Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives Since 1945 0748634444, 9780748634446

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Hell in Contemporary Literature Western Descent Narratives since 1945

Rachel Falconer

Edinburgh University Press

Hell in Contemporary Literature

For my father Alexander Graham Falconer

# Rachel Falconer, 2005, 2007 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh First published in hardback by Edinburgh University Press in 2005. Typeset in Sabon by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh, and printed and bound in Spain by GraphyCems A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3443 9 (paperback) The right of Rachel Falconer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Hell is neither here nor there, Hell is not anywhere, Hell is hard to bear. W. H. Auden, `Hell' (September, 1939)

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction:

1

Descent and Return ± the katabatic imagination

1 Hell in Our Time Is Hell a fable? Hell as the modern condition Descent and dissent in modern philosophy

13

2 Chronotopes of Hell 42 Generic features of katabatic narrative Bakhtin's Inferno: visionary versus historical chronotopes Unspeakable wisdom Conversion versus inversion Infernal inversion: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano The absolute and `my absolute': Sarah Kofman's Smothered Words 3 Auschwitz as Hell Pathways through a life: The Search for Roots Black holes and the biblical Job A constellation of chronotopes: If This Is a Man Threshold crossing into Hell Auschwitz as education The visionary world On trial in Hell Sea-voyage and shipwreck The intersection of pathways

63

4 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust Narratives Bog-boys and fire-children Vertigo and luminosity: W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz From depth to ascent: Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces

89

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Hell in Contemporary Literature

5 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness 113 Down the rabbit hole Parallel worlds and protest culture: Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted The schizophrenic HyperReal: Carol North's Welcome, Silence Falling into grace: Lauren Slater's Spasm: A Memoir with Lies 6 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld Gender dynamics in the descent to Hell Inside the hero's descent: Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills Hell and utopia: Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time Dante upside-down: Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette

144

7 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots Karl Marx's katabasis Postmodern Capitalist Hell: Alasdair Gray's Lanark Lanark's search for roots Can realism lead fantasy out of Hell? Can fantasy help realism?

172

8 East±West Descent Narratives 196 Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Western descents to the East Salman Rushdie's disoriented subjects The migrations of Orpheus in five acts: Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet Threshold crossing Ground Zero Looking back Dismemberment Return of another Epilogue: Katabasis in the Twenty-First Century September 11th: the first circle Afghanistan and Iraq: there and back again (again) Global fear and its inversions

224

Appendix: Primo Levi, `Map of reading'

232

Bibliography

233

Index

253

Acknowledgements

This book was completed with the generous support of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, which granted me a Research Leave Award from September 2003 to February 2004. I would like to thank Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope Studios for their permission to reproduce a still from Apocalypse Now on the cover of this study. Grateful thanks, also, to Martin Sheen for generous permission to reproduce his likeness in this still. Thanks are due to the Penguin Group (UK) and Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, for permission to reproduce the illustration, `Black Holes', from Primo Levi's The Search for Roots (p. 9) in the Appendix of this study. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was originally published as `Selfhood in Descent: Primo Levi's The Search for Roots and If This Is a Man', in Sue Vice (ed.), Immigrants and Minorities, 21, 1±2, Special Issue: Representing the Holocaust (March/July 2002), pp. 202±30 (http://www.tandf.co.uk). Chapter 8 includes sections of a longer article published as `Bouncing Down to the Underworld: Classical Katabasis in The Ground Beneath Her Feet', in Sabina and Simona Sawhney (eds), Twentieth Century Literature, 47, 4, Special Issue: Salman Rushdie (Winter, 2001), pp. 467±509. Thanks to Twentieth Century Literature and Immigrants and Minorities (a Frank Cass journal) for permission to reproduce this material. I would particularly like to thank Jackie Jones, my editor at Edinburgh University Press, for overseeing the progress of the manuscript with such scrupulous care and sound judgment. Thanks also to Carol Macdonald of Edinburgh University Press, for all her work on the production side of the project. I am very grateful to my readers, Dr Nicola King of University of the West of England, Bristol, Dr David Pike of American University and Dr Galin Tihanov of Lancaster University for their valuable suggestions and support of the project in its initial stages, as well as their own outstanding research into, respectively, the descensus in modernist literature, memory and narrative, and Bakhtinian theory. I am indebted to

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my colleague Dr Sue Vice for reading through drafts of Chapters 1, 3 and 4, and more generally for our conversations about Holocaust literature, dating back many years. I would also like to thank other colleagues at Sheffield, particularly Shirley Foster, Jonathan Rayner, Neil Roberts and Erica Sheen, all of whom offered valuable suggestions as to where to find the best Hells in literature and film. I would also like to thank Alastair Renfrew for first drawing my attention to Lanark many years ago; Roger Starling, for discussions of Levinas, Derrida and Lyotard at the `Narratives of Disaster' Conference in MuÈnster, 2003; Adrian Harding for extolling the virtues of Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette at the `Poetics of the Subject' Conference in Aix-en-Provence, 2003; and Kiera Vaclavik for inviting me to speak at the `Undergrounds' Conference at the University of Manchester, 2003, where I learned from Baryon Tensor Posadas about the katabatic novels of Haruki Murakami. Warm thanks to Janey and Jeremy Knowles for giving me a home in Cambridge, MA, which enabled me to use the Widener Library. From its gestation nearly a decade ago, the present study has been enriched by the enthusiasm, intelligence and insight of many undergraduate students in my Literature of Descent seminars at the University of Sheffield. I have also been privileged to work with some very gifted postgraduates in contiguous areas of research. In particular, Brendan Stone's PhD research into autopathography and narrative has contributed valuable insights to Chapter 5 of the present study. I would also like to thank Nicole Campbell, Aideen Fitzpatrick, Julie Scanlon, Brendan Stone and Kiera Vaclavik for their valuable comments on drafts of various chapters. For their patience and support, I would like to thank my friends and family, especially my mother Ann Falconer, Julia, Tom, Jenny and Sara. My father, Graham Falconer, has been the indispensable Virgilian guide who steered this book through its penultimate stages, reading through the entire manuscript and making innumerable suggestions and improvements. In token of my heartfelt thanks, this book is dedicated to him.

Introduction

Descent and Return ± the katabatic imagination

Speaking on television on the anniversary of September 11th, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani described New York City, the night after the attack on the World Trade Center, as `Hell, what Dante must have meant when he described Hell'. In such a context, this familiar allusion is striking in spite of, or perhaps because of, its very conventionality. A Catholic invokes `Hell' and `Dante' in the same breath, incidentally omitting reference to any sacred text. Like many present-day Catholics including the current Pope, Giuliani doesn't claim to believe in a theological Hell, an actual place of eternal torment to which sinners are sent in the afterlife.1 But the invocation of the name of `Hell', together with the appropriation of Dante, constitute something more than a literary allusion. The double invocation aims to seal off the event from others, to claim for it a unique status, to transform it from a historical occurrence into a mythic absolute. In this book I argue that, like Giuliani, many secular Westerners retain a vestigial or quasi-religious belief in Hell: Hell as the absolutely horrific experience from which no one emerges unchanged. In the Western imaginative tradition, even more important than the notion of Hell as a sacred space is our belief in the journey through Hell, the idea of the transformative passage, the destruction and rebirth of the self through an encounter with the absolute Other. The arc of such a journey only becomes visible retrospectively, when remembered and narrated. Having survived the journey, the survivor gains the perspective to identify it as Hell, as the unimaginable, unspeakable experience, the caesura which severs present from past selfhood. While Hell as a space remains unfathomable, we invest the narrative of the journey through Hell with potent meaning. Like Coleridge's wedding guest, we are at once repelled by and drawn toward stories of those who have returned from the abyss. More than Hell itself, then, it is this narrative of a descent and return in which we apparently continue to `believe'. Why should this be so, in the predominantly secular cultures of the

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Descent and Return ± the katabatic imagination

West? In this book, I will argue that we are still very much governed by a `katabatic imagination', that is a world-view which conceives of selfhood as the narrative construct of an infernal journey and return. The ancient Greek term for the story of a hero's descent to the underworld is katabasis, which means literally `a going down'.2 Etymologically, `katabasis' could refer to a place from which descents are made, such as a cave mouth, or to a military manoeuvre involving a descent. Both of these etymological senses are relevant to recent political events, including the bombing of Afghanistan (which aimed, as President George W. Bush put it, to smoke the enemy terrorists out of their holes) and the invasion of Iraq by British and American-led military forces in 2003. But metaphorically, katabasis (or in Latin, descensus ad inferos) was used by the Greeks more particularly to refer to a story about a living person who visits the land of the Dead and returns more or less unscathed.3 The well-known Greek and Roman heroes who made such a journey include Orpheus, Theseus, Jason, Heracles, the goddess Demeter, Homer's Odysseus and Virgil's Aeneas. The Greeks may also have known of the older Sumerian and Akkadian descent heroes such as the king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, or the goddess, Inanna.4 In the Christian tradition, the conversion of Saul into the apostle Paul is allegorised as a descent and return. Indeed every Christian's experience of conversion may be understood as a shadowy imitation of Christ's own descent into Hell and reascension. The pervasive influence of this tradition on the modern Western psyche is, as we shall see, both literary and religious. Undoubtedly the katabatic writer of most far-reaching influence on contemporary Western literature is Dante Alighieri, who seamlessly combined the ancient Greek and Roman with the medieval Christian traditions of descent narrative.5 Dante's Inferno famously begins, `Midway on the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood' (Inf.1.1±2). In these lines, the `I' is both singular and archetypal, at once an individual character and a figure for `our life'. For the modern secular reader, the `I' is also an autobiographical, narrativised self; it is me the reader, made coherent by the organising powers of narrative. For the Western reader, the appropriation of Dante's model to the `dark woods' of modern life ± mid-life crisis, divorce, redundancy, cancer, AIDS or, most recently, terrorism ± comes naturally. Dante's infernal journey is always potentially the modern reader's own life story, since it helps us to see the flux of our own experience as a comprehensible narrative. Like the man in Karen Blixen's story, who looks out from his window to find that his footprints in the snow have created the pattern of a stork, we look up from reading Dante to find inferno-shapes in our own lives.6 If Dante's Inferno feels contemporary, this is not only because it

Introduction

3

embodies a vast inheritance of Western literary and theological myths, but also we are accustomed to thinking about the modern psyche, and the political and social economy, in katabatic terms. As has often been pointed out, Freud and Marx were very much influenced by classical ideas about the underworld, and even more by the idea of a heroic descent into this underworld.7 In this study, I shall be discussing Western descent narratives written between 1945 and the present, nearly all of which reflect this mixed inheritance of views about infernal journeys from Dante, Greek and Roman myth, Judeo-Christian theology, Freud's theory of the unconscious and Marx's theory of economic base and superstructure. Freud and Marx are themselves inheritors of nineteenthcentury katabatic ideas that the truth about ourselves, about our species origin, lies deeply hidden underground. As Rosalind Williams has convincingly shown, the development of mining and archaeological excavation in the nineteenth century contributed to the prevalence of these ideas.8 Darwin's theory of evolution is a story of humanity's descent from the Earth's creatures rather than the gods of the sky. What was even more distressing for his contemporaries, his theory of devolution postulated that we are always capable of regressing, of descending in a different sense, to a more primeval state.9 Added to this nineteenth- and early twentieth-century inheritance are the very considerable influences of later writers on Hell, as well as underworld myths borrowed from other theological systems such as Buddhism and Hinduism. And it is not only theology, literature, archaeology, anthropology, psychology and economic theory that have contributed to making Hell feel like a reality to the modern, secular imagination. As I will argue in Chapters 1 to 3, the sheer pressure of twentieth-century history itself has convinced many people of the view that Hells actually exist, and survivors do return, against all probability, to pass on their experience. Dante's description of his journey through Hell is a strikingly vivid, engrossing narrative in its own right. But there are many additional factors that contribute to a twenty-first-century reader's sense of recognition when he or she first encounters the medieval pilgrim lost in the wood. In classical katabasis, the descent to Dis or Hades is about coming to know the self, regaining something or someone lost, or acquiring superhuman powers or knowledge.10 The descent requires the hero to undergo a series of tests and degradations, culminating in the collapse or dissolution of the hero's sense of selfhood. In the midst of this dissolution comes the infernal revelation, or the sought after power, or the spectre of the beloved. The hero then returns to the overworld, in some cases succeeding, in other cases failing to bring back this buried wisdom, love or power from the underworld. In Dantean and medieval Christian katabasis, the

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Descent and Return ± the katabatic imagination

traveller's sinful self dies upside down at the bottom of Hell, and a new self emerges, walking upright in the grace of God.11 Many contemporary writers have drawn upon this hinged narrative structure, with its descent to a zero point followed by a return, in order to convey some aspect of what Rushdie has called `the felt shape of human life' (The Ground Beneath Her Feet, p. 543). Among the major contemporary `katabasists' who, for reasons of space, have not been included in the present discussion are Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Tony Harrison and Derek Walcott. Similarly another book could (and should) be written on post-1945 katabatic film, which would include examples from the arthouse cinema of Vincent Ward and Jan SÏvankmajer to Hollywood blockbusters such as the Star Wars epic cycle and The Matrix trilogy.12 One point which I hope the present study makes clear is that Western culture is saturated with the idea of a self being forged out of an infernal journey. In katabatic narratives written after 1945, while the descent to Hell still functions as a quest for knowledge, reparation of loss or superhuman power, the descent occurs within a context which, unlike their classical predecessors, is already understood to be infernal. Post-1945 descent narratives are notably fatalistic, often beginning with the protagonist at the bottom of Hell. In Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, we are `On the Bottom' by Chapter 2; in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the narrator is already immured underground when he begins his story; in Lowry's Under the Volcano, the protagonist is already dead in Chapter 1. As we shall see in Chapter 8, one of the key differences between Coppola's film Apocalypse Now and the early twentieth-century novella on which it is based, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is that Captain Willard begins his descent from Saigon rather than the West. Early in the film, Coppola's Willard is roused to consciousness by two fellow American soldiers, one of whom says to the other, `give me a hand here, Captain. We got a dead one'. Post-1945 descent narratives aim to show that we have already reached the end, although this fact is obscured by a surface of comfortable pseudo-realities. In such narratives, rather than making the traditional crossing from historical to eternal realms, descent heroes are found peering through cracks, ripping back curtains, opening trapdoors to find infernal worlds contingent and coterminous with our own. Both worlds are represented as equally real. More frightening still is the possibility that, as E. L. Doctorow claims, once the trapdoor to that other, deeper reality is thrown open, it can never be closed.13 In such cases, the function of the descent journey can no longer be to overcome and subjugate the

Introduction

5

dark realm. Rather the protagonist's task, as we find in Gray's Lanark and Rushdie's Ground Beneath Her Feet, is to acquire the ability to live with the double-vision or to stand astride the two realities. So while Hell is embedded in twentieth-century history and consciousness, it may still take a descent journey to bring that reality home to us. The descent thus exposes the infernal nature of individual psyches, as well as twentiethcentury institutions, governments and histories. At the same time, and more optimistically, by framing the experience of Hell as a journey of descent and return, many contemporary descent narratives articulate their resistance to this apparently inescapable infernal condition. If Hell has become a historical phenomenon, then it need no longer be regarded as a mythical or theological absolute. It can be resisted, transformed and even ± as in Naylor's Linden Hills, Notley's The Descent of Alette and Whedon's TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer ± ultimately destroyed. Katabatic narrative offers contemporary writers a positive structure for representing the process by which a self is created out of adversity. But there are also a set of problems specifically associated with this narrative tradition of which we should be wary, especially in the present climate of fear generated by terrorism and the polarisation of Eastern and Western nations. Many descent narratives represent otherness as absolutely Other; the rejection of the demonised Other is the necessary flipside to the creation or preservation of a self. Dante's ascent via the torso of the immured Satan, in Inferno, 34, illustrates this point graphically. Infernal journeys are also traditionally narrated retrospectively, from a position of supernatural authority. Descent narrators are the survivors of atrocity, the escape artists from Hell. The extremity of their experience and the fact that they survived gives them the right to speak and not be contradicted by their merely mortal listeners. Moreover, neither the past self nor any other participant within the descent narrative possesses the same degree of authority as the narrator, because traditionally it is only the narrator who survives the experience. As C. S. Lewis's gloomy earthman put it, `many fall down, and few return to the sunlit lands'.14 Such narrators can and often do claim to be the bearers of revelatory truth, even and especially in secular contexts. Infernal revelation can then become the means to justify acts of retribution and vengeance, as has arguably been the case with the Western response to September 11th. In recent years, popular Hollywood epic films have faithfully reproduced this traditional katabatic narrative dynamic. In Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, the enemy is a familiar other who must be transformed into, and rejected as, the absolute Other in order for the hero to return from the underworld. In these film cycles, the hero is the bearer of a sacred truth, for which millions of the enemy must be sacrificed so that a few good souls will

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Descent and Return ± the katabatic imagination

survive. The narrative dynamic operating here is similar to that which governs Virgil's Aeneid, in which the hero's descent to the underworld teaches him his destiny: that he must found the empire of Rome at some cost to others' lives and his own humanity. The texts discussed in this book, however, call into question many of the problematics associated with the classical and medieval descent narrative tradition. In doing so, they are not simply modernising a literary tradition, but also making us think about our own infernal experiences in a different way. In the aftermath of a catastrophe, there often appears to be only one way out of Hell, something that must be done whatever the price. The narratives discussed here suggest that, on the contrary, there are as many routes through Hell as there are minds to imagine them. This is an idea which Primo Levi's writing on Auschwitz conveys with particular clarity and force. From his well-known autobiographical works such as If This Is a Man, The Truce and The Periodic Table to his novels, occasional essays and prefaces, Levi showed that living through Hell need not be transformed through the filters of memory and narrative into a sacred, fixed or absolute experience. The title of my first chapter, `Hell in Our Time' is taken from Levi's Auschwitz testimony, If This Is a Man (p. 28). In this chapter, I explore the proposition suggested by Levi, Steiner and many others, that in the twentieth century, Hell was made immanent in history. I test out this idea against the evidence of a broad spectrum of twentieth-century experiences and writings, not all of them literary, and not all of them related to major historical events such as the two world wars and the creation of the death camps. Cutting across this cultural analysis, I adopt a more formalist approach to Hell in Chapter 2. My aim there is to demonstrate that however we define Hell, whatever we think being in Hell means, our ideas are shaped by the conventions and dynamics of narrative. Formally considered, Hell is what Bakhtin defined as a chronotope, a generically distinct representation of time and space in narrative. As such, it represents the image of the human subject in particular and distinctive ways. Once we recognise this, however, we are in a position to challenge the traditional chronotopic representations of Hell as temporally fixed and spatially distanced, hence to be feared and revered as a theological absolute. In Chapter 3, I discuss Primo Levi's classic testimony, If This Is a Man, as a descent narrative in which Hell is represented as a juxtaposition of many chronotopes, each of which reveals a different image of the human subject. This is a deliberately belated approach to If This Is a Man; that is to say, I am not trying to capture the searing, visceral impact the text makes on a first-time reader, although the text itself was composed from

Introduction

7

`an immediate and violent impulse' to communicate the experience of internment, as Levi informs us in the Preface (pp. 15±16). But much has been written on If This Is a Man already, including its allusions to Dante's Inferno. There is little need for further allusive or empathetic readings of the text, especially when Levi himself conveys this kind of response so much more effectively. What I am interested in exploring is the retrospective Levi, the testimonial writer perceived through the filter of his own, later reflections on the Holocaust and our own increasing distance from the historical event. Levi's writing can be seen to work against the sacralisation of Hell that occurs in some other examples of memorialisation and writing about the Holocaust. Chapter 4 develops this theme of belatedness, or afterwardness, by contrasting two fictional novels about the Second World War: Michaels' Fugitive Pieces and Sebald's Austerlitz. These two novels were written at the distance of a generation or more from the experience of the war itself (1996 and 2001 respectively). Here it is the traumatic recollection of childhood memories that constitutes the descent into Hell. The contrasting ways in which Austerlitz and Fugitive Pieces represent war trauma illustrate how memories of Hell can work to entrap survivors or unexpectedly release them from unbearable aporia. Chapters 5 and 6 move on to consider more recent, and more personal examples of Western descent narrative. In Chapter 5, I discuss the autobiographical or semi-autobiographical accounts of mental illness written by recovered patients/writers such as Susanna Kaysen, Carol North and Lauren Slater. All these writers frame their experiences of mental illness within the narrative structure of a descent into Hell and return. These actual survivors of mental illness present us with very different accounts of the experience than do leading theorists of madness such as Jameson, Deleuze and Guattari. In various ways, they demonstrate that the return from such a Hell need not be a matter of choice between Cartesian self-certainty and postmodern self-doubt. If madness has long been associated with underworlds, so too has femininity. The classical descent narrative is frequently (though not exclusively) gendered as the journey of a male hero into the female Earth via a female sacrificial victim. In order to illustrate how this gender dynamic has been disrupted and redefined in recent years, Chapter 6 analyses fictional descent narratives written by women such as Gloria Naylor, Marge Piercy and Alice Notley, in which a female character descends into the underworld. Following on from Notley's critique of patriarchal capitalism in The Descent of Alette, Chapter 7 examines the continuing relevance of the Marxist idea of a descent to the underworld of the workplace in a postmodern, and some might add post-Marxist, context. Alasdair Gray's Lanark demonstrates how descents into Hell operate within social and

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Descent and Return ± the katabatic imagination

economic contexts in which the `base' is no longer held to be synonymous with reality and truth, and in which underworld revelation often turns out to be as duplicitous, as fantastical as the chimerical desires pursued by capitalist consumers in the overlying `superstructure'. Here, as elsewhere, our condition appears to be inescapably infernal, and yet Gray's novel is one of the great narratives of resistance to capitalist Hell produced in the last quarter century. In Chapter 8, I discuss Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet as a revision of the myth of Orpheus in terms that reverse not only the geographical coordinates, but also many of the cultural and theological assumptions of traditional and modern descents from the West into an infernal East. Rushdie's richly positive representation of East±West relations, and descent journeys from one region to the other, provide a stark contrast to the Bush administration's polarised world-view, in which certain Eastern states have been characterised en bloc as an `axis of evil'.15 As a recent study of Eastern conceptions of contemporary America demonstrates, demonisation occurs in the other direction as well.16 On the anniversary of September 11th, the Iranian state-owned newspaper Al-Iktisadi showed a picture of the burning World Trade Center, with the headline, `God's punishment', written in red letters.17 In this way Orientalism clashes head to head with Occidentalism, and the chance for a positive threshold crossing into another country and world-view gets lost. In the epilogue I briefly consider the events of September 11th and their aftermath in the light of the descent narrative tradition. I suggest different ways in which the political responses to September 11th may be interpreted as attempts to narrativise the experience of Hell, suffered on the day of the terrorist attack on New York City. My treatment of the idea of the infernal journey draws on a mixture of thematic and theoretical approaches. The latter is likewise a hybrid of different schools of criticism. For example, in Chapters 2 and 3, I employ Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope, while taking issue with his theory of carnival in Chapter 8; I am indebted to Derrida's reading of Marx, in Chapter 8, and to other theorists noted in the discussion along the way. My ideas about modern and post-1945 Western identity are particularly influenced by two very different yet equally magisterial studies, Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self and David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity. On the subject of narrative self-fashioning, Paul Ricoeur's three-volume Time and Narrative and later writings, Nicola King's Memory, Narrative, Identity and Adriana Cavarero's Relating Narratives have always been close to hand. Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought helped me to clarify some of the historically distinctive aspects of twentieth-century underworld journeys. Outside of classical and medie-

Introduction

9

val scholarship, there are few full-length studies of the descent narrative in different historical periods. The descent hero figures importantly in Joseph Campbell's mono-mythic study, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In The Dream and the Underworld, the archetypal psychologist James Hillman writes about classical underworld myths, using these to develop a method of psychological analysis which he is at pains to distinguish from Freud's. More recently, Evans Lansing Smith has applied this archetypal approach to the myth of the descent journey, in such studies as Rape and Revelation: The Descent to the Underworld in Modernism and The Hero Journey in Literature.18 While fascinating in their own right, these archetypal analyses of katabatic narrative are antithetical to the historically contextualised approach adopted in the present study. Hillman and Smith are interested in descent myths for the universal psychological truths they can reveal, whereas I am interested in them for precisely the opposite reason. Contemporary descent narratives, as I aim to show, often resist any movement towards transcendence of the particular and the historical. The two studies of modern underworld journeys with which I find myself most in sympathy are Rosalind Williams' Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination which broadly explores nineteenth century attitudes towards underworlds of different kinds, and David Pike's Passage Through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds which argues for the centrality of the descensus ad inferos to early twentieth-century modernist literature and philosophy. In The Secular Scripture, Northrop Frye makes even more sweeping claims for descent narrative. He argues that descents account for two of the `four primary movements in literature' (p. 97). Either we begin on earth or in heaven and descend, or we begin in Hell or Earth and ascend (these two latter types of narrative would be anabases, or `goings up'). All stories, in Frye's view, are `complications of, or metaphorical derivations from, these four narrative radicals' (ibid.). If this is true, it is hardly surprising that so many descent narratives have been produced in the fiction, film, poetry and drama of the latter half of the twentieth century. But as I hope to show, katabasis is not only a structural category of narrative literature; it also expresses a particular world-view, one which pertains as strongly to our present historical situation as it has to various times in the past. In The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis characterised the world seen through medieval eyes as a vertically hierarchised one. To a medieval viewer, Lewis argued, the night sky would appear very different: Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is

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Descent and Return ± the katabatic imagination

downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height: height which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous . . . To look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking about one in a trackless forest ± trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. (pp. 98±9)

Yet it would seem that after the events of 2001 we are very aware of the vertiginous heights of buildings, as well as the vast gulf that separates living conditions in the developed and developing worlds. If the night sky is trackless, both the world and the individual psyche have upper and lower realms in the contemporary secular imagination. Our experiences are retrospectively narrated as journeys up and down through historical catastrophe, through the depths of the psyche and the material world. `We are on a kind of stair', writes Ian Hamilton; `The world below / Will never be regained: was never there / Perhaps. And yet it seems / We've climbed to where we are / With diligence, as if told long ago / How high the highest rung.'19 If this is a story told us long ago, it is nevertheless one which can be radically changed, as the narratives discussed in this study will demonstrate.

