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to dwell on the genre’s reactionary ethos. Indeed, the power of Conrad’s text (and its specific value for my argument) is that it interrogates the complicity between apocalyptic desire and anarchic violence by subjecting both terms to a bottomless series of ironies.25 The first and most obvious irony relates to the identity of the author of the attack. And in turn, that irony spills over to affect the question of individual agency and rational motivation. Here Conrad’s association of anarchy with mindlessness is telling. Passed off as the mindless act of a group of anarchists (who turn out to have no taste for violent action whatsoever), the assault on the Greenwich observatory is in fact conceived by Mr Vladimir, a foolish man in his own right, and carried out by Stevie, “a half-​witted,” “weak-​minded creature” (SA 212, 218), at the behest of his reckless brother-in-law. Thus while the attack is only intended to look as an act of unreason, it is actually an act of unreason. False folly, in this case, is also folly, and the effects of mindlessness, once history is exposed to them, corrupt every facet of experience, eroding the very distinction between what is and what seems. Mindlessness is what drives the action, what determines the swerve of events in the plot, and Conrad seems to suggest that no human act is possible (such is the madness of the time) without an element of unthinking, even stupid violence at inception. As a result, the plot of The Secret Agent drives a wedge between agency and action. Or, if you will, it puts forth a diagnosis of the troubling disconnection between the two terms—​terms that relate to each other as a potential to an actual state.26 If we define agency as an ability to act in accordance 25

26

Numerous critics have commented on Conrad’s use of irony in The Secret Agent to organise character relations, and to develop the interrelated themes of anarchism, secrecy and madness. I am especially indebted to studies by Jeremy Hawthorn, H. M. Daleski, and Michael Greaney. In particular, I wish to single out, and co-​opt, the following observation by Greaney: “Conrad’s irony is far more problematical for his readers than is commonly supposed. […] The assumption that The Secret Agent has an immaculately disengaged ironic narrator tells only half the story, because the novel’s ironic strategies embroil it in the very environment it abhors. Ideally, textual and epistemological irony ought to work in tandem, since the ironic imitation of other discourses serves to challenge the ideologies that they habitually, and uncritically, reinforce. In practice, however, there are complex entanglements in Conrad’s text between language and epistemology that preclude a simple disengagement from the object of critique and generate frustration and disgust that are, ultimately, vented on Conrad’s English readership.” Michael Greaney, Conrad, Language, and Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 141–​142. Jeremy Hawthorn’s reading of The Secret Agent offers a different take on the semantic gap between the concepts of “agency” and “action”: “There is an interesting shift in meaning of the word ‘agency’ towards the end of the seventeenth century, from meaning ‘acting,

82 Chapter 2 with the principle of reason, then we must view Conrad’s irony as a trenchant critique of modernity, wherein being in history is experienced as a disease, both in a political and an existential sense. That is to say, the incongruity between the ability to participate in the march of rational history and the realisation of that potential is suffered by Conrad’s characters as a form of paralysis (political and existential). And the fin de siècle recourse to anarchist activity—​or, for that matter, to apocalyptic scenarios—​is but a fool’s solution to the problem. In line with this reading, it is important to highlight two details from Conrad’s plot: 1. There is indeed an anarchic drive at work in The Secret Agent but it has little to do with the characters’ avowed politics. It is embodied in the workings of the bomb, a bomb that appears to have a mind of its own, that acts purely by accident, its agency, as the Professor explains, “a combination of time and shock” (SA 76). Time, in other words, is not the target of the bombing but a key ingredient of the bomb itself. Many readers have noted that as a result of the Greenwich Park explosion, the novel’s chronology is disrupted, and the volatility of time is brought to the fore. My point is that this volatility is an index of the reality of time—​of what we might call, in a vitalist context, its power. The scene in which Comrade Ossipon comes upon Verloc’s body is a perfect illustration of this idea. Believing that Verloc had died in the explosion, Ossipon visits Brett Street to pay his respects to the widow, only to find her in a state of agitation and Verloc lying on the couch, apparently asleep. What was it—​madness, a nightmare, or a trap into which he had been decoyed with fiendish artfulness? Why—​what for? He did not know. […] the idea that he would be murdered for mysterious reasons by the couple Verloc passed not so much across his mind as across the pit of his stomach, and went out, leaving behind a trail of sickly faintness—​an indisposition. Comrade Ossipon did not feel very well in a very special way for a moment—​a long moment. And he stared. Mr Verloc lay very still meanwhile, simulating sleep for reasons of his own, while that savage woman of his was guarding the door—​invisible and silent in the dark and deserted street. (SA 284–​285)

action’ in 1658, it comes to mean ‘intermediation’ in 1674.” Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-​Consciousness (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), 78.

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At first Ossipon suspects a trap; it is some time before he grasps the full ­import of the scene, as a second shocking realisation reverses the first. From the hat the eyes of the robust anarchist wandered to the displaced table, gazed at the broken dish for a time, received a kind of optical shock from observing a white gleam under the imperfectly closed eyelids of the man on the couch. Mr Verloc did not seem so much asleep now as lying down with a bent head and looking insistently at his left breast. (SA 285) In fact Ossipon’s consternation only lasts “a moment—​a long moment.” In that protracted interval we are made acutely aware of the workings of time not as chronology, not as a unit by which to measure human action, but as a disjunctive force that puts life in an uncanny, spectral relation with its end. 2. By targeting the Greenwich observatory Mr Vladimir contrives to launch a (seemingly) mindless attack not on time but on science, and more precisely, on astronomy.27 The significance of this detail comes into clearer focus when we take note of a privileged symbolic association between astronomy and the concept of modernity. It is not only that the name of Copernicus stands at the threshold of the modern age and that his revolution marks the first of the three scientific blows to human narcissism listed by Freud and Derrida. Greenwich also stands for a paradoxical perspectivism. On the one hand, the observatory is the location of a particular gaze. It pinpoints the privileged spot from which a man may look up at the stars. On the other, it is a strain to describe this gaze as particular, for Greenwich is where the individual perspective is universalised. The purpose of the observatory is to mark the subject-​position of humanity as a whole as it contemplates its place in the universe. It is from here (from this point in the world that stands for the entire world) that humanity gazes outward. Perspective, and the situatedness that we associate with perspective, are made global. We find in this image yet another attempt to grapple with the madness of the deictic—​and thus a correlate of the temporal disjuncture that characterises modern historicity. Perhaps the sharpest irony of The Secret Agent is that it opens modernist thought to the anarchic forces within it, to what is most progressive about the apocalypse, at the very same moment in which it dismisses

27

Adam Barrows provides an extended discussion of the political significance of Greenwich for a modernist discourse on time in The Cosmic Time of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). The study focuses on Conrad alongside Stoker, Joyce and Woolf.

84 Chapter 2 anarchism and apocalyptic desire as symptoms of the idiocy and the paralysis of the present time. This diagnosis of a fin de siècle modernity torn between paralysed reason and the madness of the now is picked up by Derrida and appears intensified in his ambivalent attitude towards twentieth-​century apocalyptic discourse. His aversion to banal proclamations of the end of history, amply documented by Callus and Herbrechter, highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of one’s situatedness vis-​à-​vis the end—​that is to say, of the way in which the now-​limit, unique and endlessly repeatable, already complicates the perspective from which any such proclamation is launched. When Derrida writes that nothing is less conservative than the apocalyptic genre, when he invests the discourse of the end with progressive, even radical connotations, his theme is the uncanny itself, the ability of the now to send history into a tailspin, to deform genres, to bring time to life in the swerve of an atom. Here the importance of the secret in Derrida’s apocalyptic discourse comes into clear focus. To start with, the figure of the secret always resonates in the philosopher’s ear with the workings of the uncanny, an association authorised by his engagement with German sources, most notably Freud. In The Post Card, and again in “Fors,” this association is made explicit as the secret becomes a by-​word for a series of aporetic relations, movements of desire that impinge on the boundary between life and death, between interiority and exteriority, between science and the unconscious, between keeping (or jealously guarding) and sharing (or letting go). Following Freud, Derrida draws on metaphors pertaining to economics, to topography and to organic life. The point of a secret is that it circulates always on the threshold of the private and the public, disabling that binary opposition by its strange economy: You know that I do not believe in propriety, property, and above all not in the form that it takes according to the opposition public/​private (p/​p so be it). This opposition doesn’t work, neither for psychoanalysis […] nor for the post […] nor for the police.28 And elsewhere: Death is always the name of a secret, since it signs the irreplaceable singularity. It puts forth the public name, the common name of a secret, the

28

Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 185.

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common name of the proper name without name. It is therefore always a shibboleth, for the manifest name of a secret is from the beginning a private name, so that language about death is nothing but the long history of a secret society, neither public nor private, semi-​private, semi-​public, on the border between the two.29 Psychoanalysis provides the privileged context by which to theorise this strange economy of the in-​between in relation to the death-​drive, that is, in relation to an order of death-​within-​life, a force that folds both states into each other and surpasses their opposition. But equally relevant is a second discursive paradigm that insists on the role of the secret within hermeneutics: the secret as a figure of indeterminacy in the trading—​in the production and the exchange—​of truth. For Derrida, the secret is the undecidable moment that haunts the workings of revelation; and it is in this sense that one finds it to be germane to apocalyptic discourse. Foundational to the very structure of historical responsibility (namely, to the ethical exigencies of being a historical subject), the secret allows for the unfolding of truth, but remains irreducible to a scientific project or to a rational history of thought. In short, it is precisely what conditions and “exceeds the play of veiling/​unveiling, dissimulation/​revelation, night/​day, forgetting/​anamnesis, earth/​heaven.”30 Following Jan Patocka (and Nietzsche), Derrida identifies two critical moments in European ethical philosophy, each characterised by a different relation to the secret, and by a different manner of putting that relation to work. First is the philosophical turn one associates with Platonism, wherein the affirmation of an ethical subject is made conditional upon the overcoming of pre-​individual, demonic energies (“the secret of orgiastic mystery that the history of responsibility has to break with”).31 This moment is then repeated, and surpassed in turn, by the event of Christianity, which reroutes history through the terror and the pity of the mysterium tremendum—​the overwhelming experience of divine love. Yet, as Derrida insists, this logic of supersession never quite fulfils the break with the past that it promises. 29 30 31

Jacques Derrida, Aporias: Dying—​Awaiting (One Another at) the “Limits of Truth,” trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 74. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 26. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1995), 6.

86 Chapter 2 The secret that the event of Christianity takes to task is at the same time a form of Platonism—​or Neoplatonism—​which retains something of the thaumaturgical tradition, and the secret of the orgiastic mystery from which Plato tried to deliver philosophy. Hence the history of responsibility is extremely complicated. The history of the responsible self is built upon the heritage and patrimony of secrecy, through a chain reaction of ruptures and repressions that assure the very tradition they punctuate with their interruptions …32 At issue, here, is a truly odd structure: a redoubled repression akin to the experience of impossible mourning, or the topology of the crypt as outlined by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Once again, these associations point us to a certain paradoxical conception of the limit—​they insist on a redrawing of the boundary between public and private, inside and outside, place and non-​ place. Thus the crypt preserves “a secret interior within the public square, but, by the same token, outside it, external to the interior.”33 And again, a few pages down: “The inhabitant of a crypt is always a living dead, a dead entity we are perfectly willing to keep alive, but as dead, one we are willing to keep as long as we keep it, within us, intact in any way save as living.”34 To the extent that this structure of redoubled repression describes the genealogy of the ethical subject after the Christian turn, its aporias must also be seen to haunt the apocalyptic plot and to determine the sense of historical responsibility—​of being answerable to one’s historical condition—​within the economy of revelation. Simply put, the secret is that element in the tradition of truth that appeals at once to the universal and to the irreplaceably singular—​ or more precisely, to an undecidable moment between the two. It thus shares a peculiar phenomenality (or non-​phenomenality) with the now. Both are irreducible to presentation; both are effaced the moment they are given to consciousness. In this particular sense the now is to the structure of appearance, what the secret is to revelation. There can be no coming to presence without the singularity—​but also the iterabilty—​of the now; so too there is no apocalypse without the effects of secrecy. A secret circulates—​that is its basic operation within a hermeneutic field. Yet its currency is suspended, undecidable, between sharing and keeping. 32 33 34

Derrida, The Gift of Death, 7. Jacques Derrida, “Fors,” trans. Barbara Johnson. Foreword to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xiv. Derrida, “Fors,” xxi.

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Alex Segal has argued for a fundamental distinction between Derrida’s and Conrad’s uses of the secret. Conrad’s writing, he claims, is an unforgiving critique of secrecy itself, an indictment of a culture in which interiority is predicated on covertness, and a secret is merely the object of a power-​play between competing agencies. Even as he subjects this version of the secret to a bottomless irony, Conrad continues to frame his theme as a discourse on mastery. “The paradoxes of the radical secrecy for Conrad are tied not to any sense of a democracy to come but to mere absurdity and meaninglessness. In Conrad’s indictment of the present, there is no openness to a radical future.”35 The argument is persuasive, especially with reference to Conrad’s depiction of his characters’ motives, and the inter-​subjective relations explored in the novel. Yet there is a sense in which characters (and characters’ actions) in the Secret Agent are merely a pretext. Human agency is subjected to a cruel series of ironies, dismissed as mindless folly, precisely because it does not matter. What interests Conrad, rather, is a different sort of agency, one that manifests itself on the boundary of individual life, a strangely passive power brought about by a combination of time and shock. I am suggesting that a radical secrecy obtains where The Secret Agent insists on the reality of time and where it subordinates the modern apocalyptic plot to the madness of the deictic. On this point I wish to co-​opt Jeremy Hawthorn’s discussion of animistic elements in The Secret Agent. In particular, I would like to develop the idea that Conrad’s language contrives to blur the boundary between the animate and the inanimate, investing material objects with lifelike qualities while reducing the living to the status of dead flesh. Thus for example Stevie’s dismembered body is compared to “an accumulation of raw meat for a cannibal feast” or to “the by-​products of a butcher’s shop with a view to an inexpensive Sunday dinner.” Conversely, a long frock coat is described as having the suppleness of “living tissue,” and numerous scenes feature “a mechanical piano [that] plays tunes without the help of a piano stool.”36 These details bespeak a world in which human activity has lost all measure of immediacy, in which objects are apprehended in terms of symbolic value, and always encountered at a remove from the quick of life. Hawthorn clarifies that the web of secretive gestures and covert motivations underlying Conrad’s novel is part and parcel of this critique. A culture

35 36

Alex Segal, “Deconstruction, Radical Secrecy, and The Secret Agent,” Modern Fiction Studies 54.2 (2008), 200. See Jeremy Hawthorn’s excellent commentary on these images, in Joseph Conrad, 73–​75.

88 Chapter 2 of secrecy is the product of a split between private and public identity, and that split in turn reflects a model of commodified relations prevalent in capitalist societies: “if people relate to one another through the medium of things, through commodities, then it is not surprising that these things should come to resemble people, and to assume a life of their own.”37 By this reading, animism and its opposite (de-​animation or alienation) must be regarded as symptoms of a degraded reality—​the boundary between the living and the dead is effaced at the expense of life itself. Yet we also find in these motifs a presentiment of the unboundedness of life. The unsettling activity of the mechanical piano is first and foremost a grotesque parody of human agency. But more than that, it is a correlate of the unhinging of reality brought about by the Greenwich attack, rather as though a disembodied soul had been released by the explosion and set loose upon the world of matter. Conrad’s language, inevitably, returns to the metaphor of the ghost: “The piano at the foot of the staircase clanged through a mazurka with brazen impetuosity, as though a vulgar and impudent ghost were showing off. The keys sank and rose mysteriously. Then all became still” (SA 67). When inanimate objects come to life, life itself bursts forth, undetermined, unassigned to an identity or a generic form. Or, put another way, matter is empowered, but in a manner that disables the traditional distinction between agency and passivity. The dramatic consequences of this de-​animation for the plot of The Secret Agent are brought home in a later scene in which Mrs Verloc, having realised the cruel truth behind her brother’s death, falls into a stupor and is finally spurred to action. Nowhere in Conrad do we find a more powerful image of the coincidence of knowledge and oblivion: She started forward at once […] as if the homeless soul of Stevie had flown for shelter straight to the breast of his sister, guardian and protector, the resemblance of her face with that of her brother grew at every step, even to the droop of the lower lip, even to the slight divergence of the eyes. (SA 262) This effacement of the boundary between action and passivity, between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead is the very currency of the crypt. The grotesque vivacity of the piano, the grotesque agency of Winnie Verloc unparalysed by grief—​these speak to the power of an immemorial past, a secret 37

Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad, 78.

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we do not possess, for it possesses us, a clandestine passion that is neither ­Spirit, nor its dialectical opposite, but an original, anarchic force that somehow doubles for life itself. 4 Unattributed Life Though one hesitates to speak of a vitalist grammar at work in Derridean thought, the paradox of the crypt—​the secret economy it evokes, the strange passivity which it inscribes in memory—​is plainly indebted to a Nietzschean meditation on history and life. It harks back to an understanding of life as an immanent force—​a force aligned with historical forgetting, with genetic differentiation and the production of new forms. The insistence of the demonic secret first within Platonism, then within a Christian model of historical revelation is the return of an unattributed vitality, a life in excess of the lived, within the living present. It is through Nietzsche, precisely, that modernist uses of the word “life” are injected with an anti-​Platonist charge. And by the same token, it is Nietzsche too (more so than Freud or Marx) who provides the impetus for an uncanny decentring of ideal history, who pulls the dialectic off its hinges and presides over the epoch of a dethroned humanism. The idea of an unattributed vitality is already in play, for instance, in the genealogical method of The Birth of Tragedy, its radical, anti-​Platonist ethos expressed in the unresolved tension between Apollonian and Dionysian forces. Nietzsche famously distinguishes between two distinct phases in the development of ancient tragic drama: an original, pre-​Socratic culture, in which the terror and the ecstasy of life are affirmed as one through the clash of Apollonian forms and Dionysian revelry; and a later version of tragedy that represses the Dionysian element and, in the wake of Euripides and Plato, bends the transformative powers of the drama to the purpose of a philosophy of self-​ knowledge. Implied in this history, of course, is a commentary on the state of modernity; Nietzsche sets up a correspondence between the health of a given civilisation—​its potential for self-​renewal, its attunement to what is quick and what is dead within its own modes of cultural production—​and that civilisation’s interpretation of the tragic. While pointing to the German philosopher as a central figure in the genealogy of posthumanism, Stefan Herbrechter distinguishes between two versions of Nietzsche—​a radical theorist of immanence, who forces philosophy into a break with the moralising influences of the past, and “no longer accepts any final form of truth”; and a vitalist who “plays with nihilistic fire while giving over

90 Chapter 2 to his unbridled megalomaniac instincts.”38 It is unfortunate that in trying to iron out the “problematic” aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, Herbrechter associates the “bad” Nietzsche with the theme of vitalism. On this point my reading is most clearly at odds with his. Nor is it a coincidence that in listing the French post-​structuralist thinkers who were influenced by the virtuous Nietzsche (“Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, etc.”), Herbrechter leaves out the author of the most influential monograph on Nietzsche in the post-​structuralist tradition: Gilles Deleuze. After Deleuze, the distinction between a vitalist and a critical Nietzsche becomes untenable. The problem that propels Nietzsche’s tragic philosophy, as highlighted by Deleuze, is that of grappling with the idea of life as immanent becoming while avoiding the pitfalls of dialectical negation. In the simplest terms: how to affirm life in all its contradictions, in all its suffering, without implying that the value of life lies in transcending life, in redeeming it by taking leave of it? There is always a danger of being sentimental about life, of using life as the name of a mystical or miraculous principle: “Life is beautiful!” “Life is sacred!” and so forth. To be sure, Nietzschean vitalism does not sing the miracle of life but aims to theorise generative-​evolutionary processes, to contemplate reality itself as the passion of an immanent becoming. Dionysus, as the embodiment of a spirit of affirmation, embraces the joys and pains of becoming in a single ecstatic moment, and sets the power of the tragic in direct opposition to the dialectic. Dialectics in general are not a tragic vision of the world but, on the contrary, the death of tragedy, the replacement of the tragic vision by a theoretical conception (with Socrates) or a Christian conception (with Hegel). What has been discovered in Hegel’s early writings is in fact the final truth of the dialectic: modern dialectic is the truly Christian ideology. It wants to justify life and submit it to the labour of the negative.39 The challenge of Dionysian affirmation centres once again on a radical conception of the limit, on a view of life as simultaneously finite and infinite. The point is that for Nietzsche life does not evolve from abstract limit to abstract limit. Nor does it unfold by way of negation, as if seeking to overcome its own mortality. On the contrary, it assumes mortality as a condition of its health. This is the sense in which tragedy is immediately joyous—​not 38 39

Herbrechter, Posthumanism, 32. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2006), 17.

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cathartic, certainly not redemptive. This is the sense, too, in which Dionysian death is understood not as the “labour of the negative,” but as an experience of life at the extreme. It is what situates life between finitude and infinity. In the interpenetration of death and life, life as becoming is affirmed joyously, painfully and without judgement. By this approach, the concept of life is in competition with Hegelian history. It describes generative-​evolutionary processes but short-​circuits the abstract oppositions of culture and nature, mind and matter, organic and inorganic form. It always seeks the middle-​ ground between these terms, the point at which the boundary-​line passes into infinity. Nietzsche makes explicit the anti-​Hegelian implications of this model of historicity in the Untimely Meditations. The insistence on life as a generative process that is joyously affirmed even in its destruction, returns us to the theme of ethical agency, and reframes the problem by positing an antagonism between action and absolute knowledge. Having established that an element of forgetting is necessary to all action, and that too much historical sense can be detrimental to life, Nietzsche goes on to ask exactly how much memory can a historically responsible life sustain. What amount of debt, or knowledge of the past, can a culture bear before its generative, vital forces dry up? To determine this degree of history and therewith the boundary at which the past has to be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, we have to know exactly how great the plastic power of a man, a people, a culture is. I mean by plastic power the capacity to develop out of oneself in one’s own way, to transform and incorporate into oneself what is past and foreign, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, to recreate broken moulds.40 The reference to “plasticity” is key here. In so far as it designates the ability of a living system to absorb trauma, it would seem to align Nietzsche’s argument with Hegelian and Freudian notions of history as a type of mourning process. By this reading, “the boundary at which the past has to be forgotten” would have to be glossed, rather sketchily, as “the extent to which a trauma may be repressed or negated.” The continuation of the paragraph would appear to corroborate this view:

40

Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 62.

92 Chapter 2 There are people who possess so little of this power that they can perish from a single experience, from a single painful event, often and especially from a single, subtle piece of injustice, like man bleeding to death from a scratch; on the other hand, there are those who are so little affected by the worst and most dreadful disasters, and even by their own wicked acts, that they are able to feel tolerably well and be in possession of a kind of clear conscience even in the midst of them or at any rate very soon afterwards.41 Plasticity, in this sense, corresponds to a talent for repression, or an ability to heal fast. Yet this interpretation is soon found to conflict with the sense of forgetting deployed elsewhere in the essay, and indeed throughout Nietzsche’s career:  forgetting as the spring of action, as the antidote to encyclopaedic knowledge, and as a primordial faculty that renders human and animal life indistinct. In sum, if we accept the use of forgetting as a generative impulse that takes hold in the point of indeterminacy between genera, we may understand plasticity as the ability of a life to mobilise this indeterminacy within its own history. Nietzsche’s principle of historical forgetting, then, is not simply a matter of freeing the present from the traumas of the past. Its key function is to deregulate becoming—​to emancipate life from the prescriptive power of generic categories. The effect of this move is to redeem the past for the uses of a genuinely future-​oriented movement. It is to this end that Nietzsche distinguishes between three distinct attitudes to the past, corresponding to three ways of putting history to use: the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical. Monumental history sets up the past as a heroic standard to be emulated. It looks to history as a record of human achievement, and puts it to work as myth. The antiquarian approach, by contrast, labours to preserve the values of tradition from corruption in the present. It revers the past, and finds value in the continuity of tradition and the survival of ancient customs. Finally, the critical attitude looks to the past in order to put its culture’s most deeply held values into question. Its purpose is to return to the roots and effect a radical revaluation of tradition. But with this third attitude, a more fundamental distinction comes into play between an abstract, stultified practice of history and a truly creative manner that is able to put the past back in play, and to give it currency in the name of life. There is no question here that the vitalist and the critical 41

Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” 62.

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impulse are one and the same. Their point of convergence is not a wholesale rejection of the past, but a suspicion of philosophical grammars that identify memory with knowledge, and that, in positing self-​knowledge as the ideal object of philosophical activity, turn to the lessons of history to give meaning to life. These are the services history is capable of performing for life; every man and every nation requires, in accordance with its goals, energies, and needs, a certain knowledge of the past, now in the form of monumental, now of antiquarian, now of critical history: but it does not require it as a host of pure thinkers who only look on at life, of knowledge-​thirsty individuals whom knowledge alone will satisfy and to whom the accumulation of knowledge is itself the goal, but always and only for the ends of life.42 Nietzsche’s ambition, here, is to fashion an altogether new relation to history—​ one that disentangles historical becoming from its ideal ground, that allows an action to resonate with historical sense, without reducing it to a necessary moment in the march of reason. It is clear that “forgetting” in this context does not refer to a failure of memory, but names an original limit of knowledge. On this point the comparison with the Derridean secret is especially apt. A forgetful life carries the past within itself, the past in its entirety, but not as knowledge. It preserves a kernel of inaccessible pastness, a constitutive indeterminacy within the structure of historicity. This idea, as Vanessa Lemm has argued, also informs Nietzsche’s use of evolutionary rhetoric complicating the traditional distinction between animal and human life. While it is customary to think of evolutionary time in terms of generic supersession (the evolutionary ideal of humankind is to overcome one’s animal nature), Nietzsche appears to favour a version of historical becoming in which animal forgetfulness persists in human memory. “Becoming human is not a movement against or away from the animal, but a return of and to the animal and of and to forgetfulness as a force indispensable to human life and becoming.”43 A primordial past is thus folded into the human present in the manner of a secret. The operation throws time out of joint—​it is the very definition of the uncanny. In the name of generic indeterminacy a secret

4 2 43

Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” 77. Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy (New  York:  Fordham University Press, 2009), 92.

94 Chapter 2 agency orients history towards the future, and injects historical identity with an experience of freedom. The undoing of generic forms is precisely the juncture at which the two competing elements of modern historicity discussed here—​apocalyptic desire and Nietzschean vitalism—​intersect. To sum up, Nietzschean “life” repurposes the apocalypse by opening up historical existence to an immanent evolutionary process (a principle of deregulated becoming). In turn, apocalyptic desire complicates vitalist rhetoric by restaging it as an ethics of the limit. It calls for a recalibration of the concept of the limit, as a result of which a certain experience of finitude becomes the condition of genetic—​and generic—​ indeterminacy. In the previous chapter I  discussed the scene of self-​mourning as an allegorical fable that enables us to situate the posthuman condition on the threshold between two determinations, the Spiritual and the Natural. I would add that the modernist sense of living a time out of joint is born of the same liminality—​and reflects the same ontological quandaries. It is not my intention, here, merely to remark on the metaphorical correspondences between modernist and posthuman ghosts. My claim is that a modernist engagement with problems of historicity provides a decisive cultural environment for the posthuman turn; and, conversely, that posthuman emergence may be understood as a creative, evolutionary solution to a modernist crisis. With that in mind, it is helpful to refer once more to the brief history of narcissistic traumas rehearsed by Freud. As summed up in Specters of Marx: “the psychological trauma (the power of the unconscious over the ego, discovered by psychoanalysis), after the biological trauma (the animal descent of man discovered by Darwin […]), after the cosmological trauma.”44 What interests me in this narrative, more than the idea of a return of the repressed, is its rendering of time as an open series, at once rhythmic and linear, repetitive yet continuously deferred (after … after … after). The wounded, spectral subject of this history is always belated, always offside. Survival, in this case, is not the fulfilment of some Millenarian desire, not a longing for some prophesied end of time. Far from announcing time’s destruction, it brings time into its own by realising the end while robbing it of its intransitive character, and perhaps of its finality. Now the end (the realisation is at once belated and punctual) becomes an interminable relation to the limit. 44

Derrida, Specters of Marx, 97.

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95

Dying Better in Pirandello

This idea of survival, with its attendant existential ironies and anachronisms, finds a complete expression in Luigi Pirandello’s third novel, The Late Mattia Pascal (1904). As the story unfolds, its titular character displays an increasing awareness of being at odds with the present: “frighteningly cut off from life, my own survivor, lost now, waiting to live beyond death, but still unable to glimpse the way ahead” (MP 77). Notably, his mournful reveries do not signal the return of an ill-​repressed past, so much as hollow the present out, as if draining it of subjective content. Key to this effect is Pirandello’s use of first-​person narration, paired with the narrator’s tendency to wallow in self-​deprecating irony. Mattia’s sense of his own spectral existence transforms narrative time into a kind of serial dying—​a serial repetition of the end of history. My reading will emphasise three points in particular: 1. Pirandello’s treatment of death as an iterable event; 2. The importance, in the novel, of the theme of the proper name; and 3. The modernist and posthumanist resonances invoked by the reference to the figure of Copernicus. The novel’s early action builds up patiently to the moment in which Mattia, having left his hometown for a few days, discovers his own obituary in a local newspaper and makes the fateful decision to embrace the news of his own death—​to stay dead, as it were. The rest of the narrative elaborates on the consequences of that decision. At first, death is welcomed as an opportunity for self-​reinvention, a freedom. Mattia takes on a new name and a new identity, and, free of the old ties, comes to enjoy a happier, more authentic existence as Adriano Meis. But before long, he realises that this freedom is unsustainable. Without the formal trappings of his old life, he is unable to live his new one; he cannot seek the protection of the law after his home is ransacked, and he cannot remarry. Even his most valued friendship, with the Theosophist Anselmo Paleari, only serves to highlight his exile: Signor Paleari, at least, didn’t want to know anything about me; he was satisfied simply with the attention I paid to his talk. Almost every morning, after his habitual ablutions, he would accompany me on my walks. We would go to the Janiculum, or the Aventine, or to Monte Mario, sometimes as far as the Ponte Nomentano, always talking about death. —​This is what I’ve gained by not really dying, I thought. Some gain!—​ Sometimes I  tried to draw him on to other subjects, but apparently Signor Paleari had no eyes for the life around him. He walked almost always with his hat in his hand; at times he would raise it as if to greet some shade … (MP 123)

96 Chapter 2 Interestingly, it is the impulse to make new friends, the habit of forming ties, that brings home to Mattia the falsity of his second, more self-​determined life. If Paleari’s ability to talk with ghosts, and his blindness to the material world around him, make him an ideal companion for Adriano Meis, they also underscore the unreality of his existence. In the end, Mattia will have no choice but to fake a second suicide, to take leave of his newly acquired identity and become his old self again. Yet even this turns out to be a false solution. Back in Miragno everyone is fully reconciled to Mattia’s death; a simple return to the past is not possible. Mattia must therefore live the rest of his years in the abandoned library, awaiting his third, final passing. The fantasy is brought to completion in the novel’s last scene: I took the wreath of flowers, as I had promised, and every now and then I  go out there to see myself dead and buried. Occasionally, a curious passer-​by follows me at a distance; then, meeting me on the way out, and smiling, as he considers my situation, asks: “But say, who are you really, anyway?” I shrug my shoulders, squint my eyes and reply: “Why, dear friend … I am the late Mattia Pascal!” (MP 251; translation modified) Right away, it is possible to mark out an important structural difference between this version of the scene and Hardy’s. Mattia Pascal’s act of self-​mourning is not at odds with the laws of nature; it does not unsettle generic codes, and does not come as a complete shock to the character’s sense of reality. It is an eccentric situation seamlessly woven into Pirandello’s plot, a fitting conclusion to the ironies of the novel. Its strangeness is not that of a reality that has (provisionally) lost its coherence, but that of a subjectivity that has lost its ability to be at home in the world. We may also note that the two scenes display a very different temporal organisation. Henchard’s shock at witnessing his own death may have been subtly prefigured at an earlier juncture in Hardy’s novel, but it retains the qualities of a sudden and unrepeatable moment. By contrast, Mattia’s self-​mourning is a reiterated act. Mattia seems to have learnt to live with his condition, perhaps even to enjoy it—​an impression, this, promoted by the narrative’s tragicomic tone, and the perverse pleasure taken in those paradoxical statements of self-​ assertion (“Why, dear friend … I am the late Mattia Pascal”). There is certainly an attempt on Mattia’s part to take charge of the situation by translating self-​ mourning into some sort of habitual activity: writing, paying regular visits to the cemetery, helping Don Eligio at the library.