Notes 1. `Hell is not a ``place'', nor a punishment imposed by God, but a selfexclusion from communion with God,' paraphrase of a Papal statement made in 1999, by Hazel Southam and Nicholas Pyke. Evangelical denominations, though, still insist on the literal existence of Hell. See Southam and Pike, `Weep and Gnash Those Teeth: Hell's Back', The Independent on Sunday, 2 April 2000, p. 3. 2. Liddell and Scott, A Lexicon Abridged from Liddell and Scott's GreekEnglish Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. 3. Raymond Clark defines katabasis as: `a Journey of the Dead made by a living person in the flesh who returns to our world to tell the tale'. See Catabasis: Vergil and the Wisdom Tradition, p. 32. 4. On Homer's possible knowledge of the Epic of Gilgamesh, see Clark, Catabasis, pp. 23±4. On the cyclic poems recounting the descent of Inanna, Queen of Heaven, see Penglase, Greek Myths and Mesopotamia, pp. 17±31. 5. For a broader analysis of medieval katabatic and anabatic (ascent to heaven) narratives, see Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys. On Dante's synthesis of classical and Christian traditions, see Freccero, Poetics of Conversion, pp. 1±28, 62±9. For a range of essays on Dante's influence on modern literature, see Havely (ed.), Dante's Modern Afterlife. 6. See Cavarero's analysis of Karen Blixen's stork story, in Relating Narratives, pp. 1±4. As I argue in Chapter 1, it is only the first of Dante's cantiche that is

Notes

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

11

read with this sense of recognition. Dante's Paradiso, by contrast, feels to many readers like an alien place and concept. See Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, on Freud's debt to underworld myths and to Virgil's Aeneid. On Marx's debt to the descensus ad inferos tradition, see Pike, Passage Through Hell, p. 216, where Walter Benjamin's debt to Marx and Virgil is discussed. Benjamin glosses Marx's image of the workplace as hell, with its hidden sites of production, with the marginal note, `cf. Dante's inscription on the gate of hell'. This passage is also discussed by Williams, Notes from the Underground, pp. 48±9. See Williams, `Excavations I: Digging Down to the Truth', Notes from the Underground, pp. 22±50. On Darwin's theory of devolution, or reversion to earlier states of evolution, see The Descent of Man (1874), pp. 37±63. Raymond Clark distinguishes between the `wisdom' tradition of mortal beings crossing into the afterlife, and the `fertility' tradition of gods descending into and returning from the Land of the Dead; see Catabasis, p. 32. See Freccero on the `upside-downing' of the Christian in conversion narratives such as Dante's (The Poetics of Conversion, pp. 180±5). On the descent topos in contemporary films such as La JeteÂe, Third Man, Kanal, Kusturica's Underground and The Matrix, see David Pike's forthcoming monograph, Subterranean Cities. See also David Pike, `Urban Nightmares and Future Visions', in Wide Angle, pp. 9±50. On the katabatic films of Australian director Vincent Ward, see Jonathan Rayner, `Paradise and Pandemonium', and Michael Wilmington, `Firestorm and Dry Ice: The cinema of Vincent Ward'. In The Book of Daniel, E. L. Doctorow writes that it was `the master subversive' Edgar Allen Poe who `wore a hole into the parchment and let the darkness pour through . . . When Poe blew this away through the resulting aperture in the parchment the darkness of the depths rose, and rises still from that small hole all these years incessantly pouring its dark hellish gases like soot' (p. 183). Lewis, The Silver Chair, p. 140. In Book 5 of Tolkien's The Return of the King (the final volume of the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings), Chapters 9 and 10 describe the gathered Men of the West riding together to defy Sauron, Lord of the evil Eastern empire of Mordor. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (2004). Anon., `Chirac and Putin Voice Sympathy, Iraq Cites God's Will', The Guardian, 12 September 2002, International Section, p. 4. Smith's most recent publication on the subject, The Myth of the Descent to the Underworld in Postmodern Literature, came to my attention as the present monograph was going to press. Alan Bennett quotes Ian Hamilton's poem in his diary entry, published in The London Review of Books, 2 January 2003, p. 3.

Chapter 1

Hell in Our Time

Is Hell a fable? After he has sold his soul to Lucifer, Marlowe's Dr Faustus says to Mephistophilis, `I think Hell's a fable'. And Mephistophilis dryly responds, `Ay, Faustus, think so still, till experience change thy mind' (Doctor Faustus, II, 1, 130±1). The dramatic irony of this exchange rests on the assumption that Faustus is wrong and the audience knows it. Faustus himself seems more ready to defy Hell than disbelieve in it; after all, he is conversing with a demon he has just summoned from the underworld. The medieval premise of this Renaissance play, that a region of eternal torment exists, might seem completely alien to a modern audience.1 But is there a sense in which Mephistophilis' reply remains true for us? Does experience teach us that Hell exists? On the face of it, this idea seems implausible in the context of a modern, secular culture. Even religious communities in the West have modified their views on the subject of a punitive afterlife. According to the current Pope, Hell as a literal place to which sinners are sent after death is no longer part of official Catholic doctrine.2 Piero Camporesi begins his study of Hell in visual art by firmly separating pre-modern from modern views on the subject: `We can now affirm with some justification that hell is finished, that the great theatre of torments is closed for an indeterminate period, and that after almost 2,000 years of horrifying performances the play will not be repeated' (The Fear of Hell, p. vi). But like Milton justifying God, Camporesi's spirited declaration raises doubts. One thinks of Norman Taylor, a lecturer on the occult in Hayer's film Night of the Eagle (1961), who begins his introductory lecture by writing `I DO NOT BELIEVE' on the blackboard. Moments later a Satanic eagle bursts into the lecture room and pinions Taylor against the board, where his body obscures the word `NOT' in the sentence above.3 If Hell really is finished as Camporesi says, why does the fact need affirmation or

14

Hell in Our Time

justification? If the play is not to be repeated, why insist repeatedly on its closure? (`We need to realise once and for all that we have entered a postinfernal age' (p. vii).) On the contrary, as one follows Camporesi's fascinating account, one has the distinct sense that nothing about the underworld is `once and for all'. Each historical phase in the visual representation of Hell which Camporesi describes can also be found in twentieth-century art and literature. For example, the classical concept of an ordo poenarum, a system which distinguished crimes punishable by extreme cold and those punishable by fire (Fear of Hell, p. 5), is evident in Gloria Naylor's novel, Linden Hills. The Hell that Camporesi terms `pneumatic' (the `world of pallid, bloodless and pagan shadows who drifted in cold and lifeless air . . . like souls, birds, errant breezes, labile and inconsistent figures, and frozen breaths from damp ravines' (p. 14)) is evident in Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette, in several of Margaret Atwood's dystopias, in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Beloved, and in countless contemporary Gothic novels and films. The crowded, chaotic spaces of the Catholic Baroque inferno still provide the dominant images of Hell in our time, in factual as well as fictional accounts of ghettoes, war camps, prisons, hospitals, undergrounds, mines and other spaces of entrapment. After the Baroque period, Camporesi writes, `Hell was likened to a slaughter-house, a hospital, a torture chamber, all these variations of Catholic infernality come together in the predominant morphology of the drain through which the flesh, contaminated by the infected spirit, falls' (p. 15). Sadly, this image of Hell as a receptacle for contaminated human rubbish also survives in our time. In Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, for example, a poor Latino woman watches gulls wheeling over the New York State mental hospital where she is to be confined, wheeling `as over other refuse grounds . . . She was human garbage carried to the dump' (p. 32). In all these post-1945 examples, as we shall see later, the name of Hell is invoked to locate such horrifying spaces. The novels and poems I have cited should not be discounted just because they are fictions; they are still representations of what real life is already like for some, or (in the case of dystopias) the way things might become in future. Nor should they be ignored because the name Hell is being used metaphorically. While this may be partially, or in some cases wholly, true, it was also true to an extent for medieval orthodox texts. Medieval Christians believed Hell to exist, but elsewhere, beyond this life; Hell could only be invoked into the present, then as now, by the power of the imagination. Indeed, it might be argued that although medieval Christians believed in the existence of Hell, only secular moderns believe in Hell. Only for us is Hell actually here, whether in the mind, or in actual, twentieth-century historical events.4

Is Hell a fable?

15

Nor is it necessarily the case that twentieth-century advances in science and technology have made it impossible to believe in regions of infinite darkness and negation. `Today the vertical depths of cosmic space have ousted those of the abyss', Camporesi staunchly declares; `Space travel . . . has rendered any journeys downward both obsolete and useless' (p. vii). But the abyss can also be found in cosmic space. Seven years after the publication of Camporesi's study in Italian, in a completely different corner of the universe, the physicist Kip Thorne was inviting readers to imagine `a hole in space with a definite edge into which anything can fall and out of which nothing can escape; a hole with a gravitational force so strong that even light is caught and held in its grip; a hole that curves space and warps time' (Black Holes and Time Warps, p. 23). Black holes in space are not science fiction but scientific predictions now widely accepted by astrophysicists as real. The black hole closest to earth is located near the star Vega; only about the size of Los Angeles, it has a mass that makes it ten times heavier than our Sun. Astronomers have named it Hades, the ancient Greek name for the underworld (pp. 24, 29). In the writing of Primo Levi, a scientist and Holocaust survivor, Auschwitz is figured as a black hole in modern European history (see Chapter 3). Moreover, contemporary science is discovering more about dark matter all the time, and not just in the `depths' of outer space. Research centres like the Boulby Underground Laboratory, located a thousand metres under the North Yorkshire Moors, have been set up to study the invisible dark matter that apparently makes up ninety per cent of the mass of our universe. So the concept of the infernal abyss continues to exert its influence on modern history and science, and not just metaphorically.5 This to say nothing of modern religious fundamentalism, the dominant culture in many parts of the Arab world and increasingly influential in the United States. Witness, for example, the extraordinary if controversial success of Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ (2004). In her testimony of near-death experience, Beyond the Darkness, the Christian writer Angie Fenimore complains that her kind of testimony is becoming far too common. She takes pains to emphasise that her own narrative is the genuine record of a visionary descent to Hell and return. Fenimore clearly believes in this region of eternal punishment ± and the fact she actually went there: `Its floor was firm but shrouded in black mist swirling around my feet, that also formed the thick, waist-high barrier that held me prisoner . . . I knew that I was in a state of Hell' (p. 94). Fenimore's realistic narrative recalls the graphic infernal journeys of medieval times, as well as the rhetorical strategies of seventeenth-century Puritan prophecy. But it is perhaps not surprising to find the medieval legacy so vividly present in contemporary Christian writing. What is more surpris-

16

Hell in Our Time

ing is that secular cultures are also permeated with images of Hell and allusions to infernal journeys. Thus a fire killing over a hundred people in an underground station in Taegu, South Korea, was described by witnesses as being `close to Hell'.6 A survivor of the Tokyo subway gas attack on 20 March 1995 told the writer Haruki Murakami in an interview, `what I saw was ± how shall I put it? ``hell'' describes it perfectly.'7 More recently, the journalist John Simpson described the sight of Baghdad, after being bombed by the US in March 2003, as a scene from Hell.8 The number of such allusions raises the question: why has the idea of Hell survived to such an extent in modern secular cultures? One could say that twentieth-century history makes it hard for us to do without a concept of Hell. To know even the basic facts about the trenches of the First World War, the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, the Nazi death camps, Hiroshima and the devastations inflicted by AIDS is to admit that, to paraphrase Voltaire's remark about God, if Hell hadn't existed, we would have had to invent it.9 But the invention has not come from nothing. In retaining the name of Hell, we have also retained the traces of earlier religious ideas. In In Bluebeard's Castle, George Steiner suggests that the loss of belief in a religious Hell caused greater shock waves in Western Europe than the loss of belief in Heaven (p. 48). He attributes the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century at least in part to the collapse of metaphysical depth in the European psyche. Thus it may be that the mutation of Hell into metaphor left a formidable gap in the co-ordinates of location, of psychological recognition in the Western mind. The absence of the familiar damned opened a vortex which the modern totalitarian state filled. To have neither Heaven nor Hell is to be intolerably deprived and alone in a world gone flat. Of the two, Hell proved the easier to recreate. (p. 48)

Steiner cites the many extraordinary resemblances between the spatial organisation of the Nazi concentration camps and traditional Western iconographies of Hell; in both, we find the `technology of pain without meaning, of bestiality without end, of gratuitous terror' (p. 47). It was the achievement of the twentieth century to bring this familiar, constantly reimagined space into material reality: `the concentration and death camps of the twentieth century, wherever they exist, under whatever regime, are Hell made immanent. They are the transference of Hell from below the earth to its surface' (p. 47). Steiner's claim for the immanence of Hell in modern European history is one with which many Holocaust survivors and writers would agree. It is a far stronger claim than the truism expressed by Keith Thomas, for example, that `whilst we live in the fear

Is Hell a fable?

17

of hell, we have it' (Religion, p. 203). For Steiner, Hell isn't simply a private mental phobia. We have made it historically real, in the way Keats wrote of Adam's dreaming: `he awoke, and found it truth'.10 Nevertheless, for modern Western cultures Hell is still a truth that needs to be conjured into existence. As Charles Taylor argues in Sources of the Self, no moral framework can be taken for granted any longer as the framework which everybody shares (p. 17). No one can assume that a particular historical event or personal experience or horrific vision will embody Hell for someone else. We invoke the name of Hell to conjure a sense of collectively recognised evil; but more than this, Hell is the name we give to the absolute evil that defines the limit of the known or thinkable world. But how is the limit to be drawn, and who has the authority to name it? Often our very insistence on the name of Hell betrays a certain hesitancy or resistance, whether in the speaker or the addressee. As he passes through the gate into Auschwitz, the haÈftling Primo Levi thinks, `This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this' (If This Is a Man, p. 28). Even for such a time and place, the simple declarative sentence is not enough. Levi feels the need to persuade himself and us with a qualification (`in our times'), an imperative (`must be') and an iteration of the name. Again and again, one comes across this repetitive stutter over the name of Hell in contemporary discourse. It is evident in the passage quoted from Steiner above (where the name is repeated and italicised) and in Rudolph Giuliani's 2002 memorial speech about September 11th. The stutter is unmistakably audible in this letter from a prisoner on death row to a friend on the outside: I have spent 21 years in continuous incarceration. I am 40 years old. I have no desire to foresee hell in any other form; for I have already discovered it. This is a literal `hell-hole'. It is a LIVING HELL. If the fires do not consume me, I hope to someday be free; to tell of my terrifying experience. That such a HELL, under no circumstances, can be the answer. Not ever.11

Prisoners on death row in the United States are referred to as `dead men' (they usually are men, rather than women). Robbins' film, Dead Man Walking (1995), explored some of the horrific conditions of their existence. But as the above extract shows, the `dead man' feels a desperate need not only to make his circumstances known, but also to convince us that what he is experiencing is an absolute evil in human experience. `Death Row is much more than a place filled with despair, uncertainty, sordidness, indifference and futility. It is the dungeon of hell that awaits all individuals sentenced to death' (Welcome to Hell, p. 75). By claiming this is `the dungeon of hell', I do not think the prisoner is engaging in the futile exercise of comparing evils, ranking his as the worst.

18

Hell in Our Time

Rather what seems important is that this evil be recognised as something beyond the thinkable or acceptable. It is a polemic gesture that not only demands our concurrence, but internally reinforces the distinction between the self and the experience of the infernal. Naming something `Hell' has an apotropaic function, like placing a hex sign on a barn; it is saying, this is not me, not where I belong. But whether or not one accepts Camporesi's view that the West is finished with Hell, his study of the iconographic tradition underlines one important fact. The inferno is a historically determined timespace; its physical and moral topographies are constantly developing and changing. While the medieval idea of Hell as a region of punitive justice is still very much with us, modern usage of the name tends to focus on the suffering of the damned. The prisoners on death row who talk about Hell clearly mean to convey the extremity of their suffering and not to suggest they deserve it in a divine scheme of justice. Sometimes this shift in what Hell means to an audience can be explained by the change in the narrator's status. As in the case cited above, it is the inhabitant of the underworld who identifies Hell rather than a Dantean visitor. But even when an observer names some horrific experience Hell, this description is generally intended to rouse sympathy for those suffering inside. When Giuliani and the journalist John Simpson respectively described New York and Baghdad as scenes from Hell, neither was implying that the carnage was deserved. Dante's Hell bears the famous inscription on its gateway: `Justice made me'. In direct contrast, modern Hells are places of injustice where the innocent suffer. In answer to Job's question, `why does the just man suffer?' we hear the uncompromising reply: hier ist kein warum, there is no `why' here. This is the guard's reply to Levi's request for information in Auschwitz (If This Is a Man, p. 35). In Charles Taylor's view, modern identity involves securing three central moral goods: autonomy, affirmation of ordinary life (a `term of art' for `the life of production and the family') and the avoidance of suffering (Sources of the Self, pp. 12±13). The modern emphasis on Hell as a place of unjust suffering indicates that the underworld still functions mythically as the space in which the self is unmade, but what unmakes us now is the failure of a human community rather than divine wrath. In this context, it is well to remember that inferno and hell are terms whose meanings have dramatically changed over time. According to Hans KuÈng, up to the early middle ages, inferna means, quite simply and neutrally, the realm of the dead, that is of all the dead (as in the Hebrew `Sheol' or ancient Greek `Hades').12 Likewise, the German HoÈlle and the English `hell' are at first neutral terms, stemming from the old Norse hel, hehlen meaning to `cover' or `conceal'; both terms are

Is Hell a fable?

19

etymologically related to HoÈhle or `cave' (ibid.). The ancient Greek term for a heroic descent to the underworld, katabasis, also referred originally to any physical descent, through a cave mouth or other such entrance, into the earth. It is only later, in medieval scholasticism, that inferna and `hell' come to mean the realm of the non-blessed below, the special place for those who are finally damned; the Hebrew term for this realm is `Gehenna' (p. 158). In the twentieth century, Freud's remarkably influential theory of the unconscious has helped to shift modern definitions of Hell closer to these etymological roots. The underworld is once again what is covered or concealed, although now it is concealed within an individual's body and psyche, or within the history of a community or nation. In Freudian and Lacanian pyschoanalytic theory, what we conceal are the forces that unmake us, that dismantle the subject at source. If, as Charles Taylor argues, `being a self is inseparable from existing in a space of moral issues' (p. 112), then the psychoanalytic account of subjectivity is not in itself sufficient as an explanation of what constitutes a self. But the two approaches, psychoanalytic and philosophical, can both be brought to bear on our modern understanding of Hell. Repeatedly what we find in modern accounts of Hell is the spectacle of the self being destroyed by suffering, by the absence of autonomy, and by the severance from `ordinary life', in other words the absence of Taylor's key `moral goods'. We will return to Freud and the philosophers in the next section. But before considering how the modern underworld has been theoretically conceptualised, we should explore further how it has been experienced and narrated. Spatial confinement is a primary feature of most Hells, modern and pre-modern. In a sentence with chilling import for modern history, the seventeenth-century Jesuit Jeremiah Drexel computes the appropriate spatial coordinates for Hell: `If 30 or 100,000 million persons were condemned to hell, and if this prison was one German mile in each direction, that is to say, high, wide and long, it would be amply sufficient to house such a large number. A prison should above all be narrow, since spacious living is a part of freedom.'13 One of the appalling aspects of the Nazi death camps is the fact that so many people were crammed into such concentrated spaces. The transport trains were physically overcrowded to the infernal degree described by Drexel above. Primo Levi describes `a human mass, extended across the floor, confused and continuous, sluggish and aching, rising here and there in sudden convulsions and immediately collapsing again in exhaustion' (If This Is a Man, p. 24). But with the crematoria, the camps could accommodate millions of people in just a few square miles. Their singularity, in the astro-physical sense, consisted of their capacity to collapse space and time in this horrific way.14 Loss of autonomy also entails metaphysical constraint: divesting the

20

Hell in Our Time

self of its ability to connect with and influence others. The exercise of free will is meaningless in a vacuum, so one way to destroy the will is to place it in solitude. By this means, the `ordinariness' of human interchange is also destroyed. Primo Levi wrote that the worst aspect of Auschwitz was the way it set one prisoner against another: `in the Lager . . . everyone is desperately and ferociously alone' (If This Is a Man, p. 94). For prisoners on death row, `solitary confinement' combines two tortures destructive to the psyche: `You are locked up in a five-foot by eight-foot cell all of your own . . . No one really knows what loneliness is until they come to the row' (Welcome to Hell, p. 61). In infernal space, the body is often said to feel heavy and sluggish, dragged down by despair. Conversely, and often simultaneously, it feels unnaturally light, even weightless, once cut off from social interaction. Lightness is the sign of a damned soul in descent narratives from the Aeneid (6.411±14) to Paradise Lost, where Satan is told, `read thy lot in yon celestial sign / Where thou art weighed, and shown how light, how weak,' (4.1011±12), and from Liana Millu's Smoke Over Birkenau, in which the weightless exit via the Chimney is universally feared as the worst death, to Primo Levi's The Truce, where as a free man, Levi is surprised to feel his bed sink under his weight (p. 379). A suicidal woman confined to a closed psychiatric ward expresses the paradoxical condition of heavy lightness in Hell: `The top of my head feels quite light but the thread that runs down from my head to my stomach is soaked in deep despair. Maggots in my belly multiply. Rotting flesh' (Linda Hart, Phone at Nine, p. 19). As is clearly the case here, Hell is traditionally meant to be felt viscerally, in flesh and body. Medieval visions of Hell (and Purgatory) were always represented as actual, bodily journeys, and sometimes the traveller not only observed but experienced the tortures of the damned. In Otherworld Journeys, Carol Zaleski distinguishes the infernal narrative from medieval visions of Heaven, which were generally static tableaux observed in dreams only, while the body remained motionless (p. 93). Dante's Paradiso was one of the rare exceptions of a journey through Heaven although, as is clearly apparent from Botticelli's drawings of the third cantica, even Dante's Paradise is a less visceral place than Hell or Purgatory.15 That Hell was meant to be experienced in the flesh, as a difficult, dangerous journey, is still very much evident in Milton's description of the fallen angels exploring Hell for the first time: . . . through many a dark and dreary vale They passed, and many a region dolorous, O'er many a frozen, many a fiery alp, Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death Paradise Lost, 2.618±21

Is Hell a fable?

21

As commentators have pointed out, the last line is rhythmically clogged, obstructive to the reader in a way that mimes the impeded movement of the angels through the underworld. This is one paradox of Hell, that bodies are physically afflicted even though the bodies themselves are insubstantial, shades of former existences. Indeed, for some seventeenthcentury theologians, the body of the damned could become a Hell in itself. Drexel cites Coelius Rhodiginus: ` ``the body was like hell, in which tides run riot, and gales rage, and there the burning hot spells of the summer'' '.16 Another paradox of Hell is that, although a region of death, no one ever dies here; on the contrary, it is the `shades of death' that are fearful, rather than death itself. The corporeality and immanence of the infernal journey distinguishes this genre of narrative from the via negativa of Buddhist and Christian traditions. In Christian religion, `negative theology' is that which attempts to describe God through negative statements (He is unimaginable, incomprehensible, illimitable), rather than positive ones (He is the God of love, omnipotence, omniscience).17 Those pursuing a knowledge of God via this mode of thought, the via negativa, rigorously exclude the ephemeral and the physical; the aim is to achieve a calm, meditative, transcendental state. In Poustinia, for example, Catherine de Hueck Doherty describes her spiritual enlightenment as a journey through the desert, in which the desert is an altar on which the self is offered. The process of enlightenment entails cutting oneself off from the physical and social world: `For the poustinik, the most powerful of all his thoughts and prayers should be to empty himself as Christ emptied himself by his incarnation. We will never reach that depth, but that is the poustinik's vocation' (pp. 139±40). Doherty likens divine revelation to the discovery that one has a terminal illness. In that moment, `All the things that we have dreamt about, desired, perhaps 98 percent of them fall away in an instant . . . When one is visited by God, a kenosis [Greek, emptying-out] takes place, and all our plans and projects perish before our eyes' (p. 134). The via negativa combines physical privation with religious ecstasy; it feels good to have the ephemera of life, love, plans, ambitions crumble into sand. By contrast, the journey through Hell is painful not ecstatic (pace Sade); the emptying of selfhood is not necessarily a desired outcome, but very often an unlooked for, and unwilled, transformation. Katabatic narratives do not necessarily aim to transcend material existence, as does the Christian via negativa. On the contrary, as we shall see, the result of the katabatic journey can be a fuller, more intense participation in actual, bodily existence. One of the ways that Hell disrupts human chronicity is by destroying the natural limit to life, the ordinary distinction between living and dying.

22

Hell in Our Time

The effects on a sense of chronicity are immediate and pervasive. In remembering serious accidents or disasters, many people describe the way time seems to slow down or stop at the moment of crisis. But however extreme the experience, can one say that this sense of arrested time is anything like the theological concept of an eternal Hell? Camporesi argues, for example, that `the obsession about the perpetuity of punishment . . . has dissolved' (p. 25). Doctrinally he may be right, but his position cannot account for the way people actually experience suffering. Most accounts register a radical shift in time-sense: an arrest of chronological flow, an emptying out of future possibility, a sense of being cut adrift of history. For example, this death-row prisoner writes: Sometimes I feel like a ghost in here, Ruth . . . I find myself caught between the world of the living and the dead . . . We're the people who've been completely transformed by the legends and myths. We're the replacements, the ones they warn their children about, the ones who're supposed to come from nowhere and get you in the dark if you're not good. (Welcome to Hell, pp. 100±1)

Cut off from any interaction with the outside world (excepting the letter itself), the prisoner says he is like a myth, a creature outside historical time. With no future orientation, the self is destroyed from within: `There are no real dreams here . . . And as dreams are the sap of life, your roots soon dry, your structure decays and rots' (p. 107). The prospect of imminent death does nothing to diminish that sense of existing in eternal time, as this comment reveals: `When fighting the death penalty [people outside are] too often satisfied with just keeping someone alive, even if they're locked in Hell for all of eternity' (p. 98). The experience of suffering and unjust punishment feels like an endless condition, and to this extent the experience is properly described as infernal. In any case, the theological idea that Hell had to last forever was always a contentious one. As D. P. Walker explains, the doctrine of a static Hell (that is, where the moral life is frozen and no repentance is possible) was a necessary corollary of the argument for Hell as a deterrence to crime in this life. `It is only by making this earthly life the unique period of trial that the greatest possible moral weight can be thrown on our present actions and the greatest force be given to the fear of hell' (The Decline of Hell, pp. 23±4). On the other hand, a static Hell raises problems theologically, since if the damned do not technically continue to sin, there ceases to be a strong justification for their eternal damnation (p. 24). Hence even Renaissance orthodox theologians hedged their bets on the issue of Hell's eternity. The scriptural authority for the existence of Hell in the Christian tradition comes from Matthew 25 and Revelations 14 and 20. In Matthew, Christ is quoted as saying he will send the wicked to `the

Is Hell a fable?

23

everlasting fire, everlasting punishment' (to pur to aionion, kolasis aionios) but as Walker points out, aionios can mean age-long as well as eternal. The idea of perpetual punishment, without the possibility of release, turns out to be difficult to justify theologically since `the ability to sin presupposes some measure of free will and hence the possibility of repentance' (Decline, p. 25). Arguably, then, the modern penal system which includes the death penalty and life sentences where `life means life' has done a more thorough job of inventing eternal punishment than orthodox Christian theology itself. A quasi-religious sense of inevitability, as well as eternity, may also attach to twentieth-century secular Hells. When Steiner argues that the Holocaust is Hell made immanent in history, he is not arguing that the Holocaust constituted a new kind of Hell. On the contrary, it is a Hell that is already familiar to us from the history of European art and literature. Like Dante's Inferno, he argues `the death camps constituted a complete, coherent world . . . There were regulated gradations of horror within the total, concentric sphere' (In Bluebeard's Castle, p. 47). The camps at Belsen struck the newly arrived prisoners as familiar, Steiner argues, because they were a `deliberate enactment of a long, precise imagining' (p. 47). Bohdan Wytwycky likewise finds similarities between the concentrically arranged circles of the medieval Hell and the organisation of the camps; both had `different circles into which victims were consigned and in which they suffered a variety of cruel fates'. (The Other Holocaust, p. 17). According to Wytwycky, the three lowest circles were occupied, in ascending order, by Jews, gypsies and Slavs; upper circles housed the Volksdeutsche (expatriate Germans), political prisoners and ordinary criminals (p. 18). Each circle had its distinct horror; while the majority of Jews and gypsies died in gas chambers, most Slavs were either shot, starved or worked to death (p. 19). Such detailed resemblances to the regions of torture in medieval religious art lend a sense of uncanny, mythic inevitability to the twentieth-century death camps. Medieval orthodox Hell and extreme suffering both alter the relation between an individual and his or her death, and in this sense both types of Hell are experienced as eternal and inevitable. In The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman offers the striking idea that a person walks around her whole life with her own death at her shoulder (p. 275). What this image underlines is the importance of death as a natural and individuating presence in each life. Fear of Hell is not so much a fear of death as a fear of having your death taken from you. For example, this prisoner discusses the difference between facing death freely and having it owned by someone else:

24

Hell in Our Time

It used to be that death was like a familiar to me, a part of nature and part of life . . . Redline! the edge, the border between life and death and when you get on that line, when you stand on it you're close enough to see death as it is. I've been there so damn many times . . . Unfortunately, that's all changed now. They've stolen death. (Welcome to Hell, p. 83)

If in pre-modern times damnation was at least a sign of divine justice in operation, in modern times the reverse is most likely to be true. Now Hell is the state one enters when facing a death that is meted out arbitrarily, senselessly. Anyone who assumed that the death penalty in the United States was severe but just, for example, would be seriously underinformed. Consider the following statements by Arriens: A map of the United States shading in the executing states is virtually a map of the Confederacy in the Civil War. The four main executing states are Texas, Florida, Georgia and Louisiana. (Welcome to Hell, p. 30) Defence lawyers maintain that no one able to buy proper counsel gets the death penalty. It is the black, the poor, the under-educated and the retarded who are particularly at risk . . . no white man had ever been executed for the murder of a single black victim until September 1991. (ibid., p. 31) Just one out of every 100 convicted murderers is sentenced to death. These are by no means always the worst offenders. Just under 50 per cent of those on Death Row are from minorities, compared with a national average of 12 per cent. (ibid., p. 31)18

When the prisoners of death row refer to their condition as Hell, they mean not only that they are suffering endlessly, but that their punishment is capricious and arbitrary. In conventional medieval theology, the punishments of Hell are not only justly deserved, but instructive to those on the outside. The medieval descent to Hell narrative is didactic in function; the narrator's aim is to scare his audience into better behaviour. At the same time, the narrator must demonstrate that the good Christian traveller emerges unscathed from Hell. Thus the fourteenth-century Vision of Tugdal has Tugdal question his divine guide: Lord, if it pleases you, tell me . . . why are they [the righteous] led into hell? The angel replied: if you wish to know why the righteous, who must not suffer punishment, are taken to visit hell, this is the reason. They are taken so that having seen the torments from which they have been spared by divine grace, they will be more ardently fervent in their love and praise of the Creator.19

Similarly, Dante's Ulysses shipwrecks at the foot of Mount Purgatory because, allegorically, he has aspired too far as a pagan in a Christian universe. It may be tragic that he dies `as pleased Another', but in contrast

Hell as the modern condition

25

to the fate of the prisoners cited above, Ulysses' death is at least a meaningful one ± not least to Dante, who will learn to curb his own, very similar intellectual hubris (Inferno, 26.141). Once again, it would seem that the twentieth century has surpassed medieval orthodoxy in achieving the infernal goal of unmaking identity. As Adorno writes of the Holocaust, `The administrative murder of millions made of death a thing one had never yet to fear in just this fashion . . . in the concentration camps it was no longer an individual who died but a specimen' (Negative Dialectics, p. 362). A person who dies as a specimen cannot be aware of the dehumanising event, but to witness another's death in this manner is properly infernal. The key moral goods that Taylor identifies with modern Western identity (autonomy, absence of suffering, the affirmation of ordinary life) are all different facets of a notion of respect ± for oneself, but especially for the other (p. 12). Abandoning the idea that the other's life has a meaningful shape is also to lose oneself. Sarah Kofman writes that the camps turned death into something banal, anonymous and public. For the detainees, `the true abjection is . . . to give up wanting to keep ``the other'' ± (the) self and others ± alive, to become indifferent to the death of the other, a shocking indifference that would, in effect, mark the advent of a new species of man' (Smothered Words, p. 62).20 Being in Hell is existing where death has ceased to matter. By 1945 three different political systems, fascism, communism and liberal democracy, were implicated in mass murder: in the death camps of Eastern Europe, the Soviet gulags and at Hiroshima. To say they were all implicated is `not for a moment to equate them', as Neiman writes (Evil in Modern Thought, p. 253). If Hiroshima showed us that humanity has the capacity to destroy itself, it did not institutionalise human degradation in the way the Nazi death camps did. But in different ways and at different levels, all these modern Hells manifest a `shocking indifference' to the other's death. We might well take our cue from Mephistophilis, then, and assert that twentieth-century experience has taught us Hell exists.

Hell as the modern condition Most people think of Dante's Inferno as a sequence of scenes displaying increasingly severe punishments for a graded series of sins. Dante must obviously have approved of this system, because he elaborated on Catholic doctrine by developing his own complex scheme of contrapasso, which is generally understood as a form of retribution exactly suited to the nature of each sin. Kenneth Gross, however, advances a convincing

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argument that contrapasso does not mean `retribution', but rather a reverse or retrograde step (from the Latin contra, `against', and passum, `pace, step'). `The states of the damned, then, can be read not so much as simple retributive punishments,' Gross argues, `but instead as various incarnations of false love or as emblems of false, downward, or parodic conversion.'21 Dante's method becomes less objectionable to a modern reader, Gross believes, if we understand that the poet's intention is to reveal the horrifying nature of the crimes themselves, not to illustrate how each will be punished in the afterlife. Thus Pope Boniface, whose soul Dante meets in Hell while still alive on Earth, becomes the very exemplum of how Dante's underworld relates to the living overworld (Inferno, 19). An analogous example in contemporary cinema would be The Matrix (1999). Once Neo has broken through the vast complex of images (the apparently real) generated by `the matrix', he discovers what reality (or the film's conception of `reality') has actually become: a vast factory producing energy from human slaves. This interpretation of Inferno crosses what looks like an otherwise unbridgeable divide between medieval and modern conceptions of Hell. Of course for Dante, the infernal is only one possible continuum of the real; there are divine conversions in Purgatorial and Paradisal reality, as well as the retrograde conversions of the world in its infernal aspect. It seems to be a distinctive feature of secular modernity to associate truth and reality with the underworld alone. In the Epilogue of Alasdair Gray's Lanark, the fictional editor comments `Modern afterworlds are always infernos, never paradisos, presumably because the modern secular imagination is more capable of debasement than exaltation' (p. 489). In her essay `Negotiating with the Dead', Margaret Atwood argues that `it's by the inmates of the Inferno, not in the Purgatorio or the Paradiso, that Dante is told the most stories, and also the best ones' (Negotiating with the Dead, p. 156). Anyone studying the reception of Botticelli's `Drawings of Dante', exhibited in 2002 at the Royal Academy in London, would have to concur. The drawings were exhibited in three adjoining rooms, one room for each cantica: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. The Inferno room was packed, daily, with a double queue of people inching their way past the illustrations, often bad-temperedly elbowing others out of the way or complaining about being thus elbowed. Botticelli's illustrations of Inferno were likewise densely packed with writhing, jostling, bad-tempered humanity. The Purgatorio room (and likewise the drawings therein) attracted about half the number of viewers. As for Paradiso, most viewers were too exhausted by the time they got there to do more than throw a cursory glance round the room from the doorway. And Botticelli himself seemed exhausted by the time he got to drawing the Paradiso.

Hell as the modern condition

27

With the exception of an intricate Heavenly rose, most of the canvases were achingly blank but for a cherub or a Beatrice tiptoeing across a cloud wearing an expression of deathly serenity. Borges's view is that the ending of Dante's Paradiso is the most infernal of all three of the cantiche, because here at the very end, Beatrice bestows on Dante the briefest of glances, before turning and leaving him.22 But painful as the Paradiso may be, the idea of Hell seems to have survived the transfer to secular modernity in the way that the idea of Paradise has not. The notion of Hell raises fundamental questions about the limits of the human, and the sense of our own, individual interiorities, in a way that Paradise no longer does. As Dostoevsky's devil declares, `It's reactionary to believe in God in our age. But I'm the devil. You can believe in me.'23 If, as Charles Taylor argues, no moral framework is shared by everyone in the modern period, then modern identity is in part defined by its need to be constructed and affirmed. To be a modern self is to find oneself `on a quest' for identity.24 The quest for a moral framework is bound up with the quest for selfhood, for `being able to find one's standpoint in this space, being able to occupy, to be a perspective in it' (Sources of the Self, p. 112). My argument throughout this book is that the katabatic journey, which is structured as a descent to the interior and return, has become one of the principal ways of `telling the self' in modern times. The prominence of the katabatic model is, I think, directly linked to what Taylor calls the `inward turn' of modern identity: Our modern notion of the self is related to, one might say constituted by, a certain sense (or perhaps a family of senses) of inwardness . . . We think of our thoughts, ideas, or feelings as being `within' us, while the objects in the world which these mental states bear on are `without'. Or else we think of our capacities or potentialities as `inner', awaiting the development which will manifest them or realize them in the public world. The unconscious is for us within, and we think of the depths of the unsaid, the unsayable . . . as inner. (Sources of the Self, p. 111)

What Taylor does not discuss, although it is everywhere implicit in his analysis, is how often the coming-to-self narrative is expressed as a journey of negation followed by discovery and empowerment. It is striking how many of Taylor's quintessentially modern writers, for example T. S. Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Mann and Proust, narrate the quest for selfhood as a descent to Hell and return.25 From The Waste Land to the Hell Cantos and the Hades chapter of Ulysses, modernist texts have represented the material and spiritual dislocations produced in and by Western capitalism as an infernal condition, often directly comparable to Virgil's or Dante's underworlds. Indeed, Taylor concludes the paragraph

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quoted above with a reference to Conrad's novella, perhaps the most widely read of all modern katabases (Sources of the Self, p. 111). The modern nexus of associations between evil, inwardness and truth, seminally epitomised in Conrad's title Heart of Darkness, may be one of the peculiar results of splicing together the moral topographies of religion and Freudian psychology.26 With Marlow, we tend to assume that our innermost desires will be evil to a degree too horrific to contemplate. Particularly for `anti-subjectivist' modernists like Pound and Eliot, writes Taylor, the `turn inward may take us beyond the self as usually understood to a fragmentation of experience which calls our ordinary notion of identity into question' (p. 462). Thus the concepts of Hell and the unconscious have dovetailed together in modern secular thinking as in modern literature. The irony of this would not be lost on Freud, who described religion as an infantile obsession, one that `surely was destined to be surmounted' (The Future of an Illusion, p. 233).27 The descent to Hell figures importantly in the writing of the first half of the twentieth century, as David Pike's excellent study, Passage Through Hell, demonstrates. But in my view, the Second World War marks a kind of watershed, at least in Western philosophical thinking, after which no metaphysical condition seems conceivable except the infernal one. If the victims and survivors of the Holocaust experienced Hell as a material reality, then we who inherit the legacy of the Holocaust live on in a spectral world of infernal memories. Haunted by such an event ± even by the possibility of such an event, we feel dispossessed of our identities, disoriented and trapped in the realms of Dis or Hades. Still more profoundly for some, the Holocaust made manifest what was (and is) implicitly infernal about modernity from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Thus Adorno argues that the modern condition is to be homeless, lacking an assurance about one's place in the world; the Holocaust confirmed this condition, but did not create it: The house is past. The bombing of European cities, as well as the labour and concentration camps, merely proceed as executors, with what the immanent development of technology had long ago decided was to be the fate of houses . . . Today . . . it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home. (`Refuge for the Homeless, Minima Moralia, p. 39)

But if the whole of the twentieth century is included in this dystopian vision, the vision itself took shape in the second half of the century (Adorno's Minima Moralia was published in 1951). This view of the `infernal' twentieth century gathered momentum in the wake of the Second World War, and retrospectively recuperated memories of the First World War, as well as the underworld-oriented theories of Freud (especially

Hell as the modern condition

29

concerning the unconscious and the death drive), Darwin (the evolution and devolution of species) and Marx (especially his analysis of the destructive energies of capitalism).28 I will argue here that after 1945, Hell acquires two distinctive characteristics. First, it becomes a permanent, immanent condition (either universal or, for some, particularised). And, somewhat conversely, it is temporally or spatially dislocated from the present ± a past horror, a future threat or a disaster happening now but elsewhere. These two contrasting characteristics arise out of the extreme nature and the vast scale of human suffering in the twentieth century. If, as Steiner argues, the Holocaust was Hell made immanent, it was also a Hell that, for sheer horror, could not be looked at directly at the time. And as the temporal distance between us and the event grows, it begins to seem even more incredible: a historical fact, and yet an impossibility. The idea of an infernal century appears to have taken shape in the aftermath of the Second World War. If one were looking for a more precise date for the threshold crossing into this doomed perspective, one might well choose the year 1947. In this year, four great descent narratives were published in three different Western languages: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. The reflection `too late, too late, we are all ``down'' ' (If This Is a Man, p. 27) applies in different ways to all four of these works. In each case, the Hell represented is historically and materially specific, yet it has also become inescapably intrinsic to the modern human condition. Lowry's Under the Volcano is both critical and fatalistic about the rise of fascism in Mexico during the late 1930s. The oblique representation of Nazism in Mann's Doctor Faustus in part mystifies their rise to power. Ellison's `invisible man' leaves readers pondering whether a black man's position in 1940s America can be altered for the better, or whether it serves in this text as a figure for the modern condition of alienation. Levi's If This Is a Man is explicit about the sufferings of the deportees in Auschwitz, but is eerily silent about the perpetrators of violence and torture. His companion volume, The Truce, ends with Levi waking from a dream with the fatalistic consciousness that `nothing is true outside the Lager' (The Truce, p. 379). This nightmare state of mind might be taken as the late twentieth-century view of Hell: we know it is a dream from which we have recently awoken, yet it still feels present within and around us. Hannah Arendt famously argued in Eichmann in Jerusalem that the worst Nazi crimes occurred as a result of banal, routine decision-making. This surprising absence of malicious intent is what Susan Neiman, following Arendt, identifies as the single most important feature of evil

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in contemporary times. Thus, Neiman writes, `In contemporary evil, individuals' intentions rarely correspond to the magnitude of evil individuals are able to cause' (Evil in Modern Thought, p. 273). That we can feel such evil, or the possibility of evil, in the mundane rhythms of ordinary life is arguably a specific legacy of the Holocaust. As Wislawa Szymborska writes in the first stanza of `Hatred': See how efficient it still is, how it keeps itself in shapeour century's hatred. How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles. How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down. (Forbes (ed.), We Have Come Through, p. 41)

The infernal as the invisible texture of existence (Dis as upper Hell, housing banal evil) is a major theme in the writing of Emmanuel Levinas, who in turn has influenced postwar philosophers such as Derrida, Lyotard and Blanchot. Disagreeing with Heidegger (for whom nothingness is empty, the antithesis of being), Levinas argues that being itself has a horrifying presence. He postulates being as an anonymous state that pre-exists `existents' (individuals, subjects). At certain times, for example, when we lie awake at night, we become aware of this anonymous being; Levinas names it, il y a or `there is'. At such times, we feel threatened and haunted by a `mute, absolutely indeterminate menace'.29 And this can happen even, and especially, when there is no tangible cause for alarm. In such cases, it is being itself which is horrific: It is like a density of the void, like a murmur of silence. There is nothing, but there is being, like a field of forces. Darkness is the very play of existence which would play itself out even if there were nothing. It is to express just this paradoxical existence that we have introduced the term `there is'. We want to call attention to this being a density, an atmosphere, a field, which is not to be identified with an object that would have this density . . . We want to call attention to the existential density of the void itself, devoid of all being, empty even of void, whatever be the power of negation applied to itself. (`There is', Levinas Reader, p. 35)30

One might ask why this pre-subjective existence, this `nothingness of being', should be menacing rather than simply neutral. But the date of publication of `il y a' (1946/47) and the fact that Levinas, a Lithuanian of Jewish parents, spent the Second World War in German labour camps must have some bearing on the question. As the survivor never mentally leaves the camps behind, so this `existence without existents' is an inescapable condition which does not cease with the individual's death. In the same essay, Levinas argues that what is horrific about Shake-

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speare's Macbeth is not the murder of the king, but the fact that murder and dying make no difference to consciousness. The murderer finds no release in his act of negation because the ghost will return to haunt him; thus, `Horror is the event of being which returns in the heart of this negation, as though nothing had happened' (p. 33). Someone is killed, yet it is `as though nothing had happened'; the horror continues. With every appearance of Banquo's ghost, Macbeth will be returned to the murder scene, hence the traumatic scene of his own unmaking as well as Banquo's. Despite an avowed dislike of psychoanalysis, Levinas is clearly influenced by Freud's writing on trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (see Critchley, below) where the concept of the death drive is formulated to explain the astonishing desire of traumatised patients to return to and relive the scene of trauma. Freud reasoned that this apparently perverse desire could only be explained by the possibility that we are driven by something beyond the pleasure principle, a stronger and more elemental drive to witness and achieve our own extinction. For Levinas, however, this traumatic `event of being' is not necessarily a negative one, as we shall consider in a moment. In their different spheres, Freud and Marx already had well developed theories of an underworld where truth resides. In part, this was their nineteenth-century inheritance, as Rosalind Williams has shown in Notes on the Underworld. Das Kapital reads in parts like a nineteenth-century ghost story; for example, `capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more it sucks' (Capital, Vol. 1 [1867], 1976, p. 242).31 Where many postwar philosophers part company with Marx and Freud is not so much on the matter of whether or not the underworld exists (the unconscious, the material base of capitalism) as on the question of how human subjectivity relates to it. How do we access this hugely destructive, underworldly truth? Do we descend to it, and if so, how do we return? Do we return? Or alternatively, does it come to us; are we dragged down unwillingly? And what is the effect on the psyche (or the economy or the state) of such an infernal encounter?