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Enough. I live in peace now45 with my old Aunt Scolastica, who took me into her home. My mad adventure suddenly raised me in her esteem. I  sleep in the same bed in which my poor mother died, and I  spend a great part of my day here at the library with Don Eligio, who is still very far from having put the dusty old books in any kind of order.” (MP 250; translation modified) The idea of death as an iterable event is announced in the novel’s opening pages. Chapters 1 and 2 are written as short preambles to the tale, introducing the main character, elaborating on the strangeness of his case and offering a mock-​ philosophical justification for the writing of the manuscript. Mattia’s three deaths are of course the salient feature of this justification. The announcement comes at the end of the first chapter, delivered like a punch line to a joke. I am bequeathing my manuscript on condition that no one open it until fifty years after my third, last, and definitive death. For the moment, (and God knows how much it pains me) I have died already twice: but the first time was a mistake; and the second … (MP xiii) The effectiveness of the line is not merely in its multiplication of the protagonist’s deaths. It is in the suggestion that death can be serialised, in other words, that it can be rendered as a linear narrative sequence. The originality of Pirandello’s treatment of self-​mourning may always be traced back to this notion—​which, in turn, has a number of corollaries: first, that life and death are essentially public affairs, and that their concepts are bound up with public perception, with the social sphere, and with an experience of the law. There is no innermost core of existence, no site of irreducible, private selfhood. Secondly, that to be robbed of the finality of one’s death is tantamount to being robbed of one’s life. In order to think death as both a common and an individuating event, at once shared and not shared, Mattia Pascal associates this concept with the figure of the proper name. The correspondence is already in play in the novel’s very first words: One of the few things, in fact about the only thing I was ever sure of was this: that my name was Mattia Pascal. And I took full advantage of it too. Whenever one of my friends or acquaintances so far lost his head as

45

I have slightly modified Weaver’s translation here, in order to retain the ironic echo of “I rest in peace” in Mattia’s statement.

98 Chapter 2 to come and ask me for a bit of advice on some matter of importance, I would shrug my shoulders, squint my eyes, and reply: “My name is Mattia Pascal!” […] To tell you the truth, I myself did not think it was an especially valuable piece of knowledge. But at the time I  had no idea what it meant not to know even this much—​I mean not to be able to answer as before, when necessary: “My name is Mattia Pascal!” (MP xi; translation modified) The scene plays with the idea that having the use of one’s name adds up to having some measure of control, or ownership, over one’s life. A proper name delimits a life and assigns it to its owner. Mattia’s narrative sketches out this thesis and proceeds to ironise it. It invests the proper name with the same anxieties, the same potential for error and loss, as the face might carry in a rewriting of the Narcissus myth.46 But there are crucial differences between name and face that need to be remarked. Indeed, while the face is intuitively the more reliable index of recognition (in Mattia’s world, as in ours), names do have a stronger bureaucratic and legal purchase. They establish self conventionally, as coins might refer to the value of an object. They circulate freely and authorise formal acts of self-​identification—​but they also enable a disavowal of identity: “I am/​ I am not Mattia Pascal” are equally grammatical, equally credible statements. As the plot follows the disintegration of the protagonist’s identity, the inability to say “my name is Mattia Pascal” suspends Mattia in a kind of limbo, a state of death in life. The formula tested out at the end of the novel “I am the late …” is, after all, a grammatical sleight of hand achieved through a play of clashing tenses (“fu” is the third person past simple conjugation of the verb to be). In other words, Mattia is able to use his real name only by undercutting the logical consistency of his statement. The anachronism goes hand in hand with the novel’s ghost imagery, and with the existential paradox of a life lived between deaths. In short, the importance of the proper name for Pirandello is not that it establishes an identity, not that it circumscribes life, but that it lays those

46

The parallelism becomes clearer if we consider the opening of another widely acclaimed novel by the same author, One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (1926). The latter deals with the same existential themes as The Late Mattia Pascal but relies on the face as a marker of threatened or illusory identity. The narrative begins with the protagonist examining himself at the mirror. A casual comment by his wife makes him realise that the face he sees is not the face other people see, and this awareness sets off a process of personal disintegration, a complete loss of faith in the concept of authentic selfhood.

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operations open to error or substitution. It is this lability that makes it possible for Mattia to trade one name for another, one life for another, and thus to pass from death to death. By distributing the scene of self-​mourning over an extended narrative sequence, Pirandello gives us to think the posthuman condition as an uncanny, but ultimately habitable state of affairs. The time of Mattia’s life is certainly out of joint. But rather than centre the action on a nostalgia for better days, or on a narrative of resistance, the novel follows the narrator’s efforts to turn the uncanny into habit. A brief discussion of Mattia’s deaths, as plotted in the novel, brings this theme into clear view. I wish to highlight one issue in particular—​ namely, Pirandello’s exploration of the theme in relation to intentionality, fakery or error. We have seen that Mattia himself characterises the first event as having occurred per errore (“by mistake”). Within the economy of the plot, that phrase would seem to refer to the mistaken identification of a disfigured corpse discovered in the mill flume running by Mattia’s own farm. Everyone in Miragno assumes it to be Mattia’s body, and the error, never disconfirmed, quickly takes on the contours of reality. But per errore also translates as “by accident,” implying that this death occurred without calculation or planning, against the predetermined course of Mattia’s life. Mattia himself is shocked by the announcement—​which is to say that the event in question places him in the position of a wholly passive figure, a victim of circumstance, though he is quick to digest the news, and to see ways of working it to his advantage. “Mistake,” in this context, is bound up with chance, with the event as Lucretian clinamen, or as a deviation from destiny. In this sense, too, the second death is an exact reversal of the first. It is intentional, carefully executed, yet determined by circumstances outside the protagonist’s control. It remains an undesired, unwelcome death, if a deliberate one. Its purpose is precisely to set things right that were thrown askew by the transgression that was Mattia’s first passing. That this purpose fails is signalled by the reference to a third and final death, which now constitutes the true temporal horizon of Mattia’s act of narration. Once again, this third death, invoked at the end of Chapter 1 with the instruction that the manuscript not be opened until 50 years after its occurrence, promises a return to some natural order, a definitive adjustment of the time of Mattia’s ghostly existence. But the serial nature of the narrative holds that moment in abeyance as if, robbed of its finality once already, death had lost its power to properly delimit life. Punctuating the plot is thus a progression from an accidental death, premised on the mistake of others, to an increasingly necessary one. It is as though Mattia were trying to get the experience right—​to die again and die better. On the one

100 Chapter 2 hand, this progression entails a dialectical shoring up of the concept of death (in the dialectic, the necessity of a concept is what guarantees its truth). On the other, Mattia’s efforts only serve to undermine the reality of his experience. This is the phenomenological paradox to which self-​mourning always somehow returns: the more studied the experience, the less authentic the event. The irony is reinforced by a note of disillusionment in the value of literature, and more broadly, in the cause of culture, struck in the first chapter and sustained throughout the entire novel. After establishing a correspondence between the theme of self-​mourning and the workings of a proper name, the narrator dwells on the difficulties involved in choosing to put his story to paper. It is here that we encounter the novel’s clearest reference to a turn of the century, posthumanist mythology. Inside a desolate deconsecrated chapel-​turned-​library, surrounded by unopened books, Mattia explicitly identifies the times with a crisis of humanistic culture dating back to the Copernican revolution. The very writing of his story becomes a testament to the death-​in-​life of the Hegelian Spirit. “Ah, my dear Reverend,” I say to him, sitting on the low wall and resting my chin on the knob of my cane as he tends his lettuces. “I’m afraid this is no time to be writing books, not even in jest. For literature, as for everything else, I can only repeat my usual motto: ‘Damned be Copernicus!’” […] Copernicus, my dear Don Eligio, Copernicus has ruined humanity forever. (MP 4–​5; translation modified) To understand the senses that accrue to the name Copernicus here, it is necessary to remark on two issues pertaining to historical context. First, it should be noted that the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had witnessed a surge of interest in cosmological myths, and the name of Copernicus, standing metonymically for modern scientific curiosity, would have called to mind a strange convergence of discourses linking astronomy, cosmography, optics, spiritualism, and the study of the occult.47 At the same time, the reference to Copernicus takes on a peculiar significance in light of post-​Hegelian philosophies en vogue at the turn of the century. The name features prominently in the writings of Leopardi, Engels and especially Nietzsche. Pirandello’s novel participates in this cultural moment and enters into dialogue with all these sources. Leopardi wrote earnestly about Copernicus’s scientific achievements in his Storia dell’astronomia; but a more obvious influence on Pirandello is his 47

Suffice it to recall, in this context, the hugely influential figure of N. Camille Flammarion, whose extraordinary career straddled the genres of popular science (Astronomie

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mock-​Platonic dialogue “Il Copernico,” which imagines a Sun grown weary of revolving around the earth and unwilling to resume its daily task of tending “to three or four puny creatures, living on a distant ball of clay.”48 Copernicus is called upon to convince the earth to provide for itself all that the Sun had been providing on its behalf, and an ironic debate on the consequences of this reversal for humanity’s self-​esteem ensues. Pirandello himself would later draw on this dialogue in order to claim that Copernicus was, unwittingly, one of the greatest humorists of all time, “in that he took apart, not the machinery of the universe itself, but certainly the pompous image that we had formed of it.”49 The argument plainly echoes the reference to Copernicus in Mattia’s preamble, and doubles as a commentary on that text.50 Simply put, the figure of Copernicus (the scientific revolution for which he stands) draws attention to the incongruence of appearance and reality, and in so doing, unmasks the puniness of mankind’s position in the cosmos. While there is nothing particularly modern (much less revolutionary) in a scientific paradigm that opposes appearance and reality, we must take stock of a change in the significance of this opposition after Copernicus. Engels enlists the astronomer to the cause of dialectical materialism, hailing him as a hero in the struggle of natural science against religious authority and superstition. With Copernicus, he argues, the study of nature achieves its independence from theology. Modernity is able to overturn a centuries-​old bias that sought always to exempt the workings of mind from the laws of matter. And as the new scientific paradigm takes hold, dialectical thinking is set free of its reliance on a transcendental movement or an abstract perspective. “It was as if the world were to be shown that henceforth the reciprocal law of motion would

48

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Populaire 1880; Le Monde avant la création de l’homme 1886), fiction (Lumen 1872; La Fin du monde 1894), and research on paranormal phenomena (L’Inconnu et les problèmes psychiques, manifestations de mourants 1900; La Mort et son mystère 1920–​1922), as well as a monograph on Copernicus (Vie de Copernic 1873). “Io sono stanco di questo continuo andare attorno per far lume a quattro animaluzzi, che vivono in su un pugno di fango, tanto piccino, che io, che ho buona vista, non lo arrivo a vedere.” Giacomo Leopardi, “Il Copernico,” in Tutte le opere. Vol. 2 (Milan: Mondadori, 1945), 989; my translation. “Uno dei piu grandi umoristi, senza saperlo, fu Copernico, che smontò non propriamente la macchina dell’universo, ma l’orgogliosa immagine che ce n’eravamo fatta. Si legga quel dialogo del Leopardi che s’intitola appunto dal canonico polacco.” Luigi Pirandello, “L’Umorismo,” in Opere di Luigi Pirandello. Vol. 6: Saggi, poesie e scritti vari (Milan: Mondadori, 1960), 156; my translation. Notably, Pirandello’s essay bears the dedication “To the good soul of Mattia Pascal, ­librarian.”

102 Chapter 2 be as valid for the highest product of organic matter, the human mind, as for inorganic substance.”51 But it is reductive simply to associate the Copernican revolution with a reversal of ancient prejudices and an acceptance of humanity’s marginal place in the universe. Already in Kant, the wondrous spectacle of the starry sky, co-​ implied though it is with the experience of freedom, is linked to a humbling of the mind—​the philosopher faced with his animal nature. Yet that reminder is only the first part of a twofold process destined, before long, to elevate the human animal to the status of a moral creature. It is this two-​part articulation of the movement of self-​overcoming Nietzsche’s vitalism rejects. If for Kant the figure of the animal stands for that base existence which needs first to be condemned in order to be redeemed, for Nietzsche the dualism itself, the insistence on two discreet moments, represented by two separate natures, is what keeps life subjugated. Animality, here, is coterminous with the potential of life to be unreflective, ahistorical, free of all debt. In this connection, the claim that organic and inorganic processes fall equally under the purview of nature lends itself to a more radical application; it invites us to do away with the dualism of spirit and nature altogether, and to short-​circuit the opposition between sensory and transcendent experience in favour of a properly immanent concept of reality. In other words, if modern astronomy insists on the marginal character of all human endeavours, it is not to decry the limitations of human knowledge but rather to liberate reality from the need to defer to the divine. The gap between “what seems” and “what is” is less important in this context than the radical perspectivism it inspires—​not only is the scientist’s gaze always partial and contingent, but that partiality becomes constitutive of the universal. Thus Nietzsche too invokes Copernicus as a philosophical forebear; but in doing so he denounces modernity (and Kant in primis) for selling the scientific revolution short, and for turning the emancipation of science from theology into yet another opportunity to denigrate life. “Has not man’s self-​deprecation, his will to self-​deprecation, been unstoppably on the increase since Copernicus? […] all science, natural as well as unnatural—​this is the name I would give to the self-​critique of knowledge—​is seeking to talk man out of his former self-​respect as though this were nothing but a bizarre piece of self-​conceit.”52 To make the most of its post-​Copernican freedom, humanity must learn to let 51 52

Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature, ed. and trans. Clemens Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1940), 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, ed. Keith Ansell-​Pearson (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1994), 122.

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go of what Nietzsche calls the ascetic ideal—​an ideal that expresses contempt for life, that speaks of life’s vanity even in the absence of ecclesiastical authority. Neither natural nor theological, a truly modern thinking takes hold in the space of immanence between. The anti-​rhetorical gesture that frames Pirandello’s novel (“I’m afraid this is no time to be writing books […] ‘Damned be Copernicus!’ ”) conforms precisely to the self-​deprecating reflex denounced by Nietzsche. But the pose is struck not without a certain narcissistic delight in the ironies of Mattia’s condition, and in the narrative potential of his self-​pity. For all his disenchantment with the state of modern letters, Mattia does not give up his literary pursuits. On the contrary, he continues to write regardless of the value he ascribes to the work. A worthless, but irresistible, compulsion, writing fills out the hours of his late existence, while it records his strange, anachronistic life. On this point, a comparison suggests itself between Pirandello’s anti-​hero and Beckett’s Molloy, for whom the activity is altogether unrewarding: “There’s this man who comes every week. […] He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money. Yes, I work now, a little like I used to, except that I don’t know how to work any more.”53 Both texts, then, depict writing as an exercise in passivity stripped of ambition or motive, save for the marking of a tired time. Even Molloy’s mention of “work” demands a quick clarification: “The truth is I haven’t much will left. When he comes for the fresh pages he brings back the previous week’s. […] When I’ve done nothing he gives me nothing, he scolds me. Yet I don’t work for money. For what then? I don’t know.”54 However, Mattia’s writing differs from Molloy’s in that it is still, on some level, literary—​it still springs from a desire to contribute to cultural memory, to produce something for posterity, hollow as these tags may be. From the very first day [working at the library] I conceived such a low opinion for books, printed or in manuscript (some of those under my charge were very old) that I  should never have thought of taking up writing—​were it not that, as I mentioned, my case is a very strange one; and I suppose that it may prove instructive to some chance reader who should someday, in fulfilment of Monsignor Boccamazza’s wishes, wander into the library and stumble upon this manuscript of mine. (MP xii-​ xiii; translation modified)

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Samuel Beckett, Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 7. Beckett, Three Novels, 7

104 Chapter 2 Here the narrative frame of Mattia Pascal sets up a counterpoint between materialist tropes and ghostly temporalities. The allegorical resonances of the setting (plainly, a mausoleum of Spirit), and the reflections on the semiotic and bureaucratic uses of a proper name, play into this contrapuntal structure. The novel’s premise is a materialist critique of high culture; but the narrative keeps falling back on a cluster of spiritualist motifs—​as though a ghostly existence were the unavoidable by-​product of the radical perspectivism of the day. 6

The Spiritualist Temptation of Mattia Pascal

Mattia’s diagnosis of the dissolution of humanistic values in the present finds its perfect foil in his conversations with Anselmo Paleari. The latter’s theosophical interests are largely dismissed as puerile and fanciful. But they are also strangely seductive to Mattia as he contemplates his own ghostly existence. Now I found myself with Anselmo Paleari’s books in my hands, and these books taught me that the dead, the really dead, were in my very same condition, the “husks” of the Kâmaloka—​especially the suicides whom a certain Mr Leadbeater […] depicts as being ravaged by human appetites, without ever being able to satisfy them, stripped as they are of their bodies, which they do not realize they have lost. (MP 118; translation modified) Here, for a brief moment, Pirandello’s novel toys with a philosophical conceit that would later become central to posthumanist revisions of Descartes. “Oh, imagine that,” I said to myself, “I might almost believe that I really did drown there in the millrace, and that I am merely deceiving myself with the notion that I’m still alive.” It’s well known that certain types of madness are contagious. Paleari’s, though I  resisted it for some time, at last took hold with me. (MP 118; translation modified) The madness in question is of a kind with a famous moment at the end of Descartes’ First Meditation, when the philosopher is struck by the possibility that his hold on reality, his very sense of the coherence of waking life, might have been authored by a deceitful creator or an evil genius: I shall suppose, therefore, that there is, not a true God, who is the sovereign source of truth, but some evil demon, no less cunning and deceiving than

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powerful, who has used all his artifice to deceive me. I will suppose that the heavens, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things that we see, are only illusions and deceptions which he uses to take me in.55 For Descartes, this grounding of science in radical uncertainty is merely a step on the way to a principle of unimpeachable self-​knowledge (no more than a briefly entertained notion). But by the start of Pirandello’s century, the evil demon hypothesis appears to have outgrown its prescribed role within the method of the Meditations. The scenario calls for a paradoxical empowerment of states of unreality (dreams, madness, fakery, forgery) within the rule of reason. It invests modern science with an all-​consuming doubt when it asks us to distrust the very foundation of reality in consciousness—​that is, when it suspects the intentional act by which reality as a whole is constituted. Now the evil demon is not an aberration of rational thought, or merely an obstacle on its path, but the intuition of an original limit of reason that folds reality in with its outside, as in an Escher drawing. In short, Mattia’s momentary surrender to the insanity of Paleari’s theories harks back to a monstrous idea conceived together with the Cogito—​ conceived and laid to rest at the same time, like the unborn twin of modern rationalism. The fantasy repeats Descartes’ insight that there is no way of declaring the primacy of the waking world over the dream-​state with any degree of certainty—​and by extension, no way of distinguishing genuine experiences (the world as it is given to rational consciousness) from oneiric distortions and false impressions. Helen Sword has written extensively about the correspondences between the ideologies underpinning modernist avant-​garde experimentation and the popular currency of twentieth-​century spiritualism. In particular, she points to the figure of the twentieth-​century Spirit medium as one that straddles high and low cultures, tapping into those same energies of cultural subversion, authorial displacement, and ventriloquism one readily associates with modernist poetics. This analysis rightly stresses the grammatological aspects of mediumship. For Sword, the cultural draw of the séance has to do less with the promulgation of an esoteric philosophy, than with the staging of a writing scene: “modernist-​era spiritualists seem almost to revel in the fact that the dead, like us, are mired in the materiality of the written word.”56

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Descartes, Meditations, 100. Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 20.

106 Chapter 2 Re-​inscribing Paleari’s theories within an avant-​garde poetics, this insight prompts us to read the references to ghosts and mediumship in Mattia Pascal not as a cheap, sentimental reflux of humanistic clichés, but as an ironic complication of the narrator’s anti-​humanist stance. As Sword points out, “a spirit medium who claims to ghostwrite for the dead is […] the ideological figure for everything that, according to Foucault, the author-​function holds in check: ‘the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and the recomposition of fiction.’”57 Viewed in this light, the historical contexts evoked by Mattia’s brush with spiritualism seem to reinforce his sense of literary authorship as a bankrupt concept; but they are also able to re-​motivate and re-​energise what would otherwise be a tired, aimless writing project. Extending this point beyond the scene of writing, I would argue that the stakes are somehow analogous to those of Tarr’s Nietzschean parable. Of course Mattia’s spiritualist temptations tell us something about modernity itself—​about the identification of modernity with the history of reason and the values of scientific progress. If the figure of Copernicus presides over a traumatic history of the human, it is in the name of a materialist critique—​but a possessed, haunted materialism that deregulates genres and short-​circuits any tidy opposition of Reason and Nature.58 Perhaps the power of Pirandello’s scene lies in its diagnosis of a historical present in which the project of rationalism has become infected with a contagious and irresistible madness. In a moment of exhaustion, of saturated potential for growth, modernity comes face to face with its vanishing twin, with the unreason that watches over it. 7 Posthuman Stakes The debasement of spirit is an obvious thematic constant in the texts I discuss in this chapter. An emblematic moment in Mattia Pascal has the titular character using a holy-​water basin as an ashtray by mistake. The incident colours Mattia’s (and the reader’s) earliest impressions of Adriana Paleari, contrasting

57 58

Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, 12. Derrida alludes to just such a process of deregulation when he identifies apocalyptic discourse with a power to dislocate destinations through a “mixing of voices, genres and codes” (“Of an Apocalyptic Tone,” 29–​30; qtd. above). I have unpacked this claim in light of its Babelian resonances, emphasising the role of the secret within a structure of historical revelation. Here, in the context of a ghostly-​materialist critique of natural science, the reference to generic hybridity harks back to an ancient atomism, to the logic of the clinamen, the swerve of atoms that gives evolutionary time over to accident.

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her sober religiosity to her father’s eccentric beliefs, and setting up both against the protagonist’s own nihilism. There is a remarkable lightness of touch to Pirandello’s staging of the scene. Mattia’s gaffe lends itself to an obvious allegorical gloss, but it also marks him out as a fish out of water, inadequate, comically at odds with the world he has chosen to inhabit. We know the ironies of The Secret Agent are of a different order altogether—​ angrier, more caustic and more pervasive. The idea of spiritual debasement is reflected in the novel’s seedy urban setting, typified by a nervous customer at Verloc’s shop who, upon finding Mrs Verloc at the counter, exchanges his intended purchase of condoms or pornography for a bottle of ink, “which, once outside, he would drop stealthily in the gutter” (SA 5). Here the prevailing sentiment is a mixture of anger and shame; and the squalor of the situation leaves no one unaffected. As for The Turin Horse, the lion’s share of dialogue is concentrated in a single scene, a visit from a neighbour looking to pick up a bottle of palinka. In a film dominated by silences, the sequence has a jarring, almost comedic flavour. The neighbour takes on the role of a loquacious doomsday prophet delivering a speech on the debasement of spiritual values (the pun on spirit as a synonym for soul and alcoholic substance is surely intended): BERNARD: I’ve run out of brandy. Would you give me a bottle? OHLSDORFER: Give him some … Why didn’t you go into town? BERNARD: The wind’s blown it away. OHLSDORFER: How come? BERNARD: It’s gone to ruin. OHLSDORFER: Why would it go to ruin? BERNARD: Because everything’s in ruins, everything’s been degraded […] Because, you see, the world has been debased. So it doesn’t matter what I say, because everything has been debased that they’ve acquired. And since they’ve acquired everything in a sneaky, underhand fight, they’ve debased everything. Because whatever they touch—​and they touch everything—​they’ve debased. This is the way it was until the final victory. Until the triumphant end … Those who read the speech as a meta-​discursive moment, or as a key to the nihilistic vision of the film, miss the sharp contrast between Bernard’s bluster and Tarr’s minimalism. Bernard’s apocalyptic vision cannot be confused with the film’s own, with the pathos of a terminal time in which reality becomes progressively resistant to human use—​in which, as I argued above, the vital relation between finitude, work and nature breaks down object by stubborn

108 Chapter 2 object. Neither triumph, nor defeat; the end comes to pass, if it comes to pass, without recriminations. It comes down to how we interpret this apocalypse: as a final delimitation of the realm of human knowledge; as a transformative encounter with a type of being that a certain current of twentieth-​century thought might describe as poor in world; as a violent affect; as a revelation that is somehow punctual (of the moment, of the now) and ahistorical at one and the same time. I am reminded, in this connection, of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, which concludes with the following reflection: I then realized that there was a sort of link (or knot) between Photography, madness, and something whose name I did not know. I began by calling it: the pangs of love. […] I collected in a last thought the images which had “pricked” me (since this is the action of the punctum), like that of the black woman with the gold necklace and the strapped pumps. In each of them, inescapably, I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die, as Nietzsche did when, as Podach tells us, on January 3, 1889, he threw himself in tears on the neck of a beaten horse: gone mad for Pity’s sake.59 I suppose it will always be tempting to read Nietzsche’s pity for a dying animal as a dramatic change of heart, a spontaneous rejection of a lifelong philosophical enterprise (“Mutter, ich bin dumm”). What could be more Christian, in Nietzsche’s derogatory sense of the word, more transparently indebted to a modern conception of tragedy, than this pathetic tableau? But the gloss misses the point of Barthes’s association, which is Orphic as well as Christian, and is concerned precisely with the power of an image to move us not in the manner of a representation, not as an illusion or a simulacrum, but in the keeping of an absolute secret—​a strange affective power that takes hold beyond such dichotomies as life or death, reality or unreality. And it misses the point of Tarr’s film which turns on the unfolding of an apocalyptic time that brings no revelation. Here is a passion that traverses logos and stupor, reason and unreason, human memory and animal life. 59

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 116–​117.

Chapter 3

Thinking Historicity with Trees The mind grows rings … pain is absorbed in growth. Virginia Woolf

∵ The importance of ghosts in Virginia Woolf’s imaginary is well established, but much remains to be said of the significance of haunting in her understanding of the forces that shape posthuman history. In a review for the Times Literary Supplement, published in March 1917, Woolf famously takes issue with the use of paranormal situations in fiction, and affirms her distaste for narratives that break too readily with the realm of the ordinary and the quotidian. The article singles out war and the supernatural, as two subjects that tend to invite sentimentality and sensationalism. War is deemed suspect because of the immediacy of the violence and the extremity of situations. The supernatural is more summarily dismissed as the work of a “conjurer” and an unsatisfying “trick.”1 And yet it is the latter that elicits Woolf’s finer critical distinctions. Our life, she admits, “is largely at the mercy of dreams and visions which we cannot account for logically.”2 Four years later, in a piece devoted to Henry James’s ghost stories (December 1921), we are offered an amended version of that same idea. Surely, we might say to a writer set upon the supernatural, there are facts enough in the world to go round. […] But writers, if they are worth their salt, never take advice. They always run risks. To admit that the supernatural was used for the last time by Mrs. Radcliffe and that modern nerves are immune from the wonder and terror which ghosts have always inspired would be to throw up the sponge too easily.3 1 Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2: 1912–​1918, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1987), 87. 2 Woolf, The Essays, Vol. 2, 87. 3 Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919–​1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1988), 321.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004390355_005

110 Chapter 3 In other words, ghosts may be outmoded, unmodern creatures, ill-​suited to a nuanced investigation of the uncanny, but a wholesale dismissal of the supernatural is no better than an admission of defeat, a shirking of modern art’s responsibilities to engage with the excesses of everyday life.4 Henry James’s ghosts have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts […] They have their origin within us. They are present whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange.5 Recent studies have identified this renewed commitment to the strange, ghostly energies that ring the ordinary with a peculiar ordering of time: Sanja Bahun speaks of a poetics of “ ‘anticipatory grief’, an impulse to foretaste mourning, melancholically to probe an impending historical catastrophe”;6 and Paul K. Saint-​Amour describes a literary project that dislocates the temporal coordinates of traumatic experience, a writing of apprehensiveness, where apprehensiveness is understood as “the uncanny condition in which some still-​forming thing appears to take hold of us, as if from a future that has itself become prehensile.”7 By these accounts, Woolf’s radical experiments with narrative form may be seen to articulate a traumatic response to a catastrophe held in abeyance, a disaster that is both past and “not yet,” historical and imminent. “According to the dominant trauma studies model, a disaster that cannot be registered in real time has in a sense ‘not yet’ happened to the subject, making itself known only through encrypted symptoms.”8 The scene I wish to explore in this chapter is an extension and a refinement of the temporalities sketched out above. It is modelled on patterns that characterise melancholic subjectivity, but it modifies the melancholic script in order to stage a fantasy of posthuman becoming.9 More generally, though my 4

5 6 7 8 9

For an extended analysis of Woolf’s reading of James’s supernatural tales, and the impact of James’s ghosts on her articulation of modern literary experience, see Luke Thurston. Pertinent to the argument of this chapter is Thurston’s claim that “what the ghost story offered to the modernists was an exemplary fracture of narrative consistency, an uncanny telepathic fissure of textual topography […] mystical participation in an otherness beyond the ontological boundaries of the ego” (Literary Ghosts, 128). Woolf, The Essays, Vol. 3, 324. Bahun, Modernism and Melancholia, 156. Paul K.  Saint-​Amour, Tense Future:  Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford: ­Oxford University Press, 2015), 93. Saint-​Amour, Tense Future, 93 For a sustained approach to the posthumanist resonances in Woolf’s work, one centred on the Deleuzian notion of becoming-​animal, see Derek Ryan’s “ ‘The Reality of

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argument insists on a rigorous distinction between the scene of self-​mourning and the clinical concept of melancholia, I wish to co-​opt, with a slight amendment, Sanja Bahun’s claim that modernism and melancholia share a striking affinity; that melancholia “operates as both a propeller and a sustainer of the modernist project: it permeates modernist epistemology, but also gives a distinct shape to modernist art.”10 My analysis will turn on Woolf’s use of the verb to grow, in both its transitive and intransitive forms; and on the tension between that verb and two others: haunting and thinking. Woolf’s vision of modern historicity emerges in the space between these actions, these movements of spirit-​and-​matter combined, and the strange phenomenalities they bring to light. A measure of supplemental materiality is implied in all three. If the ghost stands for the memory of generations, the spirit that endures but remains irreducible to human life, it is also bound up, as Sword and Rabaté have shown, with certain material conditions of production and transmission. The cyborg, in turn, marks the historical moment at which machine and organic life have become inextricable—​it embodies the unsurpassable middle-​ground of nature and culture. Within this series of clichés we are to think of growing in Woolf as an ostensibly organic (but in reality uncanny) process, haunting’s perversely natural counterpart. Each verb, as we will see, recalibrates the next. In the interplay of haunting, thinking and growing, Woolf discovers a surprising kinship between human-​ and tree-​life, and conjures up a strange identificatory fantasy—​a vitalist variation on anticipatory grief—​across genre and gender labels. (Woolf’s inspiration, I will argue, is a kind of materialist vitalism, where life is the revenant force history labours to exclude, a principle of indeterminacy, of unregulated becoming, irreducible to genre or gender.) The numerous glimpses of ghostly existence afforded in her fiction reflect a desire to explore the madness of history by the most delicate craft, avoiding the cheap trickery of the supernatural, while consistently calling upon energies that dislocate empirical or natural attitudes. A haunted atomism runs through the writing, powering a life in excess of life, imagining a physics freed of generic constraints. Yet the violence that unhinges nature is of the order of submerged events. It goes about its work in the manner of a secret.

10

Becoming’:  Deleuze, Woolf and the Territory of Cows,” Deleuze Studies 7.4 (2013); “Following Snakes and Moths: Modernist Ethics and Posthumanism,” Twentieth-​Century Literature 61.3 (2015); and especially Chapter 5 of Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Bahun, Modernism and Melancholia, 10.

112 Chapter 3 1

Genre, Gender, Generation

Central to this project is the intuition that the madness of history is bound up inseparably with the theme of generic indeterminacy. Where Hardy’s scene showcases the power of an event to derail nature, Conrad’s plot touches on the mindlessness invoked by the apocalyptic energies of history, and Pirandello dwells on the ironies of a historical consciousness poised between crippling self-​deprecation and the contagious madness of a fin de siècle fascination with life after death, Woolf prompts us to consider generic belonging and historical identity as two faces of the same coin. The idea is first developed in Mrs Dalloway, through the figure of Septimus who compares himself to a drowned sailor on a rock: I leant over the edge of the boat and fell down, he thought. I went under the sea. I have been dead, and yet am now alive, but let me rest still; he begged (he was talking to himself again—​it was awful, awful!); and as, before waking, the voices of birds and the sound of wheels chime and chatter in a queer harmony, grow louder and louder and the sleeper feels himself drawing to the shores of life, so he felt himself drawing towards life, the sun growing hotter, cries sounding louder, something tremendous about to happen.11 The passage returns to the claim from the 1917 review, that “our life is largely at the mercy of dreams and visions” (quoted above). To be sure, it is Septimus’s thinking that frames the entire scene (“I leant over the edge […] he thought”). But the theme of the paragraph is unreality itself: the textures of a dream, and its lingering distortions upon waking consciousness; the intensity of a premonition that “something tremendous is about to happen”; and of course, the sense of having died (the jarring note sounded by that awkward phrase “I have been dead”) gnawing at the living present. As for the rhetorical highlight of the passage, the overarching simile modelled on Dantean rhythms and motifs (“and as, before waking, the voice …”), it befits the modernist phantasmagoria, the shadowy quality of Septimus’s perceptions and the figures that people his world (“And as one who, with laboring breath,/​has escaped from the deep to the shore/​turns and looks back at the perilous waters …”).12

11 12

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 75–​76. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy:  Inferno, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander (New York: Anchor, 2002). Canto I: lines 22–​23.