Descent and dissent in modern philosophy In Evil in Modern Thought, Susan Neiman argues that there are broadly speaking two schools of philosophy on the problem of evil. One believes that evil must be meaningful; the other holds it to be meaningless (she places Leibnitz, Kant and Marx in the first category and Hume, the Marquis de Sade and Schopenhauer in the second). A similarly broad

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distinction can be applied to the way people think about Hell and their relation to it. On one side are those who think something of value can be gained from the descent to Hell; on the other are those who think that the experience is purely negative, indeed that to transform suffering and loss into something positive is unethical. I would define the first school as essentially the katabatic one, deriving from the classical tradition of a descent to Hell to acquire wisdom or to regain something lost. This classical tradition dovetails smoothly into the Judeo-Christian tradition of descending into Hell although not into visionary accounts of Heaven.32 Judaic descents include the sufferings of Job and Jonah in the belly of the whale; Christian descents include the conversion of Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus, Christ's crucifixion as well as the risen Christ's descent to Hell and return to Heaven. As John Freccero has shown, Augustine's Confessions and Dante's Inferno famously hybridise the classical and Christian traditions of descent, by combining Virgil's description of the descent of Aeneas to Hades in Aeneid, 6 with the New Testament account of Saul/Paul's conversion in Acts 9 and 22 (on Freccero's `poetics of conversion', see Chapter 2). In the way they transfer this biblical and classical material to first-person autobiographical narratives of mental or spiritual breakdown and recovery, Augustine and Dante are arguably the progenitors of modern illness memoirs, examples of which are discussed in Chapter 5. The second school, for whom the infernal journey is valueless, would appear to be the secular fall-out from the Judeo-Christian belief in Hell; according to this view, Hell is a place of eternal torment but without orthodox religion's traditional rationale for the suffering. But classical katabasis also accommodates this `no-value' school of descent. For example, in the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid, Aeneas ascends from Hades with a clear vision of his imperial destiny, spelled out for him by the ghost of his father Anchises. But in Aeneid, 7, Juno rouses the underworld witch Allecto, who in turn goads the Latin queen Amata and her son Turnus into waging war against Aeneas. In Passage Through Hell, David Pike compares the descent of Aeneas and the rousing of Allecto with Benjamin's analysis of modernist excavations of the past (p. 9). According to Benjamin, modernist excavation typically constitutes either a `tiger's leap into the past', devouring and appropriating the past, or a `leap into the open air of history', unleashing a revolutionary power to turn back and destroy the present.33 Pike argues that the descent of Aeneas to Hades constitutes a tiger's leap, an appropriation of the past, while Juno's rousing of Allecto is an open-air leap which threatens to overturn the hero's imperial destiny. And conversely, many secular writers retain the `wisdom' tradition's

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assumption that infernal suffering can be made meaningful. Such a horizon of expectation is evident in the many secular adages pertaining to suffering and recovery: for example, that `whatever doesn't kill you is good for you' or that `you have to hit rock bottom before you can get better'. Value derived from extreme suffering is the implicit theme of a recent collection of `Survivors' Poetry', edited by Peter Forbes and published under the pithy title, We Have Come Through: 100 Poems Celebrating Courage in Overcoming Depression and Trauma (2003). While many of the poems individually describe descents to Hell, the collection as a whole is also organised as a meta-narrative of a descent and return.34 The centrality of these questions to postwar philosophy has ensured that the ancient stories of katabatic heroes such as Job, Oedipus, Odysseus and Orpheus are frequently revived in discussions of how (or whether) the modern subject is constituted. As I see it, the chief philosophical disagreement ± articulated in terms of a narrative of descent ± is how one interprets the subject's return from Hell. As the examples cited generally refer to male descent heroes, we will gender the subject masculine for the moment (but cf. Chapter 6). Does he return with knowledge of himself, understanding the causes of suffering (as in the example of Oedipus)? Or does the encounter with the demonic leave him a stranger to himself, without an answer to the question why the innocent should suffer (Job)?35 Does he return safely, achieving his heart's desire (Homer's Odysseus ± though not Dante's), or does the underworld rob him of love, wholeness, selfhood (Orpheus)? Moreover, if we take as a given that the modern, and especially the postmodern, condition is to be surrounded by, steeped in, the infernal, still there remains the need to negotiate with this sense of pervasive menace, and more particularly, with Hell's eruption into the material world, with actual instances of disaster, war or terrorism. In an anniversary speech on September 11th, the Canadian prime minister Jean ChreÂtien represented the attack as just such an eruption of the collective unconscious into the actual world: `We saw the dark side of human nature unleash itself savagely, showing itself in all its horror, showing itself to a world which was overwhelmed.'36 If underworld forces are constantly brimming up to meet us, then we are forced into some kind of negotiation with Hell, whether passively or actively. Some form of descent is therefore more than ever necessary, as is the return from Hell. Deconstructionists sometimes insist on there being no return possible for the would-be ethical subject, but this seems to me to overstate and thereby weaken their case. For example, in `The Jewish Oedipus', Lyotard writes in praise of a `dispossession without return'.37 But it is rarely the person who is still in Hell, whether the homeless, the

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schizophrenic or the starving deportee, who becomes the ethical subject that Lyotard celebrates here. Even to think ± let alone lecture, publish, be paid to think ± about infernal dispossession presupposes a degree of distance from the experience. The truer contrast would appear to be between those for whom the journey can be made meaningful retrospectively, and those who refuse to `make sense' of it. To invoke Derrida's neologism, the descent journey is either an ontology or a `hauntology', either a story of how subjects are made (integral, coherent, consistent) or how they are unmade (haunted, traumatised by the past, dispossessed of a future). In `The Jewish Oedipus', Lyotard contrasts the `language of knowledge' with the `truth-work' of deconstruction (p. 395). In this context, the first might be classed as an ontology and the second as a hauntology. If the `language of knowledge' attempts to control and seal off unconscious desires, deconstruction aims to unbind the unconscious, to make as visible as possible something that is, by definition, hidden. Lyotard presents the contrast in terms of two different kinds of descent narrative. In the following extract, for example, deconstruction behaves like an Orphic hero, descending to find the ghost of his wife in Hades: The work of deconstruction comes to meet the other work, that of the unconscious, by dismantling the bastion of signification. The anti-logic of meaning will find, in this area stretched between the ennui of words forever dwelling on reasons, the screen on which to trace its figures; not the figure itself, it is lost like Eurydice, but the figure's lateral peripheral inscriptions. (p. 396)

The unnamed figure of Orpheus is important here, because he is a descent hero who fails in his quest to revive Eurydice and whose art stems from the experience of loss. If one were to pursue the analogy with Orpheus further, however, it would become clear that the hero named deconstruction does return, though without possession either of the `language of knowledge' or the lost beloved. Instead, Lyotard develops his thesis with a contrast between Sophocles' Oedipus and Shakespeare's Hamlet. Lyotard argues that the former aims to acquire the language of knowledge and in Freudian terms fulfils his desire by killing his father. And the latter `knows himself dispossessed of origin . . . knows himself possessed by an Other who has spoken'; haunted by his father's ghost, Hamlet's Freudian desire remains unfulfilled (p. 402). For Lyotard, the difference between Greek and Shakespearean tragedy is that the former recuperates loss into a `language of knowledge', while the latter refuses or fails to complete this economy of recuperation. Lyotard takes `Hamlet's non-fulfillment of the paternal

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word as the modern's difference from the Greek' (p. 398). Besides Oedipus, the other hero who fits Lyotard's portrait of `the Greek' is Homer's Odysseus. Citing Levinas, Lyotard denounces the `odyssey of knowledge' as `an odyssey of the Self, as a desire simply to be tempted, to have been tempted, and to come out intact from the ``test' '' (p. 404). For deconstructionists, it is better to be haunted than tempted. The gift of the unconscious `consists in that, through it, the subject is taken, possessed' (p. 405). In contrast to the Homeric odyssey, Lyotard describes the deconstructive journey as `Confronting the Odyssey of the eye, which is locked in the sun, the dispossession without return' (p. 405). But one should be sceptical about this reasoned, densely allusive claim to a dispossession of reason and knowledge. Moreover, Lyotard weakens his case against `the Greek' by invoking another Greek myth of descent, that of Icarus, to support his reading of Hamlet. Such reservations aside, for `hauntologists' it may be more appropriate to speak of a return to Hell rather than a return from it. If pre-conscious existence is a region of horror, if this is where we come from, then every instance of Hell returns us to where we really belong. Thus in a footnote to `il y a', Levinas praises Blanchot's Thomas L'Obscur (1941), in which `the return of being to the heart of every negative movement, the reality of irreality, are there admirably expressed' (`There is', p. 36). But even such a return to the infernal has a purpose beyond that of being dispossessed per se. As Simon Critchley explains: The Levinasian subject is a traumatized self, a subject that is constituted through a self-relation that is experienced as a lack . . . But this is a good thing. It is only because the subject is unconsciously constituted through the trauma of contact with the real that we might have the audacity to speak of goodness, transcendence, compassion, etc. . . . Without trauma, there would be no ethics . . . Without a relation to that which summons and challenges the subject, a summons that is experienced as a relation to the Good in a way that exceeds the pleasure principle and any promise of happiness . . . there would be no ethics. (Ethics±Politics±Subjectivity, p. 195)

Ethics stem from the horrifying contact with il y a, or the Lacanian underworld of the Real. Only by realising the lack in ourselves, the noncoincidence of identity and desire, are we saved from the closed circle of egotism. Critchley here explores Levinas's debt to Freud, specifically the concepts of traumatic repetition and the death drive (`that [which] exceeds the pleasure principle'). Such a debt is surprising, given Levinas's declared aversion to psychoanalysis. But it serves to demonstrate that like many descent narratives, the Freudian one of the descent to the unconscious can be read as an odyssey of the self or an odyssey of dispossession, an ontology or a hauntology, according to the predilection of the reader.

36

Hell in Our Time

`Hauntology' is a term Derrida invents to co-opt Marx to deconstruction, as Levinas and Lyotard, in their different ways, co-opt Freud.38 But in Derrida's Specters [sic] of Marx, the appropriation clearly works both ways. If the ontological basis of Marx's critique of capitalism needs deconstructing, then so does deconstruction need its political vision sharpened by the remnant or spectre of Marxism in Europe post1989.39 Both halves of the argument are structured as descent narratives. In the first, Marx would have us descend through the spectrality of capitalism to retrieve the fundamental use value concealed at its base: a descent and return from Hell to `true' selfhood. According to Marx, `one must win out over the specter, have done with it' (Specters, p. 132). In the second, Derrida would concede the value of spectres to divorce us from ourselves; but Marx himself would be summoned as a spectre to haunt capitalist Europe, to remind us of our accountability to ideals of justice and human dignity. This second descent allies us with Dis, with the socially disoriented and economically dispossessed. The opening sentence of Specters of Marx might be taken as a paraphrase of the descent hero's situation at the start of the journey: `someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to live finally' (p. xvii). Most katabatic heroes would ask themselves, `but how?', which would then initiate the underworld search for a reply. Descent heroes learn to live from those who are capable of giving them a perspective from beyond life. Less traditionally, Derrida asks `finally but why?' Why should one seek the finality of an answer, and anyway who could really teach someone to live? Specters thus immediately calls into question the descent hero's desire for extra-mortal knowledge. Derrida does not dismiss the need for an underworldly journey altogether, though. On the contrary, `learning to live' is important, and the underworld turns out to be the only suitable place to pursue such an inquiry: `If it ± learning to live ± remains to be done, it can only happen between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone' (p. xviii). Giving a positive value to the infernal condition of living on after death, Derrida argues that we must learn to live on, sur-vie, with ghosts, if we are to develop any kind of responsibility towards the past or otherness: It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. (Specters, p. xix)

Like Lyotard, Derrida is alluding specifically to the ghost of Hamlet's father. Hamlet again figures as the modern dislocated subject, for whom

Descent and dissent in modern philosophy

37

the time is `out of joint'. But Derrida's image of the subject en-seÂance also has contemporary, as well as ancient, resonance. The idea that no ethics can be considered just unless it recognises respect for the dead is surely a reaction to the mass murders of the twentieth century which failed to do precisely that. Furthermore, the image of speaking with ghosts returns us to Homeric descent, this time positively. In the nekyia of Odyssey, 11.34±41, Homer describes Odysseus not descending to Hades, like Theseus or Heracles, but summoning ghosts from underground to the edge of a pit so that they can tell him more about his past and future.40 Odysseus, then, is a model of one who lives on, or survives, in the company of ghosts. His opposite would be someone who `does not know death, and does not want to hear about it', someone who insists on `absolute life, fully present life', which for Derrida is an `absolute evil' (Specters, p. 175). The choice laid out in Specters of Marx seems to be between returning from Hell to live in and for the present alone or surviving diachronically, feeling the `non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present' (p. xix). But this is not quite the same as the choice Lyotard offers his readers, between triumphalist return from the underworld and refusing to return at all. In Derrida's text, Orpheus is once again a key mythical analogue, because he fails but returns from Hades haunted by loss. For some philosophers, notably Plato's Phaedrus, Orpheus's failure to fail completely, his decision to return rather than remain in the underworld with Eurydice, is a sign of his moral cowardice.41 But this is an absolutist view, one that insists on fully present death as much as fully present life. For some writers, fully present death is, in any case, an impossibility. Rainer Maria Rilke's poem `Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes' starkly conveys the lack of companionability in the underworld. Hermes, conducting Eurydice out of Hades, sees that Orpheus has looked back; `the god laid hold of her, and, with an anguished / cry, uttered the words: He has turned round! ± / she took in nothing, and said softly: who?'42 To the ghost of Eurydice, the descent of Orpheus means nothing. As Adriana Cavarero writes, Rilke's Eurydice is `by now a creature of the subterranean world, perfect and indifferent. She is the sublime figure of absolute un-relation' (Relating Narratives, pp. 103±4). Any suicide mission by Orpheus would thus have been pointless, as there are no relations with the other in Hades, only indifference. On the border between Hades and the overworld, Orpheus turns and looks at Eurydice. His gazes transforms her, and she dissolves from flesh to spirit before his eyes. Derrida's `backward glance' (Specters, pp. 131, 133) likewise transforms Marx into a spectre before the reader's eyes; this ghost is then summoned to haunt the present-day political scene (p. 174).

38

Hell in Our Time

Derrida conjures a `spirit of Marxism', disembodied from the dogma of party and proletariat, that yet retains something of Marx's original project: a certain emancipatory and messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise that one can try to liberate from any dogmatics and even from any metaphysio-religious determination, from any messianism. And a promise must promise to be kept, that is, not to remain `spiritual' or `abstract', but to produce events, new forms of action, of practice, of organization. (p. 89)

Allowing this spectre to survive in us, Derrida suggests, we can continue to resist capitalism's most egregious injustices, particularly the prejudicial nature of current international law (p. 83). For Derrida, then, the descent journey to `speak with ghosts' becomes a form of active political dissent rather than a passive relinquishing of desire and voice to Dis. In response to injustice or loss, do we choose dispossession, absolute presence or active dissent? As Derrida's recent work, including The Work of Mourning as well as Specters of Marx, demonstrates, the narrative of the journey to Hell continues to inform the way we respond to calamity, both personally and collectively, in contemporary Western cultures.

Notes 1. In a review of a revival of Marlowe's play at the Young Vic Theatre in March 2002, Michael Billington inquired, `Why is it that modern, secularised audiences should relish an apparently broken-backed play that depends upon a medieval belief in heaven and hell?' In Billington's view, the play `may use the devices of the medieval morality play . . . but it is set in an eternal present in which material wealth, scientific knowledge and sexual fantasy become the objects for which we trade our own integrity' (`Carry on Doctor', The Guardian, 13 March 2002, Arts Section). In my view, the popularity of Doctor Faustus in the twentieth century is one indication of the way that medieval images of, and beliefs in, Hell persist in the modern, secular imagination. 2. `Hell is not a ``place'', nor a punishment imposed by God, but a selfexclusion from communion with God,' paraphrase by Hazel Southam and Nicholas Pyke of a Papal statement, 1999. Evangelical denominations, however, still insist on the literal existence of Hell. See Southam and Pike, `Weep and Gnash Those Teeth: Hell's Back', The Independent on Sunday, 2 April 2000, p. 3. 3. See Darryl Jones, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film, p. 184. 4. In Middleton's Women Beware Women (1620±24), the jilted Leantio compares his anguish to the infernal torments of the damned, in a passage that seems remarkably modern: `'tis an affliction / Of greater weight than youth was made to bear, / As if a punishment of afterlife / Were fall'n upon

Notes

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

39

man here' (III, 3, 253±56). But note the pre-modern `as if'; the analogy between present and afterlife suffering remains just that, an analogy, rather than an actualisation. See also Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, and Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, pp. 173±228. BBC Radio 4 News at One, 19 February 2003. See also Jonathan Watts, `Failed Suicide Attempt Started Korean Tube Fire', The Guardian, 20 February 2003, Special Report: North and South Korea. Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, p. 14. John Simpson, BBC Radio 4 News, 6 April 2003, on the scene of a convoy of US and Kurdish soldiers hit by `friendly fire': `This is just a scene from hell here. All the vehicles on fire. There are bodies burning around me, there are bodies lying around, there are bits of bodies on the ground.' In EpõÃtre aÁ l'auteur du livre des Trois Imposteurs [1768], Voltaire wrote `si Dieu n'existait pas, il foudrait l'inventer' (Oeuvres CompleÁtes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland. Paris: Garnier, 1877±85, vol. 10, pp. 402±5). John Keats, `Letter to Benjamin Bailey' (22 November 1817), in H. E. Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John Keats. Cambridge, MA, 1958, vol. 1, p. 185. Jan Arriens (ed.), Welcome to Hell: Letters and Other Writings by Prisoners on Death Row in the United States, p. 61. Hans KuÈng, Eternal Life?, p. 158. Drexel, L'inferno prigione (1641), cited by Camporesi, The Fear of Hell, p. 62. Kip Thorne explains, `a singularity is a region where ± according to the laws of general relativity ± the curvature of spacetime becomes infinitely large, and spacetime ceases to exist. Since tidal gravity is a manifestation of spacetime curvature . . . a singularity is also a region of infinite tidal gravity, that is, a region where gravity stretches all objects infinitely along some directions and squeezes them infinitely along others' (Black Holes, pp. 450± 1). On the rarity of Dante's journey through, as opposed to vision of, Paradise, see Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, p. 59. Coelius Rhodiginus is quoted by Jeremiah Drexel, in De cultu corporis (1658), in Hieremia Drexelli, Opera Omnia, Lugduni (1968), t. II, p. 412, and cited by Camporesi, Fear of Hell, p. 36. Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1998, p. 759. See also under `via negativa' in Mircea Eliade (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Religion London: Macmillan, 1987, vol. 15, p. 252. See also a study by The Economist on the death penalty in the US: `Executions: Dead Man Walking Out', The Economist, 10 June 2000, pp. 25±8. The Vision of Tugdal (vulgarised in the fourteenth century), cited by Camporesi, The Fear of Hell, p. 54. Compare Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, pp. 177±8. Kenneth Gross, `Infernal metamorphoses', p. 46. Borges refers to the end of Paradiso, where Beatrice smiles briefly at Dante, then disappears into the Rose of Paradise. According to Borges, Dante

40

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

Hell in Our Time invented the Commedia so as to imagine himself together with Beatrice, `hence the appalling circumstances, all the more infernal for taking place in the empyrean: the disappearance of Beatrice . . . the fleetingness of her glance and smile, the eternal turning away of the face' (The Total Library: Non-Fiction, p. 304). On Borges' reading of this passage, see also Manguel, Into the Looking-Glass Wood, pp. 63±4. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, cited by Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, p. 279. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 17; the phrase is from Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. On the descent in Proust, see Thanh-VaÃn Ton-That, `Proust et OrpheÂe: Avatars et MeÂtamorphoses d'un Mythe'. See, for example, Marlow's description of the African wilderness as `something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion' (Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 85). See also Chapter 8. See also Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, pp. 227±37. As a visual symbol of the way the Second World War gathered into itself memories of the First World War to produce an image of the actual world as Hell, think, for example, of the famous scene in Abel Gance's 1938 film, J'Accuse. After serving in the trenches of the First World War, Jean Diaz watches in horror as Europe slides towards the Second World War; in a desperate attempt to prevent it, Diaz summons the ghosts of the war dead from the graves and fields of France to accuse contemporary Europe. Levinas, `There is: existence without existents' (1946), The Levinas Reader, ed. SeÂan Hand, p. 31. Jean Paul Sartre's Huis Clos (1944) famously presents the opposite view to Taylor's, notably in a concluding phrase, `l'enfer, c'est les autres' (Hell is other people). Here too, the influence of Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) seems undeniable. On Marx and vampires, see Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein's Shadow, pp. 121±40. On nineteenth-century vampirism in general, see James Twitchell, The Living Dead. See Carol Zaleski, Otherworldly Journeys, pp. 26±42. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 261. Cited by Pike, Passage Through Hell, p.19. Peter Forbes (ed.), We Have Come Through: 100 Poems Celebrating Courage in Overcoming Depression and Trauma. This collection of poems is structurally arranged so as to describe the narrative arc of a descent and return, from the threshold crossings of Part I (`Scenario for a Walk-on Part') to the anatomies of Hell in Parts II and III (`Why We Go Mad' and `Welcome to the Club') to the reascents of Parts IV and V (`Aftermath and Redemption' and `Survival Strategies'). Interestingly, Parts IV and V offer alternative views of the return journey, the one emphasising spiritual transcendence, the other secular accommodations and adaptations. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell offers a notably more optimistic (though in my view unconvincing) interpretation of Job's story: here, `the hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, under-

Notes

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

41

stands ± and the two are atoned . . . to Job himself the revelation appears to have made soul-satisfying sense' (pp. 147±8). Anon., `Chirac and Putin voice sympathy, Iraq cites God's will', The Guardian, 12 September 2002, International Section, p. 4. Lyotard, `The Jewish Oedipus', Genre, p. 405. For `hauntology' see Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 10. See Critchley, Ethics ± Politics ± Subjectivity, pp. 143±82, and Chapter 7 of this study. Clark distinguishes katabasis from (1) visionary ecstasis, where the soul travels, but the body stays at home; (2) nekyia, where the dead are called up in seance; and (3) fertility rites, in which a god descends rather than a mortal human being (Catabasis, p. 34). But in the later history of the tradition, such clear-cut distinctions are not always maintained. Plato, Symposium, Oxford Classics, p. 12. See also Chapter 8 for Rushdie's views on Plato's interpretation of Orpheus. Rainer Maria Rilke, `Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes', in Requiem and Other Poems, trans. J. B. Leishman.

Chapter 2

Chronotopes of Hell

In the last chapter, I discussed what Hell might mean to a contemporary secular Westerner. Here I would like to shift the focus to what narratives of Hell characteristically do and, in terms of their formal attributes and generic characteristics, how they work. In Bakhtin's view, literary genres are defined by their chronotopes, their distinctive representations of time and space and the human image within that timescape.1 Of the two elements that comprise a chronotope (time and space), the most important one for defining the particular characteristics of a genre is time. In Gary Saul Morson's paraphrase of Bakhtin, `each narrative genre implicitly manifests a specific model of temporality.'2 To say of an experience or event that `it was Hell' is to evoke a generic horizon of expectation in the listener or reader. `Hell' itself is a chronotope whose most familiar inherited temporal and spatial features include: narrow constraints on spatial movement, an absence of future orientation, experienced by an individual both separate and alienated from his or her environment and from other people, despite often being crowded into close proximity with others in an undifferentiated mass. But if we are to appreciate the ways in which contemporary writers have challenged and redefined the horizons of traditional katabatic narrative, we need to examine this generic inheritance in considerably greater detail.

Generic features of katabatic narrative Although often found as an episode embedded in other types of narrative, the story of an infernal journey may still be described as a distinct genre in itself in that it codifies a particular world-view, operates according to a certain narrative dynamic, and draws upon an inherited set of motifs and imagery. For example, in any Western katabatic narrative, the reader would expect to find one or more of the following images or motifs:

Generic features of katabatic narrative 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

43

a person lost in a wood, labyrinth or trackless ocean; a guide from the otherworld sent to recover the person lost; a series of initiatory rites; the discovery of a talisman such as Virgil's famous golden bough; a threshold crossing, often through some gateway inscribed with an apotropaic message (for example, Dante's `Abandon hope'); a river crossing, usually in a leaky or damaged boat; flocks of damned souls crowding the shore like birds or leaves; a bad-tempered ferryman; monsters and demons that flagrantly hybridise classical and Judeo-Christian iconography (as in the opening and closing scenes of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1585±87)); a Lethean lake of forgetfulness; regions of Hell/Hades subdivided into circles or compartments by different kinds of threshold boundaries; fiery and frozen zones; a series of graded punishments increasing in severity as the traveller descends lower; distortions of time (such as accelerations, mythic arrest of time, or regression to primal scenes, traumatic repetitions, or schizophrenic split or multiplied realities); distortions of space (such as the telescoping of distances, compression and contraction, or extreme changes in gravitational fields); a graded series of tests that the traveller must overcome, culminating in an encounter with the demonic Other (usually Dis/Hades, Satan or some other manifestation of abjection, terror or despair) and/or the beloved Other (such as Orpheus's lost Eurydice); if the latter must be retrieved, the former must be suppressed in order for the descent hero to return safely to the overworld.

Finally, when (or if) the hero does return, he or she usually does so with surprising rapidity and ease, despite explicit warnings to the contrary. In perhaps the most often quoted lines in all katabatic literature, the Cumaean sibyl warns Aeneas: `facilis descensus Averno . . . sed revocare gradum . . . hoc opus, hic labor est' (`the descent to Avernus [Hell] is easy, but to retrace your steps, this is the task, this the difficulty' (Aeneid, 6.126±29)). But as Eduard Norden has pointed out, this is only true in a limited sense; it is easy to go to Hades by dying, but difficult to cross over when alive; and the return journey in most cases occurs swiftly and with little hindrance.3 Aeneas slips out the ivory gate of false dreams instead of the horn gates of truth (Aeneid, 6.898). Dante narrates his return to the surface in under seven lines, and here the rapidity of the narration, rather than the journey itself, conveys the impression of an unimpeded return.4 Moreover, according to Charles Singleton's calculations, Dante and Virgil reach Satan's torso at six in the evening, but they leave the monster's body at six in the morning ± of the same day.5 Dante

44

Chronotopes of Hell

orchestrates this temporal loop so as to round off his protagonist's journey which began on Good Friday, on Easter morning. In fact, the tricksiness of the return, either the return leg of the journey itself or the narration of the return, is a standard feature of descent narratives. In Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), Satan meets an unexpected lack of resistance when he approaches Hell's exit gates, which `on a sudden open fly / With impetuous recoil' (Paradise Lost, 2.879). In Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), the trio of explorers reach the end of their supplies of food and water and are facing certain death many miles underground when a volcano erupts, catapulting them safely, if improbably, to the Earth's surface.6 As Camporesi's The Fear of Hell shows, the iconography and topography of Hell is constantly changing. But rather than shrinking, the storehouse of infernal motifs appears to be growing all the time. To the above collection of traditional underworld topoi and imagery, new motifs that have become generically defining for contemporary literature would have to be added, including images or ideas derived, for example, from Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1897). In infernal journey narratives, a living protagonist descends into the land of the Dead in pursuit of wisdom, love or power. The katabatic `world-view' holds that these moral goods (or evils) are to be found underground rather than in the heavens or in the familiar, daylight world. Contrary to what one might expect, however, this world view is not inherently gloomy or tragic; there are comedic as well as tragic katabases. Descent heroes, typically, can choose to go or be forced against their will, they can succeed or fail in their quests, and they can return or remain trapped in the underworld. None of these outcomes is generically prescribed, any more than a realist novel has to end happily or sadly. In some versions of the Orpheus myth, such as the medieval romance Sir Orfeo (c.1488) or Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), the poet regains his wife from Hades; in others, he comes back alone. When Mozart's Don Giovanni was first performed in Prague in 1787, the opera concluded with a comic sextet celebrating the damnation of the Don. Seven months later, in Vienna, Mozart cut this final scene, ending instead with Giovanni's defiance as he is dragged off to Hell, thus transforming the descent narrative from a classical comedy into the Romantic Promethean tragedy familiar to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century audiences.7 Terry Eagleton distinguishes tragedy, with its awareness that `change is bought at [to]o steep a cost', from what he calls the `barracks-room view [that] . . . suffering makes a man of you.'8 The katabatic world-view, however, can accommodate both these perspectives. For example, Wes-

Generic features of katabatic narrative

45

tern publishing markets are currently flooded with biographical accounts of what Pamela Stephenson (Billy Connolly's wife) calls `creative illness', one that crushes you but from which you recover to become an unexpectedly brilliant comic.9 But should you not recover, your story might still be told as a tragic descent narrative by a surviving relative. Marlowe's play Dr Faustus (1588±89) qualifies as a descent narrative, in my view, since although Faustus does not recover from his Fall, the other players and the audience do. There has to be a return in katabatic narrative, but it need not be the hero who returns.10 In Malcolm Lowry's Faustian novel Under the Volcano (1947), the descent of the British consul Geoffrey Firmin is narrated by a friend who survives the consul's death. In essence, whether comic or tragic, the narrative dynamic of katabasis consists of three movements: a descent, an inversion or turning upside down at a zero point and a return to the surface of some kind. Descent narratives characteristically function like springs or hinges; there is always a kick-back movement, generated by the force of an underworld encounter. When embedded in other forms of narrative, notably classical epic, the katabatic episode performs this hinge function for the text in which it is embedded. The descent not only provides a major turning point in the plot, it also frequently transforms or converts the text from one world-view into another. The descent thus performs a caesural incision on the narrative as a whole, cutting it into a `before' and an `after' or, as in Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937), a `there and back again'. In Epic and Empire, David Quint argues that there are two categories of epic narrative: those produced by history's winners like Homer and Virgil, and those produced by history's losers such as Lucan, Ercilla and d'AubigneÂ. (An example of English `loser's' epic would be Abraham Cowley's The Civil War (1643), a Royalist epic produced during the Republican commonwealth period.) But more often, the dialectic between winning and losing operates within the epic itself, where the descent episode functions as the nadir, the ground for a polemical shift of perspective, a turning point at which the epic stops thinking of itself as a loser, as it were, and the hero is transformed from victim to moral crusader. The descent to Hades in Book 6 of Virgil's Aeneid divides the Odyssean and Iliadic halves of the Roman epic; but more importantly, it transforms Aeneas from plaything of the gods into agent of Rome's imperial destiny. When thus embedded as an episode in another narrative, the katabatic journey functions as the linchpin of the larger narrative. This is also the function of non-embedded descents, though in a different sense. When Dante writes that he finds himself lost `midway' in life, he indicates that his narrative will represent only a fragment of that lifelong story. But while fragmentary, the descent narrative will contain the revelatory

46

Chronotopes of Hell

turning point, by which the whole of his life will be illuminated. As John Freccero has pointed out, Dante's representation of the pilgrim's conversion imitates such narratives as Acts 9 and 22, and Augustine's Confessions, where conversion is represented as `tantamount to a death of their former selves and the beginning of new life'.11 This quasi-deathly experience bestows a special advantage on the narrators of conversion texts. Most autobiographical narrators have a limited vantage point on the meaning and shape of their own lives because they are still in the business of living them. But the converted narrator sees his or her former self as belonging to a prior life altogether; the pre-conversion past is absolutely closed off from the present and therefore open to being authoritatively interpreted. Religious descent narratives are typically organised around the moment of conversion, in which the old self is enfolded into the new. The rest of the life story automatically becomes redundant, and is often left untold since it is the conversion itself that determines the meaning of the whole. Within the descent narrative itself, the hero's encounter with Dis or Satan at the bottom of Hell thus constitutes a conversionary turn in microcosm. Such a turn occurs in the final canto of Inferno, when the guide Virgil takes Dante on his back, climbs onto Satan's thighs, turns them both upside down and proceeds to climb upwards toward Mount Purgatory in the southern hemisphere. Thus Dante writes: As was his pleasure, I clasped him round the neck, and he took advantage of time and place, and when the wings were opened wide he caught hold on the shaggy flanks; down from shag to shag he descended between the matted hair and the frozen crusts. When we had come to where the thigh turns just on the thick of the haunch, my leader with labor and strain brought round his head to where his shanks had been and grappled on the hair like one who is climbing, so that I thought we were returning into Hell again. (Inferno, 34.70±81)

This upside-downing episode converts the sinner whom we meet lost in the dark wood into the `saved' poet. The Dante who emerges on the other side is the new man who is capable not only of pursuing his journey up through Purgatory and Paradise, but also of turning back and retrospectively narrating his journey through Hell. This type of religious conversion can be represented in various different ways. For some protagonists, the experience consists of a heavenly flight, for others a purgatorial journey. Katabatic religious conversion characteristically occurs on the road downwards; the new self is born from fire, like the legendary phoenix, out of extreme physical suffering or psychological despair. Here, as David Pike notes, `conversion conflates the two moments [death of the old self, birth of the new] so that God

Bakhtin's Inferno: visionary versus historical chronotopes

47

himself is encountered at the nadir of the descent.'12 This process occurs in contemporary religious autobiographies as well as medieval ones. In Beyond the Darkness (1995), for example, Angie Fenimore describes her experience of descending to Hell following an attempt to commit suicide through drug overdose. In Hell she experiences despair followed by a certainty that she is in the presence of both Satan and God. She returns with the conviction that they are equally present in the material world: `Just as God and Jesus Christ are real, a being of darkness, Satan, truly exists. He has conclaves of dark angels and we are their prey' (p. 135). With the self-authorising certainty of a Dantean narrator, she knows by the proof of her own feelings that this must be absolutely true: `a powerful energy rose in me, confirming that my new insights were true' (p. 137). Here, as Freccero writes of Inferno, the conversionary descent and return enacts `the transformation of the problematic and humanistic into the certain and transcendent' (The Poetics of Conversion, p. 25). On this basis, we might conclude, therefore, that the central dynamic of katabatic narrative consists of a radical shift of temporal perspective from historical to theological or mythic time.13

Bakhtin's Inferno: visionary versus historical chronotopes Dante's transcendent vision reveals, in extraordinarily intricate detail, the entire structure of God's triple-tiered, infinite cosmos. Paradoxically, however, he weaves this totalising vision out of stories and conversations with dead people. In `Forms of Time and of the Chronotope', Bakhtin explores the conflict between two opposing chronotopes in Dante's Inferno. The Inferno's distinctive model of temporality consists of its almost unique juxtaposition of two chronotopes, the one realist and historical and the other extra-temporal and evaluative. Of these two, the dominant one is undoubtedly the extra-temporal chronotope, that which defines the genre of vision literature. Bakhtin writes that in the Commedia everything must be perceived as being within a single time, that is, in the synchrony of a single moment; one must see this entire world as simultaneous. Only under conditions of pure simultaneity ± or, what amounts to the same thing, in an environment outside time altogether ± can there be revealed the true meaning of `that which was, and which is and which shall be' . . . To `synchronize diachrony,' to replace all temporal and historical divisions and linkages with purely interpretative, extratemporal and hierarchicized ones ± such was Dante's formgenerating impulse, which is defined by an image of the world structured according to a pure verticality. (The Dialogic Imagination, p. 157)

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Chronotopes of Hell

To be able to view the cosmos `extra-temporally' and `simultaneously' is to see it as only God can. This is the humanly impossible perspective for which Dante reaches in the Commedia.14 It is the assumption of this perspective that gives Dante the authority to anatomise the system of divine punishments as an expression of God's absolute justice in Hell. We hear Dante adopt this perspective most audibly in Canto 11, when Virgil takes Dante to a vantage point overlooking lower Hell, and explains to him the region's structures and systems of punishments. This evaluative, extra-temporal perspective is something more than ordinary retrospection, since even the damned souls reflect on their pasts. What the damned souls in Inferno lack is any kind of perspective, any ideological framework that would make sense of their suffering (in contrast to the souls in Purgatorio who, like Freccero's religious converts, are able to read their past lives as part of a totalising, ideological framework). It is in this sense that Bakhtin contrasts the `evaluative' with the `historical' chronotope. In his view, it is the visionary chronotope that generates the Inferno's formal and evaluative symmetries, its cathedral-like structure and its graded circles of sins and torments. A similarly extreme verticalisation of the historical world can still occasionally be found in contemporary descent narratives. For example, Gloria Naylor transposes Dante's gradation of sins onto the black, middleclass suburb she represents in Linden Hills. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1947) is an underworld narrative which describes a near complete circle, beginning with the words, `The end is in the beginning' (p. 9) and concluding with `The end was in the beginning' (p. 460). The end is also the beginning in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947). Lowry's first chapter ends at 7 p.m. on the Day of the Dead, while the rest of the narrative unfolds between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. of the preceding year leading up to that day; to underline this numerological symmetry, a horse branded with the number seven turns out to be instrumental in the protagonist's death, while a clock strikes seven times as he dies. Martin Amis takes infernal circularity a step further in Time's Arrow (1991), a novel about the Holocaust narrated in reverse chronology. The protagonist, Tod Friendly, develops from a seemingly kind, generous doctor at the start of the novel into the ruthless Nazi killer he was fifty years previously. In this overly determined story, as the title of the first chapter underlines, `What goes around comes round' (p. 11). In many contemporary descent narratives, the normal forms of time by which protagonists measure experience are represented as blocked or arrested; such temporal arrest includes the reversal of ordinary clock-time, suspension of historical development or seasonal change, and the blockage of any Proustian transformation of memories and reflections into a sense of selfhood.

Bakhtin's Inferno: visionary versus historical chronotopes

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In a celebrated passage in Mimesis, Erich Auerbach traced the origins of the nineteenth-century realist novel to Dante's damned but still defiantly historical souls.15 Similarly for Bakhtin, the verticalising, formal and evaluative structures of Inferno are countered by realistic and historicising energies in Dante's epic: But at the same time, the human beings who fill (populate) this vertical world are profoundly historical, they bear the distinctive marks of time; on all of them, the traces of the epoch are imprinted . . . Therefore the images and ideas that fill this vertical world are in their turn filled with a powerful desire to escape this world, to set out along the historically productive horizontal, to be distributed not upward but forward. (The Dialogic Imagination, p. 157)

For the most part, the damned souls avoid introducing themselves to Dante as emblems of particular sins. In Canto 33, Count Ugolino assumes Dante knows his crime (betrayal of his city); instead he wants to tell Dante how it feels for a father to watch his children, who were imprisoned with him, die of starvation. Whatever the specific theological reason for their being in Hell, the damned souls want to tell Dante about much more: their own memories of abjection, of descent and aspiration, their victories and betrayals. This is why a first-time reader of Inferno often has difficulty recognising which sin is being illuminated in each circle of Hell. The untheological, storytelling impulses of the damned are governed, in Bakhtin's terms, by a `historical' chronotope, as opposed to an `evaluative' one. Like many twentieth-century commentators, however, Bakhtin seems to have got caught up in the Inferno and to have lost sight of the rest of the Commedia at this point in his argument. Only in the first cantica could the souls be described as fixed in place, but `filled with a powerful desire to escape'. The souls in Purgatorio are unfixed, and those in Paradiso have no desire to escape. The two temporal perspectives, the `evaluative' and the `historical', are most strongly and starkly opposed in Inferno, which is one reason for the first cantica's forceful impact on its readers. In my view, this chronotopic conflict is one of the defining features of traditional katabatic narrative (including Inferno), in which an observer travels through Hell and converses with those who are lost to the ordinary world. Dante draws the reader into this conflict of chronotopes, invoking sympathy for the damned on the one hand and admiration for the divinely ordered, absolutely just cosmos on the other. Eventually however, as Bakhtin concludes, the evaluative chronotope wins out over the historical one; `the artist's powerful will condemns [the once historical damned soul] to an eternal and immobile place on the extra-temporal vertical axis' (p. 157).

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Bakhtin's concept of opposing chronotopes in Dante's Inferno provides us with a way of formally accounting for some of the conflicting ways the name of Hell is invoked in secular contexts today. `Hell' is commonly understood to represent both an extra-temporal absolute, and an experience to be survived (or not) and knitted together in a narrative. As we saw in the previous chapter, many contemporary references stutter over the actual naming of Hell, a hesitation that seems to indicate that people are no longer quite sure what is meant by the term, or even whether it belongs in a historical, secular context. On the other hand, the very repetition of the name suggests that a widespread belief in an absolute beyond the historical still exists. As Bakhtin's analysis shows, one of the functions of descent narratives may well be to transform the personal and historical into just such a mythical absolute.

Unspeakable wisdom A third reason for hesitating over the naming of Hell, however, is that the word is invoked only to refer to situations that are beyond description or ordinary comprehension. In this case, remembering that hel means `cover' in old Norse, the term is used to cover a horror that cannot be spoken. This leads me to consider a further aspect of infernal revelation, one not entirely accounted for either by Freccero's theory of conversion or Bakhtin's analysis of Dante's visionary chronotope. Raymond Clark persuasively places katabasis within a tradition of wisdom literature. But if katabatic literature is concerned with the acquisition of wisdom, it is a particularly charged kind of wisdom, an impossible, unspeakable insight. This is particularly true for twentieth-century descent narratives; one thinks immediately of Kurtz's inarticulate cry when gazing through the rent veil of Europe's colonial dream: `the horror, the horror!' (Heart of Darkness, p. 139). But it is also the case in many ancient katabases. In Aeneid, Book 2, Dido asks to hear about the fall of Troy, arguably the first katabatic episode in the Aeneid. Aeneas begins his narration of the fall with these words: `Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem' (`it is an unspeakable grief, O queen, that you ask me to renew' (Aeneid, 2.3, my trans.). In other words, recalling and narrating the journey constitutes a descent to Hell in itself; if the sibyl is wrong in Book 6 about the manner of Aeneas's return from Hades, she still may be right about the pain it will cost him to remember the experience.16 She says, `sed revocare gradum' (`but to retrace your step') is the difficulty. But as well as `retrace', revocare can also mean `to call to mind' or `remember'.17 So perhaps she is alluding to the difficulty he will face remembering not only the

Unspeakable wisdom

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descent to Hades, but the loss of Troy, Creusa, Dido and others on the journey to Rome. The sibyl adds that Aeneas should go, `if your mind is filled with such a love, so great a desire, to swim the Stygian lake twice, and twice look upon black Tartarus' (Aeneid, 6.133±5). Again, the primary sense of this comment is that everyone gets to see Hades once, when they die. But in a secondary sense, she refers to the traveller's obsession on his return to share his experiences with others and relive the experience through narrative; `who but a madman would do this?' inquires the sibyl. The wisdom acquired on the underworld journey cries out to be shared, yet at the same time it is unspeakable; it cannot be communicated. In Dante's Inferno, the conflict between synchronic and diachronic chronotopes is played out in every circle of Hell and in every conversation Dante has with a damned soul. But it is also internalised within Dante himself as a psychomachia between the overawed, near-sighted, sympathising protagonist and the far-sighted, omniscient narrator he is to become by the end of the poem. This is a subject about which Bakhtin has surprisingly little to say, although it is within Dante that the synchronic wins out over the diachronic, and an ahistorical vision fills the imagination of a historical being. Many critics have commented on Dante's audacity in claiming to know God's wisdom and justice in the Commedia. For example, Freccero argues that Dante could see in his own conversion, `the figura of God's redemptive act, the master-plan of all history' (Poetics of Conversion, p. 26). And Barolini writes that Dante's adoption of the vantage of scriba Dei [God's scribe] confers a breathtaking advantage . . . From it the poet is able to claim knowledge of the truth not only with respect to the historical moment but also sub specie aeternitatis [by the measure of eternity], for to know what happens after death, in the context of the Christian afterlife, is to know what every action really accomplished . . . what every thing, in short, really signifies.18

While this may be true, fewer readers have noted what it costs Dante or the average medieval Christian to believe that God's justice towards humanity is absolute and already fixed sub specie aeternitatis. Dante betrays his personal bias by placing his political enemies in Hell, but he also condemns to Hell his own earlier work, his former emotional attachments, political hopes and ideals. As Bakhtin points out, even the poet's own `historical and political conceptions, his understanding of both progressive and reactionary forces of historical development (an understanding that was very profound) are drawn into this vertical hierarchy' (The Dialogic Imagination, p. 157). J. L. Borges was one reader who acutely understood the cost of Dante's

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vision to the poet himself. For Borges, not only is the brevity of Dante's encounter with Beatrice in Paradise an infernal loss, but in coming to understand God's infinite justice, Dante also has to accept the fixity of his own place in the divine plan. In his short story `Inferno I, 32' (1960), Borges likens Dante to a leopard in a zoo. In a dream, God tells the leopard the reason for his imprisonment: `You shall live and die in this prison, so that a man I have knowledge of may see you a certain number of times and never forget you and put your figure and your symbol into a poem, which has its exact place in the weft of the universe' (Collected Fictions, p. 322). Just as the leopard is there so that Dante will see and write about him in Inferno, 1.32, so Dante must suffer exile and loneliness for the Commedia to come into being. And unlike the leopard, Dante has to understand and accept God's reasons for making him suffer. In `The Maker' (1960), Borges similarly suggests that the onset of blindness in Homer constitutes a descent journey that `makes' him as a writer (Collected Fictions, pp. 292±3). And as Homer's withdrawal into his childhood memories uncovers a series of distinctly Borgesian images and themes, the descent journey of the Greek poet is implicitly that of the blind writer Borges as well.19