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Septimus is in many ways a re-​coding of just those elements Woolf admitted to disliking in fiction: the experience of war and the sense of the supernatural. The intertextual elements invested in the character are well documented. Looking at the early drafts of Mrs Dalloway, Kathryn Van Wert highlights the following pertinent fragment: “He [had to] confess his sin; & then would be crucified: & would pass through death [& rise].”13 Plainly enough, Septimus exists in order to take upon himself the suffering of an entire generation. Where other characters in Mrs Dalloway are painted in nuanced brushstrokes that reveal the minute workings of a modern consciousness, he is conceived allegorically, the product of historical trauma and of multiple cultural allusions—​most saliently, the archetypal figure of the Crucified, superimposed and brought to bear onto the memory of war.14 As Jean M. Wyatt observes, Septimus presents the most extreme example of character created by literary allusion. To Septimus, life is books:  he went to war “to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole” (the teacher who first introduced him to Shakespeare). […] When he goes mad he becomes little more than a compilation of literary fragments culled from his voracious reading, various incarnations of the dying god/​vicarious sufferer/​scapegoat.15 The name, too, functions within this framework—​where Smith suggests ordinariness, Septimus adds an intertextual, mythic layer of signification, in the manner of Joyce’s Dedalus. The character is an atypical everyman, a patchwork of quotations and signifiers that feed into an image of quotidian experience, but rewrite the quotidian as a cultural moment on the verge of collapse. Critics have noted that the madness of Septimus resonates with echoes of Dante’s Inferno. The association between a descent into madness and a descent into Hell is vaguely suggested through the insistent use of verbs that connote falling or plunging, the presentiment of a downward pull penetrating

13 14

15

Quoted in Kathryn Van Wert, “The Early Life of Septimus Smith,” Journal of Modern Literature 36.1 (2012), 78. For three very different approaches to the theme of Woolf and war, see Karen L. Levenback, Virginia Woolf and the Great War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999); Mark Hussey, Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991); and Saint-Amour, Tense Future. Jean M.  Wyatt, “Mrs Dalloway:  Literary Allusion as Structural Metaphor,” PMLA 88.3 (1973), 440.

114 Chapter 3 Septimus’s every thought and foreshadowing his death. The mythic resonances of the name come into full relief as part of this thematic setup. As Beverly Ann Schlack points out, The allusion to Dante’s Inferno supplies the single most illuminating explanation of Septimus’ strange first name. Behind Dante’s use of the number seven loomed the collected rhetorical power of the seven deadly sins and the seven sacraments. […] The seventh circle is the first one in Lower Hell. Only after readers realize that the circle that is Septimus is the circle of punishment for war, suicide and sexual perversion, can they fully appreciate the dazzling rightness of the allusion.16 Once alerted to the connection between Septimus and the souls of the seventh circle, it is possible to appreciate the Dantean derivation of certain images in the character’s hallucinatory consciousness. The most poignant of these is the motif of suffering trees, which feeds into a powerful Dantean meditation on the ethics of suicide and the expression of trauma. “K … R …” said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvellous discovery indeed—​that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life!17 And again: Leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement.18 The punishment that Dante devises for the suicides is a powerful contrappasso. Having betrayed their own nature, done violence to themselves, and usurped God’s right to determine life and death, the souls are stripped of their human 16 17 18

Beverly Ann Schlack, Continuing Presences: Virginia Woolf’s Use of Literary Allusion (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979), 70. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 25–​26. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 26.

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appearance and turned into sentient trees, tormented by Harpies. Their suffering produces a hum of disembodied sighs that mixes with the Harpies’ laments to ghastly effect. Dante’s walk through this eerie landscape deliberately recalls the wood that opens the first Canto, the use of the adjective “aspra/​aspri” describing both environments.19 At Virgil’s bidding Dante snaps a twig off one of the trees and it starts to bleed, spluttering its pain and unfolding its narrative in one and the same gesture. As from a green log, burning at one end, that blisters and hisses at the other with the rush of sap and air, so from the broken splinter oozed blood and words together20 The image is alluded to in Septimus’s distraught pronouncement that “men must not cut down trees,”21 and still more strikingly in the hallucination of red flowers blooming on his body like stigmata: “Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head.”22 Septimus becomes the cross to which he is nailed, his body traversed by far too many impressions—​overly porous, overly penetrated. But where Dante had used the imagery of twisted roots and knotted branches to suggest a peculiar state of being turned against oneself (his understanding of the suicide’s condition), Woolf gives us to ponder the paradox of an excessive connectedness to the world, an excess of feeling paired with the anxiety of being unable to feel. Her treatment of the psychology of suicide rests not on the conceit of being turned against oneself, but rather on the idea of being folded outward, infinitely extended into the surrounding environment. Here it is tempting to draw a tidy conclusion about the co-​implication of self-​mourning with tragic thought. The association would seem to be intuitive, even obvious. Stripped of any practicable sense of his own discreteness Septimus can only speak like Pier della Vigna, through the bleeding wound. The tenor of the allusions that make up his world is plainly tragic. His passion, his metamorphosis, his sacrificial death on behalf of an entire generation—​all place Woolf’s discourse on history under a tragic sign.

19 20 21 22

Dante, Inferno Canto I: 5, and Canto xiii: 7. Dante, Inferno Canto xiii: 40–​44. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 28. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 76.

116 Chapter 3 Yet if we consider the recurrence of the scene in Woolf’s fiction beyond Mrs Dalloway, we are able to highlight a change in Woolf’s approach to the question of historicity and to signpost the evolution of a theme that would find a more mature expression in Orlando. Orlando passes through time as Septimus is said to “pass through death.” Both are identified with the forces of history, and both embody those forces through the figure of a genetic/​generic transformation. But in the comparison between Orlando and Mrs Dalloway we discern a tonal shift. I propose that this shift is not unique to Woolf’s career—​that it is in fact a generalisable model against which to trace the historical emergence of the fantasy. Self-​mourning is always in principle either a deformation of tragic thought or a departure from the tragic. A tragic sensibility is encoded in its form (as one would expect of any trope that riffs on theories of mourning or that contemplates a time out of joint). Yet, time and again, the overriding inspiration for the scene is comedic. Orlando would fall into one of his moods of melancholy; the sight of the old woman hobbling over the ice might be the cause of it, or nothing; and would fling himself face downwards on the ice and look into the frozen waters and think of death. For the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy; and he goes on to opine that one is twin fellow to the other; and draws from this the conclusion that all extremes of feeling are allied to madness. (O 31–​32) Woolf famously confessed to having conceived Orlando as a literary joke, and, on a separate occasion, she described it as a delightful farce written “half in mock style.”23 But the book’s comedic inspiration cannot be reduced to a recognition of its wit or to an impression of levity. Comedy describes the amplitude, the scope of an action. It situates an event in relation to a structural limit, a relation that still determines, for Woolf, the unity of a literary work: “I began it as a joke and went on with it seriously. Hence it lacks some unity.”24 A recurring motif in the novel is the association of Orlando’s sex-​change with being dead. The scene of her return to England makes this connection explicit.

23 24

Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1925–​1930 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1980), 117. Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, 185.

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But now Orlando was to learn how little the most tempestuous flutter of excitement avails against the iron countenance of the law […] No sooner had she returned to her home in Blackfriars than she was made aware by a succession of Bow Street runners and other grave emissaries from the Law Courts that she was a party to three major suits which had been preferred against her during her absence, as well as innumerable minor litigations, some arising out of, others depending on them. The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which amounts to much the same thing; (3) that she was an English Duke who had married one Rosina Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her three sons, which sons now declaring that their father was deceased, claimed that all his property descended to them. (O 118) Orlando’s transformation and her continued existence in time beyond his/​ her natural lifespan are twin expressions of the same fantastic premise. Disregarding, for the moment, the role played by the Law Courts in this scene (a detail that invites comparisons with Pirandello, but also, most intriguingly, with Beckett’s and Flann O’Brien’s versions of the trope),25 I want to emphasise that Woolf’s satire targets not only gender identity but also the rationalist presuppositions underlying an ideal-​historical view of reality—​namely, the idea that the rational alone is real, and that history is the history of reason. Transgendered life, precisely, becomes a figure for madness, another instance of ghostly work. The claim that being a woman and being dead amount to the same thing is foreshadowed at several junctures throughout the novel. For instance, when the Archduchess Harriet Griselda intrudes on (the male) Orlando distracting him from his literary labours, we learn that she “desired above all things to make his acquaintance […] She had seen his picture and it was the image of a sister of hers who was—​here she guffawed—​long since dead” (O 81). Later, after Orlando’s transformation, we come upon the following parody of the gender politics implicit in romantic cliché: Indeed she was falling asleep with the wet feathers on her face and her ear pressed to the ground when she heard, deep within, some hammer on an anvil, or was it a heart beating? Tick-​tock, tick-​tock, so it hammered, so it beat, the anvil, or the heart in the middle of the earth; until, as she 25

I will develop these comparisons in the course of Chapter 4.

118 Chapter 3 listened, she thought it changed to the trot of a horse’s hoofs; one, two, three, four, she counted; then she heard a stumble; then, as it came nearer and nearer, she could hear the crack of a twig and the suck of the wet bog in its hoofs. The horse was almost on her. She sat upright. Towering dark against the yellow-​slashed sky of dawn, with the plovers rising and falling about him, she saw a man on horseback. He started. The horse stopped. “Madam,” the man cried, leaping to the ground, “you’re hurt!” “I’m dead, sir!” she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged. (O 176) Here two scenes are folded into one. At first glance, we are afforded the thrill of a perfectly stylised romantic encounter, complete with the amplified sound of a lady’s beating heart, which soon turns out to be a sympathetic metaphor for dramatic action (think of Elsa Lund’s more memorable “was that cannon fire or is it my heart pounding?”); the sense of danger at once heightened and dispelled by the arrival of a tall stranger on horseback; the gender politics written in the mise en scène, with the damsel in distress on the ground and the man “towering dark” against the sunlight; and finally, the brief, gallant exchange ending in the couple’s engagement. But a closer reading highlights the tension between a conventional and a secret reality. We catch a glimpse of the latter only when Orlando is alone with the earth, face pressed to the ground and about to fall asleep. (Of course, the theme of a secret communion with the earth ties in with the broader concept of a human body growing roots, or extending into the soil. The image itself, Orlando resting her head on the ground, is suggestive of burial, but it also speaks to what I described earlier as Woolf’s materialist vitalism.) At this moment, everything seems interconnected, open to change, under the spell of freedom. Reality itself is transformed into a play of rhythms traversing human and non-​human bodies, the heart becoming a hammer and anvil, becoming a horse’s hoof and an echo in the middle of the earth. But this secret world evaporates when the connection with the earth is severed and human company appears. Then, once again, convention rules the scene. Several critics have commented on the importance of the conceptual pairing of genre and gender in Orlando, where the central, gender-​bending conceit is so obviously bound-​up with the novel’s reflections on generic hybridity. James Miracky reads the novel as an allegory of Woolf’s search for a new type of writing, a genre “produced by the reconciliation of genders in an androgynous mind.”26 Focusing on the mixture of (fictional) biography and parody, he highlights Woolf’s 26

James J. Miracky, Regenerating the Novel: Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair and Lawrence (Hove: Psychology Press, 2003), 9.

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desire to “subvert what she sees as conventional masculine forms (e.g., literary history, realist fiction, biography, and the essay)” in order to “create new gender-​and genre-​bending ones.”27 In a similar vein, Sam Slote considers the novel’s strategies alongside Aristotle’s discussion of genre as a literary form that reflects the writer’s nature. His reading focuses on the tension that arises between the codified features of a given form, the correspondence of these features with a certain temperament or natural disposition, and the ethical value-​judgements determined by a work’s generic classification. As he explains, the ambivalence of genres lies in the fact that poets get to choose the form in which they work, yet this choice somehow expresses their nature, and determines their artistic choices. Genre is a kind of mask that is, or rather should be, appropriate to the wearer. But, precisely because it is a kind of mask, it can always be dissimulated. One can always select an improper mask and if one has enough cunning one can get away with it. […] Genre thus is an outward mask purportedly reflecting an inner truth that is enacted to perform distinctions of value. But the value of the generic distinction itself is jeopardised if the arbitration of genres can be confused.28 The power of Woolf’s novel, Slote concludes, has everything to do with its insistence on the indeterminate nature of genres and genders viewed alongside their determining power. Genres can be exchanged, transmuted, parodied, or mixed, but even at their most indistinct they control standards of appropriateness, they continue to shape expectations and to define identity. If Orlando brings matters of genre and gender to bear upon the theme of modern historicity, it is precisely by subordinating these categories to a radical force of becoming, promoting the principle of indeterminacy as the more primordial historical agency. The idea crystallises around the ghost-​imagery that informs the plot of Orlando’s disinheritance. As Erica L. Johnson notes in relation to the novel’s treatment of national history: “Woolf shows Englishness to be composed of exclusions as well as inclusions, revealing the extent to which national identity is haunted by what she might have called ‘invisible presences’, which inhabit national space not as subjects and citizens, but as ghosts.”29

27 2 8 29

Miracky, Regenerating the Novel, 9. Sam Slote, “Gillet lit le Joyce dans la Woolf: Genre in Orlando and Ulysses,” Journal of Modern Literature 27.4 (2004), 30. Erica L. Johnson, “Giving up the Ghost: National and Literary Haunting in Orlando,” Modern Fiction Studies 50.1 (2004), 113.

120 Chapter 3 In other words, Woolf’s ghosts become figures of historical dispossession, of the fertile tension between all that is forgotten and all that is remembered in history. Here, a third term is added to the genre/​gender dyad. The word ghost calls up, once again, the phantasmagoric quality of everyday life, the ordinary ringed by the strange, contemplated in Woolf’s discussion of James’s stories. But it also hints at the strained relation that Orlando’s biography keeps with the order of nature. What deprives Orlando of her legal and genetic inheritance—​of her standing in history and nature—​is precisely a supernatural transformation. Her change, as the biographer relates it, comes about suddenly, with no apparent regard for rules of cause and effect; yet it is also long in the making, and plainly prefigured in numerous details of the foregoing narration. It alters reality at its core, yet leaves all appearances, all incidental attributes, intact. In sum, with the impossible extension of Orlando’s life beyond one natural lifespan, and the ironic association of being woman with being dead, Woolf’s experiments with genre and gender are reframed as a story of generational haunting. These coordinates speak to a peculiar conception of nonhuman life in Woolf, emerging not only from her representations of natural environments (the animal world, the landscape, the starry heavens, the waves, and so on), but also, and more importantly, from figural strategies that emphasise the unbounded temporal character of generative processes between history and nature. As Gillian Beer has argued, one can hear a distinct Darwinian note in Woolf’s depiction of the Victorian age as a cultural moment marked by abundance, “rank profusion” and “prodigious growth.”30 Orlando registers the shock of evolutionary theory to the Victorian imagination, and, “using hyperbole to mimic hyperbole,”31 renders the discovery of a natural economy given to grotesque overproduction, in its syntax, imagery and plot. Plainly informed by late nineteenth-​century developments in the life sciences,  Woolf’s references to the natural world gesture towards a contemporary understanding of life as an emergent, creative force—​but a force that can never be disentangled from its historical dimension, never viewed at a remove from the distortions of ideology, the shaping rhetoric and the clichés, that characterise the historical moment. Recent Woolf scholarship has developed this premise in a number of directions, most prominently that of an ecofeminist reading for which Bonnie Kime Scott provides the blueprint: “Nature, as an inescapable aspect of being 30 31

Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-​ Century Fiction, 3rd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 115. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 115.

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human, went dangerously unacknowledged in the twentieth century, as predominant cultures delighted and indulged in modernity—​its various aspects including technical invention, urban development, rapid transport, global capitalism, militarism, and the empowerment of masculine assertion, based on Western values.”32 Scott argues that it is necessary, in light of this bias, to “discover a new, post-​humanist pattern that escapes androcentrism and the nature/​culture binary, and fosters richly varied, contextual, and relational thinking, holding in high regard all living beings.”33 Carrie Rohman carries the idea further in an inspired reading of The Waves that invites us to attend to the affective qualities of Woolf’s prose, to the vibrations and the rhythms of a language in which words “take on an animal and oscillating nature.”34 A few pages later, speaking of the character of Jinny, she identifies this dimension of language with the insight that “culture finds its roots in nature’s excesses.”35 My approach differs from these in the view that the eco-​critical privileging of the natural world (even as a corrective of a long-​standing cultural bias) misrepresents Woolf’s association of life with sheer excess—​indeed undersells it. I claim that Woolf’s insistence on the inseparability of nature and culture, entails a denaturing of nature itself; that it is reductive to think of life’s generative and transformative powers as part of a natural order of things. While a discussion of the interpenetration of nature and culture is of enormous interest to posthuman modernism, in and of itself, I dwell on it here in order to set up a substantially different point: that in dealing with life as an emergent, over-​ productive, self-​exceeding force, Woolf’s most radical move is to interrogate the primacy of the organic within modern theories of becoming. The discovery and observation of a natural order ringed by the supernatural, inscribes a false movement within organic form. Nature reveals a monstrous side. After 32 33 34

35

Bonnie Kime Scott, In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 2. Scott, In the Hollow of the Wave, 2. Carrie Rohman, “ ‘We Make Life’: Vibration, Aesthetics, and the Inhuman in The Waves,” in Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman, eds., Virginia Woolf and the Natural World: Selected Papers from the Twentieth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2011), 17. Rohman, “ ‘We Make Life’,” 20.—​In addition to Scott’s and Rohman’s influential studies, I should like to single out the following important contributions to the critical conversation on Woolf and nature: Christina Alt, Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Elise Swinford, “Transforming Nature: Orlando as Elegy,” in Czarnecki and Rohman, eds., Virginia Woolf and the Natural World: 196–​201; and Charlotte Zoe Walker, “The Book ‘Laid upon the Landscape’:  Virginia Woolf and Nature,” Beyond Nature Writing:  Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001): 143–​61.

122 Chapter 3 Darwin, after the war, and in the wake of an increasingly mechanised and urbanised experience of the quotidian, the very distinction between the natural and the ghostly is called into question. 2

Growing Rings, Being Historical

In Chapter 2 I suggested that Mattia Pascal’s library serves as an ideal setting from which to launch a parable on the exhausted life of spirit. In much the same way, trees in Woolf seem to function as figures of a haunted materiality, spatial markers by which to think through the paradox of a life in excess of life. In her distaste for the supernatural in fiction, Woolf turns to sylvan imagery to stage an event in which nature appears to supersede itself. Recent scholarship has focused on the significance of trees in Woolf’s work as vestiges of an ancient world within the modern. Mayuko Nakazawa argues for a symbolic reading of the tree imagery in The Waves, emphasising the contradiction between the stability of the roots and the seasonal changes signalled on the leaves, a metaphor for the unity and the multiplicity of human consciousness: “Woolf believes that both trees and the self consist of ‘a million atoms.’ The million atoms can be understood as the changing, shifting elements of life and also the fundamental elements of matter.”36 Caught between immobility and change, Woolf’s trees are monuments to a primordial past, but also living creatures subject to the rhythms of the present.37 For Susan Trangmar, in turn, this duality invokes a recurrent Woolfian concern—​the exploration of a reality that exists independently of human presence. By facing us with the image of a world from which humans are excluded, a world altogether indifferent to the constitutive work of consciousness, trees stand “as an elaboration of the porous boundary between the human and non-​ human elements [of the self], and as metaphor for the wandering patterns of an organic mind, ceaselessly seeking order out of chaos through language.”38 36 37

38

Mayuko Nakazawa, “ ‘A Million Atoms’: Virginia Woolf’s Primeval Trees in The Waves,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 81 (2012), 11. In the same vein, Derek Ryan’s reading of The Waves in The Materiality of Theory “emphasises a reality consisting of ‘phenomena’, as foundational units which include all features in a given experimental arrangement, with no ontologically predetermined separation” (177). Susan Trangmar, “ ‘A Divided Glance’: A Dialogue between the Photographic Project ‘A Forest of Signs’ and the Figure of the Tree in Virginia Woolf’s Writing,” The Literary London Journal, 10.1 (Spring 2013). Web.—​http://​www.literarylondon.org/​london-​journal/​ spring2013/​trangmar.html

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Examples span Woolf’s career. In To the Lighthouse trees are associated with the fullness of time, that ghostly, organic substance that inhabits—​and fills up—​time in its entirety, the sum of all actual and virtual occurrences (“And all the lives we ever lived,/​And all the lives to be,/​Are full of trees and changing leaves”).39 But they are also figures for the plasticity of life, for a peculiar evolution of thought and matter into impersonality. The mind grows rings; the identity becomes robust; pain is absorbed in growth.40 And a few pages down: Tuesday follows Monday:  Wednesday, Tuesday. Each spreads the same ripple. The being grows rings, like a tree. Like a tree, leaves fall.41 Time and again, Woolf registers the indifference of trees to human life, and takes note of a corresponding human ignorance:  “trees grow, and we don’t know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us.”42 Yet even as she insists on this division, her enduring concern is with the processes by which the two worlds overlap, and one perspective—​or indeed one organic form—​transforms into the other. The moment in which human and tree become indistinct, in which the mind grows rings, is also the tipping point of life into afterlife. But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one’s eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one won’t be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose shaped blots of an indistinct colour—​dim pinks and blues—​which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become—​I don’t know what.43 39 4 0 41 42 43

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 351. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 673. Woolf, The Waves, 696. Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall,” in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick (London: The Hogarth Press, 1986), 82. Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall,” 78.

124 Chapter 3 In these texts growing becomes the hallmark of a new type of being in the world. The processes which render human-​and tree-​life indiscernible coincide with a loss of focus, a blurring of distinct images, light and colour, prelude to the emergence of some other form of life (more definite, yet still indeterminate). The transformation is a matter of eyes and toes, with the latter replacing the former as a body’s privileged connection to the phenomenal world. The tree is eyeless—​which is to say that its being in the world is organised not by vision, or distinct perception, but by an extension of the extremities, a growing and pulling at the roots. One cannot help a comparison with the scene at Muir Woods Park in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In that famous sequence trees come to embody an extended natural time that emphasises, by contrast, the brevity of human life. Theirs is a time abstracted from action or mobility, a time without awareness and without attention; a truly slow time. MADELEINE: How old? SCOTTIE: Oh … some, two thousand years, or more. MADELEINE: The oldest living things … SCOTTIE: You’ve never been here before? MADELEINE: No. The point is driven home by the composition of the scene, a low-​angle, medium shot that highlights the sheer scale of one tree, a small fraction of which fills the frame, dwarfing the human figures beside it. With the figures aligned, the difference in scale between them seems almost to put a strain on perspective. Madeleine and Scottie appear at a distance, while the tree feels far too close. Inspired by the eerie setting, the dialogue renders explicit the anxieties invested in self-​mourning: SCOTTIE: What are you thinking? MADELEINE: Of all the people who have been born and have died, while the trees went on living. SCOTTIE: Their true name is Sequoia Sempervirens, always green, ever-​living. MADELEINE: I don’t like them. SCOTTIE: Why? MADELEINE: Knowing I have to die … The setting also resonates metonymically with the colours of Vertigo. Hitchcock’s use of red and green to underscore the film’s ghost imagery is

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Figure 3.1 Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo – Close-up on the eye (grayscale)

well-​known. Green is, unforgettably, the shade of the neon-​infused haze from which Judy Barton re-​emerges as Madeleine Elster. And it accompanies Madeleine and Judy at several strategic instances in the plot (Madeleine’s shawl upon her first appearance at Ernie’s, her car, Judy’s sweater in her first scene). Red, in turn, dominates the intense wallpaper background at Ernie’s, and is also the colour of Madeleine’s robe soon after she is saved from the fake suicide at Fort Point (while in that sequence Scottie wears green). Most importantly, red is foregrounded in the highly stylised title sequence, which opens with a Paramount and VistaVision logo in black and white, transitions to a discoloured shot of a woman’s face, and then, triggered by the close-​up on the eye, settles on a vibrant red image, making the emergence of colour the film’s first narrative subject. [Fig. 3.1 & 3.2] Perhaps more than any other element of the film, the interplay of colours, and their emotional or symbolic resonance, has been the object of sustained critical attention. But a more interesting angle for my argument is the non-​symbolic deployment of colour within a mesh of metonymic connections that foreground the dense, material sensibility of time and space, and set the workings of the human eye against a constant disorganisation of sense and perspective. The eye grows rings. [Fig. 3.3] Tom Cohen views the title sequence of Vertigo as one in a series of Hitchcockian signature moments that challenge the primacy of the eye, and with it, the authority and function of organic perception, in film theory and practice. Against prevalent interpretations of Hitchcock as the auteur of a film language centred on the gaze—​typically, the male gaze—​Cohen argues that

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Figure 3.2 Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo – Close-up on the eye (colour)

Figure 3.3 Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo – The eye grows rings

the eye in Vertigo “appears as if preinhabited by graphics and mnemonics.”44 Indeed, even before the narrative has gotten underway, before the time of the action, the film deploys a series of visual puns. The first is an unmissable play on the second V of VistaVision, which plunges dramatically to recall the sense

44

Tom Cohen, Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies. Volume 1: Secret Agents (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xvii.

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of vertigo and its initial letter, while it prefigures the shape formed by Scottie’s arms as he holds on to a rooftop gutter for dear life. In the same manner, the spiral of colour that emerges from the woman’s eye during the title sequence picks up the O of the title. In turn, that final O is amplified in an early scene in Midge’s apartment which contains a play on words ending in O: “Vertigo … bingo … Oh, Johnnie-​O”; but most importantly, it foreshadows the growth rings on the tree trunk in the Muir Woods sequence. The effect of these metonymic relays is to interrupt the identification between the camera and the eye, and to inscribe a “spectrographic” trace (Cohen’s term) upon the field of vision.45 Something of this ghostly inscription is in play in the scene at Muir Woods National Park. But while I am sympathetic with the general thrust of Cohen’s argument concerning the spectral logic of Hitchcockian signature tropes, I view the mobilisation of a ghostly trace in this particular sequence differently. Eli Friedlander has observed that colours seem to function counter-​intuitively in Vertigo, caught within a semiotic practice that maximises ambiguity, and subjects all surface reality (all surface effects) to ironic reversals: “even though color is an essential content of Vertigo I doubt that specific colors constitute a clear signifying system that can be read consistently throughout. If anything, what seems important is that we start seeing those colors repeated, as though their presence threatens the very unobtrusive continuity of visual experience.”46 The Muir Woods setting recycles the green and red details in the film, remotivates them (or pretends to do so) and unpacks their significance in relation to the theme of a life in excess of life. The trees’ true name, as Scottie explains, is “Sequoia Sempervirens, always green, ever-​living,” but the genus is better known as the California Redwood. By virtue of a pun that straddles visual and verbal cues the idea of the wood as a haunted space is metonymically aligned with the film’s treatment of colour as the stuff of ghostly apparitions, the very weight and texture of an image. The Redwoods are cast as a monument to the

45

46

Chris Marker’s La Jetée offers the most haunting narrative elaboration of this idea. The film is in many ways a meditation on the ghostly temporalities of Vertigo, and while many of its stylistic choices appear far removed from a Hitchcockian aesthetic (it is shot in black and white, the landscape is ruinous, apocalyptic, and its genre might be described as New Wave proto-​cyberpunk) there is no better illustration of the cyborgian implications of Hitchcock’s vision. Marker’s theme is precisely that of the eye haunted by spectrographic traces; but also the eye as affected, suffering tissue. In La Jetée the organ is set upon by scientists, and turned into a time-​machine. Fuelled by memory and desire, it is tasked to efface the present, to produce or project images that are at once real and illusory, ruinous and lasting, of the past and out of time. [Fig. 3.4] Eli Friedlander, “Being-​in-​Techni(color),” in Vertigo, ed. Katalin Makkai (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013), 176–​177.

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Figure 3.4 Chris Marker, La Jetée – The eye as time-machine

time and the space of self-​mourning; but they also tease out a ghostly figural effect at work in the medium of colour film itself.47 Several production details, and elements of the mise en scène, reinforce this impression of an uncanny, phantasmic space. As Murray Pomerance explains, “we are given to experience the height of the forest visually by means of the shafts of palpable darkness through which bars of sunlight run. The taller the trees, the more the forest blocks light.”48 Hitchcock was faced with the technical challenge of lighting the set without compromising this sense of bottomless, oppressive darkness: Achieving the visual quality of the forest was a logistical nightmare for the production, since, available sunlight being minimized by the dense growth, all the light had to come from hidden arc lamps powered at a distance. Particularly fine Japanese lenses were used with the apertures wide open, a method that normally reduces the depth of field. Therefore, 47

48

Tom Cohen has this to add on the spectrographics of “wood”: “The figure of ‘wood’ emerges across a series of names (Midge Wood in Vertigo, Charlotte Inwood in Stage Fright, Bishop Wood in Family Plot) of which the figure of Oak would be a subspecies owing to its troping of the O and the zero (Charles Oakley in Shadow, the Oak Bar at the Plaza). In part, ‘wood/​oak’ cites the tree as trope of nature itself as product of the ‘cut’, or preinhabited by a prosthetic, such as the archival circles of dates inhabiting the severed sequoia in Vertigo …” (Cohen, Secret Agents, 59). Murray Pomerance, An Eye for Hitchcock (New Brunswick:  Rutgers University Press, 2004), 234.

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to create the extraordinary sense of depth in the sequence, a great deal of light was necessary in the rear planes of focus. To the degree that the forest clearing can seem hidden away from the regular flow of light, that is, to the degree that lighting technique and copious supplies of electricity can make it discernible and yet not exactly bright, it feels abstracted from the everyday and from the continuum of history … .49 Here two ghostly temporalities vie for our attention. In the first place the sheer size of the trees is a direct, organic expression of their age (“the oldest living things”). The older they are, the bigger they get. Yet, as excessive old age in humans is customarily denoted by wizened, diminutive forms, this simple correspondence of age and size feels awry. There is, too, something offensive about the comparison—​and especially so, after one of the trees is addressed by Madeleine (“it was only a moment for you, you took no notice”). The tree continues to pay no attention, but in the staggering disproportion between one life span and another, the natural sign comes disfigured; the encounter denounces nature’s double standard and twists the image of the oldest living thing into a grotesque, uncanny figuration. But the sequence also provides a more reassuring image of time in the map of historical dates pinned onto the rings of the tree’s cross-​section. 1066 Battle of Hastings; 1215 Magna Carta Signed; 1492 Discovery of America; 1776 Declaration of Independence and so on … This is the record of a deceptively anodyne, universal history, to which the tree, despite its indifference to all things human, is forced to bear witness. Vertigo stakes its ghostly materialism precisely on the tension between an organic and an archival time. Within that project, the inattention of the tree calls to mind the same logic of radical secrecy, the same affective power of an immemorial past, discussed in Chapter 2 in connection with the paradoxical structure of the crypt. Incidentally, a sylvan setting will be used again in North by Northwest. Only in that film it is the male lead who fakes his own death and is brought back to life in the woods. Persuaded by the Professor to take on the role of Kaplan again, Roger O. Thornhill (the O stands for “nothing”) acts out a jealous scene with Eve Kendall for Vandamm’s benefit, pretends to be fatally shot, and is transported to a pine forest (the film script specifies “a lovely wooded glen”). This time the trees are thin and sparse, the space is well lit, and one can see Mt Rushmore in the background—​which is to say that history looks on, and appears to take an interest in the proceedings. Yet there is little in this setup 49

Pomerance, An Eye for Hitchcock, 235.

130 Chapter 3 to invoke the order of a primordial or pre-​human time; no counterfeit light, no uncanny perspective, no weight to the shafts of darkness, no spectral redoubling of the past. The faces carved on the mountain are all too familiar, and while their gaze is the cause of some anxiety, their authority is flippantly dismissed (“I don’t like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me …”). A natural and an archival past do coexist uncomfortably in Hitchcock’s use of the monument itself, and the tension between the two will become apparent when the action is transferred to the top of the mountain. Indeed, at that point the faces of Presidents will come disfigured; a giant nose will turn into a jutting boulder, a portion of one brow into a precarious foothold. But before then, the sequence among the pine trees merely offers a time-​out from the madness of history. Both Kaplan’s death and Madeleine’s possession are of course faked, and both films thematise the extraordinary power of a false identification upon the production and tradition of truth; but the implications of the two scenes within their respective plots are substantially different. Madeleine’s avowal of her own death is plainly a melancholic gesture; her identification with the dead is acted out in the name of a fixation with the past—​and furthers a conspiratorial, criminal plot calculated to produce an untruth. By contrast, in North by Northwest, Roger Thornhill fakes death and returns to life in order to become the action hero the film needs him to be. Always one step behind the truth—​always in flight, or comically reacting to circumstances—​he finally catches up with the narrative when he agrees to impersonate his non-​existent alter-​ego. His conversation with Eve Kendall coincides with a complete disclosure of the story’s remaining enigmas. It is certainly possible to explain away Madeleine’s “here I  was born and there I  died” in light of later revelations that would show the entire Muir Woods sequence to be part of an elaborate deception. The anxiety expressed by Madeleine/​Judy, and the disjunctive temporalities mobilised as a result, are easily dismissed as a falsehood. Yet, even within the more rational (or less supernatural) economy of the murder plot, even after the enigma of Madeleine’s strange behaviour has been solved, the impact of the scene among the trees—​ Madeleine’s sense of being trapped between two orders of the past, between two measures of mortality—​is real enough. That is to say, the exposure of Judy Barton’s conspiracy with Gavin Elster does nothing to dispel certain ghosts. In this connection, it is worth noting that the theme of haunting in Vertigo is only symptomatically tied to the storyline of Madeleine’s identification with Carlotta Valdes. Chris Marker’s famous conjecture that the second part of the film is entirely dreamt up by the catatonic Scottie captures beautifully the sense of enduring unreality—​the idea that unreality is ultimately more

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powerful than reality, or at the very least, indiscernible from it—​with which the film leaves its viewers. Marker’s interpretation remains one of the most original in Vertigo scholarship. And even if one hesitates to endorse its central claim, there is something irresistible to the way in which the essay teases out the Orphic resonances of Hitchcock’s narrative—​a narrative in which reality and unreality are made to duplicate each other as in a game of mirrors. In Marker’s view, “the entire second part would be nothing but a fantasy, revealing at last the double of the double. We were tricked into believing that the first part was the truth, then told it was a lie born of a perverse mind, that the second part contained the truth. But what if the first part really were the truth and the second the product of a sick mind?”50 Here too, as in Orlando, ghosts are the stuff of irrational histories. They come about when reality brushes up against unreality, at the point of hesitation between the two. Madeleine’s anxiety in the presence of the Sequoias rings true, even in retrospect, because the scene has little to do with Elster’s deception of Scottie. Its truth is an instance of the film’s broader concern with the doubling of reality and unreality, and the unreason that shadows official histories. We cannot look to the murder plot for an explication of this theme. But a perfect, stylised commentary is provided in the sequence at the Argosy Bookshop—​the folk history rehearsed by Pop Liebel, a local Mr Memory, and in particular, Liebel’s insistence on a generational perspective. And, uh, there was, there was a child, yes, that’s it, a child, a child. I cannot tell you exactly how much time passed or how much happiness there was, but then he threw her away. He had no other children. His wife had no children. So, he kept the child and threw her away. You know, a man could do that in those days. They had the power and the freedom. And she became the sad Carlotta, alone in the great house, walking the streets alone, her clothes becoming old and patched and dirty. And the mad Carlotta, stopping people in the streets to ask, “Where is my child?” “Have you seen my child?” Note the emphatic gendering of madness at the heart of the narrative, the knowing comments about the dated culture that makes Carlotta’s story both unique and exemplary, and the pathos that attaches to the image of the bereaved mother. 50

Chris Marker, “A Free Replay (Notes on Vertigo).” Web. Last accessed 28th November 2017. http://​chrismarker.org/​chris-​marker/​a-​free-​replay-​notes-​on-​vertigo/​ Originally published in Positif 400 (June 1994): 79–​84.

132 Chapter 3 The generational drama explored in Orlando is similarly gendered. But Woolf’s irony has a different target, and an altogether different flavour. Carlotta’s madness is the product, and later the ghostly symptom, of habitual, institutional violence (“a man could do that in those days”). The matrix is plainly tragic: a causal chain of injustice, intolerable loss, and insanity. In Orlando, by contrast, the symptomatic expression of the violence of history is an extension of one life into far too many afterlives, followed by a comical descent into bureaucratic limbo: “uncertain whether she was alive or dead, man or woman, Duke or nonentity […] she posted down to her country seat, where, pending the legal judgment, she had the Law’s permission to reside in a state of incognito or incognita, as the case might turn out to be” (O 118–​119). There is nothing psychological, much less personal or pathetic, about this madness. What starts out as a fantastic biography, doubling as a national history, becomes a legal farce, a case of extreme generalisation, then grotesque indeterminacy, the laws of genre and of nature going off the rails. Within this interpretive framework the oak tree fulfils a double function. Chronographic: it stands as a monument to the slow passage of time, and the continuity of life across several generations; and allegorical: it participates in a pattern of tree images featured across Woolf’s entire body of work, suggestive of a certain type of being in the world—​that is to say, an existence characterised by eyelessness (an indifference to a world of clear and distinct images), complex connection (not unlike a cybernetic system), and disproportionate growth. Both senses are in evidence towards the end of the novel, in a scene which finds Orlando returning to the foot of her favourite tree. This is the site that had stirred his imagination as a young boy, inspired his/​her literary ambitions through the years, and provided the theme of her acclaimed poem. The ferny path led, with many turns and windings, higher and higher to the oak tree, which stood on the top. The tree had grown bigger, sturdier, and more knotted since she had known it, somewhere about the year 1588, but it was still in the prime of life. The little sharply frilled leaves were still fluttering thickly on its branches. Flinging herself on the ground, she felt the bones of the tree running out like ribs from a spine this way and that beneath her. She liked to think that she was riding the back of the world. She liked to attach herself to something hard. (O 228–​229) Here, as elsewhere, the verbs do most of the work: the tree stands (as a monument might stand) having grown bigger and sturdier; the leaves flutter; Orlando flings herself … Woolf’s description aims first of all to provide a concrete, visual correlative to the tension between a fast and a slow changing reality, the

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precariousness of the present implied in the lightness of the “little […] fluttering leaves,” in contrast with the ever growing sturdiness of the tree itself. At the same time, the comparison of the tree’s roots to the backbone of the earth, coupled with Orlando’s signature act of flinging herself to the ground, reaches into the past, back to the memory of a youthful, carefree season somewhere around 1558. He sighed profoundly, and flung himself—​there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word—​on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth’s spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be. (O 13) In the echo between those two moments, 1558–​1928, the oak tree might be said to represent all that remains unaffected by time—​in a banal sense, the ideal form of time itself, or time understood as the constant medium of personal memory and historical change. A lesser writer might leave it at that. But what matters to Woolf, rather than some principle of continuity underlying all change, is to juxtapose two competing temporalities, two orders of change in nature, the better to highlight their incongruity and set the stage for an impossible transaction between them. Crucially, the life of the tree is subject to material processes no less than the human body (“it had grown bigger, sturdier […] but it was still in the prime of life”). But in that comparison, the very concept of becoming loses all shape, ceasing to be regulated by a sense of proportion or boundary. Orlando communes with the tree, the tree stretches its roots out into the earth, the earth appears to develop a spine—​and the extent to which these transformations are deemed to be material or spiritual, literal or metaphorical, becomes a matter of shifting coordinates. 3

Secret, Slow and Like the Intercourse of Lovers

Woolf’s genius is to have aligned this movement of becoming with a rhetoric traditionally reserved for the most intimate acts of identification. Orlando’s communion with the tree is likened to a secret exchange; it evokes the ideals of love and literary inspiration, the universal yet supremely private, and ultimately incommunicable, relation to one’s death, in short, all that exists at a remove from the idle chatter of society. Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? […] What could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these years to the old crooning song of the woods …? (O 229)

134 Chapter 3 The word secret, here, calls to mind an intimate topography that might have been associated, in a different context, with a desire for unmediated self-​ presence, the scene of a perfect coincidence of self and self-​image; only this act of identification turns the chronotopical coordinates of the scene inside out. It reimagines identification as a stretching out, as connecting with the world at one’s extremities and growing (the likeness of another) out of oneself. By the same token, we would normally take the word slow to refer to a deliberate, inward looking activity, the time of meditation or introspection. But in this case, it describes the longing of a poetic sensibility to be one with the passing of time, a movement purified of individual identity, life at its most general. Indeed, earlier in the novel, an attempt is made to explain the tension between slow and fast duration in terms of the distinction between a time of doing and a time of thinking: when a man has reached the age of thirty, as Orlando now had, time when he is thinking becomes inordinately long; time when he is doing becomes inordinately short. Thus Orlando gave his orders and did the business of his vast estates in a flash; but directly he was alone on the mound under the oak tree, the seconds began to round and fill until it seemed as if they would never fall. (O 69) The passage does not seem at first to be especially ambitious. It rehearses a beloved high-​modernist trope, a Bergsonian distinction between subjective and objective time, or between duration and chronology, thematised (and popularised) in many novels of the 1920s, most notably in Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Sure enough, time slows down during moments of introspection or contemplation—​and it seems to expand, to gain texture and weight when considered in and of itself, that is to say, when it is untethered from the customary view of clock-​time as a measure of external movement, distances covered, work done. But beyond these Bergsonian insights a more radical idea is at stake in the passage. Flagged by the reference to the oak tree, and foreshadowing the identificatory impulse of the later scene, the extraordinary slowing down of time knocks the very notion of thinking off balance. And, not for the first time in Woolf, the vital point is delivered parenthetically. In such thinking (or by whatever name it should be called) he spent months and years of his life. It would be no exaggeration to say that he would go out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man of fifty-​five at least. (O 69)

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These distortions of time and space, then, signal an extraordinary transition—​from a human manner of being in the world, still grounded in thinking, to an altogether different phenomenology. Recall the claim made at the start of this chapter—​that the staging of a fantasy of posthuman becoming in Woolf is premised on a tripping up of narrative and generic codes customarily associated with melancholia. Saint-Amour and Bahun both dwell on a series of rhetorical strategies that leave Woolf’s narratives melancholically suspended between two catastrophes. These strategies, as Bahun goes on to explain, enact a radical aesthetic programme by intervening upon the minimal components of narrative, and forcing units of sense (phonemes, words, paragraphs) into new formal relations. The result is a systematic transgression of received grammars of representation, and a novel—​Bahun’s focus is on Between the Acts—​that consistently pitches reality in an ontological no man’s land. “One may read this poetics of the hybrid and the unclassifiable as formal expression of Woolf’s insight that life and art, history and ‘supra-​history’, abide in a similar melancholic suspension.”51 The picture of a melancholic modernism presented here finds support in a variety of philosophical sources, most notably, Julia Kristeva’s exploration of melancholic genius in Black Sun, and Walter Benjamin’s writings touching on allegory and the dialectical image, from the early volume on German Tragic Drama to the Arcades Project.52 We know that for Kristeva melancholia is a fraught response to the original trauma of separation from the mother, the inability to absorb the trauma, and reinvest the losses, coinciding with a disturbance of those normative signifying functions and identificatory practices that allow the subject to feel at home in language. In the case of certain modernist avant-​garde writers (Kristeva’s most compelling example is Marguerite Duras), this position is expressed as a writing of silences and warped meanings, a literature that eschews catharsis and embraces its own disease. “Beginning with Heidegger and Blanchot respectively evoking Hölderlin and Mallarmé, and including the surrealists […] Melancholia becomes the secret mainspring of a new rhetoric: what is involved this time is to follow ill-​being step by step, 51 52

Bahun, Modernism and Melancholia, 165. The melancholy dimension of Woolf’s modernist engagement with technology is touched upon in Pamela Caughie’s volume Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000). Two standout chapters: Sonita Sarker’s reading of Three Guineas in light of Benjamin’s observations on the aura of the artistic work [“Three Guineas, the In-​corporated Intellectual, and Nostalgia for the Human”: 37–​66]; and Makiko Minow-​Pinkney’s analysis of the effects of twentieth-​century technology, represented by the shock and the exhilarating speed of the motorcar, on an increasingly fragmented experience of city life [“Virgina Woolf and the Age of Motor Cars”: 159–​182].

136 Chapter 3 almost in clinical fashion, without ever getting the better of it.”53 By this account, the crisis of representation so often associated with modernist poetics is reimagined as the strange condition of choosing to live with one’s own death over the pain of having to confront the traumatic scenario of matricide. The same inspiration informs Benjamin’s understanding of the value of critical thought in modernity. As Max Pensky has shown, Benjamin’s modernity is quintessentially melancholic in the sense that it arises from (and responds to) the experience of a devalued reality. The “great minds” of the baroque, unable to accommodate themselves easily to religious doctrines and political creeds according to which their own experience of general social crisis was to have been rendered comprehensible, perceive with horror the specter of an empty world. This is a destructive moment. But such devaluation leads to a creative response in art—​as in the Trauerspiel—​or in criticism.54 In other words, modern critical thinking is the expression of a history that has been emptied of revelatory force, a phenomenology of objects without currency, and of symbols severed from their theological ground. Within this paradigm, the sign embraces its decayed status, and operates by dint of its own paucity, a correlate of Kristeva’s invitation to “follow ill-​being step by step […] without ever getting the better of it.”55 My understanding of the posthuman chronotope in Woolf draws heavily on this theoretical corpus, but my principal interest, here, is in the meta-​historical dimension of Pensky’s argument. Whether we look to the aesthetics of the ruin at the heart of Benjamin’s historiography, or to a psychoanalytic valorisation of mourning and melancholia as foundational processes of the ego’s libidinal economy, the notion that modernism displays a distinctively melancholic character conforms to the developmental scheme set up in Hegel’s Phenomenology, and makes Hegelian sense of the century’s affinities with catastrophe and tragic thought. As noted in Chapter 1, the work of mourning is a perfect analogue for the organic processes that regulate and shape the unfolding of ideal history. Malabou explains that

53 54 55

Julia Kristeva, Black Sun:  Depression and Melancholia (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1989), 224. Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics:  Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 117. Kristeva, Black Sun, 224.

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Mourning is only truly possible when the right proportion of suppression and preservation is found. Yet the search for this right proportion is inseparable from the very movement of history […] In the course of the long working day of spirit, history searches for itself and finds itself as a right proportion between maintenance and annihilation:  in a word, as Aufhebung. One will have recognized, in the equilibrium between these two constitutive principles of the work of mourning, the very motor of the dialectic.56 Given this threefold equivalence (history/​the work of mourning/​dialectical form), we may well regard modernism as the symptom of a procedural failure, an interruption and deregulation of historical progress. Or better still, a falsification of the dialectic—​if it is true that melancholia is the onset of a magical cure, a short-​cut to healing, wherein the ego merely pretends to have successfully absorbed its formative traumas, then modernism might be the moment in which a false procedure, a simulacrum of mourning, vitiates the model, and puts on the face of reason. Here we find ourselves at a critical crossroads. For to argue that in modernism the ordinary workings of the dialectic have been replaced by a counterfeit, is to entertain at least one of the following ideas: 1. that from the standpoint of ideal history, the project of modernism is fundamentally false, that it rests on rotting ethical foundations (this is the position of the moralist who condemns modern art as decadent or degenerate); 2. that the attitude of modernism is chiefly diagnostic: in other words, modernism calls attention to the bankruptcy of truth and provides a means to work through the prevailing falsehood (this stance relies on a rhetoric of crisis in order to re-​inscribe the genius of the avant-​garde within the logic of the dialectic); 3. that a celebration of the power of the false is in fact its primary inspiration. The readings of Woolf considered in this chapter fall somewhere between the second and the third proposition. The uncanny temporality identified by Woolf scholars as a defining feature of her narrative, under the rubric of anticipatory grief, is not only an expression of interwar anxiety, but also the result of an effort to salvage grammars of representation—​to give the ruinous sign back to literature. And yet to do so not as a work of restoration, not necessarily 56

Catherine Malabou, “History and the Process of Mourning in Hegel and Freud,” Radical Philosophy 106 (2001), 17.

138 Chapter 3 with the intention of revitalising old forms, but, shall we say, out of fidelity to a new semiotic regime. As long as the discussion is framed in psychoanalytic terms, the conclusion to that statement must remain tentative. “Out of fidelity to a new semiotic regime” comes close enough, but here the concept of fidelity is itself a compromise between old and new grammars. Kristeva’s powerful phrase from Black Sun, quoted twice already, captures the contradictions implied in this line of argument, and the difficult balancing act it requires: “to follow ill-​being step by step, almost in clinical fashion, without ever getting the better of it” (my italics).57 That is to say, one wants to grant melancholia a bona fide philosophical power, to acknowledge and mobilise its positive value within dialectical thought. But the habit of reducing it to a pathological variant of the work of mourning persists. In the tension between the critical choices listed above (in particular, between 2 and 3) is a stylised representation of the ambivalence of modernism vis-​à-​vis the dialectic, and the century’s efforts to position itself in relation to ideal history. The tonal shift from Mrs Dalloway to Orlando exemplifies that ambivalence; and in many ways Orlando itself reads as a comic reflection on the meta-​ historical forces in play. The transgender narrative that stands as the plot’s central conceit highlights a disjunction between two histories, a time of privilege and one of exclusion and haunting; and in turn that division triggers an association between being woman and being dead. Thus we progress from biography as national history to a parody of melancholia (“I am dead, sir”). But, as I have argued, there is also a third moment to this narrative, an ecstatic redoubling of melancholic energies, signified by a peculiar use of the verb growing and by the heroine’s communion with the secret life of trees. Think of this moment, then, as the inscription of a false movement within organic form. Growing connotes plasticity, regenerative power, the continued subsistence of a life over time. But here it signals an excess of nature. Magnified, impossibly decelerated, it reshapes the relation of a life to its limit and renders becoming as an unbounded extension, a passage beyond possibilities. There is no question of keeping the right proportion, to use Malabou’s terms—​ no equilibrium. The mind that grows rings grows outward, in excess of self and nature. It is useful to recall, at this juncture, the discussion of finitude and mortality broached in the Introduction to this book. I  highlighted two seminal debates in posthuman theory:  very briefly, the first turns on a critique of 57

Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, 224.

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the transhumanist dream of transcending time and space, a rejection of the Moravecian fantasy of cybernetic immortality and a defence of the validity of materialist positions in the age of downloadable consciousness and digital reproduction; the second takes its cue from a twentieth-​century investment in vitalist metaphors and life sciences as the basis for a renewed engagement with questions of historicity and ethics. On both ends of the critical conversation, life is glossed as an immanent, impersonal, creative force; but also as the name of a shared vulnerability—​the principle by which to claim participation in an ethical community, or the irreducible value on which to ground a historically situated existence. In tracing these ideas back to their modernist sources I have argued that the posthuman calls for a vitalist dislocation of the concept of becoming away from the orders of history and nature (see in particular, C ­ hapters 1 and 3). In turn, this shift commands a new understanding of the tension between materiality and some principle of creative freedom one might associate, in the old idiom, with the life of Spirit (the theme of ­Chapter 2). It remains for the last chapter to develop the argument in light of discourses of embodiment. Focusing on the comic and mock-​Oedipal dimensions of the fantasy of self-​ mourning in Beckett and Flann O’Brien, C ­ hapter 4 will look at how several key features of embodied existence—​desire, sense perception, perspective, even an intuition, after Kant and Freud, of the possession of a moral sense that is inextricable from one’s instinctive life—​are reconfigured by both writers as they register the becoming-​inorganic of the human body, and engage with the pathos of a reality uprooted from its organic ground.

Chapter 4

Funny Being Dead! Tragic and Comic Laughter The dead die hard, they are trespassers on the beyond … Samuel Beckett

∵ There is an important comparison to be made between the tonal shift observed in the previous chapter, and the treatment of afterlife or death-​in-​life1 in Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien. The turn from melancholia to laughter registered in the excesses (vitalist, historical and temporal) of Orlando seems to find an echo—​if a strange, distorted one—​in the work of both Irish writers; specifically, in O’Brien’s fascination with the overlap of law and afterlife; and in Beckett’s invention of a species of ethical freedom born of extreme passivity. The comparison is nowhere more tempting than in the following sequence from O’Brien’s Irish Times column, featuring the posthumous misadventures of Sir Myles (the da): Sir Myles na gCopaleen (the da) who has been buried in the country for some months, was exhumed last week following a dispute as to the interpretation of a clause in his will, which purported to leave certain pictures in the National Gallery to the nation. The nation in question was not named, and lawyers held that the bequest was void for uncertainty, though it is no secret that with Sir Myles, words like ‘the nation’, ‘the Army’, ‘the services’ mean only one thing. The grand old man was alive and well, and looked extremely fit as he stepped from the coffin. ‘Never again,’ he said as he jested with reporters before being driven away in a closed car. (BoM 158) Regular readers of the column would have recognised the overt theme of the joke as a send up of bureaucratic cliché, amplified by a wry play on codes of 1 In this Chapter I will use “death-​in-​life” and “living death” interchangeably to signify any overlap between the two states. The notion of “afterlife” will also serve as a shorthand label for all tropes in which the boundaries between the life and death appear to have been transgressed.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004390355_​0 06

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respectability. It is not just that Sir Myles’s condition is intrinsically absurd. The detail that lands the first punchline is his improbable fitness: a jaunty hyperactivity, ill-​becoming a man of his station. The rest of the fragment rehearses the dead man’s comic attempts to control his own legacy. Starting with a hyperbolic display of calm under pressure, an unflappable intellect inclined to highbrow legal reasoning fresh out of the grave: “I considered carefully,” Sir Myles said, “the advisability of dying intestate but rejected the idea as too dangerous […] I would have placed upon me the onus of establishing quite novel juridical theses. For example, I would have to show that there is an alternative to testacy or intestacy, viz., extestacy, which would be the condition I would claim to be in. I would have to show that death is not final and conclusive. This in itself would involve equally recondite definitions of life. My own ‘existence’ would be called in question and I would have to prove—​on oath, mind you!—​that I was not dead, notwithstanding my recent decease and the hasty nuptials of my dear widow […] Even my undoubted right to participate as next-​of-​ kin in my own estate would be called in question. The income tax authorities would challenge the inclusion of funeral charges under allowable expenses and would probably insist on sticking me for death duties. It would all be far too troublesome. I would not like it at all. Gentlemen, I would rather be dead.” (BoM 158–​159) The vignette shares numerous features with the scene of Orlando’s return from Turkey. (Woolf and O’Brien are very different writers, temperamentally and ideologically, so that any comparison must seem incongruous right off the bat. It is all the more surprising, then, that the scenes should resonate in theme as well as tone.) Consider the role played by the law courts in both passages. The law functions, predictably enough, as an oppressive authority, empowered over life and death, but strangely unable to keep them separate. It is an obtuse agency, inflexible, blind to its own absurd contradictions. Woolf speaks, to this effect, of “the iron countenance of the law” which she opposes, as we saw, to the quick of life. The mock precision into which her prose descends as she enumerates clauses conveys that obtuseness perfectly: The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which amounts to much the same thing; (3) that she was an English Duke who had married one Rosina Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her three sons, which sons … (O 118)

142 Chapter 4 Flann O’Brien’s impulse is the same:  to mine legal language for comic effect and to highlight its obtuseness. Here too, it is the language of the law that makes being dead funny. Yet we cannot help noticing a difference in perspective (coinciding with the shift from an ironic third-​person narration in Woolf to a first-​person narration in O’Brien). Unlike Orlando, who experiences the absurdity of the law as a loss of privilege, Sir Myles is fully immersed in his condition, and fully identified with it. He revels in the paradoxes of a posthumous existence, and the ease with which he deploys legal concepts implies a position of mastery, or mock-​mastery—​a degree of at-​homeness if you will, in living death. This strange at-​homeness is in many ways the opposite of Orlando’s identification with life (as the very thing that history labours to exclude). For Woolf, life is affirmed from the perspective of a scandalous event. It is generically indeterminate, disowned by history, and limitless, extending beyond any individual lifespan. Sir Myles, by contrast, inhabits his limbo extravagantly, taking the sins of the law upon his own unbounded person. In his case, I submit, we do not laugh at the law’s absurdities, but at the strange combination of legal authority and irrepressible charisma. Here we might think of afterlife as a perverse identification with the letter of the law. The awareness of having lost everything, of having been disenfranchised by history and dispossessed of the most intimate relation to death, is either absent or grotesquely dissimulated. Within this interpretive framework, laughter signals the moment in which the relation to a limit is tripped. It is a loss of measure, a lack of proportion, the turning of a border into a frontier. 1

Arousing the Dead

A counterpoint to the Sir Myles vignette—​and perhaps the most extravagant variation on the scene, binding together laughter, law and afterlife—​is a famous sequence from The Third Policeman in which the anonymous narrator, having escaped the gallows by the skin of his teeth, finds freedom on the saddle of an eroticised bicycle. O’Brien too relies on cliché and gendered codes of romantic expression to describe love at first sight. We are told that the bicycle is “a thing of surpassing grace and elegance” (CN 378), its appearance “ineffably female and fastidious” (CN 378). At the same time, the encounter calls up homoerotic and autoerotic overtones when, passing his hand across the seat “with unintended tenderness” (CN 378), the narrator finds it “hard with a noble hardness” (CN 378), the leather reminiscent “of a human face, not by any simple resemblance of shape or feature but by some association of textures, some incomprehensible familiarity at the fingertips” (CN 378).

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The passage is all the more remarkable in that it remains the most convincing presentation of sexual chemistry in the writer’s entire body of work. That is to say, it would be convincing, if the feelings in question were not utterly implausible. (But who are we to judge?) The climactic paragraph extends the parody, and hams up the lyricism, but then falls back on a serious idea:  an association of erotic joy with an experience of freedom—​ physical:  all the more poignant given the narrator’s disability; as well as spiritual. I led the bicycle to the middle of the road, turned her wheel resolutely to the right and swung myself into the centre of her saddle as she moved away eagerly under me in her own time. How can I convey the perfection of my comfort on the bicycle, the completeness of my union with her, the sweet responses she gave me at every particle of her frame? I felt that I had known her for many years and that she had known me and that we understood each other utterly. She moved beneath me with agile sympathy in a swift, airy stride, finding smooth ways among the stony tracks, swaying and bending skilfully to match my changing attitudes, even accommodating her left pedal patiently to the awkward working of my wooden leg. (CN 380) Two details garnered from context are vital to a reading of this scene. The first is an identification of the bicycle with its rider’s genitals, established through metonymic association and by the migration of atoms from body to contiguous body in accordance with the novel’s eccentric physics. The second has to do with the strange legal status of the narrator who has come under the thumb of a capricious authority. Once again, the obtuseness of the law is fully on display. It matters none at all that the narrator is guilty of murder; nor that he has been condemned to death unjustly, without a scrap of evidence or anything resembling due process. In the realm of the dead, the powers of the law—​to judge, to punish, to protect—​are shown up in all their arbitrariness. “It is true,” he said, “that you cannot commit a crime and that the right arm of the law cannot lay its finger on you irrespective of the degree of your criminality. Anything you do is a lie and nothing that happens to you is true.” […] “For that reason alone,” said the Sergeant, “we can take you and hang the life out of you and you are not hanged at all and there is no entry to be made in the death papers. The particular death you die is not even a death (which is an inferior phenomenon at the best) only an insanitary abstraction in the backyard …” (CN 311)

144 Chapter 4 In this connection, too, the narrator’s escape from jail and the exhilaration he feels as he rides to freedom are entirely illusory. As his conscience informs him, he is “invisible to the law” (CN 309); and that, in and of itself, is a kind of freedom. But he is also unkillable, because already dead. The same condition explains his arousal as well as his suffering.2 Compare this version of the trope, so obviously invested in the arbitrary power of the justice system, with two precedents found in Ulysses. The first, occurring in Proteus, has Stephen Dedalus walking along the strand, reflecting on the movement of the tides. Before long, he looks down at the water and imagines the body of a drowned man hauled up to the surface. Then he imagines himself as that drowned man. Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A  quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun. A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue.3 In this case the arousal is entirely figurative, a cheap visual effect created by the fish moving inside the trousers. The close-​up on the quiver of minnows flashing through the slits of the trouser-​fly, nibbling at the corpse’s penis is deliberately (almost gratuitously) repulsive. Nor is there any trace of comedy in the passage, but rather a sombre, moody engagement with the materiality of the body, and the idea that organic life continues, constantly transformed, beyond the death of the individual. More directly relevant to O’Brien’s tone and thematic focus is the second example from Ulysses, developed in connection with the hanging of the croppy boy. The focus, in Circe, is on the duplicity of the law, its cruelty personified by the figure of the hangman, and the bureaucratic efficiency of British Imperial justice meted out upon the political martyr.

2 Maebh Long insists that “The hell of The Third Policeman is not a hell in the sense of a place of punishment designed by an omniscient deity. It is, rather, a hellish space of uncanny, undead survival” (Assembling Flann O’Brien, London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 57.—​While I am not entirely in agreement with her first claim—​there is, in my view, a marked metaphysical and moral, even moralistic, dimension to the narrator’s suffering—​I find the broader strokes of Long’s argument entirely persuasive, and take her second point entirely on board. 3 James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 63.

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(He jerks the rope. The assistants leap at the victim’s legs and drag him downward, grunting: the croppy boy’s tongue protrudes violently.) THE CROPPY BOY: Horhot ho hray hor hother’s hest. (He gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his deathclothes on to the cobblestones. Mrs Bellingham, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys rush forward with their handkerchiefs to sop it up.)4 Unlike the scene in The Third Policeman, which plays on the phony intensity of the dead man’s passions (despair before the gallows, love at first sight, unrestrained joy), the hanging of the croppy boy stresses the mechanical quality of the cadaver’s orgasm and the grotesquery of the public spectacle. By “mechanical” I mean here a lifeless movement, convulsive, disconnected from the intention (and the emotion) that ought to animate it. Joyce’s fascination seems to be with the instant at which life becomes disorganised when the quick and the organic part company. Bodies are reduced to abject waste, though a trace of vestigial sexuality remains. But it is not enough to say that the croppy boy’s orgasm is grotesque because drained of human emotion. The more salient point is that the spectacle satisfies the aggressive libido of the law. The pleasure is all another’s. This last claim highlights a perspective shared by both writers—​and equally by Beckett, as we will see. Here, in sum, is a comedic inversion of the speculative argument of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Recall the central insight of Freud’s essay: it is not simply that “the aim of all life is death,”5 but, more interestingly, that a conservative impulse—​a deep-​seated nostalgia—​inheres to life itself; and further, that this nostalgia is more fundamental to the organism than any desire to connect with others. A direct consequence of this idea is that the two drives, Eros and Thanatos, must be viewed as complicit forces. While they seem opposed to each other, they are in fact subservient to the same principle, distinct only in the most abstract sense.6 Freud speaks to this effect of an “organic elasticity” that is also “an expression of the inertia inherent in organic 4 Joyce, Ulysses, 691. 5 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol xviii (1955), 38. 6 Long provides a detailed commentary on the relevance of the death drive to a reading of the bizarre narrative situation of The Third Policeman. Especially illuminating is her discussion of the Sisyphean (infinite, repetitive, circular) nature of the narrator’s suffering. Drawing on Freud and Žižek, Long warns against interpreting the death drive as “a movement towards death”; it is rather a compulsive, repetitive movement that persists “beyond death, represented by an undead living on.”—​Long, Assembling Flann O’Brien, 61.

146 Chapter 4 life.”7 We must think of inertia, in this context, not as the negative counterpart of political agency, nor indeed as a symptom of physiological or moral disease, but as a defining feature of life at its most generic. As such its value to scientific and political thought remains unrecognised. We know that Beckett’s contribution to this conversation is shaped by his reading of Dante. The early fiction in particular borrows from Dante’s vision of the afterlife and finds in the purgatorial figure of Belacqua an intertextual prop by which to explore the ironies of divine judgement. As I will argue at greater length below, these ironies also overlap with a creative reading of Freud and inform Beckett’s critical engagement with psychoanalytic models of desire, of the origins of moral consciousness, of tragic attitudes to time and death. Beckett homes in on the tension between an omniscient, pitiless machinery of justice, and the urge to become invisible to the law. Accepting Freud’s premise that every living creature yearns to return to an earlier inanimate state, the already inanimate experiences his nostalgia as a form of banishment. Death is recast as an over-​sexed, overly-​empowered superego, its demands giving rise to a spurious joy (as in O’Brien), a travesty of ecstatic martyrdom (Joyce), or at best a desireless passion. The opening paragraphs of “Echo’s Bones” announce the motif of posthumous arousal alongside these staple Beckettian themes. The first line condenses an image of purgatorial waiting with a pun on rigor mortis (and sodomy): “The dead die hard, they are trespassers on the beyond, they must take the place as they find it, the shafts and manholes back into the muck, till such time as the lord of the manor incurs through his long acquiescence a duty of care in respect of them” (EB 3). Originally intended as a coda to More Pricks than Kicks, “Echo’s Bones” finds Belacqua sitting on a fence, “back at his old games” (EB 3) smoking cigars and indolently waiting out the time of his less-​than-​purgatorial afterlife. The action is divided in three parts, punctuated by three posthumous encounters. But the comedy is more aggressive, more overt than in other works.8 The first sequence turns on Belacqua’s involvement with a tireless prostitute who cannot seem to take no for an answer. Belacqua is dead and aroused, restored against his will to an awkward physicality:

7 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 36. 8 Laura Salisbury describes a wide variety of comic strategies deployed throughout Beckett’s work, and uncovers a pervasive comic inspiration that powers his treatment of affect. See Laura Salisbury, Samuel Beckett:  Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

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“How long do you expect to be with us?” said Zaborovna. “As long as I lived” said Belacqua, “on and off, I have the feeling.” “You mean with intermissions?” she said. (EB 6) .

“As long as I lived” harks back to the explanation given of his penance by the original Belacqua in Purgatorio IV. But now the irony of the sinner’s condition is redoubled, his inertia left at the mercy of an uncontrollable appetite. It was high time for a pause to ensue and a long one did. The lady advanced a pace towards the fence, clearly she was sparring for an opening, Belacqua pulled furiously at the immense cigar, a bird, its beak set in the heaven, flew by. “Too late!” he exclaimed at last in piercing tones. “Too late!” “What is too late?” said Zaborovna. “This encounter” said Belacqua. “Can’t you see my life is over?” “Oh” she said, in a voice something between a caress and a dig in the ribs, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.” (EB 6) The height of passion, for the Beckett of More Pricks than Kicks, is a reduction of desire to a state of mechanical arousal. Note that the comedy of this passage has nothing to do with the gift of an erection against all odds; nor should we ever mistake Beckettian laughter for the miracle of somehow being able to go on despite the impossibility of going on. Another joy is at stake in the grotesquery of Belacqua’s unwilling potency, an altogether different coordination of finitude and infinity. In the echo of the above pause she seized her opportunity, transferred her slyly grave deportment to the knees and thighs of the revenant, which parts of him trembled in the chill of the hour. A colony of rooks made their evening flight and darkened the sky, yes actually darkened the sky. Belacqua polished off his cigar, pressed it out fiercely against the rail, elevated his mind to God, crossed himself a thousand times. (EB 6–​7) Like so many Beckettian characters following in his wake, Belacqua awakens to an afterlife in excess of his own mortality, cheated of more than just his resting place. The theme of his suffering is the very same impotence implied in Molloy’s hopeless urge to “finish dying,”9 intensified, in this case, by the anxiety of being fucked interminably, without so much as an intermission; namely, an 9 Beckett, Three Novels, 7.