Conversion versus inversion The descent hero's conversion at the bottom of Hell is also a kind of sentence on the rest of his life. Once the meaning of his present, past and future life is revealed, the hero's selfhood becomes a fixed and finalised entity. No other inner development or external change can be meaningful once this conversion point is passed. In this sense, the position of the converted hero is comparable to that of Calvino's Mr Palomar, who has decided to live as if he were already dead: `This is the most difficult step for one who wants to learn how to be dead: convincing himself that his own life is a closed whole, all in the past, to which nothing can be added, nor can changes in perspective be introduced into the relationship among the various elements' (Mr Palomar (1983), p. 111). But what if this turn at the bottom of the descent journey was understood, not as a revelatory experience leading to transcendence of the historical, material world, but as a radical shift of perspective leading down, again down, into the material world? Such an inversion would not yield access to divine truth, but nor would it lead to the death of the historical self. The overturning of Dante himself provides an excellent example of katabatic inversion rather than conversion, if one adheres to a strictly literal reading of what happens in the final canto of Inferno. The guide

Conversion versus inversion

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Virgil explains in response to Dante's question, that they turned upsidedown when they passed through the centre of the Earth: `when I turned myself you passed the point to which all weights are drawn from every part' (Inferno, 34.110±11). So the primary reason for their turning upside down is a physical one; they have entered the Southern Hemisphere. But weights are drawn to the Earth's centre in the Southern Hemisphere as well. Dante's guide seems to be implying something more about their change of physical condition. In this nether sphere, it appears that they are able to travel lightly and swiftly, `caring not for any rest' (34.135). Allegorically, this is because Dante has rejected the sins and sinners of Hell. But psychologically, this is simply the point where Dante loses his fear of Hell. He does not express any sense of revelation, infernal or otherwise, when he has passed the turning point. Instead, he looks back to see Satan's legs protruding from the ice, and confesses that he feels `travagliato' (`perplexed', Inferno, 34.91). Far from being weighed down by this puzzle, he accepts Virgil's explanation about the absence of gravity at face value and follows his guide without further comment. Moreover, technically speaking, Dante does not actually reascend from Hell; he keeps travelling downwards, to emerge on the other side of the Earth. Reading against the theological allegory of Inferno, 34, then, we find the possibility of a different form of inversion in Hell. This literal or secular katabatic turn consists of an inversion of perspective on the infernal condition, rather than a rejection and transcendence of that condition altogether. Katabatic inversion is experienced as a disburdening gesture, which consciously casts off gravitas along with (in Dante's case) the Earth's gravity. Interpreted thus, the inverted hero's lightness is not a sign of his damnation (as suggested in Chapter 1), but of his newfound freedom.20 Rather than bringing theological certainty about the pattern and meaning of one's life, such a secular shift of perspective can work to circumvent the disabling aporiae of the underworld. Katabatic inversion thus inverts the hero's sense of entrapment into one of liberation or insight. It is the extremity of the condition that produces the underworld insight, even though we are still bound by the narrative dynamics of coil and recoil, the hinge movement characteristic of katabatic conversion. In this regard, the affinity Bakhtin found between two ostensibly dissimilar writers, Dante and Dostoevsky, is important. Bakhtin writes that both writers fold diachronic into synchronic world-views. Thus in the subsequent history of literature, the Dantesque vertical chronotope never again appears with such rigor and internal consistency. But there are frequent attempts to resolve, so to speak, historical contradictions `along the

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vertical' . . . there are attempts to lay open the world as a cross-section of pure simultaneity and coexistence . . . After Dante, the most profound and consistent attempt to erect such a verticality was made by Dostoevsky. (The Dialogic Imagination, p. 158)

But in Dostoevsky's writing, such an enfolding of history into simultaneity does not result in a totalising, religious absolutism. On the contrary, Bakhtin attributed to Dostoevsky the invention of what was in his view the most democratising literary form that yet existed: the polyphonic novel. In such works, argues Bakhtin, authors are `liberated from their monologic isolation and finalisation, they become thoroughly dialogised and enter the dialogue of the novel on completely equal terms with other idea-images' (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 92). Clearly, this does not happen in Dante's Inferno, where the damned souls are never truly on equal terms with the protagonist because they are fixed in Hell whereas Dante is merely passing through. But in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, The Devils and The Underground Man (to name but a few examples), the descent to Hell produces another kind of descent both for the characters and the narrators, descent as `a liberation from monologic isolation and finalisation'. If the arrest of time and space in Hell unmakes the self, it can also be the means of laying open the world.

Infernal inversion: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano The conflict between historical and theological or mythic chronotopes still governs many descent narratives written after 1945. For example, there is a powerful juxtaposition of opposing temporalities in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. Lowry intended his novel to be read as a modern Inferno, as was clear to some of his earliest readers.21 His characters appear imprisoned in net of fatal correspondences and formal symmetries from which no escape seems possible. Like Dante's interwoven rhyme scheme, the terza rima, Lowry's branching syntax appears to `mimic a kind of simultaneity' with `each sentence . . . as it were, a microcosm' creating `a kind of ``absolute time'', an interminable continuum in which everything can happen at once.'22 Like Dante's, Lowry's `powerful will' condemns his central protagonist to a fixed place and meaning in a magnificently over-determined, fictional timescape. Geoffrey is to embody `the very shape and motion of the world's doom'.23 Indeed this character's fate is sealed from the beginning, since the novel begins after his death. But after the opening, retrospective chapter, Lowry abandons the vantage point of scriba dei and returns us via Laruelle's free indirect discourse to Geoffrey's immediate perspective and inner thoughts

Infernal inversion: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano

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a year earlier. From this ground level perspective, Geoffrey's death appears to result from a series of tragic and farcical mishaps ± had he not lost his passport and been mistaken by the police for another man, he might never have been charged with spying ± as well as from his own selfdestructiveness and the climate of fear pervading Mexico in the years before the outbreak of the Second World War. While many aspects of Lowry's style and the novel's form impose a strict synchronicity on his material, there is nevertheless a strongly linear, diachronic narrative that runs counter to such synchronous totalisation. These opposing chronotopes, the particular and historical versus the mythic and synchronous, collide most dramatically in Chapter Seven, where the Consul undergoes an `upside-downing' experience analogous to Dante's at the end of Inferno. Geoffrey drunkenly boards a fairground Ferris wheel, chiefly to escape the unwanted attentions of a group of Mexican children. This gesture is heavily weighted symbolically. Lowry names the Ferris wheel `La Machine Infernale', alluding to Cocteau's play of that name, in which another hero, Oedipus, unwittingly destroys himself.24 As Lowry explains in his Preface to the novel, the wheel `demonstrates the very form of the book' and can also be considered as `the wheel of Time' or alternatively, `the wheel of law, the wheel of the Buddha . . . the symbol of the Everlasting Return'.25 Moreover, Lowry writes, `the drunkenness of the Consul may be regarded as symbolising the universal drunkenness of war, of the period that precedes war, no matter when' (Preface, p. 35). Geoffrey is powerless to resist either this weight of symbolism or the motion of the wheel itself as it tosses him up and down: The confession boxes, perched at the end of menacing steel cranks, zoomed upwards and heavily fell. The Consul's own cage hurled up again with a powerful thrusting, hung for a moment upside down at the top, while the other cage, which significantly was empty, was at the bottom, then, before this situation had been grasped, crashed down, paused a moment at the other extremity, only to be lifted upwards again cruelly to the highest point where for an interminable, intolerable period of suspension, it remained motionless ± The Consul, like that poor fool who was bringing light into the world was hung upside down over it, with only a scrap of woven wire between himself and death. There, above him, poised the world, with its people stretching out down to him, about to fall off the road and on to his head, or into the sky. 999. (Under the Volcano, p. 225)

Thus pinioned upside down, Geoffrey epitomises Bakhtin's image of a historical being eternally fixed in place within a verticalising, extratemporal chronotope.26 The episode foreshadows the Consul's death at the end of the novel, when he is thrown down a ravine named Malebolge after Dante's eighth circle of Hell.

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But unlike Dante's damned souls, the Consul knows he symbolises the world's doom. In fact, it is he who grandiosely imagines the world on the edge of catastrophe and himself as its `poor fool'. In raising the protagonist to the level of authorial self-consciousness, Lowry creates a polyphonic inferno in the manner of Dostoevsky. If Geoffrey finds himself trapped in a Hell of his own making, he is also capable of changing his mind about what entrapment means. Before the Ferris wheel stops, it spins into reverse. The Consul finds this motion even more sickening: Oh, the Consul said, oh; for the sensation of falling was now as if terribly behind him, unlike anything, beyond experience . . . he was being emptied out, returned empty, his stick, his passport . . . what did it matter? Let it go! There was a kind of fierce delight in this final acceptance. Let everything go! Everything particularly that provided means of ingress or egress, went bond for, gave meaning or character, or purpose or identity to that frightful bloody nightmare he was forced to carry around with him everywhere upon his back, that went by the name of Geoffrey Firmin, late of His Majesty's Navy, later still of His Majesty's Consular Service, later still of ± (pp. 225±6)

But here Geoffrey's fear changes to `fierce delight' at his own helplessness. Letting his passport and other documents fall from his pockets, he gives up on his old self, `everything . . . that went by the name of Geoffrey Firmin'. But rather than being born into a new self, as in conversion, he feels released from having to be a self at all. From this point in the novel, the Consul stops fighting his desire for alcohol and gives up hope of winning back Yvonne, his wife. The ride on the infernal wheel does lead to the Consul's death, although inadvertently. While the Mexican children gather his scattered documents for him, his passport goes missing. At the end of the novel, when he is mistaken for a Jewish communist spy and arrested, he has no means of proving his true identity, which leads to his conviction and execution. Thus the first turn of the wheel induces a cry for help (a `999') from Geoffrey. But the second turn inverts the cry into a sign of the devil (`666'). After this episode, Geoffrey embraces his infernal condition, declaring a little later, ` ``I love hell . . . I can't wait to get back there'' ' (p. 316). The Consul's inversion amounts to more than a merely passive acquiescence to fate. As the above paragraph shows, he experiences this `upside-downing' as a kind of liberation. From the moment he staggers off the wheel, he acts with notably less reserve, especially toward the novel's Mexican characters. The children who were his tormentors have become his allies, gathering all his possessions for him (except the fatally lost passport). He goes into a cantino to drink, and there an old woman asks in broken English, `Where do you laugh now?' The Consul responds,

The absolute and `my absolute': Sarah Kofman's Smothered Words

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`You mean ``live'', SenÄora Gregorio, not ``laugh'', con permiso' (p. 230). But `laugh' and `live' are equally correct, in this instance. This woman, who reminds Geoffrey of his mother, acts as an underworld guide to reinitiate him into the Hell in which he has elected to live. Sherrill Grace has argued convincingly that Under the Volcano is governed by a `condition of containment'.27 But equally one might observe that the novel's most powerful images of flight all stem from the minds of characters trapped in the darkest places.28 The Consul's reflections on drinking in a dark, dingy cantina could be applied to the way katabatic inversion works in the novel as a whole: `here . . . life reached bottom. But here also great wheeling thoughts hovered in the brain' (Under the Volcano, p. 204).

The absolute and `my absolute': Sarah Kofman's Smothered Words Written in the decade leading up to the Second World War and completed in 1938 in Oaxaca, Mexico, Under the Volcano hovers on the edge of the conceptual shift that Steiner describes in In Bluebeard's Castle (see Chapter 1). Susan Neiman also sees the Holocaust as one of the events in modern history which fundamentally altered the general Western perception of human nature. In Evil in Modern Thought, she argues that after Auschwitz, human nature becomes inexplicable and possibly unknowable (p. 240). Many would argue that once this threshold has been crossed, totalising narrative structures such as Dante's have become unusable and inadequate. On the other hand, when Hell enters the historical world, it does not leave its mythic properties at the door. The catalogue of motifs and images associated with traditional Hells and Hades may strike many contemporary readers as outmoded. But the inherited iconography and, more especially, the chronotopes of katabatic narration continue to shape our perception of historical Hells in profound ways. In Smothered Words (1998), for example, Sarah Kofman writes that the Holocaust survivor who has lived `on the brink of Hell (winter, the cold, hunger, lice)' both wants to describe the experience and cannot.29 Like those of Aeneas, the survivor's memories are infandum, unspeakable. The Holocaust survivor, writes Kofman, feels `an infinite claim to speak, a duty to speak infinitely, imposing itself with irrepressible force, and at the same time, an almost physical impossibility to speak, a choking feeling' (pp. 38±9). Her own narrative reflects this suffocating, inner conflict, as does Robert Antelme's L'espeÁce humaine (The Human Race), the text with which she engages in Smothered Words. Holocaust

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testimony frequently adopts an ascetic, documentary style, which is sometimes crossed with the negative sublime. Such narration deliberately falls short of describing an experience deemed beyond all description. Language can only gesture towards something immense lying beyond. And in fact, even such inadequate language is compromised by its debasement in the death camps. As Antelme writes of the prisoners' speech, `Mire and slackness of language . . . Sentences succeeded one another, contradicted one another . . . all jumbled together . . . everything that's expressed comes forth equalised with everything else, homogenised like a drunkard's puke.'30 For some survivors and second-generation Holocaust descendants, however, this `duty to speak infinitely' can become a kind of Dantean cage. The unspeakability of the death camps is gradually transformed into a negative absolute, by which all future actions and events are overshadowed and even predetermined. In other words, in some Holocaust memorialisation, the static chronotope of vision narrative wins out over the diachronic and particularising chronotope, just as in Dante's Inferno. In the context of Holocaust writing, such a resolution needs to be resisted, since it deprives victims of the Holocaust their historical addressivity in a way that painfully echoes their erasure from history by Nazi Germany. Kofman, however, distinguishes between the absolute of history, represented by the death camps, and the individual's `relation with the infinite', which she declares, cannot be circumscribed by any humanly constructed power relation. Kofman's father, a rabbi, was killed in Auschwitz for refusing to work on the Sabbath (`they could not bear that a Jew, that vermin, even in the camps, did not lose faith in God' (p. 34)). In her view, Kofman's father maintained `a relation with the infinite' even in a place where the power exercised over him seemed infinite (Smothered Words, pp. 34±5). If Auschwitz is understood as a Hell of `extreme powerlessness and violence', there remains to the prisoner the possibility of `a relation beyond all power' (p. 34). Once Hell is made immanent in history, it loses the power to judge or define us infinitely. Should one, then, regard Auschwitz as an instance of absolute evil, or the Holocaust as the absolute evil of our time? On this question, Kofman expresses herself very precisely; she writes that her father's death is `my absolute, which communicates with the absolute of history' (pp. 9±10). Both these phrases `my absolute' and `the absolute of history', are oxymoronic in the way they juxtapose the individual against the universal, the timeless against the timely. The connecting verb `communicates with', moreover, carefully avoids subsuming personal history into a fixed notion of the absolute. Kofman's readings of Antelme, interwoven with reflections about her own family history, take the reader on a

The absolute and `my absolute': Sarah Kofman's Smothered Words

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journey through Hell. Her direct gaze at the absoluteness of the Holocaust constitutes the rock bottom encounter, the hinge moment of this infernal journey. But this aporetic encounter results in a katabatic inversion, rather than the conversion to an absolute, and absolutely predictable, view. In the following two extracts, for example, we see her executing a turn away from the seemingly self-evident notion that some of us are capable of becoming absolutely evil: These limits to the power of the SS man prove that he is locked in the same species and the same history as the detainee, that he is neither a god nor a monster. For his will to kill stems from a power that is proper to man, the simple correlate and opposite of his power to succour the man who is impoverished and without shelter, the Other in his extreme destitution and distress. (Smothered Words, p. 68) If, at that moment when the distance between beings is at its greatest, at the moment when the subjugation of some and the power of others have attained such limits as to seem frozen into some supernatural distinction; if, facing nature, or facing death, we can perceive no substantial difference between the SS and ourselves, then we have to say that there is only one human race. (ibid.)

Both these statements contain powerful mental inversions, in which an infernal, unthinkable situation is transformed into an idea that can liberate us. The power of the SS implies a `correlate and opposite' power; an image of human solidarity lies couched in the image of a `supernatural' distance separating prisoner from SS officer. The duty to `speak infinitely' looks here like an insistence on infinite openness in the face of absolute historical closure. Neither of the above quotations could be mistaken for a position of facile optimism; they are, rather, polemical inversions of the historical evidence that would appear to lead inevitably to a deadlocked, nihilistic world view. In the context of descent literature, what is significant is that Kofman's historically unwarranted declaration of faith in the individual and collective human spirit is formulated as a recusatio, an affirmation by way of denial. This rhetorical figure and this katabatic mode of thought can be seen at work in her summation of Antelme's The Human Race which, she writes, is `punctuated by two affirmations, each as tenacious as the other: against the division desired by the Nazis, the affirmation of unity; against the will to anonymity and indistinction, the affirmation of the singularity and incompatibility of choices' (p. 72). This is one of the viae negativae of descent literature, characteristic of katabatic inversion; it leads to a complex historical vision, rather than a transcendence of history altogether. Another writer on the Holocaust who polemically affirms these two paradoxically opposing values ± unity against division, and singularity

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against anonymity ± is Primo Levi. In the following chapter, I will show how in Levi's writing, Auschwitz is transformed from a mythic absolute into a complex network of journeys, all of them unfinished, all of them lived, historical and to an extent imaginable. Like Blixen's stork pattern in the snow, such a reading of Levi emerges more clearly as the distance between us and the events he describes grows greater. But if the distance grows, so too does the need for this kind of perspective on historical catastrophe. In the first years of the twenty-first century, there have been attempts on many fronts to translate `my absolute' into the absolute, which in turn legitimises acts of `absolute justice' that stand outside human law (detaining prisoners without trial at Guantanamo Bay, for example). My reading of Levi will try to show that there is nothing inevitable about this shift from the particular to the visionary chronotope. As Viktor Frankl, another Holocaust survivor wrote, `the ability to choose one's attitude to a given set of circumstances' is `the last of human freedoms'.31

Notes 1. The `chronotope' in Bakhtin's coinage signifies the representation of `timespace' in a text; more generally, it is a term which highlights `the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships'. See Bakhtin, `Forms of Time and of the Chronotope', The Dialogic Imagination, p. 86. 2. Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, p. 5. 3. Eduard Norden (ed.), Aeneid VI, p. 159. 4. According to Pike, the unexpected ease of ascent in many descent texts is a figure for the dynamics of the present text's appropriation and revision of a literary predecessor. See Passage Through Hell, pp. 11±12. 5. In his commentary on Inferno, Singleton notes, `there is . . . a difference of twelve hours between the two hemispheres, with respect to the meridian of Jerusalem and to the other directly opposite it. But by assigning evening to the meridian of Jerusalem and morning to the other one, Dante makes it twelve hours earlier in the hemisphere opposite to Jerusalem . . . This arrangement is completely arbitrary on the part of the poet, but by setting the clock back twelve hours he gains an entire Saturday (Holy Saturday at that) for the climb from the center' (Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno: Commentary, vol. 2, p. 641). 6. This novel by Jules Verne compellingly translates many of the classic topoi of katabatic narrative into a science fictional medium. The improbable rise to the surface takes place in Chapter 42 (p. 199), after a free fall of many miles. Like Dante and his guide, Axel and his uncle pass through the earth so that their compass swings into the opposite direction (Chapter 43, p. 204). They re-emerge on the surface, `upside down' in an Italian paradise. For a study of katabasis in another of Verne's novels, see Kiera Vaclavik, `Strange Doings Underground: the Descent of (Wo)Man in Jules Verne's Les Indes Noires

Notes

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

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and Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines', MA thesis, Department of French, University of Manchester, 2001. The first performance took place in Prague, on 29 October 1787. Among other changes and additions, the Vienna performance on 7 May 1788, omitted the comic sextet at the end of the opera. The truncated Vienna version was retained well into the early twentieth century. I am grateful to Graham Falconer for this reference. Terry Eagleton, The Idea of the Tragic, pp. 57±8. Stephenson used the phrase `creative illness' in a BBC Radio interview. Her biography, Billy, relates Billy Connolly's unhappy family life and past alcoholism. My view differs from Raymond Clark, who excludes from the katabatic tradition all descent narratives in which the hero fails to return (Catabasis, p. 34). John Freccero, The Poetics of Conversion, p. 25. David Pike, Passage Through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds, p. 29. Similarly, David Pike explains, `the most characteristic strategy of the descent is to stress its own complexity and novelty in contrast with a simple and outmoded past, a past newly constituted as such by the new act of descent. In other words, the newest elements in the constellation are legitimated, rendered as the dynamic description of a historical present, when the previous constellation is represented as a single and static mythic past that is being surpassed' (Passage Through Hell, p. 2). Borges parodies Dante's totalising perspective in his short story `The Aleph' (1949), in which a poet, Daneri (portmanteau of `Dante Alighieri'), is given a glimpse of the universe, in its entirety and all at once, when he looks into a magical stone (the `aleph'). See Borges, Collected Fictions, pp. 274±86. For an excellent analysis of Borges's critical reading of Dante in this story, see Jon Thiem, `Borges, Dante, and the Poetics of Total Vision', pp. 97±120. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 151±76. In Negotiating with the Dead, Atwood argues that all fiction-writing is a kind of descent into the underworld (p. 140). Definition 13b, in The Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante, p. 53. In the solitude of blindness, Borges' Homer finds the key images of the Iliad and Odyssey, but also the `coin in the rain', the `bloodied knife', the `labyrinths of stone' (`The Maker', Collected Fictions, p. 293) that are found, respectively, in `The Zahir',`The South', `The Circular Ruins' and many other stories by Borges. Compare Calvino's essay, `Lightness' in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, pp. 3±30. For a study of the allusions to other literary hells in Lowry's Under the Volcano, see Robert Heilman, `A Multivalued Poetic Fiction' (1947), in Bowker (ed.), Malcolm Lowry, pp. 64±9; and Lowry, `Preface to a Novel' (1948), in Bowker (ed.), Malcolm Lowry, pp. 29±35. See Brian O'Kill, `Aspects of Language in Under the Volcano', in Bowker (ed.), Malcolm Lowry, pp. 36±57.

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23. This description of the Consul is from the first draft of the novel; see Bowker (ed.), Malcolm Lowry, p. 12. 24. Jean Cocteau, La Machine Infernale (1934). 25. Lowry, `Preface to a Novel' (1948), in Bowker (ed.), Malcolm Lowry, pp. 32±3. 26. In his Preface, Lowry writes that `the spiritual domain of the Consul is probably Qliphoth, the world of husks and demons, represented by the Tree of Life [emblem of the Cabbala] turned upside down and governed by Beelzebub, the God of Flies' (p. 34). But in his innocence, the Consul also resembles `the poor fool', Christ, who descends to Earth to save humanity, as well as the hanged man in the Tarot pack. 27. Sherrill Grace, `The Luminous Wheel', in Bowker (ed.), Malcolm Lowry, pp. 152±71 (p. 154). 28. On the `centrifugal movement of all these images' see O'Kill, `Aspects of Language in Under the Volcano', p. 46. 29. Sarah Kofman, Paroles suffoqueÂes (1987, literally `suffocated/suffocating words'), translated by Madeleine Dobie as Smothered Words. Kofman's book addresses Robert Antelme's L'espeÁce humaine (1978). 30. Antelme, The Human Race, p. 135, quoted by Kofman, Smothered Words, p. 50. 31. Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p. 86.