148 Chapter 4 impotence-​unto-​death, a draining of power that withholds even the freedom to die completely. 2

Testament, Figure and Cliché

In exploring the connection between laughter, law and afterlife, O’Brien turns to the form of the conversion narrative, drawing on a series of Pauline tropes and rhetorical figures to position himself historically as a reluctant modernist.10 The chief appeal of Paul’s rhetoric for O’Brien is the invention of a paradoxical relation to the law, a neither/​nor-​but-​both-​at-​once logic of self-​ identification with a legal subject or a legal community. O’Brien looks to Paul to characterise his own ambiguous status as an experimental modernist writer, and, simultaneously, a critic of modernist avant-​garde pretentions. The paradoxical structure of the conversion trope inspires a reflection on the historical present (the now of modernism) in its contradictory relation to tradition. But it also provides the existential coordinates of a time out of joint, the very texture of the present in which O’Brien’s characters exist. If we understand the present as continuity, as the time of conscious live experience, we might think of the typical Mylesian11 setup as a present shot through with the after-​effects of one’s own death. It is not life that is lived in real time but death itself. This narrative paradigm recurs throughout O’Brien’s body of work. In addition to the two works mentioned already, the circular hell of The Third Policeman, and the running gag in The Irish Times column on the testamentary troubles of Sir Myles, it features in The Dalkey Archive, where the apostle Paul makes a brief cameo appearance as one of Augustine’s “encorpified” companions: I sometimes roar after him “You’re not on the road to Damascus now!” Puts him in his place. All the same that Tolle Lege incident was no 10

11

Stephen Abblitt has thematised this ambivalent attitude towards the modernist avant-​ garde by focusing on O’Brien’s parodic treatment of Joyce in The Dalkey Archive. His argument identifies O’Brien as a reluctant or ironic modernist, divided between “his repeated disavowals of Joyce’s modernism, and his obvious dependency on the advances made by this literary movement”—​Stephen Abblitt, “The Ghost of ‘Poor Jimmy Joyce’: A Portrait of the Artist as a Reluctant Modernist,” in Julian Murphet, Rónán McDonald, and Sascha Morrell (eds.), Flann O’Brien & Modernism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 65. Myles na gCopaleen is one of several pseudonyms used by Brian O’Nolan, and is associated mainly, though not exclusively, with the Cruiskeen Lawn column. I follow standard critical practice in employing the adjective Mylesian to refer to the entire literary corpus, even as I privilege the pseudonym Flann O’Brien when making general claims about the author.

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conjuring trick. It was a miracle. The first book I picked up was by Paul and the lines that struck my eyes were these: “Not in rioting or drunkenness, nor in chambering or wantonness, nor in strife or envying: but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh in the lust thereof”. (CN 635) The “Tolle Lege incident” refers to the conversion of Augustine, the moment when Augustine was inspired by a disembodied voice to “take up and read,” specifically, to take up and read Paul’s epistle to the Romans. Indeed Paul’s authority presides over the entire afterlife of the novel. It is also implicit in the later discussion of Pneuma, the breath of life, or the living spirit which gives life to the body. Flann’s interest in Pauline clichés (in particular his rhetoric on the breath of life and the dead letter of the law) has a lot to do with the suspicion that death, in modern representation, has become a trivial event, at best a legal technicality. What happens when the afterlife becomes the purview of lawyers and bureaucrats is a triumph of cliché. As in the running gag of the “Sir Myles” vignette, being alive is scarcely distinguished from being dead. The lesson has a direct allegorical application for the craft of the modern writer. As several critics have pointed out, part of O’Brien’s genius was the recasting of English as a sort of mummified tongue. For Anthony Cronin, “The ­basic prose style of the first person narrator of At Swim-​Two-​Birds had sometimes read like a translation from the Irish […]. At others its very meticulousness, a sort of painstaking clarity and flatness, had given the impression that English was being written as if it were a dead language.”12 The effect is an ­upturned picture of the state of Anglo-​Irish power relations. But the move also resonates beyond immediate language-​politics to include matters of law, of testament and tradition. In this respect too, the afterlife of Sir Myles (the da) reads like a comic riff on the Acts of the Apostles. Paul famously stakes the authority of his word on two moments. The first is the moment of grace on the road to Damascus, an event by which the Apostle symbolically relives the passion and resurrection of Christ, and in doing so, rewrites the old covenant on Mt Sinai. The second is a systematic critique of legalism that seeks to redefine the relation of all free men to the law to which they are subject.13 Ultimately, both strategies address 12 13

Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien (London: Grafton Books, 1989), 106. “For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. For if they which are of the

150 Chapter 4 the question of what it means to be under the law—​under its protection, but also under its jurisdiction. Ostensibly Paul’s aim is to promote a doctrine of inclusiveness and universalism, but the polemical thrust of his writings is directed towards a supersession of both Jewish law and Roman citizenship. In this regard, the Epistle to the Romans wants to be two things at once: a reaffirmation of the past and a new beginning; conjunction and disjunction.14 Paul’s rhetoric relies throughout on a series of conceptual oppositions and chiastic reversals: the old is of course pitted against the new, the letter of the law against the Spirit, loyalty to the dead against loyalty to the living. Thus, for example, in Romans 7: For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. But now we are delivered from the law [having died to the law], that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter. […] For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I  died. And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death.15 In these reversals we observe a strange logic of simultaneous affirmation and disavowal, of having one’s cake and eating it too. The self is turned inside out. I am reborn to a present free from the burdens of the past. By the grace of God I am given a new start. But my new life is only justified to the extent that it repeats and redeems my old one; and the authority of my testimony depends on what I have suffered in the throes of death. The importance of this move in establishing Paul’s literary authority cannot be overstated. Paul can speak

14

15

law be heirs, faith is made void, and the promise made of none effect: Because the law worketh wrath: for where no law is, there is no transgression.” Epistle to the Romans 4: 13–​15. All references to Paul’s Epistles (Romans, Corinthians, Galatians) are from the Acts of the Apostles in The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments, Revised Standard Version. The clearest formulation of this double-​focus is in Romans 9–​13, to which Jacob Taubes provides an illuminating commentary: “My thesis is that Paul understands himself as outbidding Moses. […] Some hold, of course, that he is measuring himself against Christ, that he is now Christ and bears Christ’s suffering on his own body. I regard that as a total exaggeration, because he is always doulos, he is always serving. No, not that, but he does measure himself against Moses, that certainly. And his business is the same: the establishment of a people. That’s what’s accomplished by c­ hapters 9–​13.”—​Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2004), 39–​40. Epistle to the Romans 7: 5–​10.

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against the Jews because he is one of them in the flesh. And he can speak for them because his covenant repeats and updates the marriage contract God signed with Moses.16 But he also speaks for Christ because, like Christ, he died and came back among the living. Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I. Are they ministers of Christ? (I speak as a fool) I am more; in labors more abundantly, in prisons more abundantly, in stripes above measure, in deaths oft. […] Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep.17 The epic adventure of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians goes on to list numerous near-​death (and actual death) experiences, followed by a vision of the third heaven. How can an apostle speak on behalf of Christ without going through the harrowing process of death and resurrection? Paul returns to this question time and time again—​it is what justifies his entire mission. But we fail to understand that mission altogether if we treat the question as a mere figure of speech, or a thought experiment. I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth), such an one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth), how that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. Of such an one will I glory: yet of myself I will not glory, but in mine infirmities.18 16

17 18

A self-​styled Apostle to the Gentiles, or, as Taubes insists, an Apostle “from the Jews to the Gentiles” (Political Theology, 38), Paul challenges the privileged relationship between God and the people of Israel; and tests the possibility of universalising that privilege. Can the past survive such a revolutionary act? Does the Epistle to the Romans repeat the covenant at Sinai, extending its tenure both temporally and juridically, or does it simply close off one history to inaugurate another? The question is complicated by the fact that the covenant with Israel was never a wholly original event in the first place. Sinai repeats Abraham, who takes up from Noah, who redirects the promise to Adam. In what sense, then, is Paul’s covenant an absolute break from the covenants that precede it? Might we not think of it as the continuation of a long tradition? Second Epistle to the Corinthians 11: 22–​25. 2 Corinthians 12: 2–​5.—​In this connection consider also The Apocalypse of Paul, an Apocryphal text from the sixth century which tells of Paul’s journey beyond the third heaven (all the way to tenth).

152 Chapter 4 In the “Sir Myles” vignette, Paul’s militant rhetoric against the dead letter of the Old Testament is rewritten as a mock-​legal problem: a reflection on the minutiae of testamentary law. The parody may well be an end in itself; but viewed in light of several other scenes of death-​in-​life featured in O’Brien’s work, it lends itself to a broader commentary on the author’s poetics. Myles seems to be using Paul to engage an eminently modernist idea: that the task of the writer is to infuse life into a dead medium, to pour spirit into the dead letter of tradition.19 However, his fiction participates in this programme as it participates in the Gaelic Revival: by playing up the pretentiousness of its rhetoric. More precisely, it targets the century’s bad-​faith secularism and the falseness of its universalist politics. In place of the modern writer as a purveyor of the living word, as a Pentecostal figure or as a champion of Spirit, we come upon the allegory of writing as an insoluble testamentary problem. Once again, there is a sense of having only dead words to play with, of being able to speak with authority only from beyond the grave. 3

Two in One—​or, the Tell-​tale Foreskin

The parody of Pauline rhetoric is given a macabre twist in the short story “Two in One.” Here, life and death are folded into each other, as are, quite 19

The other side of the coin—​a life so stark, so far removed from social norms that it becomes indistinguishable from death—​is suggested in the motif of decomposition that inspires the domestic scenes at the beginning of The Poor Mouth. The cliché of the “child among the ashes” (CN 416) introduces us to a world putrefied at its core, and the sense of pervasive rot is reinforced through the symbolic identification between Bonaparte O’Coonassa and the family pig Ambrose. Maternity is an issue in both cases: the pig is suckled on cow’s milk, while Bonaparte is brought up among whispers that “[he] was not born of [his] mother at all but of another woman” (CN 414). Raised “among the ashes” (CN 416), as cliché would have it, his first memory is of almost getting burnt while sitting too close to the fire. Like Ambrose, he is adopted by the Old Grey Fellow, and left to play in a bed of mud, muck, and chicken droppings—​a youngster’s natural habitat “according to the old Gaelic tradition” (CN 416). “Later at midnight I was taken and put into bed but the foul stench of the fireplace stayed with me for a week; it was a stale, putrid smell and I do not think that the like will ever be there again” (CN 416). The scene is echoed (and ideally completed) by the episode of Ambrose’s death:  first, the pig stench drives Bonaparte’s mother to set fire to the house; then, the steam from the sick, rotting pig is itself mistaken for smoke, and finally, the pig is found dead of its own stench on the hearthstone. “Ambrose was an odd pig and I do not think that his like will be there again. Good luck to him if he be alive in another world today” (CN 423). In its insistence on the grotesque, on the grotesquely pathetic, The Poor Mouth substitutes teeming cliché for the spirit that breathes life into the word.

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literally, flesh and spirit, when the narrator, having killed his employer, provides an alibi for himself by wearing the skin of his victim. The plot follows a perfect symmetry. In the flesh, Murphy is mistaken for Kelly; but in spirit, Kelly is found guilty of Murphy’s crime, and sentenced to death in his place. Encoded in this pot-​boiler premise is thus another anti-​modernist, modernist metaphor: the figure of the storyteller as a homicidal taxidermist. It is important to take note of the overlap between taxidermy and Murphy’s literary craft. The opening paragraph already hints at a connection. The very first words draw attention to the act of storytelling and to the field of literary activity: The story I have to tell is a strange one, perhaps unbelievable; I will try to set it down as simply as I can. I do not expect to be disturbed in my literary labours, for I am writing this in the condemned cell. (SF 84) Murphy then talks at length about the skill and patience required of the taxidermist, and later names low job-​satisfaction as his major grievance against his employer. Kelly carried on a taxidermy business and I was his assistant […] He knew I had a real interest in the work, and a desire to broaden my experience. For that reason, he threw me all the commonplace routine jobs that came in. If some old lady sent her favourite terrier to be done, that was me; foxes and cats and Shetland ponies and white rabbits—​they were all strictly my department. I could do a perfect job on such animals in my sleep, and got to hate them. But if a crocodile came in, or a Great Borneo spider, or (as once happened) a giraffe—​Kelly kept them all for himself. In the meantime he would treat my own painstaking work with sourness and sneers and complaints. (SF 84–​85) The frustrations of an under-​appreciated artist thus provide the motive for Murphy’s violent act. The murder doubles as the subject of a good story and as the pretext for the most challenging, most rewarding job a taxidermist can hope to take on. In short, it is an opportunity for the narrator to ply his trade and to take pride in his art. Paul Fagan has unpacked the connection between taxidermy and writing by looking at the confessional strategies encoded in the story’s narrative situation. From within his “condemned cell” (SF 84)  Murphy appears to implicate the reader into a work of self-​fashioning and self-​justification. The confession is “ostensibly directed towards the goal of formulating the text’s ‘I’ as a coherent,

154 Chapter 4 communicable […] whole,”20 but, subsumed in the artist-​murderer’s craft, it is transformed into an act of dissimulation and self-​effacement. In this sense, as Fagan observes, “Two in One” reads as “an autobiography of how Murphy’s self comes not to be, or, perhaps, how it unbecomes.”21 Jennika Baines continues the exploration of the narrator’s confessional stance by pointing to the central conceit of the story as a variation on those impossible, infinitely regressive structures to which O’Brien resorts so often in the earlier novels: MacCruiskeen’s chests of drawers, de Selby’s series of mirrors reflecting all the way back into the past, the story within a story construction of At Swim-​Two-​Birds. In this case: The narrator of “Two in One” sits quite literally within another character: “that night I was able to look into a glass and see Kelly looking back at me, perfect in every detail except for the teeth and eyes, which had to be my own but which I knew other people would never notice” (SF 86). From within this narrator, too, comes the voice of every other character as all dialogue is provided through the narrator’s voice rather than within direct quotes. […] In this way every character comes from within this murderous character, who sits within another character, who sits within a cell and waits for death.22 Fagan and Baines both frame the central conceit of “Two in One” (Murphy’s decision to wear the skin of his murder victim) as the literalisation of an idiom—​and in both cases this ploy is shown to organise the game of doubles in the narrative. In Fagan’s reading, the theme of getting under someone’s skin points to an unsettling of the confessional scene, involving reader and narrator in a transformative power-​exchange, a kind of reluctant complicity; for Baines, the sense of a character sitting “literally within another character” establishes the murderer’s position as the (dubious, unreliable) foundation of the entire narrative construction, a perspective that inhabits and controls all perspectives.

20 2 1 22

Paul Fagan, “ ‘I’ve got you under my skin’: ‘John Duffy’s Brother’, ‘Two in One’, and the Confessions of Narcissus.” In Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies, eds. Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan, Werner Huber (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 72. Fagan, “I’ve got you under my skin,” 72. Jennika Baines, “The Murders of Flann O’Brien: Death and Creation in At Swim-​Two-​Birds, The Third Policeman, An Béal Bocht, and ‘Two in One’,” in Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies, 207.

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Joining this conversation, but adjusting the focus slightly, I want to claim that Paul’s rhetoric on the letter and the spirit of the law informs not only the central conceit of “Two in One” but also its figural strategies. Thus, while Murphy’s confessional narrative positions itself precisely on the borderline between the literal and the figural, the writings of Paul provide a theoretical backdrop to the story’s staging of its own use of literalised conceits for narrative composition. Paul’s intuition in Romans strikes a modern, almost Kafkaesque note. We are only subjects insofar as we submit to the authority of the law; indeed the law is the agency that makes us subjects, and in doing so it is able at once to condemn us and to save us. Without knowledge of the law we have no relation to sin; we are innocent by definition. At the same time, it is only by coming under its protection that we are capable of being redeemed. Paul resorts to the rhetoric of the living spirit and the dead letter precisely in order to resolve this contradiction. The move is accompanied by a distrust of literalism and a flat condemnation of all things of the flesh—​and right at the centre of the argument are some well-​rehearsed opinions on circumcision. For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.23 Paul’s hostility is directed at those who would see circumcision as a condition of salvation, or who would equate ritual with righteousness. By and large, the argument breaks down into three main objections: first, that they are far too literal in their interpretation of the law; secondly, that they ignore the primacy of spiritual reality over physical evidence; and finally, in a characteristically aggressive jibe, that in their eagerness to show off their piety, or to gauge the piety of their peers, they betray their exhibitionist and voyeuristic tendencies: “As many as desire to make a fair shew in the flesh, they constrain you to be circumcised; [or they] desire to have you circumcised, that they may glory in your flesh.”24 On all three counts, the issue is with circumcision understood as a physical marking, as a material sign of belonging to a community. It is best to quote from different Epistles to highlight the recurrence of strategic

23 24

Romans 2: 28–​29. Galatians 6: 12–​13.

156 Chapter 4 phrases: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.”25 And again: Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him. Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.26 Two figures, in particular, come into sharp relief here: Paul’s insistence on a “neither/​nor” logic as the condition of the appearance of someone new; and the sartorial metaphor of putting off the old man and putting on a new one. The pertinence of the latter to a reading of “Two in One” is obvious enough.  We may add putting on the new man to the string of literalised idioms that includes inhabiting a character, and, from the title of Fagan’s essay, getting under one’s skin. But the broader implications of the Pauline intertext also bear on O’Brien’s treatment of the Doppelgänger theme—​specifically, the scene in which Murphy morphs into his victim, and the final twist which provides the ironic moral upshot of the story. After the applied skin becomes unstable it fuses with Murphy’s own until the two, dead spirit and live flesh, become inseparable: “Kelly’s skin got to live again, to breathe, to perspire […] My Kelliness, so to speak, was permanent” (SF 87). Baines has touched on the topic of the law in “Two in One,” noting that at the start of the narrative “the murderer is already imprisoned by a swift and reasonably efficient judicial system. The police have the right man, they just have him for the wrong reasons.”27 That last qualification is not negligible. The point of the story, of course, is that in a sense they have the right man and the wrong man at the same time. One way to read the ending, following Baines’s lead, is as an affirmation of the infallibility of the law. By hook or by crook, a murderer will get his comeuppance and justice will be served. But then again, the same twist can also be interpreted as a demonstration of the arbitrary ways of justice. Truth is produced not by a process of unmasking, not by revealing the inner man, but by allowing a false appearance to become reality. When the legend becomes fact print the legend. In sum, “Two in One” takes its place alongside other texts by O’Brien, other allegories of writing in which life and death (or life and afterlife) are strangely 25 26 27

Galatians 6: 15. Colossians 3: 9–​11. Baines, “Murders of Flann O’Brien,” 208.

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folded into each other. But it ups the ante by reworking the premise into a modernist allegory of the act of figuration. I want to stress that the reversal of Spiritual values entailed in these texts does not automatically signal a materialist turn in O’Brien’s thought. Rather, it testifies to a strange moment in the history of Spirit, to a sense of living a time-​out-​of-​joint. In well-​worn modernist terms, what is demanded of the writer at such a time is an ambitious remapping of the relation of the present to tradition. As I suggested earlier, the originality of O’Brien’s response to this diagnosis consists first in playing up the materialist rhetoric; then in subjecting it to a moral, satirical critique. Correspondingly, we may see that his fiction opens up in two directions at once: 1.) existential, calling for a complete reorganisation of the order of reality: to be sure, the blinding light on the road to Damascus is not commensurate with experience. It is a violent event, occurring outside any margin of expectation, hence the comparison with dying and being born again. It is reductive to think of such an event as a change in the circumstances of a person. What comes undone is a person’s entire system of values; and 2.) political, enacting a “neither/​nor-​but-​both-​at-​once” gesture of resistance to the law: in Paul’s case a refusal of both the Imperial order of Rome and the authority of the Mosaic covenant, but in that refusal is also an appropriation of the concepts of citizenship and election for the purpose of a new relation to history; in O’Brien, an apprehension of the madness of the present (an anti-​modernist critique of modernity), premised on the identity of law and living death. 4

A Mad Juncture in the History of Spirit

The obvious counterpart to the rhetorical and ideological coordinates tested out above is a discourse on the co-​implication of laughter and madness. If the parody of Paul in Flann O’Brien’s fiction speaks to a perverse identification with the dead letter of the law, his investigation of madness is played out along generic fault lines, and somehow always entails an interrogation of the boundaries that separate tragic passions and comic laughter. Take for example the following Cruiskeen Lawn article in which Myles assumes the role of a theatre critic, a picture of scholarly pretentiousness, signalled by that supercilious refrain, “of course.” I HAVE NOT, of course, seen Mr Carroll’s new play. “The Wives Have Not Spoken.” But the title is good. […] I am told—​how reliably I cannot say—​ that all the characters in it go mad one by one. That, of course, is fine. It is

158 Chapter 4 not European, but it is fine. It gives me a thrill. One after another, they all go mad. At the end, everybody’s crazy and you have … tragedy. (But have you? Surely, I mean … for … tragedy, you must have somebody there sane enough to experience pity … and terror … ? Surely … the Greeks … still mean something … in this old Georgian Athens of the West … ?) (BoM 246–​247) On the surface Myles’s point is simple enough. The association of madness and tragedy is long-​standing, but by itself the theme cannot suffice to properly define the genre. What makes an action tragic is the emotional register underlying it—​namely, the production of pity and terror. Moreover, we are told that the staging of these emotions is for the benefit of the sane, and presupposes a rational consciousness to ground the experience. Simply put, it would not be a tragedy if the hero were to slip into madness without warning or reason. The descent must be gradual, and must follow clearly signposted steps leading to the completion of the tragic action. In short, tragedy may draw on madness as a favourite theme, but the plot itself, the tragic form of the descent, is nothing if not rational. Thus far, the argument is textbook Aristotle. But Myles’s purpose here is neither to rehearse a classical paradigm, nor simply to make fun of it. The idea, rather, is to explore the tension between tragedy and comedy; and to say something about the manner in which one genre comes to be mistaken for the other. The rest of the sketch continues in the same jokey vein, but with a telling change of tone at the very end: I may, of course, be misinformed about “The Wives Have Not Spoken” but what I heard gives me an idea for a fine play, three bangs of the gong up with the curtain and on the stage twelve characters sunk in a frightfully Celtic condition of rural lunacy. Then one by one they all get better. Doctor chap comes in, cerebral electrolysis, occupational therapy, most modern drugs and they all respond, soon the house is happy, everybody has a healthy mind. They all become registered readers of The Standard, develop “a healthy outlook” on life and one by one, they go up to Dublin and become fully-​fledged Knights. If Mr Carroll’s theme is tragedy, is mine comedy? I don’t think so. Mine’s rather tragic, too, you know. (BoM 247) If we accept the premise that a descent into madness (with the notes of pity and terror that it hits) is a quintessentially tragic plot, why is it so absurd, so blatantly wrong to think of its reversal as a comic paradigm? And what should we make of Myles’s claim that an ascent to sanity from madness is tragic too?

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A Brief History of Tragic and Comic Thought (Early Days)

Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy unfolds slowly, over several sections of the Poetics, but his definition essentially turns on two quite separate moments (and much confusion has resulted from the fact that the relation between them remains unclear). First, tragedy is introduced as one of two types of imitation available to the poets of the day. This leads to a comparison between tragedy and comedy which, from the get go, puts tragedy forward as the more serious genre. Note that no formal analysis is provided to substantiate this distinction. Aristotle simply tells us that at a certain stage in its genealogy, poetry “broke up into two kinds according to the differences of character in the individual poets; for the graver among them would represent noble actions, and those of noble personages; and the meaner sort the actions of the ignoble.”28 Following that premise, we conclude that tragedy deals with nobler characters and elevated themes, whereas comedy is concerned with the ridiculous and focuses on the errors of lesser people (the term lesser here has moral and aesthetic implications, but is also, inevitably, a marker of social class). With this, the comparison between the two genres is dropped, and we come to a long formal analysis aimed at breaking tragedy down into its constituent parts. This section of the Poetics contains the definition Myles is thinking about when he writes that “surely, for tragedy, you must have somebody there sane enough to experience pity and terror” (BoM 247). For Aristotle, tragedy entails the imitation of a certain type of action, one that is “serious, and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself […] with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.”29 It is important to keep in mind that by the time Aristotle provides this definition, he is not thinking about comedy at all. That is to say: there is nothing to indicate that the formal characteristics of tragedy listed here—​pity, terror, catharsis—​have a counterpart in any other genre. And yet countless theories of comedy have come back precisely to this moment, attempting to fill in the blanks by reverse engineering Aristotle’s argument, imagining what the flipside of pity and terror might be—​wondering how to interpret catharsis when the passions involved happen to be comic rather than tragic. Like it or not, the history of comic thought is founded on a

28 29

Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), iv: 1458/​§1448b. Aristotle, Poetics vi: 1460/​§1449b.

160 Chapter 4 sloppy philological reflex—​the same reflex Myles will imitate and make fun of with his idea for a new play based on “The Wives Have Not Spoken.” This is not to say, however, that the history of comic theory after Aristotle is entirely misguided, or that it needs to be set straight. On the contrary, my point is that the reflex is gloriously productive. And, as I have argued elsewhere, in relation to Joyce, it is especially productive within a Catholic context. Indeed, an important division within the concept of comedy seems to take hold during the Middle A ​ ges: on the one hand, the prose tradition stays true to Aristotle’s statement that comedy deals with the ridiculous. (This is the type of comedy we associate with the carnivalesque, with grotesque humour and with the celebration of the low-​brow.) On the other hand, Scholastic philosophy picks up Aristotle’s references to pity and terror, but gives the passions a theological twist. Tragedy is associated with the pity and the terror of Good Friday whereas comedy is identified with the joy of Easter Sunday. In this connection it is vital to disambiguate the concept of a dramatic passion from that of a subjective feeling. When I refer to tragic and comic passions, to pity and fear, madness and so on, I do not employ these terms as representations of psychological content or of an individual state of mind. Psychology doesn’t come into it all—​or if it does, it is a pre-​modern psychology, a psychology made up of allegorical images, like figures in a morality play. In a classical or a Scholastic sense the passions describe the way in which reality bends towards us—​or in which we bend towards reality. They give shape to a dramatic action, underlying it and punctuating it as it unfolds. Moreover, we know that in Catholic iconography pity, terror, and catharsis are invested with a precise liturgical significance:  catharsis becomes the aesthetic model for the principle of Purgatorial suffering; terror is allegorically identified with the crucifixion, and pity with the image of the Mother of Sorrows receiving the body of Jesus. Even at its most secular, modern tragic thought must come to terms with this religious undercurrent; and so too, must comedy, when it is theorised as some sort of transformation of tragic action. We come back by this path to the gist of Myles’s joke—​which invites us to ponder the absurdity of a comic plot devised simply by reversing tragic commonplaces. The joke seems to rely on two distinct moments: first, it renders a dramatic premise in the most abstract terms, the better to foreground the assumption that tragedy can easily turn into comedy with a few minor adjustments; next, it deliberately misrepresents the process by which that transformation takes place. Yet the question remains unanswered: how does tragedy become comedy—​ what must happen for one genre to turn into the other? Strictly speaking, for Aristotle, it shouldn’t. Tragedy and comedy are two distinct temperaments, and

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the difference between them is categorical. One would never morph into the other, except by an error of execution. For the Christian-​Scholastic tradition, by contrast, the change is gradual, and implies a spiritual ascent. We pass—​we progress—​from the passion of Good Friday to the joy of Easter Sunday; from the terror and the pity of Dante’s Hell, to the joy of Paradise … 6

“John Duffy’s Brother”

With that formula in mind, I would like to turn to the example of “John Duffy’s Brother,” perhaps O’Brien’s most nuanced, most carefully measured treatment of tragic passions. I propose that we read the short-​story as a fully developed counterpart of the silly idea for a play presented in the Cruiskeen Lawn article—​a modern exploration of the highlights that accompany a descent into madness, and an equally tragic return to sanity. The narrative opens with a long preamble emphasising the pleasures of third-​person narration, the double-​bind of sharing and keeping another man’s secret, and the safety of gazing outward unobserved. Then, with the transformation of Mr Duffy into a train, the narrative becomes more dramatic: there is a lot more dialogue in the middle section, and two additional perspectives are introduced: that of the train, which, having no power of introspection, does not feel embarrassment or shame, and that of the two colleagues, old Mr Cranberry and young Mr Hodge, who respond to the strangeness of the situation by viewing it as a joke. Mr Cranberry gave a laugh and winked at Mr Hodge […] “Alright, Mr train,” he said. “That’s a cold morning, sir. Hard to get up steam these cold mornings, sir.” […] Mr Hodge was sniggering behind his roller. (SF 57) The formal function of the two side-​kicks is double: they laugh a great deal—​ that is to say, they announce and amplify the comic potential of the scene. And they provide a mirror (an external counter-​part) to the un-​self-​aware perspective of Mr train. But it is the brother’s return to sanity that packs the story’s emotional punch: “We now approach the really important part of the plot, the incident that gives the story its significance.” I do not read the narrator’s signpost ironically. It is right at this point in the narrative that references to madness and sanity intensify; and in turn these are accompanied by a rhetorical insistence on fear.

162 Chapter 4 In the middle of his lunch John Duffy’s brother felt something important, something queer, momentous and magical taking place inside his brain, an immense tension relaxing, clean light flooding a place which had been dark. […] He gazed out into the day, no longer a train, but a badly-​frightened man. (SF 58) As with the first metamorphosis, Mr Duffy’s transformation into a badly frightened man happens suddenly, and without a discernible cause. There is, however, one crucial difference between the two events: in the former, Mr Duffy is “possessed of the strange idea” of being a train, he knows he is a train and he understands what he must do to operate properly as a train, but there is no indication that he is aware of the change itself—​of the before, the during and the after. To be sure, he picks up a few habits from his previous life; he shows up at the office, and recognises his colleagues. But he reacts with confusion when they speak to him: “ ‘Can you not see I am a train?’ he [says]. ‘Why do you call me Mr Duffy?’ ” (SF 56). The second event, by contrast, carries with it the full memory of the previous stage, and the real time (the before, during, and after) invested in the transformation. As Mr Duffy’s sanity is restored (“an immense tension relaxing, clean light flooding a place which had been dark”), his own self-​ awareness divides him from himself, and provides finally a perspective from which to register the fear and the pity that bubble underneath the joke. It is only after the cure that the narrator is able to register the damage done by the events of the day. And in a sense, the damage coincides with the cure itself. A closer look at the last page highlights this strange coincidence of sanity and desolation, “clean light” flooding the dark corners on one hand, and crippling fear on the other. Nothing could be further removed from the Scholastic idea that in comedy we rise above, and joyously transcend, the pity and the terror of our earthly existence. In a Scholastic sense there is no comedy here at all. If anything, the moments of nervous laughter serve to mask the true emotive impact of the scene: He gazed out into the day, no longer a train, but a badly-​frightened man. Inch by inch he went back over his morning. So far as he could recall he had killed no one, shouted no bad language, broken no windows. He had only talked to Cranberry and Hodge. Down in the roadway there was no dark van arriving with uniformed man infesting it. He sat down again desolately beside the unfinished meal. (SF 58)

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And again a few lines down—​the very last paragraph brings home the fragility of Mr Duffy’s condition by folding together the rhetoric of sanity (and madness) with the motifs of fear and silence: It was a complete cure. Never once did the strange malady return but to this day John Duffy’s brother starts at the rumble of a train in the Liffey tunnel and stands rooted to the road when he comes suddenly on a level crossing—​silent, so to speak, upon a peak in Darien. (SF 58) Keith Hopper has argued that the reference to silence in the last line resonates with intimations of the title character’s closeted homosexuality.30 I  find the claim persuasive, and take it fully on board. But my interest in the thematic complicity of silence and secrecy, here, is structural rather than psychological. Silence signals the turning inward of a gaze that had been, until now, only directed outwards; it is the loaded counterpart to hollow laughter and office chitchat. By this reading, the motif of silence serves to organise the world of John Duffy’s brother according to a traditional realist grammar—​whereby essences always underlie appearances; and the hidden is valued as more real than the apparent. What should we make, then, of Myles’s claim that a plot describing a return to sanity from madness falls, counter-​intuitively, under the rubric of tragedy? And where do we place “John Duffy’s Brother” in the philosophical conversation that would have us conceive of comedy as a modification of tragic thought? I have argued that the story plays with classical conventions. It goes back to Aristotle’s understanding of tragedy as the imitation of an action modulated by fear and pity, and to his association of comedy with a representation of the ridiculous. But against Aristotle, for whom the genres are ideally kept separate, O’Brien’s instinct is to look for the point at which the tragic and the comic overlap. On this count, “John Duffy’s Brother” would seem to subscribe to a comedic practice that identifies laughter with a distortion or a disfigurement of the tragic.31 Let us agree that there are at least two types of comedy at work in the story: the lame attempts at humour shared by Cranberry, Hodge and eventually 30 31

Cf., Keith Hopper, “Coming Off the Rails: The Strange Case of ‘John Duffy’s Brother’,” in Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies: 19–​32.  M. Keith Booker notes to this effect that “O´Brien’s comedy overlays a serious and sometimes dark attitude toward the human condition.”—​Booker, Flann O´Brien, Bakhtin and Menippean Satire (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 23.

164 Chapter 4 Duffy himself to cover up the embarrassment of the morning; and the subtle modulations of style that force tragic materials (pity, fear, madness) to brush up against the ridiculous. Neither of these is particularly joyous—​or funny. But they both have their use within the allegory of dramatic and critical concepts presented here. In the first instance, comedy is just a front, a flimsy mask used to conceal the true import of a situation. The ontological bias of the scene is plainly mimetic, and the implication is that reality is, at its core, frightening, and pitiful—​in a word tragic. The second instance invests comedy with a certain dignity, and with a real power, namely the power of the false or the counterfeit. Like an evolutionary joke that puts stripes on a leopard … Laughter, in this case is the symptom of a genetic swerve, the appearance in reality of something “completely false and unconvincing” (CN 265, 402). Once again we are persuaded to think of comedy as tragedy plus time—​ but not in the sense intended by Dante (for whom time marks the progress of a spiritual and emotional education); nor, indeed, the banal sense invoked by Lester, the character played by Alan Alda in Crimes and Misdemeanors (for whom time is the healer of wounds that allows us to revisit traumatic events and joke about them). In “John Duffy’s Brother,” terror, pity and madness retain their tragic character, and the comic element is at best an unconvincing appendage. But as it extends tragic form, as it pushes the representation a little too far, a little beyond the correct measure, comedy disfigures the passions and hands them over to the grotesque. Its time is precisely the medium in which the false and the unconvincing are empowered. 7

A Brief History of Tragic and Comic Thought (Modernity)

The distinction between tragic pathos and comic laughter goes directly to the heart of the debate on the ethics of finitude in modernity. At issue, once again, is the form of the dialectic itself, and the articulation of a historically situated subject in relation to the ideals of self-​determination, freedom and organic life. But while Hegel’s definition of tragedy is well known, the transition to comedy remains a little-​understood section of his aesthetics. As is often the case with Hegelian philosophy, it is necessary to begin by considering both genres in the context of a comprehensive, encyclopaedic system covering all those scientific disciplines and modes of knowledge by which Spirit ascends to self-​ understanding. This is to say that the distinction between tragedy and comedy is for Hegel part and parcel of the ideological setup, the faith in cultural progress, that regulates spiritual life.

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The resonances between tragedy and dialectical thought are of course already implied in the affinity of the Phenomenology with discourses of mourning (touched upon in previous chapters). But a thesis on the distinctive formal (and historical) features of tragic drama is only fully developed in volume two of the Aesthetics. There tragedy is famously presented as the dialectical elaboration and resolution of competing ethical claims. It entails the overcoming of particular perspectives, towards the realisation of an image of eternal justice. Hegel’s references to the tragic passions confirm his indebtedness to the Scholastic tradition. Adopting Aristotle’s statement that the effect of tragedy is to arouse fear and pity in order to achieve a catharsis of these emotions, Hegel warns against the danger of interpreting this principle reductively, as a sentimental appeal to an individual’s feelings, or an exchange of sympathy between the actor and the audience. What matters, rather, is the ethical dimension of the passions, the way in which they open onto an apprehension of a higher ethical order. Even in the case of Aristotle’s dictum we must therefore fix our eyes not on the mere feelings of pity and fear but on the nature of the subject-​ matter which by its artistic appearance is to purify these feelings. […] What a man has really to fear is not an external power and oppression by it, but the might of the ethical order which is one determinant of his own free reason and is at the same time that eternal and inviolable something which he summons up against himself if once he turns against it.32 The passions, then, are not psychological states, but a function of the relation between character and tragic action; an inner weakness or strength that drives a character to action—​not a content of the mind, but a force that seizes the character, the tenor of a certain single-​mindedness, and, by extension, the expression of the individual’s finitude. It is the object of tragic drama to stage this inner drive in order to dissolve it, to bring the conflict written in the character’s one-​sided passion to a resolution in the workings of divine justice. The discussion of comedy pivots on two points. 1. The first is a distinction between serious and unserious action, the former a feature of tragic drama, and the latter of comic form. That is to say, if tragedy indicates a high-​stakes moral conflict destined to be resolved only with the death of a tragic hero who fully and uncompromisingly

32

Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 2, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1197–​1198.

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identifies with the passion that drives him, comedy implies the resolution of a conflict without real consequence, an action all the more self-​ affirming for being unsubstantial. “In comedy there comes before our contemplation, in the laughter in which the characters dissolve everything, including themselves, the victory of their own subjective personality which nevertheless persists self-​assured.”33 Persists is a key word here. Consider the plot of The Big Lebowski: the dude’s quest to replace a favourite rug, or indeed his completely accidental solution of the mystery of Bunny Lebowski’s kidnapping, capture perfectly the idea of an “infinite light-​heartedness […] felt by someone raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in it at all.”34 We proceed from failure to failure, and every new frustration is met with the refrain, “Ah, fuck it,”35 the very opposite of tragic one-​sidedness. In this case, the unsubstantial nature of the action is a fitting expression of the character’s personality, synthesised in the tag line, “the dude abides.” Hegel’s second pivotal distinction is between the merely laughable and the properly comic. The former may include satire, schadenfreude, malicious wit (pranking), mirth at the expense of a poor man’s misfortune; it might coincide with the smug unmasking of a rival’s pretentiousness. None of these are worthy of a true comic spirit. The flattest and most tasteless things can move people to laughter, and they often laugh all the same at the most important and profound matters if they see in them only some wholly insignificant aspect which contradicts their habits and day-​to-​day outlook. In such a case their laughter is only an expression of a self-​complacent wit, a sign that they are clever enough to recognize such a contrast and are aware of the fact.36

Comedy, by comparison, is always positive, always a benign sentiment. From this perspective, an example of true comic inspiration might be “John Duffy’s Brother” if the ending were heavily rewritten—​if the protagonist were to carry the memory of his transformation without shame or fear, indeed feeling strangely energised at the rumble of a train in the Liffey tunnel, and unable to suppress a certain spring in his step whenever he comes suddenly on a level-​crossing. In 33 34 35 36

Hegel, Aesthetics, 1199. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1200. Ethan and Joel Coen, The Big Lebowski (Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2005), passim. Film. DVD. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1200.

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short, if he were able to embrace the train-​like symptoms of his desire with a light heart. Comedy belongs to the dazed but happy survivor, the subject who is undeterred, even invigorated, by inadequacy, failure or death.37 But perhaps the most surprising feature of Hegelian comedy is that it comes after tragedy. It is the crowning moment of Hegel’s Aesthetics—​in the systematic review of all the fine arts, it takes the last spot—​and coincides with “the dissolution of art altogether.”38 What does it mean, then, for one genre (necessarily) to come after another—​and for this coming after to be played out on the stage of universal history? Here we arrive at a crossroads, a defining dilemma of modern critical thought, the stakes of which cannot be over-​emphasised. On the one hand, Hegel appears to confirm Aristotle’s postulate of two genres existing independently of each other, two formal units that function abstractly as predetermined moments in the artistic education of Spirit. On the other, he re-​inscribes the difference between the genres within a developmental or a genetic frame. Henceforth, the passage from tragic pathos to comic laughter must be conditioned on a certain articulation of time. 8

Tragic Laughter: Beckett and Deleuze

Deleuze’s reflections on tragic and comic form are developed far less systematically than Hegel’s, and must be pieced together across a number of works. The

37

38

While I do not entirely agree with the overall materialist emphasis of his interpretation, Žižek provides another extremely pertinent example of Hegelian comedy: “the ultimate comic scene is that of a false death: say, the proverbial scene of the solemn funeral with all the relatives gathered, crying and praising the deceased, when, all of a sudden, the allegedly dead awakens (he did not really die, after all) and asks what the hell is going on, what’s all the fuss about …”—​Slavoj Žižek, “Laugh Yourself to Death: The New Wave of Holocaust Comedies!” Lecture at Lund University. 15 December 1999. Web. http://​www. lacan.com/​zizekholocaust.htm—Last accessed 28th September 2017. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1236.—​There is in fact a slight dissonance between the prestige Hegel accords to tragedy (as suggested by his tone, by the length of the discussion and the detail invested in his analysis), and the importance of comedy, certified, mainly, by its position in the book. As Mark W. Roche points out, “The superiority of comedy within the Hegelian system was clear to nineteenth-​century thinkers attuned to Hegel’s dialectic […] In the Phenomenology and the Aesthetics, comedy has an unambiguously later (and superior) position. Though Hegel may have had a stronger emotional attachment to tragedy, the systematic position of the two genres is beyond question.”—​Roche, “Hegel’s Theory of Comedy in the Context of Hegelian and Modern Reflections on Comedy,” Revue internationale de philosophie 221.3 (2002): 421–​422, note 5.

168 Chapter 4 main signposts are 1.) a reading of Hamlet as a parable on Kant’s Copernican turn, ushering in modernity with a radical reimagining of the form of time; 2.) a critique of the psychoanalytic uses of Oedipus as a regulatory fantasy of universal desire; and 3.) the notion of schizo-​laughter, associated with a canon of modernist writers and thinkers, most notably Nietzsche, Kafka and Beckett. The trajectory is laid out in the first two chapters of Difference and Repetition. It begins with the uncovering of a philosophical secret, “a precise moment within Kantianism, a furtive and explosive moment,”39 the power of which Kant himself did not fully comprehend. As Deleuze goes on to explain, this moment is the introduction, within the history of philosophy, of a passive dimension of the Cogito, a passivity that precedes all conscious work, and conditions every act of representation. It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time. In this form it is the correlate of the passive self which appears in time. Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution.40 From the standpoint of this passive self, Deleuze’s reading of Hamlet becomes the story of the birth and formation of a modern philosophical unconscious. Hamlet and Oedipus are now redeployed as allegories of how the modern Cogito, the self-​contemplating ground of phenomenological experience, emerges as a temporal being, where time is understood as the form of self-​relation. In other words, the reading of Hamlet feeds into a formal analysis of the Cogito’s power to be affected, and thus lays the groundwork for an account of the first stirrings of the phenomenal world. In lieu of a dialectical procedure based on abstract negation, Deleuze mobilises a pre-​subjective, pre-​representational order of repetition, a dialectic of infinitesimal differences. Deleuze’s intuition is that after Kant and after Hamlet the term “Oedipal” takes on two quite irreconcilable meanings. In one sense, it describes the unmooring of time from tragic action. In another, it betrays that same articulation of time for the sake of a wholesale fantasy dedicated to the empowerment of a normative state of desire. The overwhelming importance of Beckett in Deleuze’s canon of twentieth-​century writers has a lot to do with a tendency to

39 40

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 58. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 86.

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inhabit this dual sense—​in a word, with the insight that his work is simultaneously Oedipal and mock-​Oedipal. “First Love,” Beckett’s most systematic reworking of Oedipal motifs, provides an ideal test-​case. The narrative opens with an ironic nod to psychoanalysis: “I associate, rightly or wrongly, my marriage with the death of my father in time” (FL 11). The statement implicitly puts the narrator on an analyst’s couch (the scene of therapy is already hinted at in the first two words) and foreshadows two pivotal moments in the story:  the meeting with Lulu/​Anna on a public bench, and the use of the couch in her apartment. That the association between the father’s death and marriage is made “in time” and that it calls for a suspension of judgement (“rightly or wrongly”) seem to be, at first glance, unnecessary clarifications. But they do focus our attention on the peculiar temporal structure of the narrative, on its treatment of tragic time and its resonance with the idea of tragic justice.41 Both these themes are in fact of extreme pertinence to a Deleuzian reading of Beckett and I shall return to them later. At this juncture it must suffice to note that the psychoanalytic premise of Beckett’s short story is submitted to an ironic reversal of gender roles the very moment it is set up. As various commentators have observed, the Oedipal drama of “First Love” begins not with the narrator’s expulsion from a state of perfect unity with the mother, but with his eviction from the idyll that was his father’s house.42 It is the figure of the father (his house, his grave, his provident corpse) that is invested with nostalgia, with a sense of wholeness and self-​identity only compromised by the erotic encounter with Lulu. The narrative itself takes the form 41 42

For an interesting discussion of tragic ethics in Beckett see Andrew Gibson, “Three Dialogues and Beckett’s Tragic Ethics,” in Three Dialogues Revisited, eds. Marius Buning et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003): 43–​54. For more on the story’s reworking of Oedipal motifs see Julia Kristeva, “The Father, Love and Banishment,” in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S.  Roudiez (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1980):  148–​158; Paul Davies, “Three Novels and Four Nouvelles: Giving up the Ghost to be Born at Last,” in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996): 43–​66; Daniel Katz, “Beckett’s Measures: Principles of Pleasure in Molloy and ‘First Love’,” Modern Fiction Studies 49.2 (2003): 246–​260; and Sigi Jöttkandt “The Narcissism of Small Differences: On Beckett’s First Love,” A: The Journal of Culture and the Unconscious 3.1–2 (2003): 117–​126. Jöttkandt’s commentary in First Love: A Phenomenology of the One (Melbourne:  re.press, 2010)  is especially relevant to my argument here:  “Beckett’s First Love dethrones many of the key tropes and tenets of the psychoanalytic myth of first love as mother love. For starters, it is not from a blissful maternal but a paternal universe that the narrator is summarily ejected. And instead of tracing a narrative of return to the mother (through one or more substitute objects, more about which in a moment), the key narrative events are separations and expulsions rather than reunifications” (9–​10).

170 Chapter 4 of a series of flights that seem to repeat the trauma of that first eviction, charting a progression from the graveyard to the marriage-​bed (the bench where the narrator and Lulu meet), and from Lulu’s apartment out into the open street. Sigi Jöttkandt describes this structure as a reversal of traditional spatial hierarchies, “a spatial back and forth movement from inside to outside and back again,” by which life is turned “into a periodic series of small deaths.”43 By this reading, the plot of “First Love” is simultaneously serial and circular; it follows an infinitely digressive pattern only to come back to its beginning when the narrator relives his father’s departure by abandoning his own son. It is in the contemplation of this paradoxical plot structure (the digression that brings us full circle, or the infinitely open series of relived deaths) that Beckett’s reading of Oedipus seems to coincide most obviously with Deleuze’s. In Oedipus the King, the hero’s banishment is pronounced three times, each repetition serving to punctuate the ironies of the tragic action. The first time looks to the future, as Creon brings word from the oracle at Delphi that in order to free Thebes of the plague that has stricken it, it will be necessary to banish the murderer of the former King Laius. The second is rooted in the past when Laius banishes his infant son who, as prophecy decreed, was to bring about his death. And the third brings the action in line with the present as Oedipus realises that he is, after all, his father’s murderer. In “First Love,” too, the motif of banishment is bound up with the central irony of the plot, though in this case the narrator’s wanderings have nothing to do with fate or prophecy. “What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion this evening. When she had finished and my self been resumed, mine own, the mitigable, with the help of a brief torpor, it was alone” (FL 18). Here, love is understood as a relinquishing of the self, a disturbance of the comforts and the habits that shore up identity. Deleuze, in turn, focuses on the wandering of Oedipus as a feature of the play’s temporal structure, signalling a far-​reaching philosophical change in the relation between time and tragic action. As Deleuze observes, Oedipus’s story is emptied of the moral clarity that traditionally governs the interpretation of tragedy. The hero is suspended in a world in which the moral dimension of his acts (the ethical horizon which in advance judges him, and immediately condemns his transgressions) has become indefinite.44 In a sense, Oedipus only emerges as the hero of his own tragedy when he realises his own transgression. 4 3 44

Jöttkandt, “The Narcissism of Small Differences,” 118. On this score, we will see that Deleuze draws an explicit analogy between the wandering of Oedipus and Hamlet’s hesitations.

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But the realisation takes time. By the play’s odd structure, the interpretation of his actions, the very possibility of judging them, lags behind the actions themselves. In this context, banishment describes the state of being adrift in time, orphaned of the law—​lawless in the most radical sense: The tragic cycle of time is, broadly, like three unequal arcs of a circle; there is the moment of limitation; limitation is nothing other than justice, it’s the lot assigned to each. And then there is the transgression of the limitation, the act which transgresses. […] Before Sophocles, in the Greek sense of the tragic, it’s man who eludes the limit. You can see, in the limitation-​limit, man transgresses the limit and in so doing eludes the limit; but with Oedipus one can no longer say that it has the atmosphere of someone who transgresses the limit, who eludes the limit. In the case of Oedipus, it’s the limit which is elusive.45 At stake, in both Beckett’s and Deleuze’s reflections on tragic form, is this new understanding of the limit, by which “limit” ceases to denote a proscription, or a limitation, and becomes the inhabiting of an extremity (life turned into a series of repeated deaths). This radical redefinition of the concept of finitude is precisely what Deleuze has in mind when he writes that tragedy is opposed to the dialectic: “not a dialectical opposition, but opposition to the dialectic itself.”46 It is a mainstay of Deleuze’s philosophical project, and a key aspect of his interest in Beckett’s work. Viewed in light of Deleuze’s encounter with Beckett, Oedipus becomes a testing ground for two competing theories of tragedy—​corresponding to a distinction between two concepts of the limit and two distinct articulations of desire. Famously, the issue informs Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis in Anti-​Oedipus, where Oedipal desire is explicitly identified as the metaphysical blind-​spot of psychoanalytic theory, and a betrayal of its original potentialities. Psychoanalysis is like the Russian Revolution; we don’t know when it started going bad. We have to keep going back further. To the Americans? To the First International? To the secret Committee? To the first ruptures, 45 46

Gilles Deleuze, “Lecture on Kant (Part II:  21/​03/​1978),” Cours Vincenne, trans. Melissa ­ cMahon. Web. https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67—​Last accessed 16th ­September M 2012. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 17.

172 Chapter 4 which signify renunciations by Freud as much as betrayals by those who break with him? To Freud himself, from the moment of the “discovery” of Oedipus? Oedipus is the idealist turning point. Yet it cannot be said that psychoanalysis set to work unaware of desiring production.47 By providing Freud with a parable for the interpretation of a universal fantasy Oedipus domesticates desire, and bends it to the form and the ideal power relations of the nuclear family. It reins in the unconscious. More importantly, it brings the unconscious under the purview of the law, transforms it, as it were, into a regulated process, and recuperates desire to the order of representation. The unconscious is reduced to a mere theatre of dreams. What Freud and the first analysts discover is the domain of free syntheses where everything is possible: endless connections, nonexclusive disjunctions, nonspecific conjunctions, partial objects and flows. […] This will all be lost, or at least singularly compromised, with the establishment of a sovereign Oedipus. Free association, rather than opening onto polyvocal connections, confines itself to a univocal impasse. All the chains of the unconscious are biunivocalized, linearized, suspended from a despotic signifier. The whole of desiring production is crushed, subjected to the requirements of representation.48 Against this paradigm, Deleuze and Guattari propose an understanding of the unconscious as a site of unregulated production. The consequences of this critique extend to an ambitious revision of the death instinct. If for Freud the death instinct names the tendency of all organisms to return to an original undifferentiated state beyond life (a version of the law of entropy applied to psychobiological processes), for Deleuze it corresponds to an investment of energy that deregulates acts of self-​identification and manifests the form of repetition itself. Here the distinction between organic and inorganic matter has no purchase. Death is folded into life as an impersonal force of becoming, the very principle by which differences are produced and reality is affirmed in all its multiplicity. It is not the destiny or destination of all living things, but the matrix of a tragic, ecstatic movement, the pain and simultaneously the joy of metamorphosis. 47 48

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-​Oedipus:  Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R.  Lane (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 55. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-​Oedipus, 55.

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Implied in this idea is a new articulation of the concept of tragedy, wherein tragic thought is cleared of its association with paternal authority, with prohibition, and with the law conceived as a limiting or a negating force. Freud’s reading of Oedipus is dismissed as a banal drift: “a true renaissance is needed in order to liberate the tragic from all the fear and pity of the bad listeners who gave it a mediocre sense born of bad conscience.”49 9

Limits of the Dialectic

The importance of Beckett in Deleuze’s literary library is well documented, yet the nature of the affinity between the two figures remains a point of debate for Beckett and Deleuze scholars alike. The critical stakes are first laid out by Anthony Uhlmann who writes that if we are to believe the publicity which follows Beckett and Deleuze, then, strictly speaking, their projects should be considered irreconcilable. After all, Beckett is, in caricature, associated with negation, the expression of nothing, failure, the misery of being; all of these are (no doubt justifiably) critical commonplaces in the field of Beckett studies. On the other hand Deleuze is, like Spinoza, seen as a philosopher of affirmation, of joy, of positive Being which requires no negation.50 More recently, Audrey Wasser echoed the sentiment when she argued that reading Beckett alongside Deleuze helps reveal the inadequacy of a pair of commonplaces that attend both Beckett and Deleuze’s work, respectively: on the one hand, that Beckett’s novels and plays pursue a progressive negation, an impoverishment of meaning, and a straining towards silence and formlessness; on the other hand, that Deleuze’s philosophy is wholly affirmative of the plenitude of being.51 In short, the pairing is as irresistible as it is counter-​intuitive, with much of the evidence to support the hypothesis of a common Deleuzo-​Beckettian project 49 50 51

Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 17. Anthony Uhlmann, Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9. Audrey Wasser, “A Relentless Spinozism: Deleuze’s Encounter with Beckett,” SubStance 41.1 (2012): 133.

174 Chapter 4 coming from Deleuze himself. Aside from the extended analyses of “The Exhausted” and “The Greatest Irish Film,” Deleuze returns to Beckett numerous times throughout his career, most notably in Anti-​Oedipus and in the book on Kafka. Common to many of these passing references is a tendency to situate Beckett in a tradition of writers whom Deleuze associates with a joyous inspiration—​a tradition that includes Kafka and Nietzsche. To understand Deleuze’s fascination with Beckett is to recognise the quintessentially funny character of these writers. It is to see laughter not as an incidental effect, but as a defining aspect of their work. We will term “low” or “neurotic” any reading that turns genius into anguish, into tragedy, into a “personal concern.” For example, Nietzsche, Kafka, Beckett, whomever: those who don’t read them with many involuntary laughs and political tremors are deforming everything.52 But if joy is such a vital element of Beckett’s writing, why is it so easy to misconstrue? What must we make of this scrupulous warning not to confuse laughter with anguish? In point of fact, Deleuze is even reluctant to characterise Beckett’s humour as oblique. To ignore the laughter in Beckett is to read him poorly—​to overlook an obvious point: Max Brod tells us how the audience would laugh hysterically when Kafka used to read The Trial. And Beckett, I  mean, it is difficult not to laugh when you read him, moving from one joyful moment to the next.53 I would like to elaborate on the paradox of a “joyful moment” (or a burst of laughter) that is both hard to miss and too often mistaken for something else, by suggesting that laughter in Beckett is inextricably bound up with tragic form. More precisely, I want to claim that the laughter Deleuze admires in Beckett takes root in tragic action; it repeats the tragic and transforms it as a whole.54 We must start by taking note of two distinct reflections on tragedy occurring early on in Deleuze’s career. The first sets the tone for a powerful 52 53 54

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka:  Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 96. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–​1974, ed. David Lapoujade (New York: Semiotexte, 2004), 257–​258. Rabaté writes of another type of laughter in Beckett, one that springs from a “deflated pathos” (Think, Pig! 124), and that he associates with the theme of birth. There is, I think, a compelling symmetry between the anxiety that attaches to womb imagery in Beckett and the recurring motif of a dispossessed afterlife.

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interpretation of Nietzsche, presenting the evolution of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a systematic exploration of anti-​dialectical intuitions. The focus on The Birth of Tragedy is all the more significant in this context since tragedy has traditionally been viewed as a dialectical form. Deleuze rehearses Nietzsche’s original understanding of the tragic as a reconciliation of Apollonian and Dionysian forces. To the extent that it dramatises and resolves the clash between two opposite poles—​one standing for the principle of individuation and the other for the principle of primordial unity—​tragedy may indeed be seen to fit a dialectical setup. But Deleuze insists that Nietzsche’s true insight consists in trying to remould that setup into a new type of contradictory logic.55 Such an attempt will come into clear focus late in Nietzsche’s career as he revisits the main ideas of The Birth of Tragedy. Whereas in its early conception the clash between Apollo and Dionysus conforms to a pattern in which tragic suffering must be lifted onto a higher plane to be absorbed into the unity of pre-​individual life, in the revision of Ecce Homo the ascendancy of Dionysian forces—​the identification of Dionysus with the very essence of the tragic—​is reinterpreted as an affirmation of life in all its diversity and transformative power. Saying yes to life, even in its strangest and hardest problems […] this is what I understood as a bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not freeing oneself from terror and pity, not purging oneself of a dangerous emotion through a vehement discharge—​such was Aristotle’s misunderstanding of it—​but, over and above terror and pity, being oneself the eternal joy of becoming, that joy which also encompasses the joy of destruction …56 Incompatible with Platonism and with Christian ethics, removed to the margins of cultural history, such a view of tragedy is tantamount to saying that life is sufficient unto itself, that it requires no redemption by a higher power and no elevation to the joys of a better world. For Christianity the fact of suffering in life means primarily that life is not just, that it is even essentially unjust, that it pays for an essential injustice by suffering, it is blameworthy because it suffers. The result of this is that

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See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, especially 10–​17. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 47.

176 Chapter 4 life must be justified, that is to say, redeemed of its injustice or saved. […] How different this aspect is from the true Dionysus!57 Dionysus suffers differently: not in the spirit of self-​sacrifice, but in an ecstasy of self-​creation (which always carries within it a self-​destructive passion). His suffering and his laughter are thus inseparable; both speak of a blameless life, of a process of becoming that is unmoored from judgement. Here tragic thought undergoes an ironic reversal. If the original sense of the tragic is lost to modernity, if it has been replaced by dialectical and Christian grammars of thought, this is not to say that we are left with an injunction to mourn it, or that we must attempt to restore its power by demonstrating its historical primacy. Yet neither can we simply accept the death of Dionysus as a matter of course. To render the Nietzschean concept operative again it is necessary to put its spectral character to work. The power of the tragic, in Deleuze’s philosophy, is the anachronism it enforces. The Preface to Kant’s Critical Philosophy brings this theme to the foreground. The book opens with a commentary on Hamlet’s line “the time is out of joint,” a formula which, for Deleuze, announces the turn to modernity with absolute epigrammatic precision. As Henry Somers-​Hall explains, the “focus of Deleuze’s philosophical interest […] is in Hamlet’s hesitation,” an aspect of the play which can lead to an altogether new understanding of tragic drama “[p]‌rovided we do not simply explain […] hesitation as a contingent psychological phenomenon.”58 Deleuze speaks of a new conception of time wherein time ceases to be subordinated to the rhythms of nature, to the cyclical movements and seasonal changes that order the natural world. That is to say, speaking in dramatic terms, it ceases to be a measure of action, or to function as a fixed term within which one plays out the stages of one’s tragic destiny. A time out of joint is a time that affords no assurance of restored order or poetic justice. Like the wandering of Oedipus, it puts the action in a completely new relation to the system of values which serves as its ground. And by the same token, it puts life in a new relation to its limit.

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Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 15. Henry Somers-​Hall, “Time Out of Joint: Hamlet and the Pure Form of Time,” Deleuze Studies 5, December Supplement (2011), 67.—​In addition to the essay by Somers-​Hall, I refer the reader to Garin Dowd’s excellent discussion of Deleuze’s use of Hamlet’s formula in relation to Kant and Beckett.—​Garin Dowd, Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), especially 227–​232.

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Tragic thought thus comes into contact with a well-​known Beckettian motif—​the experience of time as interminable hesitation, as a purgatorial suspension of judgement. Of course, not all hesitation is tragic (in the same way that not all laughter takes root in tragedy). Beckett’s case is emblematic precisely because it calls for a different understanding of the relation between an action and its projected end. It does not stand for a pause in the action, nor does it merely indicate the faltering of a character’s will. Rather, it marks a sort of break within time, a gap that sets off the action but leaves us stranded on the far side, making any sort of resolution or progress impossible. Belacqua’s cagey replies to Zaborovna’s advances, or Molloy’s inability to finish saying his goodbyes, are both hesitations of this kind; Deleuze himself mentions “Murphy’s metabulia,” an extreme lack of will that hollows Murphy out and seems to situate him in a state of passivity vis-​à-​vis his own thoughts,59 but perhaps the most salient example is at the beginning of Endgame: I hesitate, I hesitate to … to end. Yes, there it is, it’s time it ended and yet I hesitate to—​ (He yawns.) —​to end.60 Hamm’s “I hesitate” harks back to Hamlet’s indecision but empties it of all but the most general dramatic value, and makes the action, if possible, even more inert. After Beckett we understand that hesitation is not a plot device, or an aspect of the hero’s character. It is a condition of plot. It is said of time itself.61 Deleuze’s reading of Hamlet promotes a similar revision of the play’s temporal structure. As mentioned above, the anachronism announced in Act i scene v is reinterpreted as a figure for the insistence of tragic thought in modernity; 59 60

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Gilles Deleuze, Essays, Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), 30. Samuel Beckett, Endgame and Act Without Words (New  York:  Grove Press, 1994), 3.—​ The Shakespearean debts of Endgame are well documented by Beckett scholars, most notably by Theodor Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” New German Critique 26 (1982):  119–​150; Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (New  York:  Norton, 1974); and Ruby Cohn, “Endgame,” in Twentieth-​Century Interpretations of Endgame:  A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Bell Gale Chevigny (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:  Prentice-​Hall, 1969): 40–​52. Stanley Gontarski develops an interesting analysis of the relation between movement and time in Beckett, via a Bergsonian/​Deleuzian critique of Eleatic paradoxes.—​Cf., S. E. Gontarski, “Creative Involution:  Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze,” Deleuze Studies 6.4 (2012): 601–​613. I am also indebted to Salisbury’s excellent chapter on Endgame in Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing, 113–​147.

178 Chapter 4 it describes the effects of Dionysus, of the original sense of the tragic, upon time itself. The first of these effects entails the liberation of time from the form imposed upon it by natural order (or by divine law). Deleuze parses out Hamlet’s line proceeding from a literal to an allegorical interpretation: “The hinge, Cardo, indicates the subordination of time to precise cardinal points, through which the periodic movements it measures pass. As long as time remains on its hinges, it is subordinated to extensive movement; it is the measure of movement, its interval or number.”62 When time comes unhinged, when it loses its cardinal bearings, it forgoes all moderation. It stretches out beyond itself, and, pushing past its projected limit, finds its bearings by an infinitely receding horizon. Such excess is what marks our experience of time with a sense of before and after. But this does not mean that time itself is successive (on this point too, the relation between time and action needs to be re-​conceptualised). As Deleuze specifies, it is important to understand that succession does not define the form of time; rather, it is time that imposes an order of succession upon objects. This is the germ of Kant’s Copernican revolution: we pass from the notion of time as a tally of cardinal numbers (numbering the key-​points in a plot, keeping count of the action), to time as pure relation, as the disposition of an action within an ever-​changing whole. It goes without saying that the change described here, from a cardinal to an ordinal distribution of time, parallels the change in the classical conception of the “limit” discussed above, in connection with Deleuze’s reading of Oedipus. Indeed, the philosophical stakes of the argument are the same: both discourses—​that of the number and that of the limit—​address metaphors employed in Aristotle’s theory of time. In the Physics, Aristotle famously defines time as the “number of motion with respect to ‘before’ and ‘after’.”63 And in turn, the distinction between “before” and “after” is predicated on an understanding of the “now” as a link and a limit: “The ‘now’ is the link of time […] and it is a limit of time.”64 The turn to modernity entails a reinterpretation of both metaphors. We pass from the concept of the limit as a marker of finitude to the limit as an extremity, a “passage to the limit,”65 and from number as quantity to number as a relative position within an infinite series. 62 63 64 65

Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 27. Aristotle, Physics, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 292/​§219b. Aristotle, Physics, 296/​§222a. Deleuze, “Lecture on Kant,” Cours Vincenne.