Chapter 3

Auschwitz as Hell

Primo Levi is a writer who, by his own admission, `strive[s] . . . to pass from the darkness in to light.'1 He repeatedly emphasises that retrospectively, he derived positive value from his year of imprisonment at Auschwitz.2 I would argue that what he has to say about Auschwitz is informed by certain premises: that meaning can be derived from nihilistic experience, that reason can help us to compass insanity, that while language might fail to communicate the fullness of horror, it should nevertheless be used, because silence is self-internment and an expression of despair in other people. In my view, Levi is a katabatic writer for whom Hell is refashioned into a journey and a process through which one gains a more complex and rigorous understanding of selfhood in extremis. To align Levi with the `talkers' rather than the `silent' survivors of a journey into Hell is to situate his writing somewhere in relation to the tradition of Dantean katabasis.3 Levi's major allusions to Dante's Inferno, along with his explicit verbal echoes of the poem, have already been discussed by Risa Sodi and others.4 In brief, Levi alludes to Dante both to verify his own experience of Hell ± what Dante imagined, the prisoners actually experienced ± and to underline the important contrasts ± Dante's Hell is an expression of divine Justizia, Auschwitz of human injustice. Like Dante, he presents himself as an observer of Hell, and as we shall see, he also exploits the distance between the naive ingeÂnue in the camp (Dante's pilgrim or protagonist) and the survivor-witness he became (Dante the poet or narrator). Levi also reads Dante in the romantic Italian tradition, in which damned souls such as Farinata, Brunetto Latini and, above all, Ulysses express the unconquerable human spirit that cannot be broken by their confinement in Hell.5 The particular Dantean aspect of Levi's writings I would like to focus on here, however, is their habitual verticalisation of experience, their attempt to map a historical, biographical experience onto a reflective,

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evaluative plane. As we saw in the previous chapter, Bakhtin conceptualised such a process as a powerful tension created by the juxtaposition of two opposing, generically defining chronotopes, the historical and the visionary. Looking beyond Dante, what Levi shows is that the journey through Hell can be multi-layered, discontinuous, revelatory, aporetic, but not finalised. As a survivor, he never achieves the position of outsideness which would transform observation into revelation. But given this premise, what is interesting about Levi's katabatic writing is its demonstration of how, within the journey, the insider's perspective can be shifted, multiplied and inter-illuminated with that of others. In this sense, Levi's katabatic narratives are comparable to the distillation process described in The Periodic Table: `a metamorphosis from liquid to vapour (invisible), and from this once again to liquid; but in this double journey, up and down, purity is attained, an ambiguous and fascinating condition.'6 I wish to argue that the multiplication of perspectives in If This Is a Man produces just such a katabatic distillation of experience, and that the layering of perspectives is one major way in which Auschwitz is transformed into an `ambiguous and fascinating' chronotope. The Search for Roots illustrates this process more readily, both because the text is less familiar (it was first translated into English in 2001) and because anthologies do not raise the same generic expectations as autobiography and Holocaust testimony. The Search is a late, self-reflective work by Levi, culminating many earlier experiments in autobiographical narration. Levi habitually framed these experiments in autobiography as descents into the underworld. The `personal anthology' of The Search comprises a series of extracts taken from Levi's favourite books, arranged roughly in the order he read them; the contours of a `life' thus emerge through the history of a lifetime's reading. Read as quasi-autobiography, the anthology provides new light on Levi's earlier testimonial writing on Auschwitz. Here I wish to use The Search as a filter to re-read If This Is a Man, to demonstrate how the katabatic journey on which the reader of Levi's writing embarks can be understood as a manifold experience, a testing of different routes simultaneously rather than a quest for singular revelation.

Pathways through a life: The Search for Roots The Search is, as it were, an anthology of autobiographies, rather than a narrative tracing a single, linear continuity of selfhood. One can easily trace at least five quasi- autobiographies, the first being the order in which the thirty textual extracts appear in the anthology. This order replicates

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the chronological history of Levi's reading, although Levi admits to tampering with the order `to contrive contrasts' and `stage . . . a dialogue across centuries' (p. 8). Against this temporally linear narrative of a developing taste and world-view, Levi provides us, in contrast, with a spatial map of the work (the `work' itself comprising a network of texts and the possible meanings created in the spaces between their contiguities). This map, reproduced in the Appendix of this study, appears at the end of the Preface in The Search. The map is spheroid in shape, and comprises four descending arrows which are joined at top and bottom of the sphere. Levi suggests that the map traces `four possible routes through the authors in view' (The Search, p. 8). We are invited, then, not to follow a single journey but, as we are reading, to tease out four different journeys, four contrasting sets of preoccupations, moods, intellectual positions. The four arrows are respectively labelled: salvation through laughter, man suffers unjustly, the stature of man and salvation through knowledge. These lifelong preoccupations are not ranked or numbered, but the two `salvation' arrows form the outer axes of the sphere, while the two pertaining to `man' run through its centre. Generically speaking, the texts named on each axis fall roughly into four different groups: comedy, tragedy, epic and science. The map can be read both vertically ± on the tragic axis, for example, we find Eliot, Babel, Celan, Rigoni Stern ± and horizontally; taking a cross-section of the four axes at their lowest (and perhaps darkest) points, we find Aleichem, Stern, Saint ExupeÂry, Arthur C. Clarke. Every extract has a place on both vertical and horizontal planes (note that Rigoni Stern appears twice in the above example). But as we make these interconnections, the important point to remember is that the map is comprised of arrows, not lines, in other words, that the business of forging connections is itself a temporal journey. In The Search, retrospective evaluation of the journey turns out to be part of the chronological process, and chronological development involves constant reflection, evaluation and comparison. Nor does one kind of insight cancel out another; for example, Rabelais' not wanting to accept human misery (p. 77) coexists alongside the knowledge that the Yiddish culture which produced Aleichem's Tevye has been entirely destroyed (p. 148).

Black holes and the biblical Job Where, then, does Levi situate Auschwitz in this multiply stranded autobiography? His year at the concentration camp was obviously not an experience in which much reading figured. But given the central importance of this experience to any reading of Levi's life narrative,

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how is its influence felt on his personal history of reading? Is there a sense of a reading consciousness that alters from `before' to `after'? Or is the task of the narrator, and then the reader, to recuperate or reorientate texts read before? One novel does relate directly to the time Levi spent at Auschwitz. This is Roger Vercel's Tug-Boat which, as Levi explains, is `important to me for my private reasons, symbolic and charged, because I read it on a day (18 January 1945) when I expected to die' (The Search, p. 6). In the linear sequence of extracts, the Vercel extract appears almost at the mid-point (thirteenth of thirty texts). On either side, it is flanked by texts that either appear on, or may be inferred to belong to, `the stature of man' (epic) axis. Thomas Mann's Tales of Jacob precedes it; Melville's Moby Dick, Saint ExupeÂry and Marco Polo follow immediately after. These titles demonstrate how easily questions of sequence become enmeshed in evaluation; from the order of texts, the reader has moved to their reordering on the map of the Preface. But another, more surprising point deserves emphasis. If Vercel is taken as the sign of the year at Auschwitz, this caesural text does not attract to itself the darkest, most pessimistic extracts in the anthology. On the contrary, it is grouped with texts illustrating how `a man can remake himself'.7 Even on the axis of `the stature of man', Vercel does not appear as the lowest point on the map. So, while this extract is undoubtedly charged with negativity for Levi, there is also a certain buoyancy surrounding its placement in a narrative trajectory. This is the first indicator of the complexity of Levi's chronotopic representation of Auschwitz. A further layer of complexity is revealed by the positioning of signs for `Auschwitz' on the Preface's `map of reading' (see Appendix). As Calvino suggests, the Book of Job (positioned at the top of the sphere) reminds us that `the journey of Primo Levi passed through Auschwitz' (The Search, p. 222) because Job is the archetypal `just man oppressed by injustice' (The Search, p. 11). And as Calvino also notes, `Black Holes' (at the bottom of the sphere) constitute a point `no less charged with negativity' (The Search, p. 222). Introducing an article by the astrophysicist Kip Thorne in the final extract, Levi draws attention to the metaphorical significance of these dense, Charybdic pools of gravity in our universe: `In the sky there are no Elysian Fields, only matter and light, distorted, compressed, dilated, and rarefied to a degree that eludes our senses and our language' (The Search, p. 214). Like the Book of Job, Black Holes become tropes for an alien, hostile or indifferent universe. So on the map, Auschwitz figures (spatially) at top and bottom, and (temporally) at beginning and end, of all four axes of descent. So should one conclude that every autobiographical journey Levi makes begins and

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ends with Auschwitz? Such an interpretation would crucially miss out on the counterbalancing energies of the anthology, the conceptual shifts from light to dark, and dark to light, that we are invited to make along vertical as well as lateral axes of development. Better, I think, to view these two poles as initiating and attracting all movement and development of the autobiographical subject on its descent journey.8 In any case, as with the Vercel extract, we find that the `negative poles' at top and base of the diagram, exert a powerful, positive charge. Turning to the headnotes of `Job' and `Black Holes', the reader discovers Levi affirming human powers of resistance and endurance. The introduction to `Black Holes' provides an excellent example of Levi's habit of mentally inverting `darkness towards light': certainly we are immeasurably small, weak and alone, but if the human mind has conceived Black Holes, and dares to speculate on what happened in the first moments of creation, why should it not know how to conquer fear, poverty and grief? (The Search, pp. 214±15)

In a katabatic inversion of the kind found in Kofman's writing (see Chapter 2), Levi turns our ability to conceptualise such infinite phenomena as black holes into a hypothesis that we also have the capacity for infinite good. Here it is the scientist's ambivalent imagination that reaches beyond fear, to find pleasure in gained knowledge.9 This inverted perspective on black holes brings Levi's anthology to a close. The final words are given to Thorne: `the future does not seem unpromising' (The Search, p. 220). Auschwitz, then, figures at top and bottom, at the beginning and the end of the descent journey, while also occupying a place somewhere in the middle. These points constitute so many negative centres but they are also charged with positive energy. The way these positionings play off against each other is a formal indication that Auschwitz cannot be said to occupy one fixed meaning or value in Levi's autobiographical narratives. Within The Search's multiply stranded autobiography, Auschwitz is the interior chronotope which destabilises the whole, which sends Levi repeatedly on his katabatic journey.

A constellation of chronotopes: If This Is a Man A similarly productive intersection of perspectives and temporalities seems to me to inform Levi's most famous work, his Holocaust testimonial narrative If This Is a Man. Following the model of multiple autobiographical narratives developed in The Search, I will argue that If This Is a Man offers us five distinct but overlapping representations of the

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protagonist Levi on a descent journey. As in The Search, each of these images of the prisoner-as-traveller is in part defined and shaped by the pressure of different chronotopes with their contrasting horizons of expectation. Viewed in this way, `Auschwitz' is irreducible to a singular place, experience or event in If This Is a Man; it becomes a constellation of chronotopes, within which the haÈftling develops along a number of different narrative trajectories. The major chronotopes in the narrative of this infernal journey might be identified as: threshold, education, vision, trial and shipwreck.

Threshold crossing into Hell The chronotope of the threshold governs the first four chapters of If This Is a Man, which describe Levi's deportation from the outskirts of Turin to Auschwitz. This chronotopic representation of Auschwitz offers us a series of absolute contrasts, between `up here' and `down there', between the rational and insane, human and infernal, historical and mythic. The descent protagonist, Levi's former self, is constrained within the particular spatio-temporality of the threshold chronotope.10 Here there is no possibility for interior development, and little sense of time as dureÂe. The condition of threshold existence is handled much more starkly than in Dante's Inferno, even though the narrative momentum of the medieval text is entirely dependent on threshold crossings. In Inferno, the damned souls may be trapped on the nether side of the threshold, but the pilgrim himself develops through his repeated threshold encounters.11 But in Levi's text, there is no orchestration of crossings-over, no gradual crescendo towards a final, definitive break, because the first crossing is already final. Levi is already `Sul Fundo', at the bottom of Hell, by the beginning of the second chapter. All thresholds crossed thereafter are experienced not as a deepening of the experience, but as an absurd repetition of this singular, absolutely definitive crossing into Hell. No inner development, and little individuation, of the protagonist is possible in the Lager, or concentration camp, when it is thus represented as an infernal threshold. Historical time appears to have ceased, and the prisoners cross over into a mythic time, in which everything seems always to have existed in this infernal state. In an unmistakable echo of Dante's Inferno, Levi registers the shift to mythic time at the moment of reading the sign over Auschwitz's gate: `we saw a large door, and above it a sign, brightly illuminated (its memory still strikes me in my dreams): Arbeit Macht Frei, work gives freedom. We climb down' (p. 28). Like Dante, Levi omits any description of an actual crossing (Dante's pilgrim faints

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before the gate and wakes up in Hell). Instead a new paragraph and shift of verbal tense indicate the profound alteration in his metaphysical condition. For a modern-day reader, the debilitating impression of deÂjaÁ-lu is particularly intense at this point. If we know anything of Auschwitz (or Dante), we are already familiar with the words over the gate. We thus participate in the uncanny as defined by Freud, an encounter with the unknown with which, fearfully, we already seem to be familiar.12 This is the dominant mood of the threshold chronotope, a nightmarish sense that tells us Auschwitz has always existed and always will. The Lager as myth occupies an eternal present and has infinite capacity to haunt us. This is the uncanny representation of Auschwitz with which Levi concludes The Truce: `I am in the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager' (p. 379). The chronotopic image that epitomises the timescape of the threshold in Levi's writing is the goods train used to transport prisoners to the camps.13 When representing his own deportation, Levi strikingly describes the train as already familiar: Here, then, before our very eyes, under our very feet, was one of those notorious transport trains, those which never return, and of which, shuddering and always a little incredulous, we had so often heard speak. Exactly like this, detail for detail: goods wagons closed from the outside . . . for a journey towards nothingness, a journey down there, towards the bottom. (p. 22)

The train journey conducts the prisoners from historical reality into the realms of myth. In an essay in The Drowned and the Saved, Levi writes that `almost always, at the beginning of the memory sequence, stands the train, which marked the departure towards the unknown not only for chronological reasons but also for the gratuitous cruelty' (p. 85).14 For Levi, Auschwitz as threshold has gates open, as it were, on both sides of the temporally localised event; `we are all in the ghetto . . . close by the train is waiting' (The Drowned and the Saved, p. 51). As a chronotopic image, the freight train represents the instability of the ground on which the Holocaust survivor's sense of identity is based. Remembering that the gates of this threshold chronotope are still open to us, that the moment of absolute loss is repeatable in our own futures, we are right to find this conceptualisation of Auschwitz profoundly unsettling. But, as in The Search, this represents only one of a number of possible pathways through Levi's infernal journey.

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Auschwitz as education Besides experiencing Auschwitz as threshold, the reader of If This Is a Man may also trace the pathway of a developing identity within the generic horizons of what might be described as an infernal Bildungsroman. Here the reader hears a new note in Levi's intertextual dialogue with Dante's Inferno, a work which Freccero has described as the `first novel of the self' (The Poetics of Conversion, p. 58). By positioning his former self at the start of an infernal journey involving duration and internal change, Levi sets that self on the pathway of Dante's pilgrim. But at the same time, he refuses to resurrect the Inferno's play of subjectivities, the living pilgrim (subject-in-process) against the souls of the dead (fixed and finalised subjects). The story of his own `education' is read alongside the experience of a collective crossing over. The central theme of If This Is a Man is not Levi's singular survival, despite the title of the American edition, Survival in Auschwitz. Nevertheless, one of its chronotopic trajectories might be identified as the metamorphosis of Levi the haÈftling. In the Afterword, Levi compares his experience to `a friend of mine, who . . . says that the camp was her university. I think I can say the same thing' (If This Is a Man, p. 398). Unlike the threshold crossing into Hell, this educative journey becomes visible only retrospectively; it is activated by the gaze of the narrator on his former self. The inter-illumination of the threshold chronotope by the education chronotope within the text is evident, for example, in the exchange between Levi and the Austrian sergeant Steinlaus (If This Is a Man, p. 47). The interview with Steinlaus prompts the beginning of a different way of conceptualising `damnation', one which involves awareness of a journey through darkness, not just a point of arrival sul fundo. The fact that Levi is left asking questions after the interview reveals this change of consciousness; his questions are directed towards possible future behaviour (`would it not be better . . . ?', p. 47). When Auschwitz is conceptualised as an educative space, a sharply accelerated biographical trajectory comes into focus: the development of the haÈftling from naive newcomer, a `high number' (signifying the newest arrivals into the camp), into a vecchio or old-timer. In Chapters 1 through 4, the perspective of the `high number' predominates; a gradual shift in attitude is discernible: `by now we are tired of being amazed. We seem to be watching some mad play, one of those in which the witches, the Holy Spirit and the devil appear' (p. 31). From Chapters 4 to 9, this naive spectator recedes from view and in his place, emerges the vecchio, an alien, bleak and toughly comic figure. The vecchio is no Dantean pilgrim travelling across the

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canvas of the underworld. He is now part of its fabric; he belongs to Hell. The character zone of Levi as vecchio is not constituted as an individual consciousness or discourse; his idiolect is represented as one strain of a monstrously hybrid language which is epitomised in the multilingual naming of the Carbide Tower, `Babelturm, Bobelturm' (pp. 78±9). From Chapter 11 to the final chapter of If This Is a Man, Levi's extra-diegetic journey from vecchio to narrator begins to surface. Thus two trajectories play off against each other. On the one hand, the reader witnesses Levi as vecchio becoming mentally tougher and more resourceful. On the other hand, the narrator-to-be is increasingly ashamed of his Lager identity; the latent theme of self-blame becomes most audible in the penultimate chapter, `The Last One'. It should be emphasised that the educative chronotope under consideration here is developed alongside the representation of Auschwitz as threshold rather than subsequently. In the book's opening paragraph, the reader is immediately made aware of the distance between Levi as protagonist and as narrator of this autobiographical narrative: I was twenty-four, with little wisdom, no experience and a decided tendency ± encouraged by the life of segregation forced on me for the previous four years by the racial laws ± to live in an unrealistic world of my own, a world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phantoms, by sincere male and bloodless female friendships. (p. 19)

The gap between the protagonist and narrator revealed in this opening paragraph raises generic expectations of a linear autobiographical narrative, with a trajectory soon to be developed which will link together these two vastly different consciousnesses. At the same time, however, the chronotope of emergence and education is already destabilised by the nature of this type of autobiography (testimony), where the discontinuities of identity are expected to be vast and possibly unbridgeable. There are also elements of the threshold chronotope visible here, where former and present selves inhabit worlds on either side of the looking glass. And disconcertingly, it is the pre-camp Levi, whose experience lies closest to the reader's, who inhabits the dream world, the world of `Cartesian phantoms'. The Levi who knows the world for what it is is the vecchio, the old-timer at Auschwitz. Furthermore, Levi's narrative begins by representing his `educatable' self in a triangulation of perspectives (rather than the two ± the beforeand-after ± selves of conventional autobiography).15 The three firstperson perspectives combine in the paragraph quoted above: the twenty-four-year-old idealist, the twenty-five-year-old Lager vecchio, and the twenty-seven-year-old narrator. A remarkably short temporal

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span divides these three characters; nevertheless each holds a radically different world-view. The shift in perspective is not unidirectional, from the twenty-four year old to the present-day narrator, as one might expect. Much that the vecchio learns to value is regarded by the narrator as a darkening, a betrayal of former identity. In fact, all three perspectives are subject to ironic deflation or critique by each other. In the following sentence, for example, the irony works in two directions: `At that time I had not yet been taught the doctrine that I was later to learn so hurriedly in the Lager: that man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, while he who errs but once pays dearly' (p. 19). The vecchio mocks the new inmate, inferring that his punishment is `justified' (p. 19); but the survivor-witness invites us to condemn the vecchio's wisdom, insisting on a different system of values. The `university' of Auschwitz thus instigates an unceasing dialogue between world-views that are in many respects irreconcilable and incompatible.

The visionary world Counter-pointing the one above, a third chronotopic representation surfaces in the second section of If This Is a Man (Chapter 4 to Chapter 9); this chronotope represents the Lager as a fully realised other world, existing in parallel (like Dante's three realms) to our actual, material one. In this respect, Levi's narrative demonstrates the chronotopic features of the genre of vision literature, though it must be added that for Levi, `vision literature' encompasses Lucretius and Darwin as much as it does Dante.16 Here, the reader is approaching Auschwitz, as it were, along the fourth of The Search's `pathways', the axis of `salvation through understanding'. It has often been noted that this section of If This Is a Man is organised into the structure of a chemist's report, and that the narrator's tone in Chapter 9 is that of a scientist presenting his data; for example, `we would also like to consider that the Lager was pre-eminently a gigantic biological and social experiment' (p. 93).17 In The Mirror Maker, Levi describes Dante as a poet-scientist. It is within this visionary chronotope that the reader finds Levi reproducing something resembling Dante's `scientific' or systematising imagination (The Mirror Maker, p. 172). Like Dante in the eleventh canto of Inferno, Levi in his ninth chapter delivers an overview of the infernal world he has travelled through. Again such a systematic representation would only be available to Levi retrospectively. Like Dante, he not only describes but also delivers a moral assessment of the landscape through which his former self has travelled. Of the two `categories' of men he identifies in this chapter, `The Drowned and the Saved', the first derive their

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appellation from Dante's sommersi (these are the Inferno's damned soothsayers; compare If This Is a Man, p. 93, and Inferno, 20.3). Just as Dante classifies the damned, Levi also identifies three classes of the `saved' (a highly ironic use of the term, in this context). Levi's categories of the `saved' include: the `organisator', `kombinator' and `prominent'. These three classes are not organised in any Dantean hierarchy, but a system of gradation enters the analysis of prisoner types in The Drowned and the Saved (the book which derives its title from this ninth chapter). In the Inferno, the shift from the pilgrim's experience of an infernal journey to the poet's assumption of divine knowledge about Hell is made possible by one non-negotiable premise: the damned are fixed in Hell forever, while Dante the pilgrim moves through it as a living, unfinalised being. In Levi's case, this necessary ontological breach between the former self ± who will survive ± and the `drowned' is a point from which the narrative repeatedly slides away. But it is within his representation of Auschwitz as infernal realm, within the vision chronotope, that Levi comes closest to assuming this problematic asymmetrical relationship with the `drowned'. In this chapter, it is only the drowned who are sul fundo, who have `followed the slope to the bottom' (p. 96). He and the `saved' have a fundamentally different experience of Hell, one that in each case can be narrated. Ontologically worse off than Dante's damned souls, the drowned, in this chapter, have `the same story, or more exactly, have no story' (p. 96). Here is Levi, reluctantly assuming the position of Dante's pilgrim vis-aÁvis the damned: They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me; an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face not a trace of a thought is to be seen. (p. 96)

Perhaps the most horrific aspect of this description is the alterity of the `emaciated man', the fact there is no possibility of reaching his interior being. In fact, `this image', which has indeed come to signify the `all the evil of our time', may be a singular or plural entity; it simply cannot be grasped with any specificity. There is an abyss that separates the consciousness of the survivor from this majority. At the same time, however, Levi also internalises this image. Chronotopically, this `visionary' figure comes to occupy a place in Levi's threshold consciousness. The `familiarity' of the image and its (or their) capacity to haunt his memory are indicators of a hybridisation of perspectives between poet-scientist and sufferer.