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Hamlet reflects this epochal shift by staging the unpreparedness of its hero to take centre stage. By Deleuze’s reading, Hamlet’s delay in avenging his father is no more an expression of character (say, cowardice), or a psychological symptom (melancholia), than is the comical yawn by which Hamm interrupts himself in mid-​sentence. It puts time itself on stage, lets time unfold as an open series, emptied of dramatic content. In this sense, “Hamlet is the first hero who truly need[s]‌time in order to act”;66 which is also to say that, like Oedipus, he needs time to become equal to the role assigned to him by the tragic plot.67 It is a discrepancy that must be waited out, as it were, at least until the fourth act. 10

The Passage to the Limit

Deleuze explicitly mentions Hamlet’s trip to England as the moment in which the tragic action catches up with itself. Now the hero has become equal to his task, yet, as with Oedipus, this moment also functions as a foundational event, a gap in the tragic cycle of time by which time itself is redistributed into a before and an after: In effect, there is always a time at which the imagined act is supposed “too big for me.” This defines a priori the past or the before. […] The second time, which relates to the caesura itself, is thus the present of metamorphosis, a becoming-​equal to the act and a doubling of the self, and the projection of an ideal self in the image of the act (this is marked by Hamlet’s sea voyage and by the outcome of Oedipus’s enquiry: the hero becomes “capable” of the act). As for the third time in which the future appears, this signifies that the event and the act possess a secret coherence which excludes that of the self …68 At issue here, in sum, is a parable about the reshaping of tragic action in the shift from antiquity to modernity, where “tragic” now describes the unravelling of time itself in the passage from the first to the second to third determination. At each passage, the tragic cycle is repeated and time overextends itself. The 66 67

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Deleuze, Essays, Critical and Clinical, 28. This designation of Hamlet as the “first hero who truly need[s]‌time” may seem to be in contradiction with the earlier discussion of Oedipus. But in fact, it indicates that, for Deleuze, Oedipus is always interpreted in Hamlet’s wake, its modernity brought to the fore by the comparison with Shakespeare’s masterpiece. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 89.

180 Chapter 4 play’s peculiar structure may thus be seen to dramatise the very processes by which time is given to modern experience according to the modalities of Past, Present and Future. Paradoxically, this redistribution of time (whereby time uncoils itself and unfolds into a straight line) leaves the “I” fractured. Hollowed out by the passage to the limit along which his actions now unfold, Hamlet comes into his own, but as a passive being, a product of secret contractions, compositions, re-​combinations.69 Correspondingly, “First Love” examines tragic form in terms of three distinct articulations of time: from the outset, time is announced as a central concern of the narrative (‘I associate […] my marriage with the death of my father, in time’) and is subjected to a form of mock-​scrutiny. The first articulation is the time of dates and calendars, a time of additions, subtractions and equations. The narrator’s first act is to ascertain his own age at the time of his marriage, and he achieves this by setting up an equivalence between his marriage and his father’s death, then by subtracting from the latter his date of birth. This is an attempt to reckon with time numerically, to map out its passage with numbers, taking the time of the father’s death as the original coordinate. The second order is a natural time, a time of seasons, weather cycles, and planetary motions. It too is associated with the father’s death since it is the father who first taught the narrator to recognise the constellations, and without his guidance the latter is unable to find the North Star. Finally, there is the time of love itself, which carries the narrative from eviction to eviction, from death to death. In the narrator’s own summary, “one is the hour of the dial, and another that of changing air and sky, and another yet again the heart’s” (FL 23–​24). The first two temporalities measure a complete or natural cycle, between “two limiting dates” (FL 11) or between recurrent seasonal motions. But the third time completes the cycle differently. It repeats by exceeding itself, opening the limit to infinity. Thus at times it seems that the entire narrative is delivered from beyond the grave: “I have always had my own hat, the one my father gave me, and I have never had any other hat than that hat. I may add it has followed me to the grave” (FL 23). Like dying serially, looking up at the stars is one of those gestures common to numerous Beckettian characters. My first association is with the etymology of desire [Latin de sidere:  from the stars]. And indeed, it is not implausible that Beckett would want to mobilise some faint sense of the celestial origins of desire, or an intimation of the vertical movement it implies, though, given 69

“Hamlet displays his eminently Kantian character whenever he appears as a passive existence, who like an actor or sleeper, receives the activity of his own thought as an Other.”—​ Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 30.

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the aboulic character of Beckett’s world, that notion can only be entertained ironically. The suggestion is amplified by the Dantean echoes that accompany so many of Beckett’s writings.70 For instance, the otherworldly journey of the Commedia is punctuated by the repetition of the word stelle (stars) at the end of each Canticle. Dante crosses the equator and exits the pit of Hell by a round opening, to find himself gazing once more upon the stars;71 he completes his ascent of Mt Purgatory, “pure and prepared to rise up to the stars”;72 and he concludes his pilgrimage with a beatific vision of “the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.”73 The etymological resonance with desire is present in all three instances, but is especially clear in the third. For Dante, desire is an affect (an internal motion) that comes to us from the greatest distance—​from the Divine. The following entry from Beckett’s reading notes clarifies the relevance of this motif to an interpretation of “First Love”:  Id, Ego & Superego. The philosopher Kant once declared that nothing proved to him the greatness of God more convincingly than the starry heavens and the moral conscience within us. The stars are unquestionably superb … Super-​ego: heir to the Oedipus complex.74  The excerpt, as Rabaté explains, must be viewed as a palimpsest, with Beckett repeating Freud, and Freud mediating Kant. Kant’s original point, as we recall, is that moral awareness is born of an encounter with the infinite. In the sublime experience of the vastness of creation the self is strangely humbled and emboldened at the same time—​humbled, because it understands itself to be powerless in relation to nature; and emboldened because in this understanding it discovers a consonance between the infinity without and the faculty of reason within. Freud is quick to note the metaphysical foundations of the argument. His countermove, famously, is to insist on the notion of conscience as a developed faculty rather than a divine gift. This is to say that the development 70 71 72 73 74

For a comprehensive study of Dantean intertexts in Beckett see Daniela Caselli, Beckett’s Dantes:  Intertextuality in the Criticism and Fiction (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2005). Dante, Inferno Canto xxxiv: 139. Dante, Purgatorio Canto xxxiii: 145. Dante, Paradiso Canto xxxiii: 145. Matthijs Engelberts, Everett Frost and Jane Maxwell (eds.), Notes Diverse Holo: Catalogues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, with Supporting Essays (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 160. Quoted in Rabaté, Think, Pig!, 86.

182 Chapter 4 of an inner moral sense is inseparable from sexual life and entirely bound up with the personal history of the individual. It finds its origins in the balance of parental love and authority, the giving and withholding of affection, and the neuroses resulting from that intimate drama. What then of Kant’s image of the starry heavens? As we have seen, the reference does not simply fall by the wayside. Nor can we doubt its importance to the Oedipal setup of Beckett’s short-​story. Upon exiting Lulu’s apartment, the narrator of “First Love” looks up at the starry sky and muses: “I was not sure where I was. I looked among the stars and the constellations for the Wains, but could not find them. And yet they must have been there. My father was the first to show them to me” (FL 35). Setting off a series of intertextual relays, the scene threads Dantean desire and Kantian wonder, the distant power of the former’s divine law and the sublime origins of the latter’s moral conscience, into an ironic history of tripped up tragic pathos. Dante.... Kant.. Freud-Beckett. With the plot come full circle, the Freudian premise is rewritten as a series of bathetic, ineffectual deaths. Each death repeats the trauma of that first banishment from the father’s place, comes back to the first time by way of measureless distance—​a farce. 11

Pathos and Judgement

The critical conversation on the ethics of finitude in Beckett has developed along three parallel lines. Broadly speaking: 1. a refutation of Martha Nussbaum’s charge that Beckett’s art is one of unredeemable guilt and disgust at the finitude of human existence (see especially Simon Critchley, Robert Eaglestone and more recently, Linda Ben-​Zvi);75 2. a study of the Cartesian and anti-​Cartesian implications of Beckett’s fiction, mainly inspired by Beckett’s response to the work of Arnold Geulincx (especially Matthew Feldman, and Anthony Uhlmann);76 or

75

Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing (London: Routledge, 1997); Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism:  Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 1997); Linda Ben-​Zvi, “Beckett and Disgust: The Body as ‘Laughing Matter’,” Modernism/​ modernity 18.4 (2011): 681–​698. 76 Matthew Feldman, “ ‘A Suitable Engine of Destruction’? Samuel Beckett and Ar nold Geulincx’s Ethics,” in Beckett and Ethics, ed. Russell Smith (London:  Continuum, 2008):  38–​56; Anthony Uhlmann, Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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3.

a discussion of Badiou’s powerful, if somewhat eccentric analysis of figures of love and infinity in Beckett’s later work (most notably, in Andrew Gibson).77 There is little dialogue among the three strands. For Badiou, Beckett is a thinker of alterity at its most essential. His art is a methodical and progressive refinement of the forms of encounter, a constant attuning to the minimal conditions required of a relation with an Other, pushing past nihilistic solutions to affirm the barest possibility of such an event. This is the basis of what Badiou terms “Beckett’s paradoxical optimism,”78 an uncompromising philosophical experiment conducted under the aegis of love.79 By contrast, Nussbaum argues that the negative emotional charge of Beckett’s writing ultimately reduces it to an ethically bankrupt pessimism. His prose is entirely consumed by an obsession with the maternal body, by the notion—​ at bottom, a religious cliché—​that our flesh condemns us, and shames us. It is a condition that can be neither transcended nor embraced. “There is a peculiar movement in Beckett’s talk of emotions […] from a perception of human limits to a loathing of the limited, from grief to disgust and hatred, from the

77

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For a more exhaustive summary of the ethical strands in Beckett criticism, see Russell Smith’s “Introduction” to Beckett and Ethics. Smith reflects on the phrase “Beckett’s ‘ethical undoing’ ” to suggest (a.) “an undoing of ethics through a disintegration of each term of the ethical relation”; (b.) an ethical insistence even in the face of this undoing; and (c.) a form of “not doing” that takes on ethical value, in other words, a “principled rejection of an ethics of […] action.”—​Smith, “Introduction: Beckett’s Ethical Undoing,” in Beckett and Ethics, ed. Russell Smith (London: Continuum, 2008), 3. Alain Badiou, On Beckett, trans. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003), 25. “The numericality of love—​one, two, infinity—​is the setting for what Beckett rightly calls happiness. Happiness also singularises love as a truth procedure for happiness can only exist in love. Such is the reward proper to this type of truth. In art there is pleasure, in science joy, in politics enthusiasm, but in love there is happiness” (Badiou, On Beckett, 33). To clarify what is here meant by the “numericality of love,” we must remember that Badiou develops his notion of “the encounter” in terms of a highly formalised procedure, tracing the passage from the One of the solipsistic Cogito to the Infinite (identified with the multiplicity of beings and an opening of subjective experience onto the sensible world), by way of the figure of the Two, which is proper of the encounter. Badiou’s bias is clearly in favour of the figure of the Two, which mediates the other terms and, at the same time, constitutes them in relation to each other: “Happiness is not in the least associated with the One, with the myth of fusion. Rather, it is the subjective indicator of a truth of difference, of sexual difference, a truth that love alone makes effective” (Badiou, On Beckett, 34). Hence the focus on Beckett as a writer “who gives voice to the gift and the happiness of Being” (Badiou, On Beckett, 29).

184 Chapter 4 tragedy and comedy of the frail body to rage at the body, seen as covered in excrement.”80 Finally, the Geulingian camp concentrates on the themes of ignorance and powerlessness in Beckett in an effort to rethink the possibility of ethical freedom beyond the framework of Descartes’ Mind-​Body dualism. Ethics, in this context, begins with an emptying of the will, a divestiture of consciousness from the trappings of knowledge. For Geulincx, this is the way of humility, a cardinal virtue which allows one to acknowledge God as the ultimate cause of all things. Beckett’s Geulingian intuition is to view nescience as a plausible way (perhaps the only one still available) to put the certainty of human finitude in contact with an experience of the infinite.81 I should make clear that my sympathies fall squarely with this last interpretation. As I understand them, Beckett’s philosophical parables put traditional models of being-​in-​the world to the test by staging the exhausted, impracticable afterlife of that enduring Enlightenment ideal, the self-​determined subject. The sense of being not only mortal, but in excess of one’s own death, corresponds to a state of unconditional passivity—​precisely that “limbo purged of desire”82 in which Beckett’s characters are always suspended. Time itself is pressed into a state of pure hesitation; and on this hesitation, on the utter indeterminacy of the now, is staked the possibility of an ethical future. Yet it is Nussbaum who provides the most direct clue to Beckett’s posthumanism. “Beckett’s people,” she writes, “are heirs of a legacy of feeling that shapes them inexorably. They cannot help being shaped in this way, and they

80

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Martha Nussbaum, “Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love,” Ethics 98.2 (1988), 251.—​To this day, Nussbaum’s reading continues to provide the momentum for a re-​ evaluation of Beckett as a counter-​intuitively ethical thinker. In 2011, an international conference on Beckett at the University of York (“Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive,” York) saw two keynote lectures framed as a direct response to Nussbaum’s argument: namely, Jean-​Michel Rabaté, “Beckett’s Three Critiques”; and Linda Ben Zvi, “Beckett and Disgust: The Body as ‘Laughing Matter’ ” (both published that same year in Modernism/​modernity 18.4). My own paper for that conference was published under the title “Putting the Impossible to Work” (2012), and is the basis for the Beckett-​related sections of this chapter. As Anthony Uhlmann points out, Beckett’s encounter with Geulincx’s Ethics may be seen to produce “an image of thought, with thought imagined as involving or being ‘grounded’ upon the extremely unstable foundation of ignorance. Whereas the ancient imperative was ‘Know Thyself,’ this image of thought (at least as it is adapted from Geulincx by Beckett) affirms that the self, which nevertheless remains the ground for all subsequent knowledge, cannot be known” (Uhlmann, Beckett and the Philosophical Image, 92). Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (New  York:  Arcade Publishing, 2006), 44.

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feel like ‘contrivances,’ like machines programmed entirely from without.”83 The simile is telling; I believe Nussbaum is right in suggesting that Beckett’s entire ethical project rests on an obsessive exploration of an unsurpassable materiality, and, by extension, on the experience of machine-​like subjects who are continually faced with the evidence of their own diminished autonomy. Where her reading fails completely, as has been said, is in its association of this condition with shame, despair and disgust. In reclaiming Beckett for posthuman modernism, I would like to repurpose the image—​to salvage it from a pathetic conception of tragedy, by turning it over to laughter. I must start by rehearsing two possible correctives to Nussbaum’s interpretation of Beckettian finitude. Jonathan Boulter highlights embodiment as one of Beckett’s central themes, and sees in the author’s uncompromising attention to the pains of the flesh and the resilience of matter an ethical gesture of sympathy for all mortal beings. The word Boulter uses, somewhat jarringly in my view, is compassion: “Beckett’s characters may be posthuman but they are not fully postcorporeal […] there is a compassion for the suffering subject who can really only understand herself and her world through the medium of a decaying, painful, body.”84 The second counter-​argument, offered by Ben-​Zvi, echoes the first in emphasising Beckett’s unflinching philosophical honesty in the face of human finitude, a refusal to prettify or look away. Ben-​Zvi insists that representations of the abject body in Beckett are always tempered by laughter, and that to read Beckett without laughing is to miss both the literary precision and the ethical thrust of his work, a constant life-​affirming labour of bodying forth beauty from decay. “The greatness of Beckett is that he shows what we don’t want to see and usually turn from in disgust—​our own finitude—​and finds ways for us to face this truth by prodding us, through the very evocation of disgust, to laugh.”85 I agree that Beckett’s art has everything to do with the importance of embodiment for subjectivity. And I also subscribe to the notion that an ethical approach to Beckett’s writing must by necessity take his humour into account. But I would not associate this humour with a desire to redeem life’s ugliness. Nor indeed is it a matter of directing our gaze and refusing to let us look away. As I argue above, there is in Beckett’s rhetoric a systematic, often bathetic distortion of anything that might resemble tragic passion, a hollowing out of the language and logic of pity. Humour, in this sense, is the rhetorical correlative 8 3 84 85

Nussbaum, “Narrative Emotions,” 250. Boulter, A Guide for the Perplexed, 15. Ben-​Zvi, “Beckett and Disgust,” 695.

186 Chapter 4 of a desire to disappear from view, a brief, perhaps illusory, suspension of the whole apparatus of tragic morality and (divine) judgement. The fault in Nussbaum’s reading is that it remains mired in precisely the grammars Beckett’s rhetoric is designed to undo. If she insists that his art is one of disgust at the body, it is because her scale is set, incorrectly, to a tragic register. I am reminded, here, of a scene from Molloy in which the title character is stopped by a policeman while loitering on his bicycle. Thus we cleared these difficult straits, my bicycle and I, together. But a little further on I heard myself hailed. I raised my head and saw a policeman. Elliptically speaking, for it was only later, by way of induction, or deduction, I forget which, that I knew what it was. What are you doing there? he said. I’m used to that question, I  understood it immediately. Resting, I said. Resting, he said. Resting, I said. Will you answer my question? he cried.86 The passage is exemplary of a recurring difficulty graduate students experience with Beckett’s comic tone. Many will concede that the scene is funny; and will note, further, that the effect is incongruous with the situation it represents (a disabled man harassed by an officer of the law). Few have the instinct not to treat the humour as comic relief, or wry consolation, or as an ironic counterpoint to the seriousness of the content. It ended in my understanding that my way of resting, my attitude when at rest, astride my bicycle, my arms on the handlebars, my head on my arms, was a violation of I don’t know what, public order, public decency. Modestly, I pointed to my crutches and ventured one or two noises regarding my infirmity, which obliged me to rest as I could, rather than as I should. But there are not two laws, that was the next thing I  thought I  understood, not two laws, one for the healthy, another for the sick, but only one to which all must bow, rich and poor, young and old, happy and sad. He was eloquent. I pointed out that I was not sad. That was a mistake.87 Molloy’s account of the encounter is offered in the same voice used to deliver a long litany of physical complaints, including visual impairment, near-​deafness and one or two bad legs. To these he adds panic at not knowing how to answer people’s questions, not carrying identification papers, smelling, and not always 86 87

Beckett, Three Novels, 20. Beckett, Three Novels, 20.

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wiping himself after stool. The challenge for the first-​time reader is to learn to hear the levity in the narrative while taking every detail at face value. Crucially, there is no appeal for sympathy in Molloy’s mentioning of his crutches; no resentment in his description of the officer’s impatient questioning; no disingenuousness or self-​deception in his assurance that he is not sad.88 Above all, one must resist the temptation to interpret the scene as a poignant picture of the speaker’s helplessness. The laughter is a direct consequence of the deadpan flatness of the narrator’s tone. Beckett’s preoccupation with this cluster of themes is already well in evidence in his early fiction. The intertextual echoes set off in the very first line of More Pricks than Kicks, by that first mention of Belacqua’s name, speak to a unique articulation of passivity, desire and freedom. Several features of Dante’s character would have appealed to Beckett’s sensibility—​chief among these, his inertia, which is not merely sloth, but supreme idleness, a self-​contented neutrality with respect to all impulses. But also his irony in which Beckett detects a measure of freedom, even distance from divine will. Like many of the souls Dante encounters in Purgatory, Belacqua inhabits a space between the animate world and the inanimate. But he is uniquely at home in the middle-​ground. Indeed the most striking expression of his inertia is a tendency to merge with his surroundings. When Dante comes upon him at the foot of Mount Purgatory he is leaning against a rock, motionless. Dante hears his voice, but sees only the mountain. Una voce di presso sonò, Forse Che di sedere in pria avrai distretta. Al suon di lei ciascun di noi si torse, E vedemmo a mancina un gran petrone, Del qual né io né ei prima s’accorse. […] A voice close by called out: “Perhaps You’ll feel the need to sit before then.” Hearing this, both of us turned around,

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Yael Levin provides this insightful analysis of the scene: “The only discourse available to the people who wish to communicate with [Molloy] is one of pity and sympathy, a discourse Molloy repeatedly rejects, suggesting it is as foreign to his desires and needs as is his own to the society that is unable to understand him. The police officer’s assumptions about Molloy are expressed in the negatives on a list of binary opposition. Sick, poor, old and sad—​the interchangeable adjectives articulate cultural assumptions about those who lie outside the norm.” Yael Levin, “Univocity, Exhaustion and Failing Better: Reading Beckett with Disability Studies,” Journal of Beckett Studies 27.2 (2018): 162.

188 Chapter 4 And saw to our left an enormous rock That neither he nor I at first had noticed.89 The irony of Belacqua’s character (and a further sign of his at-​homeness in Purgatory) is that he is in no hurry to be redeemed. His posture, lying flat against the rock, is an expression of his passivity, and contrasts plainly with Dante’s passion, a heaven-​sent (and heavens-​bound) desire. Relishing the opportunity for a verbal duel, Belacqua mocks Dante’s eagerness to move upward, and explains the details of his punishment, which he has embraced all too gladly: he must wait at the foot of the mountain for a period equal to the length of his sinful life. The irony is deliberate and self-​consciously exercised. Dante can have the moral high-​ground, while the lute-​maker waits out his penance patiently, even lazily. Compare Beckett’s treatment of Belacqua with T. S. Eliot’s use of another moral exemplum from Dante’s Purgatory: the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel. According to Eliot, Daniel is the quintessential purgatorial soul insofar as he fully identifies with his condition, eagerly immersing himself in the fire that refines him.90 His desire is emblematic of a redemptive potential in human nature, a power of self-​transcendence to which Eliot’s poetry always aspires. Beckett’s Belacqua is a parodic subversion of the same principle. He too submits willingly to his sentence, and in so doing, represents the modern Everyman as a purgatorial creature. But in his case, the keen acceptance of punishment only makes a mockery of the desire to be redeemed. The encounter with Belacqua thus functions as a meta-​discursive moment that makes of the pilgrim’s whole journey, life and afterlife, a purgatorial experience. The implication is that in Beckett’s work, reality itself—​reality as a whole—​ is suspended in a state of in-​betweenness. The idea is first suggested in the essay on Joyce, where Beckett speaks of “this earth that is Purgatory, Vice and Virtue.”91 Here Purgatory represents not only the point of contact between opposing moral determinations, but also the space in which those determinations collapse. Identified with “this earth,” it stands for the full breadth of

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Dante, Purgatorio Canto iv: 98–​102. “Poi s’ascose nel foco che li affina” (Purgatorio Canto xxvi: 148). Eliot famously quotes this line at the end of “The Waste Land” (line 427), and again, more obliquely in “Little Gidding” (l. 145). But the encounter between Dante and Daniel is also alluded to in Eliot’s dedication of “The Waste Land” to Ezra Pound, and in the title of Eliot’s collection of poems Ara Vos Prec. “Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce.” In Samuel Beckett, et al., Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 21.

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human experience, a space in which all distinctions and determinations are undone. The opening paragraph of “Dante and the Lobster” strikes the same note. As Daniela Caselli observes, the scene sets up a subtle game of identifications. “Belacqua moves—​although he is ‘stuck’—​from the Dante to the Beckett text […] a subtle use of the pronouns merges Belacqua Shuah—​the reader of Paradiso II—​with Dante’s Belacqua of Purgatorio IV, and with Dante the protagonist of the Comedy.”92 The Dantean reference thus provides an opportunity to blur boundaries not only between different identities, but also between the world of the book and the world of the reader. Furthermore, the scene conflates Purgatory with Hell and Heaven, as if to abolish all topographic, ethical and ontological distinctions. In the absence of human desire, all three stages of Dante’s spiritual journey fold into each other. Time (lived time, that is; the time of human experience) loses its thrust, and a passive waiting replaces Dante’s heroic will-​to-​redemption as the universe’s ethical norm. It is important to emphasise that this passive waiting is not merely a negative determination of action. It precedes the distinction between action and passion. It is neutral to both terms, and in fact may be said to hold them in reserve; hence its irreducibility to the order of subjective experience. Beckett’s “limbo” is in this sense a peculiar conjunction of existential and ontological states (being-​dead or being-​alive; being-​actual or being-​virtual), a meeting of dialectical opposites, but without any possibility of a workable synthesis. Beckett reinforces these liminal connotations in a series of images and verbal echoes recurring throughout “Dante and the Lobster.” Readers will recall the ending of the short story on a note of “quick death” (mptk 22). In turn that note reverberates with a Dantean pun that had preoccupied Belacqua earlier in the day: “qui vive la pietà, quand’è ben morta” (“Here pity lives when it is dead”; or in Beckett’s own poetic translation: “Pity is quick with death”).93 Once we 92 93

Caselli, Beckett’s Dantes, 59. Dante, Inferno Canto xx: 28 (translation modified).—​For a commentary on this translation, which appears in the early poem “Text,” see Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 11–​12; Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 29–​32; and Sam Slote, “Stuck in Translation: Beckett and Borges on Dante,” Journal of Beckett Studies 19.1 (2010): 15–​28. See also Caselli’s brilliant analysis of the significance of Dante’s pun throughout Beckett’s career (Caselli, Beckett’s Dantes, especially 58–​61). As Caselli shows, “quick” is repeatedly used by Beckett in its archaic form, as a synonym of “living.” For instance in “What a Misfortune,” Belacqua bestows his pity not on the dead, but on “the nameless multitude of the current quick”; and in “Echo’s Bones,” he is said to have departed “from among the quick” (qtd. in Caselli, 68, 75).

190 Chapter 4 are alerted to this thematic cluster, it is easy to see that it permeates Belacqua’s consciousness. His lunch revolves around the purchase of a “rotten lump of Gorgonzola cheese,” that ought to be “sweating” and “alive,” but instead turns out to be a “cadaverous tablet” giving off a “faint fragrance of corruption” rather than “a good stench” (mptk 14). In preparation of his meal, he takes care that the toast be “done to a dead end” (mptk 12) and looks forward to “the anguish of pungency, the pang of spices, as each mouthful die[s]‌scorching his palate” (mptk 13). The irony of these passages has been duly noted by critics: Belacqua’s horror at the thought of boiling the lobster alive contrasts with the pleasure he takes in consuming the rotting cheese and metaphorically doing the toast to death. It is a short-​lived horror, to be sure. But it registers, for a moment at least, an awareness of the difference between literal and figurative determinations of life and death. A genuine experience of finitude seizes Belacqua precisely at this point. In the fleeting instant, it is harder than ever to sustain the illusion that there might be such a thing as “life in the abstract” (mptk 114). The reality of life and death is brought home as immediately and undeniably as this sudden surge of emotion. Nor can life itself be reduced in this case to an ideal process unfolding in time towards an abstract limit. Yet the earnestness of that conclusion is soon dissipated, and Beckett’s ironic pun on “quick death” suggests that Belacqua’s pity is in fact little more than easy piety. References to Cain also fit into this thematic network. As Takeshi Kawashima has shown, the biblical figure is an essential part of the intertextual setup of Belacqua’s character, adding a mythical element to the pattern of doubles and identifications in the text, and branding Belacqua himself with an accursed lineage.94 “Seared with the stigma of God’s pity, that an outcast might not die quickly” (mptk 12), Cain exemplifies the paradox of being condemned to eternal life. His mark protects him from harm, delivering him to an eternity of wandering. Typologically associated with the killing of Christ, this exemption from death is a negative inversion of the glory of eternal life reserved for Jesus and his disciples. It represents a variation on the idea of resurrection, a reversal, as it were, of immortality. Thus, on the one hand, the piety of wishing

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“Belacqua shares a stigma with Cain, who is destined for exile and dispossession. The sinner’s lineage is extended when ‘Dante and the Lobster’ mentions McCabe, a real prisoner sentenced to death, whose execution is scheduled for the following day. […] Belacqua, Cain, and McCabe all share the negative legacy of sin and punishment, in which the lobster of the title too is enmeshed.”—​Takeshi Kawashima, “ ‘What Kind of Name Is That?’ Samuel Beckett’s Strategy of Naming,” Borderless Beckett/​Beckett sans frontières, eds. ­Minako Okamuro, et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 332.

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the condemned man a mercifully quick death resonates with the mercy of God’s decree that no one lay a hand on Cain. Yet the pun also implies a divine judgment—​a curse visited upon the outcast, who is suspended for eternity in living-​death. Cain’s brand of afterlife, in short, is one of those forms of total dispossession (even unto death), that Beckett himself has identified as a key to his artistic project: an afterlife that registers, not the soul’s triumph over the finite realities of the flesh, nor the power of revealed knowledge in the presence of God, but an inability to die, or to die completely.95 Granted, the archetype is not exactly funny. But, as one in a series of motifs having to do with living death, it serves a broader comic theme; it is complicit with the story’s interrogation of the relation between pathos and judgement, and conveys that same Beckettian instinct to make oneself infinitesimal, to find in passivity the smallest measure of freedom, to elude God’s gaze.96 That it is an impossible quest—​the law is ubiquitous, and its judgement inescapable—​is no objection. 12 “Echo’s Bones” The three-​part structure of “Echo’s Bones” overtly combines the mock-​Oedipal themes of “First Love” with the Dantean allegory sketched out above. The stakes of the bizarre opening sequence with Zaborovna are redoubled in the encounter with Lord Gall of Wormwood, an impotent giant, master of an 95

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See the Interview with Israel Shenker:  “The kind of work I  do is one in which I’m not master of my material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. He’s tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance.”—​Israel Shenker, “ ‘Moody Man of Letters’: Interview with Samuel Beckett,” The New York Times, section 2 (6 May 1956), 3. A striking elaboration of this idea is offered by Molloy who invokes a Geulingian concept of freedom when he imagines himself a slave aboard Ulysses’ ship heading for Mt Purgatory. “I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is a great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit. And from the poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no fatherland away, bears me onward to no shipwreck” (Beckett, Three Novels, 51). We must take note, once again, of a figural strategy that short-​circuits simple dichotomies. Identifying with the humblest of Ulysses’ men, Molloy stakes his freedom on the haunting of an ever receding limit, a space of indeterminacy, suspended between sadness and joy, the East and the West, the prow and the stern, between no home and no shipwreck—​and, overlaying the Dantean intertext, between a departure from the land of the living and a failure to reach Mt Purgatory.

192 Chapter 4 entailed estate, who conscripts Belacqua into sleeping with his syphilitic wife and siring a male heir. Figuratively, the undead Belacqua is imagined as a miniature version of the hairless/​heirless man, a reluctant sexual surrogate; in the end, a none-​too-​subtle metaphor for his penis. But as the exchange between them turns on matters of law and legacy, he is also cast in the role of the dispossessed son (for instance, he is repeatedly addressed as Adeodatus; there are references to Hamlet and King Hamlet’s ghost throughout the section;97 and Lord Gall himself is described as an excessive masturbator, intimating a connection with the Shuah family name). The language in the Lord Gall section largely consists of platitudes and double-​entendres, Beckett’s version of writing in a dead tongue. The wit is deliberately facile, playing up the theme of Gall’s sexual impotence, his wife’s infidelity, and the anxieties brought about by inheritance law.98 Oedipal clichés abound, though in contrast to “First Love” the attempt to re-​gender relationships is not evident at the outset. Belacqua’s nostalgia for the grave is associated with the promise of a return to the “womb-​tomb” (EB 5, 14), an image that punctuates the entire narrative. Later variants will include a “uterotaph” (EB 35), a pun on fatal and foetal (EB 44), and Belacqua’s candid confession that “scarcely had [his] cord been clumsily severed than [he] struggled to reintegrate the matrix” (EB 46). The pattern is completed in the third vignette. Returned to the perch of his headstone, after his adventure with Lord Gall, Belacqua happens upon the groundsman Doyle who is intent on robbing his grave. Down came the mattock on the hallowed mould like the pile-​driver in the story, such a blow can seldom have been delivered, the headstone rocked, Belacqua’s last resting-​place spouted up into his eye. ‘Easy on there’ said Belacqua, ‘what’s the big idea?’ (EB 38) The ensuing dialogue plays on the Pauline distinction between the spirit that lives and the flesh that dies. “Fortified with alcohol” (EB 37), Doyle refuses to believe that Belacqua could be anything but a figment of his imagination and fully expects his mortal remains to be still in the grave. Belacqua protests

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See Mark Nixon’s notes to Echo’s Bones. For instance: “The law is a ginnet” (EB 15); “Stand up […] be a little soldier” (EB 23); “keep up your pecker” (EB 24); “Lord Gall, whose movements could not be forecast from one moment to another, now began to stab back and forth with his clubbed index, speaking almost pidgin: ‘You’ (stab) ‘makee me’ (stab) ‘father’ ” (EB 31).

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his real presence above ground and appears to suggest that he, not the earth, should be the object of the groundsman’s attention. ‘Fool’ said Belacqua, ‘I am the body.’ Doyle threw down the mattock and took up the spade. ‘There is a natural body’ he said ‘and there is a spiritual body.’ He laid down the spade, went away and came back, he took up the shovel. ‘Reach hither with your shovel’ said Belacqua. But Doyle apparently had no interest in being convinced, for he went on with his work in a dogged and a sullen manner. He was a good worker, already he had quite a little cavity to his credit. He laid down the shovel and resumed the mattock. Belacqua spat in his eye, saying: ‘Is that also a figment?’ (EB 38) Belacqua’s nostalgia for the womb-​tomb fits the theme of a poorly Oedipalised desire. But the image also intersects with a dense network of cryptonyms, puns and ancillary rhetorical figures—​and in tracing those figures the narrative reveals a fracture in its Oedipal setup. Three in particular: the motif of the headstone; the grit in the eye; and the simile of the embarrassed caterpillar. 1. The headstone is the vantage point from which Belacqua observes Doyle as he disturbs his grave—​but the word is also encoded in a chain of allusions to iconic bald heads and skulls, including poor Yorick, St Paul and Aeschylus (who is said to have died when an eagle, mistaking his crown for a rock, dropped a tortoise on it). More importantly, head/​stone conjures the image of Dante’s Belacqua who is able to make himself invisible by resting still against a giant boulder (“un gran petrone”).99 Finally, in the combination of skull and stone we hear the fate of Echo who, spurned by Narcissus, wasted away, until nothing was left of her but a disembodied voice and bones that turned to stone. 2. The clump of dirt that hits Belacqua in the eye when Doyle plunges his spade into the earth harks back to a description of the body’s first awakening:  “distinctly he felt himself lapsing from a beatitude of sloth that was infinitely smoother than oil and softer than pumpkins, he found himself fighting in vain against the hideous torpor and the grit and glare of his lids on the eyeballs …” (EB 5). In “Echo’s Bones” the eye is the first organ to register the world. But it does so as raw tissue, an overly sensitive 99

Dante, Purgatorio Canto iv: 101.

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sore. All it wants is to stay shut—​to avoid the return of sensation. Reality is harsh, gritty, before it is visible, and grit under the eyelid, in the end, is what distinguishes a real body from a figment. Belacqua compares himself to a caterpillar when, in the course of his exchange with Doyle, he is interrupted mid-​sentence, and then fails to pick up the thread of his thought. ‘ “But” ’ said Doyle, ‘you were saying “but—​” ’ ‘My memory has gone to hell altogether’ said Belacqua. ‘If you can’t give me a better cue than that I’ll have to be like the embarrassed caterpillar and go back to my origins.’ Doyle did not smoke the reference. (EB 42)

As Mark Nixon explains, the image is culled from Darwin’s Origin of Species, and refers to an observation by Pierre Huber concerning the instincts of caterpillars. Briefly: if a caterpillar were interrupted in the construction of its cocoon, and removed from it to a second cocoon in a similar state of completion, it would be able to continue its labour instinctively and without difficulty. However, if the caterpillar were relocated to a cocoon that was close to being finished, the interruption would confound it entirely; it would only be able to resume its work, mechanically, from where it had left off.100 Belacqua’s intent here is to describe his own distracted thought process, but the parable is also an ironic comment on the groundkeeper’s labours as he goes about digging up the man’s earthly remains, undoing and redoing his final resting place. The simile inscribes familiar Oedipal motifs into the scene—​it plays on the topos of banishment; it tropes on the cliché of the tomb as a womb, and offers a biological analogue for it; and it calls up the idea of an erotic impulse reduced to machine-​like activity. In this case, it is the humble worm that labours to produce its own matrix. All three figures have to do with a representation of Belacqua’s body as not quite natural, nor spiritual, but posthumous. All three engage a double perspective, leading to a remapping of the body as an organic unit (i.e., as the locus of a unified, organised synthesis of manifold identities, desires, sense perceptions, and so on). The eye is a fragment abstracted from a whole; and perhaps more than any other body part, it tends to function synecdochically. It is both an image-​making instrument, and, somewhat lazily, the privileged organ of phenomenological perception. In an important sense, Belacqua’s eye is just an irritated eyeball, a thing disturbed from the comfort of darkness. The 100 For this summary I rely on Mark Nixon’s excellent annotations (EB 104).

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same can be said of his penis in relation to male sexuality and desire. Though its metonymic significance is difficult to discount (the arousal of the part typically stands for the arousal of the whole), it is also a machine-​like component with a mind of its own, comical in its vivacity and perseverance despite the reluctance of the rest. It is not enough to say, then, that Beckett’s figural strategies refocus the Oedipal narrative of “Echo’s Bones.” The more salient point is that they do so by tearing up the body, wresting various component parts from their organic functions. In this regard, Belacqua’s state of posthumous embodiment dislocates the very grammars by which we speak of a perspectival reality or a world given to finite apprehension. The body is whole and partial, organic and disorganised at the same time.

Conclusion: Passivity of the Eye It is the claim of this book that modernism invents the posthuman as a way to think through the aporias of its historical moment. And further, that the stakes shared by modernism and posthuman theory are formally encoded in an archetypal fantasy—​the scene of surviving one’s own death or of mourning one’s ability to die. By the most general description, posthuman modernism offers a critique of the privilege granted the human eye in modern phenomenology. It coincides with a twentieth-​century awareness of the present as a supersaturated moment in the history of reason. And it responds to this awareness by rethinking perspectival reality, relocating it to a cyborgian realm, between Spirit and Nature, or between the organic and the inorganic. I began this study with a reference to the figure of the cyborg as a wide-​eyed outlook upon the world, an image of calculated naïveté. Why do Čapek and Lang infantilise their robots? Perhaps the reason is that the cyborg is fundamentally a nostalgic invention, an attempt, in a time of unbearable historical awareness, to hone a perspective that approximates primary narcissism. The fantasy of self-​mourning is born of the same historical premise and engages the same ideas. But the focus is on a disorganisation of the eye through the assumption, within spiritual reality, of an impossible relation to death. Many of the works discussed here explore a strange dynamic of spectacle and invisibility. For instance, Murphy, the murderer in O’Brien’s “Two in One,” tries to conceal his crime by hiding his victim’s body in plain sight, a scheme that depends on being seen in public without being properly noticed. (“I was able to look into a glass and see Kelly looking back at me, perfect in every detail except for the teeth and eyes, which had to be my own but which I knew other people would never notice” [SF 86]). Beckett’s Belacqua associates the persistence of material reality after death with the grit (or the spit) under the eyelid, a condition that blinds the subject and at once prevents him from closing his eye. Woolf and Hitchcock both note the indifference of trees to human life; they dwell on their eyelessness, and their capacity for near-​endless growth, as indexes of an inscrutable, unknowable nature. In Hitchcock this idea tallies with the representation of an irrational space and time. In Woolf, it sets up the theme of an asymmetrical relation, an identificatory process, or a movement of becoming, incommensurate to human thought. Finally, Béla Tarr imagines a terminal time in which everyday objects refuse to work, the last of these being an oil-​lamp which leaves all things shrouded in darkness as its light dies out. It is not only a matter of dethroning the eye in order to break with protocols of representation, but of thinking through the order of the secret—​the

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004390355_007

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circulation within human history of a reality that continues to fall outside the purview of absolute knowledge. The paradox is unmistakably at work in “The Hunter Gracchus.” Kafka’s parable begins with descriptions of everyday life from a provincial harbour town. A bark approaches, moving silently above the water, “as if borne by invisible means” (HG 226). Even as it makes land it remains strangely distant, unnoticed by the people ashore. There is something dreamlike about the entire sequence, a certain eeriness in the juxtaposition of appearance and general inattention. Nobody on the quay troubled about the newcomers; even when they lowered the bier to wait for the boatman, who was still occupied with his rope, nobody went nearer, nobody asked them a question, nobody accorded them an inquisitive glance. (HG 226) The story’s affective power has to do, without question, with the hunter’s strange manner of coming to presence. It is significant that, once carried ashore, the body is only ready to waken to consciousness after all attendant figures have left the room—​all witnesses with the exception of a local authority, the Burgomaster of Riva, with whom the hunter has already arranged a private audience. The boatman made a sign to the bearers to leave the room; they went out, drove away the boys who had gathered outside, and shut the door. But even that did not seem to satisfy the gentleman, he glanced at the boatman; the boatman understood, and vanished through a side door into the next room. At once the man on the bier opened his eyes, turned his face painfully towards the gentleman, and said: “Who are you?” (HG 227) Is it that the dead can only commune with one subject at a time? Or that the kind of presence required for the encounter is a dedicated (private, singular) attention? The parable does not lend itself to a thetic interpretation, and any attempt to explain its enigmas will seem reductive. But there is a thematic handle, and it is found in the exploration of this singular perspective, of an eye trained on living death. Once again, as with the example of Beckett’s Belacqua, or the time-​traveller of La Jetée, “The Hunter Gracchus” imagines the eye as a patient, suffering body part, and a first entry point to a barely accessible world. Similar to La Jetée, too, is the emphasis on memory and forgetting—​the idea that living on beyond one’s death is a kind of temporal exile. But if in Marker’s film the eyes are time-​machines, fuelled by images of a desired, pre-​apocalyptic past, producing the very past that haunts them, in Kafka’s parable they are well

198 Conclusion and truly passive. Assailed by a manifold of sense-​data, and stupefied by the present, they are unable to synthesise or remember: I knew that, of course, Burgomaster, but in the first moment of returning consciousness, I always forget, everything goes round before my eyes, and it is best to ask about anything even if I know. You too probably know that I am the hunter Gracchus. (HG 228) Coded in this reference to a “first moment of returning consciousness,” and a forgetting of something that was known all along, is one of the paradigmatic forms of temporalisation associated with the scene of self-​mourning. I count at least three temporal markers: the firstness of the first moment; coinciding with the return of consciousness; coinciding with the forgetting of what was always known. Over and over. The script tells us that even in his errant afterlife, in the eternal existence to which he is condemned, the hunter is never done with limits, never quite finished with the experience of a liminal time. Except, this liminality is not a threshold that one crosses; it is the present the hunter inhabits, an infinite patience that hollows him out. The comparison with La Jetée invites one final reflection on the theme of passivity and the nature of images. A few lines up I referred to the stupor registered in the opening of the hunter’s eyes. In Marker’s film it is the opposite case. The protagonist is able to “summon the Past and Future,” to play memories and synthesise desire. He is “selected from among a thousand for his obsession with an image from the past.”1 It is important, however, not to mistake his rare condition for mastery or even agency. His eyes are worked upon, plied, until “images begin to ooze, like confessions.”2 They function, precisely, as a machine. She calls him her Ghost. One day she seems frightened. One day she leans toward him. As for him, he never knows whether he moves toward her, whether he is driven, whether he has made it up, or whether he is only dreaming.3 On the one hand, it is eros that makes time-​travel possible. On the other, it is the labour of the scientists, with their needles, and electrodes and their policing of 1 Chris Marker (dir.), La Jetée, in La Jetée  and Sans Soleil:  Two Films by  Chris Marker (New York: The Criterion Collection, 2007). Film. dvd. 2 Marker, La Jetée. 3 Marker, La Jetée.

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dreams. No doubt, the small measure of personal freedom sought by the traveller in each trip always comes up against a “barrier” in the present. Yet, there is another freedom mobilised in this last passage, a smaller, more elemental freedom which the film’s apocalyptic plot cannot revoke. It has to do with the still indeterminate character of the past, suspended between memory, figment, or dream. “She calls him her Ghost. […] As for him, he never knows whether he moves towards her, whether he is driven …” There is a portion of time that could never reduce to the present, a manner of being historical out of keeping with both agency and memory. I am reminded, once again, of Deleuze’s idea that things are images in themselves, and that “the difficulty facing everything is to become its own simulacrum.”4 We recognise, in the order of the image invoked here, the ethical appeal of the posthuman for modernism: a commitment to a perspectival reality, only premised on a dislocation of the eye from its organic ground. 4 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 67.

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Index Abblitt, Stephen 148n10 acceleration 45–​47 Adkins, Brent 39 Aesthetics 165–​167 afterlife. See death-​in-​life agency 25–​26, 66–​67, 76, 80–​82, 87–​88, 91, 198–​199 Alighieri, Dante 112–​115, 146, 181–​182, 187–​190, 193 anarchy 73–​74, 76, 80–​84 androids. See posthumans animal ethics 32n25 animal life 19, 32, 70, 92–​94, 102 animism 87–​88 Anti-​Oedipus 171–​172, 174 anti-​Platonism 89 apocalypse, apocalyptic 108 in Blade Runner 54–​55 chronotope of 12, 74–​76 co-​implying evolution 45–​46 ethical tensions in 80 as a limit or horizon 72, 78 modernism as 7, 74–​75 and Nietzsche 94 in R.U.R. 3 in The Secret Agent 80, 83–​84 in The Turin Horse 71–​72, 107–​108 architecture 48–​50, 54 Aristotle 158–​160, 163, 165, 178 astronomy 83, 100, 102 At Swim-​Two-​Birds 149, 154 Augustine of Hippo 148–​149 autobiographies 72 Babel 77 Badiou, Alain 37–​38, 182–​183 Badmington, Neil 18, 42 Bahun, Sanja 8, 110–​111, 135 Baines, Jennika 154, 156 Ballard, J.G. 75 Barthes, Roland 108 Beckett, Samuel 12–​13, 140, 146–​147, 173–​174, 182–​185, 191–​194 Badiou on 182–​183 Ben-​Zvi on 182, 185

Boulter on 185 comedy in 146–​147, 174, 185–​187 death-​in-​life in 146–​148, 189–​193 finitude in 147, 171, 178, 182–​185, 190 Geulincx on 182, 184 law in 192 Nussbaum on 182–​186 reality in 188–​189 time in 180–​181, 189 tragedy in 168–​171, 174, 177, 180, 185–​186 Beer, Gillian 120 Belacqua 24, 146–​147, 187–​190, 192–​196 Benjamin, Walter 135–​136 Ben-​Zvi, Linda 182, 185 bicycles 142–​143, 186 Bildungsroman 29 bioethics 9 birth. See rebirth Blade Runner 25, 50–​57, 59–​60, 63 architecture in 49–​50, 54 mortality in 51–​52, 54 reality in 51, 53–​54, 59–​60 Boulter, Jonathan 185 Bradbury Building 49–​50 Braidotti, Rosi 10 Brod, Max 174 Buffy the Vampire Slayer 14n16 Cain 190–​191 Callus, Ivan 46 Čapek, Karel 1–​4, 196 Carlotta Valdes 131–​132 Caselli, Daniela 189 catharsis 159–​160, 165 Catholic iconography 160 Christianity 85–​86, 90, 108, 160–​161, 175–​176 circumcision 155–​156 cities 48–​50 Clarke, Bruce 45 Cohen, Tom 125–​127, 128n47 comedy 145, 159–​160 in Aristotle 159–​160, 163 in Beckett 146–​147, 174, 185–​187 in Deleuze 174–​176 in Hegel 164–​167

215

Index in O’Brien 141–​142, 149, 157–​164, 166–​167 in Scholasticism 160–​162 and tragedy 158–​167, 175–​176 in Woolf 132, 138, 141 in Žižek 167n36 common sense 28 Conrad, Joseph 80–​82, 87–​88 consciousness 68, 73 in Beckett 146, 158, 190 in Blade Runner 47, 50, 54, 59 in Deleuze 58–​59 in Hegel 28–​36, 38–​39 in The Matrix 53 in The Mayor of Casterbridge 64, 67 in “The Hunter Gracchus” 197–​198 in Woolf 112–​114, 122 Copernicus, Nicolaus 19, 83, 100–​103, 106, 168, 178 cosmology 94, 100–​101 Crimes and Misdemeanors 164 Cronin, Anthony 149 Cruiskeen Lawn 157–​158 crypt, topology of 86, 88–​89 cyberpunk 47–​51 cyborgs. See posthumans Daleski, H.M. 67n85 Daniel, Arnaut 188 Dante. See Alighieri, Dante “Dante and the Lobster” 63, 189–​190 Darwin, Charles 19, 120, 194 death. See mortality death-​in-​life  in Beckett 146–​148, 189–​193 in O’Brien 140–​144, 148–​149, 152–​154, 156–​157 in Paul’s Epistles 150–​152 in Ulysses 144–​145 See also mortality death instinct 172 Deleuze, Gilles 36–​38, 54, 58–​59, 168, 199 on Beckett 168–​171, 173–​174, 177 on comedy 174 on Hamlet 177–​180 on Nietzsche 90 on psychoanalysis 171–​172 on tragedy 167–​168, 170–​180 De Man, Paul 73 Derrida, Jacques 

on the apocalyptic 77–​78, 84–​85 on the crypt 86, 89 on the end of history 19n6, 84 on genre 65 on Hegel 36 on mortality 84–​86 on mourning 40 on secrecy 84–​87, 93 on time 76–​77 on virtualization 41 Descartes, René 47–​48, 104–​105, 184 Difference and Repetition 168 disembodiment. See immortality dis-​organised perspective 6, 14–​16, 56, 83, 196, 199 dualism, Cartesian 9, 25, 104–​105 Ecce Homo 175 Echo and Narcissus. See Narcissus, narcissism “Echo’s Bones” 146–​147, 191–​195 education 28–​30, 164, 167 Eliot, T.S. 188 Endgame 177 Engels, Friedrich 101–​102 entropy 71–​72, 172 Epistles 149–​152, 155–​156 Erdinast-​Vulcan, Daphna 79 Erinnerung 31, 39, 54, 59 eroticism 142–​147 evolution 45–​47, 93–​94 eyes, gaze of 1, 3, 6, 14–​16, 55–​59, 83, 193–​194, 196–​199 eyelessness 124, 132, 196 in Vertigo 124–​127 Fagan, Paul 153–​154, 156 fear 2, 4, 159–​166, 173 finitude 7–​11 acceptance of 26, 34–​35 and apocalypse 72, 78–​79 in Beckett 147, 171, 178, 182–​185, 190 and life 9–​12, 26, 90–​91, 190 in modernity 7–​8, 164–​165, 178 in posthumanism 9–​11, 26 of time 74–​79, 83, 94, 198 “First Love” 169–​171, 180–​182, 191–​192 Ford, Harrison 51 Foster, Thomas 27, 45, 60

216 Index Four Elements Quartet 75 Freud, Sigmund 19, 60–​61, 84, 94, 146, 172–​173, 181 “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 145–​146 “On Narcissism” 61 Friedlander, Eli 127 gender 111, 117–​120, 131, 138, 169, 192 gender and genre 118–​120 Genesis 71 genre, generic forms 64–​66, 68, 93–​94, 112, 118–​120, 135 George, Kaplan 129–​130 Geulincx, Arnold 182, 184 Ghost in the Shell 3–​4, 48–​49, 58 ghosts, ghostly 73n5, 88, 106 in Vertigo 124–​125, 127–​131 in Woolf 109–​111, 119–​122 Gomel, Elana 74–​76, 80 Greaney, Michael 81n25 Greenwich Observatory 80–​83 growing 12, 111, 120, 123–​124, 132, 134, 138 Hamlet 168, 176–​177, 179–​180, 192 Haraway, Donna 42, 47 Hardware 25 Hardy, Thomas 12, 20–​21, 33, 63–​68 haunting 66, 77, 111, 120, 122, 127, 130–​131 Hawthorn, Jeremy 87–​88 Hayles, N. Katherine 6n6, 9, 24–​27, 43–​44 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 28–​36, 38–​40, 54, 90–​91, 100, 136, 164–​165 Henchard 20–​21, 23–​24, 33, 63–​68 Herbrechter, Stefan 15, 27–​28, 46, 89–​90 history, historicity 7, 19–​20, 38–​39, 72, 76, 136–​137 end of 19n6, 20, 74, 84, 95 in Nietzsche 91–​94 in Woolf 116, 119–​120 history, ideal 29–​30, 38, 61–​62, 89, 117, 136–​138 Hitchcock, Alfred 12, 56, 124–​131, 196 homosexuality 163 Hopper, Keith 163 horses. See The Turin Horse humanism 18–​21, 25, 27–​28 immortality 24 of Cain 190–​191 digital, disembodied 9–​11, 24–​27, 139

ethics of 25–​27 See also mortality impossibility, the impossible 28, 196 in Beckett 177, 191 in Blade Runner 52, 57 in Derrida 40–​41 in The Mayor of Casterbridge 12, 17, 21, 23 in the posthuman 46–​47, 57 in self-​mourning 33–​34, 38–​42, 60, 62 indeterminacy 62–​64, 67–​68, 78, 85, 92–​93, 112, 119, 184 industrialists 1, 13 Inferno 112–​115, 181, 189 infinity, the infinite 36, 78–​79, 90–​91, 180–​181, 183–​184, 198 interiority 60, 63 in Blade Runner 56–​57 in Hegel 30–​31, 35–​36, 39–​40 in The Secret Agent 87 Jameson, Fredric 29, 35 “John Duffy’s Brother” 161–​163, 166 Johnson, Erica L. 119 Jöttkandt, Sigi 169n41, 170 Joyce, James 144–​146, 148, 188 Kafka, Franz 24, 168, 174, 197 Kant, Immanuel 7–​8, 102, 168, 178, 181–​182 Kantian dichotomies 35 Karl, Frederick R. 67–​68 Kawashima, Takeshi 190 knowledge, absolute 6, 31, 33, 35, 54, 91 Kojève, Alexandre 31 Kramer, Dale 65 Kristeva, Julia 135–​136, 137 La Jetée 127n45, 128, 197–​199 Lang, Fritz 13, 196 laughter. See comedy law, law courts  in “Echo’s Bones” 192 in The Late Mattia Pascal 95, 97–​98 in O’Brien 140–​143, 149–​150, 152, 156–​157 in Orlando 117, 132, 141–​142 in Paul’s Epistles 155–​156 in Ulysses 144–​145 Le Carré, John 80 Lemm, Vanessa 93 Levin, Yael 187n87 life 

217

Index affirmation of 9–​12, 26, 90–​91 plasticity of 91–​92, 123, 138 and proper names 97–​99 and time 73–​74, 148 unattributed 89–​91 See also materialist vitalism; under Nietzsche, Friedrich literary modernity 73 Long, Maebh 144n2, 145n6 Los Angeles 49, 55 Madeleine Elster 124–​125, 129–​131 madness 81–​84, 104–​106, 111–​113, 116–​117, 131–​132, 157–​164 Malabou, Catherine 29, 136–​137 Mann, Thomas 134 Marker, Chris 127n45, 128, 130, 197–​198 materialism 6, 9, 101, 104, 106, 129, 157 materialist vitalism 111, 118, 121 melancholia 8, 11, 39, 60–​62, 110–​111, 135–​138 self-​mourning, difference 61–​62, 111 Metropolis 13–​15 Millenarianism 75–​77, 80 Miracky, James 118–​119 Molloy 103, 186–​187, 191n95 Moravec, Hans 9 More Pricks than Kicks 146–​147, 187–​190 mortality 76, 196–​197 of Cain 190–​191 as ethical value 11, 26 fear of 2–​4 as public/​private 97–​98 of simulacra 1–​2, 4, 10 and trees 123–​124, 133 See also death-​in-​life; immortality mortality, in  Beckett 146–​148, 189–​193 Blade Runner 51–​52, 54 Derrida 84–​86 Hegel 34, 39 The Late Mattia Pascal 95–​100 The Mayor of Casterbridge 20–​21, 23–​24, 33, 66 Mrs Dalloway 112 Nietzsche 90–​91 Orlando 116–​118, 133, 138 The Secret Agent 83 Vertigo 124, 127, 130 mourning. See self-​mourning

Mrs Dalloway 112–​115 Mt Rushmore 129–​130 Muir Woods 124, 127–​130 Murphy 153–​156, 177, 196 Myles na gCopaleen. See O’Brien, Flann Nakazawa, Mayuko 122 names, proper 97–​99 Nancy, Jean-​Luc 78–​79 Narcissus, narcissism 20, 22, 44 and Beckett 193 and Blade Runner 59 and Freud 61, 94 and Ghost in the Shell 4, 58 and The Mayor of Casterbridge 20, 23 and melancholia 61–​62 Ovid’s 22–​23 natural existence  and technology 47–​51, 54 nature/​culture divide 47, 50, 102, 121 See also organicity natural selection 45–​46 neither/​nor motif 63–​64, 66–​68, 148, 156–​157 Nemesvari, Richard 65–​66 Nietzsche, Friedrich 73 on Copernicus 102–​103 on history, forgetting 91–​93 on life, vitalism 89–​91, 94, 102–​103 on mortality 90–​91 on tragedy 175 in The Turin Horse 69–​70 Nixon, Mark 194 nonhuman beings. See posthumans North by Northwest 129–​130 now, the 7, 73–​74, 78–​79, 84, 86, 178, 184 Nussbaum, Martha 182–​186 O’Brien, Flann 12, 140–​144, 148–​149, 156–​164 bicycles in 142–​143, 186 comedy in 141–​142, 149, 157–​164, 166–​167 confession in 153–​155 death-​in-​life in 140–​144, 148–​149, 152–​154, 156–​157 law courts in 140–​143, 149–​150, 152, 156–​157 madness in 157–​159, 161–​163 tragedy in 158–​159, 161–​164

218 Index Oedipus 168–​173, 178–​179 organicity 6 in Hegel 31–​33, 40 Orlando 12, 116–​120, 131–​134, 138 gender and genre in 118–​120, 132, 138 law courts in 117, 132, 141–​142 oak tree in 132–​134 secrecy in 133–​134 Oshii, Mamoru 3–​4, 47–​48 Ossipon 82–​83 Ovid 22–​23 owl of Minerva 54–​55 Pan American Building 49 paranormal. See supernatural passivity 8–​11, 24, 198 in Beckett 103, 140, 177, 184, 187–​188, 191 in “Dante and the Lobster” 189 in Deleuze 168 in Hamlet 180 in The Mayor of Casterbridge 24, 67 in The Secret Agent 87–​88 in The Turin Horse 70, 72 Patocka, Jan 85 Paul the Apostle 148–​152, 155–​157 Pensky, Max 136 Pirandello, Luigi 95–​101, 103–​107 pity  for life 10, 189 of Nietzsche 69, 108 in Nietzsche 175 in Scholasticism 160–​162 for simulacra 1 in simulacra 2 and tragedy 158–​160, 162–​165 Platonism 53n61, 85 anti-​Platonism 89 Pomerance, Murray 128–​129 posthumanism 5–​6, 10, 62, 72, 94, 196 co-​implying humanity 17–​18, 27–​28, 72 contemporaneity 42–​46 as an event 18–​19, 40–​42, 45–​46 historicising of 73 and modernism, studies on 5–​9 trauma of 19–​20 posthumans (specific)  Batty, Roy (Blade Runner) 52n59, 55–​57 Buffy (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) 14n16

Deckard, Rick (Blade Runner) 50–​52, 54, 63 Kowalski, Leon (Blade Runner) 56–​57 Kusanagi, Motoko (Ghost in the Shell)  3–​4, 48–​49, 58 Maria (Metropolis) 13–​15 Rachel (Blade Runner) 50–​54 Sulla (R.U.R.) 1–​2 posthumans (thematic)  acceleration of 45–​47 definitions of 42–​48 evolution 45–​47 eyes or gaze of 1, 3, 6, 14–​16, 55–​59, 83 mortality of 1–​2, 4, 10 privacy, need for 3 rights of 2–​3 tragedy of 2–​4 present, the 73–​74, 78–​79, 87, 148, 157 psychoanalysis 19, 39, 84–​85, 146, 169 critique of 171–​172 Purgatory 181, 187–​189, 191 R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) 1–​3 Rabaté, Jean-​Michel 72, 78, 174n53, 181 rationalism 12, 105–​106 reality  break with, loss of 21–​24, 33–​34, 40–​41, 51–​53, 67, 157 changeable 48, 120 degrees of 50 in-​between 188–​189 and melancholia/​mourning 60–​61, 68 produced in cinema 58–​59 as rational 12, 34, 105–​106, 117 recalcitrant 71 and unreality, doubling of 130–​131 reality in  Beckett 188–​189 Blade Runner 51, 53–​54, 59–​60 Derrida 40–​41 Hegel 12, 33–​34 The Late Mattia Pascal 104–​105 The Matrix 52–​53 The Mayor of Casterbridge 21–​24, 33, 63, 67–​68 Orlando 117–​118, 120 The Secret Agent 88 Vertigo 130–​131 rebirth 4, 150, 157 revelation 75, 77–​78, 85–​86, 89, 108 The Book of Revelation 75

219

Index rights of simulacra 2–​3 Robocop 25 robots. See posthumans Roche, Mark W. 167n37 Roger O. Thornhill 129–​130 Rohman, Carrie 121 Ryan, Derek 5 Saint-​Amour, Paul K. 110, 135 Salisbury, Laura 146n8 Sammon, Paul 49 Schlack, Beverly Ann 114 Scott, Bonnie Kime 120–​121 Scott, Ridley 47, 49, 51, 54 Scottie (John Ferguson) 124–​125, 127, 130–​131 secrecy 84–​88, 93, 108, 133–​134, 163, 196–​197 Segal, Alex 87 self-​determination 45, 79–​80, 164 in Hegel 31–​33, 39 self-​difference 18, 37, 76 self-​externality 31–​32, 54, 62 self-​knowledge 22–​23, 53–​54, 93, 105 self-​mourning 11, 15, 136–​138, 196–​198 as an event 62, 67 and impossibility 33–​34, 38–​42, 60, 62 indeterminacy in 62–​64, 67–​68 and loss of reality 24, 33–​34 and tragedy 115–​116 self-​mourning, in  Derrida 40 Freud 61 Hegel 30, 33–​34, 38–​39 The Late Mattia Pascal 96–​97, 99–​100 The Mayor of Casterbridge 20–​21, 23–​24, 33, 63–​64, 67–​68 Vertigo 124, 128 Woolf 115–​116 self-​recognition 13–​15 in Blade Runner 55, 57 in Hegel 31, 33 in The Mayor of Casterbridge 21, 33, 68 self-​reflection 4, 14, 41–​42 self-​return 28, 31 Septimus Smith 112–​116 Sequoia Sempervirens 124, 127–​128, 131 silence 107, 135, 163, 173 simulacra 50 in Blade Runner 55 in Deleuze 36–​38, 54

in The Matrix 53 of mourning 137 See also posthumans “Sir Myles” 140–​142, 148–​149, 152 Slote, Sam 119 Sobchack, Vivian 50 Somers-​Hall, Henry 176 spirit 62 in Hegel 30–​35, 62 in The Late Mattia Pascal 122, 137, 139 of modernity 73 in O’Brien 157 in Paul’s Epistles 149–​150, 153, 155 in Woolf 111 spirit mediums 105–​106 spiritualism 104–​107 subjectivity 6, 17, 26–​27, 79–​80 and Beckett 185 and Blade Runner 59–​60 and Deleuze 59 ethics of 32, 62, 79 and Freud 61 and Hegel 29, 32 and Kant 7 melancholic 110 suicide 12, 20, 66, 96, 114–​115 supernatural 21, 23, 109–​110, 120 ghosts 73n5, 88, 106, 109–​111, 119–​122 survival 75, 94–​95 Sword, Helen 105–​106 synthesis, passive 6, 8 Tarr, Béla 69–​70, 196 Taubes, Jacob 150n13 taxidermy 153–​154 Terminator 25 terror 158–​162, 164, 175 The Big Lebowski 166 The Birth of Tragedy 89, 175 The Book of Revelation 75 The Dalkey Archive 148–​149 “The Hunter Gracchus” 24, 197–​198 The Late Mattia Pascal 95–​101, 103–​107 cosmology in 100–​101, 103 mortality in 95–​100 proper names in 97–​99 reality in 104–​105 spiritualism in 104–​107 The Madman and the Nun 24 The Magic Mountain 134 The Matrix 52–​53

220 Index The Mayor of Casterbridge 12, 20–​21, 23–​24, 33, 96 ethics in 66–​67 generic complexity of 65–​66, 68 indeterminacy in 63–​64, 66–​68 mortality in 20–​21, 23–​24, 33, 66 neither/​nor motif 63–​64, 66–​68 The Poor Mouth 152n18 The Secret Agent 80–​88, 107 agency and action in 81–​82, 87–​88 anarchy in 82–​84 animism in 87–​88 secrecy in 87–​88 time in 87 The Six Million Dollar Man 42 The Third Policeman 142–​145 The Trial 174 The Turin Horse 69–​72, 107–​108 entropy in 71–​72 reversal of Genesis 71 The Waves 121–​123 thinking 111–​112, 134–​135 time  end, finitude of 74–​79, 83, 94, 198 experience of 73–​74, 78 revival of 76, 94 speed of 134 and tragedy 164, 168–​171, 176–​180 and trees 123–​124, 129–​130, 132–​133 See also now, the; present, the time in  “Dante and the Lobster” 189 “First Love” 180–​182 The Late Mattia Pascal 95 Orlando 134 The Secret Agent 87 Toker, Leona 66–​67 tomb 192–​194 topos, modernist 6–​7 To the Lighthouse 123 tragedy  and comedy 158–​167, 175–​176 and madness 158, 161, 163 and self-​mourning 115–​116 of simulacra 2–​4 and time 164, 168–​171, 176–​180 tragedy in  Aristotle 159

Beckett 168–​171, 174, 177, 180, 185–​186 Deleuze 167–​168, 170–​180 Hegel 164–​165, 167 Nietzsche 89–​91, 175–​176 O’Brien 158–​159, 161–​164 Scholasticism 160–​162 Woolf 115–​116 trains 161–​163, 166–​167 Trangmar, Susan 122 traumas  in Mrs Dalloway 113–​114 of the past 91–​92 of posthumanism 19–​20, 94 separation from the mother 135–​136 trees 12, 111, 114–​115, 122–​124, 196 in North by Northwest 129–​130 in Orlando 132–​134, 138 and time 123–​124, 129–​130, 132–​133 in Vertigo 124, 127–​131 Tribulations 75–​76 “Two in One” 152–​157, 196 Uhlmann, Anthony 173, 184n80 Ulysses 144–​145 Untimely Meditations 91 Van Wert, Kathryn 113 Vertigo 12, 56, 124–​131 violence 73–​78, 80–​81, 108–​111, 132 virtualization 40–​41 Wallace, Jeff 5 war 77, 109, 113–​114 Wasser, Audrey 173 Wells, H.G. 46 Witkiewicz, Stanislaw 24 Wolfe, Cary 9–​10 Woolf, Virginia 12, 109–​124, 133–​135, 137, 141–​142, 196 materialist vitalism 111, 118, 121 on the supernatural 109–​110 See also growing; haunting; thinking; trees Wyatt, Jean M. 113 Yuen, Wong Kin 49–​50 Žižek, Slavoj 167n36