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Moreover, Levi's notion of `gradating sins' in If This Is a Man should also be carefully distinguished from Dante's. Whereas Dante ranks the damned according to a system of justice which claims to discover their essential natures, Levi instead observes the material conditions leading to loss of individuality and humanity. Levi dismisses as fascistic the pronouncement on human essence (`that man is fundamentally brutal') and deduces a much more limited principle from a particular set of examples (that `in the face of driving necessity . . . instincts are reduced to silence'). To illustrate the three classes of the `saved', Levi narrates the histories of four men: Schepschel, Alfred L, Elias and Henri (p. 98). Although one could argue that these characters are retrospectively finalised by Levi's tripartite classification, the use of present tense narration reduces the distance between observer and protagonist (`Schepschel has been living in the Lager for four years' (p. 98)). There is veiled judgment of these `types' but Levi nevertheless offers due space to their opposing world-views. This is particularly so in the case of Henri, whom Levi clearly dislikes, but restrains himself from judging: `one seems to glimpse, behind his uncommon personality, a human soul, sorrowful and aware of itself' (p. 106). Of all four `examples', Henri's is the one allowed to stand most open-ended though also set at greatest distance from the rest of Levi's own narration (`I would give much to know his life as a free man, but I do not want to see him again' (p. 106)). The `Henri' of Levi's text is Paul Steinberg who, fifty years later, found his own words to describe the `pathway' he chose to `salvation' in his memoir, Speak You Also: A Survivor's Reckoning.

On trial in Hell The aporia disclosed along the pathway of the vision chronotope is that representing the `drowned' of Auschwitz requires an abhorrent but necessary outsideness, a position vis-aÁ-vis the dead that too easily borders on superiority. This aporia triggers another lateral shift in Levi's text, a fresh attempt to make Auschwitz intelligible through a new spatio-temporal configuration: the timespace of the trial. As with the educative chronotope (and that of the voyage, considered below), the trial brings individual selfhood, both former and present, to the fore of Levi's narrative. The trial chronotope predominates in `The Chemical Examination' (Chapter 10), `October 1944' (Chapter 13) and `The Last One' (Chapter 16). Its contiguity with the chronotope of the vision (chemical examination of the haÈftling immediately superseding the narrator's scientific `report') is an indication that what is lacking along the vision `pathway' is a sense of immediate and individual addressivity.

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In dialogue, Bakhtin observes, every utterance demonstrates a distinctive `addressivity' [obrashchennost'] or `quality of turning to someone' (Speech Genres, p. 99). In the visionary chronotope that governs Inferno 11 and the ninth chapter of If This Is a Man, the speakers (respectively, Virgil and the narrator Levi) address themselves to the subject of Hell; both are physically and attitudinally at some distance (though not removed from) the experience of being in Hell itself. This attitudinal distance is the problem that is taken up in the configuration of Auschwitz as a trial. In contrast to the vision chronotope, the trial is dialogic in structure. Within this timespace, the protagonist is oriented outwards, to another character in the work, to the text's narratee or to the actual reader. Levi's configuration of Auschwitz as a trial scene is, however, further complicated both by the absence of due legal process and by the interplay of different temporalities represented in the text. Historically, death camps such as Auschwitz existed to execute sentence without trial. Hence the trial scene in which the prisoner finds himself is morally unfounded and legally absurd.18 In addition, there is an irresolvable temporal asymmetry in the dialogue between the defendant and his opponents. The narrator defends his former self against his former accusers, who will never hear his defence. At the end of `The Chemical Examination', Levi writes `he would be amazed, the poor brute Alex, if someone told him that today, on the basis of this action, I judge him and Pannwitz and the innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere' (p. 114). This apostrophe is delivered to the reader, but it is also squarely aimed at Levi's accusers within Auschwitz (here, Pannwitz and the Kapo Alex). Indeed, the `you' whom the self most urgently desires to confront is, in a sense, the one who is guaranteed to be absent. Equally asymmetric is the former self's appeal, through the narrator, to readers who were never there, who did nothing to intervene at the time, however empathetic they might be latterly. In later works, particularly The Drowned and the Saved, Levi as survivor and narrator invites his readers to pass judgment on Auschwitz as `a trial of planetary and epochal dimensions' (p. 121).19 But the temporally symmetrical address of The Drowned and the Saved is developed from the visionary chronotope that governs Chapter 9 of If This Is a Man (also entitled `The Drowned and the Saved'); the later work also offers more direct judgment, being written at a greater temporal distance from the experience. In If This Is a Man, Levi says that he `refrained from formulating judgments' of an explicit kind, though he also emphasises that the implicit judgments are there.20 One reason for the difficulty of passing judgment in If This Is a Man is that the offenders

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whom Levi would accuse are conspicuously not the ones being put on trial.21 These complexities are worth stressing at the outset, because the trial chronotope (like that of vision literature) is a spatio-temporal configuration which invites the protagonist to seek reparation or closure. But the trial scenes of Auschwitz cannot be reconfigured to produce such closure. The first chapter of If This Is a Man repeatedly stresses the arbitrariness of sentencing on the instant of their arrival (`they did not interrogate everybody, only a few' (p. 25)). Nothing could contrast more forcefully with the soul's arrival at the gates of the otherworld in classical and medieval religious katabases, where the sentence the soul receives is meant to be total and impartial. The asymmetry of the dialogue in the demonic trial scenes of Auschwitz partly explains the obsessive orientation towards the past on this particular pathway through Hell. As suggested above, the different temporalities brought into play within the trial chronotope make it difficult to construct a self in dialogue with another, due to the difficulty of bringing accuser and accused into one timespace. But there are positive aspects to this retrospective orientation, for example in the way it provides a counterbalance to the aporia of threshold perception. As Levi writes in The Mirror Maker, `living without one's actions being judged means renouncing a retrospective insight that is precious, thus exposing oneself and one's neighbours to serious risks' (p. 119). On arrival in the Lager, the prisoners relinquish not only any hope of future time, but also all connection with the past. The trial chronotope is the timespace in which that connection with the past is reforged. This happens on two narrative levels: extradiegetically, the narrator Levi explores the nature of the trial of his former self, and diegetically, the haÈftling Levi rediscovers a preLager identity, newly accented by his condition in the Lager. This process bears only superficial resemblance to the essentially conservative affirmation of a pre-existent self, which Bakhtin identifies as characteristic of the trial chronotope in romance narrative.22 In Levi's narrative, the `affirmation' of a past self is reaccented by the present, and fully dialogic. Although the `I' may resist an alien `you', the two subject-positions act as catalysts for internal change, each in the other. The central episode in If This Is a Man which demonstrates this process is the examination Levi undergoes before the SS chemist, Dr Pannwitz. Midway through the process of being `tried' on his knowledge of chemistry, the haÈftling reconnects with a pre-Lager identity. Under questioning, he recognises this sense of lucid elation, this excitement which I feel warm in my veins, I recognize it, it is the fever of examinations, my fever of my examinations, that

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spontaneous mobilization of all my logical faculties and all my knowledge, which my friends at university so envied me. (p. 112)

At first glance, this looks like a straightforward affirmation of preexistent selfhood. But as the scene unfolds, one quickly senses a more complex process working itself out. Levi at first rejects any possibility of kinship with his examiner, who looks at him, as if `across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds', the dehumanising gaze somehow expressive of all `the great insanity of the third Germany' (pp. 111±12). But the `fever' to which Levi succumbs is produced, as becomes clear, by a recognition of the shared body of knowledge between two men. The prisoner Levi sees on Pannwitz's desk a copy of Gatterman's A Practical Manual for Organic Chemists, a textbook that, in The Search for Roots, Levi describes as `the words of the father . . . which awake you from your childhood and declare you an adult' (p. 74). This sign of a common patronage opens a communicative link even across the aquarium window. A connection is indicated, for example, in the hybridisation of two languages that takes place in the consciousness of the prisoner during the course of the interview. He imagines how the doctor must be unable to see him as human and a scientist, and then becomes lost in his own trapped thinking. Levi the narrator represents the thoughts of his former self during the interview thus: `in my head, like seeds in an empty pumpkin: ``Blue eyes and fair hair are essentially wicked . . . I am a specialist in mine chemistry'' ' (p. 112). The contrast of world-views may appear absolute and unbridgeable. But notice that Levi's syntax has taken on a German inflection; `mine chemistry' is not only the syntax of Pannwitz, but also of Levi's own paternal text, Gatterman's Organic Chemistry. Levi writes that as he entered the doctor's office, he felt `like Oedipus in front of the Sphinx' (p. 111). The analogy is physically apt, since the Greek name means, literally, `swollen footed' and Levi has already contrasted his hobbling, clogged gait with the leather-shod Alex, `as light on his feet as the devils of Malebolge' (p. 113). But also, the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx is `man', and what horrifies Levi about Pannwitz is the apparent inability of the doctor to see him as a man (`that look was not one between two men' (p. 111)). Particularly arresting is that Levi felt he `would leave a dirty stain [una macchia sporca] whatever I touched' under such a gaze and in such a `shining, clean and ordered' place (p. 111). This sense of being infected and contagious is intimately connected, I would argue, to the internal `fever' Levi begins to experience as the examination in chemistry gets underway. The comparison Levi makes between Oedipus and his former self

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deserves closer attention, especially with regard to the `dirty stain' which attaches to the haÈftling on trial. Steinberg alludes to a similar sense of having been polluted or corrupted by his experience in the Lager, as do others. But much more specifically, this sense of being stained or polluted attaches itself to particular incidents which are framed, retrospectively in their narration, as trial scenes. Steinberg enters upon such a chronotope in his narration of an episode in which he slapped the face of a fellow prisoner, an old Polish Jew: `that incident, a banal event in the daily life of a death camp, has haunted me all my life . . . the contagion had done its job, and I had not escaped corruption' (Speak You Also, pp. 126±7). This sense of lingering contagion seems to be one of the forces driving Steinberg, after a silence of fifty years, finally to put his experience into autobiographical narrative: `I'm purging myself as I write, and I have a vague feeling not of liberation, but of fulfilled obligation' (p. 63). In his Preface, Levi expresses what he hopes will be the result of reading If This Is a Man: `it should be able to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind' (p. 15). But the effects of reading the book contrast markedly with Levi's explanation for writing the book; the `need to . . . make ``the rest'' participate in it, had taken on . . . the character of an immediate and violent impulse' (p. 15). Both texts raise the question, then, in what sense is the prisoner `stained' by entering such a demonic trial? And does narration of the experience, descent through the Hell of remembering, offer any real possibility of purgation, as Steinberg seems to suggest in the passage quoted above? The comparison Levi draws with Oedipus invites us to consider these questions within particular generic horizons before considering them generally. In Sophoclean and Aeschylean tragedy, one who has spilt the blood of his kindred is said to be miaros, that is blood-guilty and infectious.23 In Greek philosophy, one had to have intentionally committed the crime to acquire this miasma, whereas in Greek tragedy, the stain attaches itself to the accused, regardless of whether or not he or she has committed the crime intentionally.24 Thus famously, in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Oedipus asks Tiresias to help him find the miaros whose presence has brought the plague on Thebes.25 For the protagonists (and perhaps the audience), it makes no difference whether or not Oedipus intended to commit parricide and incest. He may have been victim of the gods or fate (or in modern parlance of unconscious drives), but he is still personally miaros and therefore responsible for the corruption he brings to the city. As opposed to the tragedians themselves, Aristotle seem to have thought that the miaron was an unfitting subject for tragedy, because such repugnant acts were incapable of being purged through pity and fear.26 The classical context thus helps to formulate two

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questions for Holocaust testimony: how can moral pollution attach itself to the consciousness of an innocent individual, one who has neither intended nor perpetrated any crime? And secondly, is such miasma purged through the act of shared communication, or (as Aristotle implies) does communicating it further spread the plague? Addressing the first of these questions, we might now reconsider the haÈftling's `fever' experienced during the examination by Dr Pannwitz. As already pointed out, Levi's `recovery' of former selfhood is, at least in part, triggered by the presence of an Other who is capable of recognising and understanding that self. But in my view, this moment of recognition not only unites two minds in the narrative present of the interview. It also travels, like an electric shock, back to Levi's pre-Lager selfhood, so that a Dr Pannwitz insinuates itself into Levi's memories of being a student, of being examined and held to account; a genuine hybridisation of perspectives takes place in at least one of the participants.27 The chapter entitled `Zinc' in The Periodic Table provides a chemical analogy to this process; there Levi celebrates the properties of the metal in its impure state. Impure, as opposed to pure, zinc acts as a catalyst for other chemical substances, inducing in them a radical metamorphosis. From the properties of pure and impure zinc, Levi suggests, one might derive two opposing principles: `the praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other words to life' (p. 34). Levi's praise of impure zinc comes, in this later quasi-autobiography, at a point corresponding to his segregation from fellow students at university due to the introduction of Mussolini's racial laws. In those days, Levi came to feel that as a Jew, he was the catalyst for life-enhancing change in others: `I am the impurity that makes the zinc react' (p. 35). So the haÈftling who might `stain' anything he touched is also the `fever' that might produce a living reaction from Pannwitz. But as a corollary, Levi himself is also catalysed, metamorphosed by the encounter. Within the consciousness of the haÈftling, a transitory meeting of minds seems to have taken place. If the encounter is dialogic, however, it is so for only one of the interlocutors of the dialogue. Pannwitz gives no indication that he recognises Levi as a fellow human being, a fact underscored by the Kapo's humiliating treatment of Levi as he leaves the room. And Levi, too, lapses into polarised categories by the end of the interview: `the excitement which sustained me for the whole of the test suddenly gives way and, dull and flat, I stare at the fair skin of his hand writing down my fate' (p. 113). Hopelessness swiftly obliterates the fleeting sense of a shared recognition between fellow scientists. But the moment of recognition turns out to be far more destabilising and

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dangerous to Levi's retrospective sense of identity than it does to the prisoner at the time. Unlike the scientifically dispassionate Levi who narrates within the generic horizon of the vision chronotope, here Levi knows that he has been touched, that is stained, by the Lager's values, through this moment of intimate connection and recognition. In an episode that produces similarly unsettling after-effects, Steinberg remembers slapping the old Polish Jew and realises retrospectively that `the contagion had done its job, and I had not escaped corruption.' One could also argue that within this chronotope a reader may also acquire a greater measure of addressivity as well. This brings us to the second question raised earlier, about the effects of exposing an audience to such `stained' narrative. Certainly, Levi is keenly aware of the pollutive effects of the knowledge he bears. His collection of poems is entitled Ad Ora Uncerta (1984), and the title is taken from Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (`Since then, at an uncertain hour, / That agony returns, / And til my ghastly tale is told / This heart within me burns.').28 Associating himself with Coleridge's mariner, Levi thus acknowledges that the survivor's need to communicate may take precedence over the audience's need to hear. But if there is a sense in which we are `inflicted' with survivor testimony, it is also true that learning to carry this `infection' may connect us in uncommon ways to history and to each other. Executing a characteristic, katabatic inversion, Levi suggests that if we are infernally `stained' by the history of twentieth-century atrocity, we are also connected by the same process to the century's greatest human achievements: Just as every person, even the most innocent, even the victim himself, feels some responsibility for Hiroshima, Dallas, and Vietnam, and is ashamed, so even the one least connected with the colossal labor of cosmic flights feels that a small particle of merit falls to the human species, and so also to himself, and because of this feels that he has greater value. For good or evil, we are a single people. (The Mirror Maker, p. 108)

Sea-voyage and shipwreck Returning to The Search for Roots, one finds textual extracts of trial scenes that crowd the second of Levi's suggested pathways, `man suffers unjustly'. Shifting laterally across to the third pathway, `man retains stature', are mostly tales of adventures at sea. Here the reader is in the region of what I would call the fifth major chronotope of If This Is a Man.29 In this context, `the man who retains stature' for Levi is epitomised in the figure of Ulysses (primarily Homer's and Dante's).30 As

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Cicioni explains, the Italian, Romantic interpretation of Dante's Ulysses is of an `individual whose ``virtue'' lies in his striving to push human ``knowledge'' further, and who maintains his sense of identity even in Hell.'31 Levi's admiration for this traditional figure might be further particularised, however; in my view, Levi's Ulysses embodies the qualities of ingenuity, adaptability, cunning, intellectual curiosity, hunger for the unknown, love of collective endeavour and desire to share and communicate knowledge, to narrate his experience. In If This Is a Man, two chapters present us with the protagonist as Ulyssean wanderer within a chronotope of the Lager conceptualised as a spiritual voyage ending in shipwreck: `The Canto of Ulysses' and its inverted image, `Kraus'.32 Just as the second and third pathways of The Search are contiguous and in the case of some extracts, indistinguishable, so the chronotopes of trial and voyage in If This Is a Man intersect and overlap in numerous ways.33 Most obviously, the key `trial' chapter (`Chemical Examination') is immediately succeeded by the `voyage' chapter (`Canto of Ulysses'). Both chapters present us with a haÈftling who attempts a reconnection with a pre-Lager self, who submits his present self to trial and judgment, and who in that trial scene willingly risks profound metamorphosis. In `The Canto of Ulysses', the intellectual voyage of discovery on which haÈftling Levi embarks ± teaching his French guide, Jean Samuel, something of Italian and of Dante's Commedia ± constitutes a trial of no less significance than the examination in chemistry discussed earlier. Like that previous episode, the walk to the soup queue with Jean Samuel may be, and has been, interpreted by many critics as a critical moment of selfaffirmation. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi himself says that the incident `made it possible for me to re-establish a link with the past, saving it from oblivion and reinforcing my identity' (p. 112). But as I emphasised earlier, this episode does more than reaffirm a pre-existent self. Dante's lines, though presumably memorised in an earlier stage in life, return to him as utterly strange and new. From memory, he recites the speech of Ulysses to his crew, which urges them to set sail again, this time out of the known world: ` ``Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance / Your mettle was not made; you were made men, / To follow after knowledge and excellence'' ' (If This Is a Man, p. 119; Inferno, 26.118±20). But as he recites it, he hears this exhortation `as if I also was hearing it for the first time. For a moment I forget who I am and where I am' (If This Is a Man, p. 119). Critics have debated at length how to interpret the `flash of intuition' the prisoner Levi experiences shortly after this recitation. On one hand, the prisoner's intuition into what is `perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today' (p. 121) seems to constitute a moral victory over a system which denies the prisoner the

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right to question `why' (`hier ist kein warum' (p. 35)). On the other hand, the Dantean intuition is as ephemeral as is the sense of intellectual achievement won in the previous chapter.34 They reach the soup queue before Levi has been able to articulate this intuition for his friend (p. 121). So the narration of this episode holds these two opposing selves in tension: the Levi who dares to set sail and the Levi who `shipwrecks' against reality in the chapter's final paragraph. The Levi who emerges from this `sea-trial' is thus an ambivalent and hybrid figure, both a creature of the Lager and one who aspires to escape it. To this extent, one might argue that trial and voyage chronotopes trace virtually identical pathways in Levi's If This Is a Man. But in the chronotope of sea-voyage, there is no sense of miaron, or what has been referred to as survivor's guilt. This change in emphasis might be described (again with reference to the four pathways of The Search) as a move one degree closer to the fourth, scientific pathway, `salvation through understanding'. As already noted, Levi's Ulysses is above all the intellectual adventurer, who risks all in the pursuit of knowledge. In contrast to Coleridge's mariner and Kafka's Joseph K, this Ulyssean adventurer is heroically undisturbed by the complexity of his motives. In `Hatching the Cobra', while he warns nuclear researchers not to hide behind the hypocrisy of scientific neutrality, Levi concludes in Ulyssean vein, that `basic research . . . can and must continue: if we were to abandon it, we would betray our nature and our nobility as ``thinking reeds,'' and the human species would no longer have any reason to exist' (The Mirror Maker, p. 214). The sense of moral release, for the infernal traveller, is palpable in this shift from trial to voyage chronotope. Comparing the spatio-temporal horizons of the voyage chronotope against those of the threshold, it becomes clear why, simply at a formal level, this shift of chrontope brings with it a sense of moral release. As does the threshold, the voyage chronotope presents the protagonist with a precise and palpable border, a line of absolute demarcation between this and another state of being. Speaking to Jean, Levi glosses Dante's phrase in this way: ` ``I set forth'' . . . it is throwing oneself on the other side of a barrier, we know the impulse well' (p. 119). But this `setting forth' across a `barrier' contrasts with threshold crossing in a number of crucial ways. First, the crossing is willed, not enforced. Secondly, what lies on the other side of the barrier is the opposite of the Freudian uncanny; it is unknown and uncharted, not mythic and familiar territory. If threshold crossing leads the prisoner into mythic time, that is a time empty of all future, then the voluntary Ulyssean `setting forth' precipitates him into an arena of genuinely open-ended time. Third, the traveller who crosses the threshold and sets forth on the voyage experiences, in each case, a sudden sense of

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gravitational release (Levi refers to Dante's Geryon as the monster who `escapes weight' (If This Is a Man, p. 171)); but this crossed-over condition of `weightlessness' bears a different value within each chronotope. The weightless `exit via the chimney' is the absolute yet inescapable horror faced by the prisoner, trapped in Auschwitz as the threshold between human and non-human, between history and myth.35 But for the Ulyssean voyager, weightlessness is the condition of the survivor, one who adapts, improvises, thinks and moves lightly. This is the mood in which both Levi and Jean conduct their journey towards the soup queue, cunningly mapping a circuitous route so as to extend the burdenless outward leg of the journey. In `The Man Who Flies', Levi argues that the ease with which astronauts adjust to the absence of gravity demonstrates the extraordinary adaptability of the human species (The Mirror Maker, p. 172). The orientation of this observation is towards the future, both its impending dangers and its potential for advancing scientific knowledge. But since the voyage of Dante's Ulysses ends in shipwreck, can such a journey be governed by a future-oriented chronotope? Levi's eleventh chapter concludes with a quotation from the final line of Inferno, 26, ` ``And over our heads the hollow seas closed up'' ' (p. 121). In If This Is a Man, the speaker of this line must be the narrator rather than the protagonist Levi, who has by now fallen silent in the soup queue. At this point in both Dante's and Levi's texts, then, there is a split in selfhood; there is an `I' who drowns and another `I' who continues to speak. Glancing briefly across the range of Levi's writing, one finds that the oftinvoked image of shipwreck is applied with notable inconsistency to his own life history. For example, in the Preface to The Mirror Maker, Levi calls himself `a man who survived a shipwreck and has retained an interest in shipwrecks ever since' (p. 4, my trans.). But in the Afterword to If This Is a Man, Levi writes that he has `avoid[ed] that total humiliation and demoralisation which led so many to spiritual shipwreck' (p. 398). Neither of these representations are consistent with the image of the haÈftling Levi, over whose head the seas do apparently close up at the end of the eleventh chapter of If This Is a Man. What is being worked out here, I think, is a response to the sliding, asymmetric addressivity of the trial chronotope. Within the space of the trial, the temporal distance between former and present selves continually collapses, returning both narrator and narratee to the time of judgment. Within the chronotope of the voyage, by contrast, the doubled journey of diegesis and narration splits apart; a loophole opens up before the narrator, while the protagonist (Levi's former self) remains fully addressed by and accountable to the histories of the `drowned'. While Dante's Ulysses shipwrecks and dies as protagonist, he survives as

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narrator to relate his journey in Inferno, 26. And while Levi the haÈftling shipwrecks in his attempt to recite all of Ulysses' speech, Levi the narrator successfully conveys to his interlocutors the vital importance of this hour of conversation. Moreover, in the shift of perspective from trial to voyage chronotope, there is a significant adjustment to the text's dialogic construction of the relation between `I' and `you', between narrator and narratee. Unlike Coleridge's mariner, the Ulyssean narrator assumes his audience desires to hear his story; this is equally true of Homer's and Dante's Ulysses.36 This mutually responsive relation between narrator and narratee is mirrored, in both Dante's and Levi's texts, in the way one protagonist addresses another. In contrast to the interview with Pannwitz, in Chapter 11 both participants engage willingly and eagerly in conversation. Jean encourages Levi to speak of Dante, just as in the Inferno, Virgil with formal courtesy requests the Greek to speak. As noted above, Levi's Ulysses is a natural `talker'; his desire is to narrate his history, to name himself even when his audience is a hostile one. Thus in The Search, Levi selects the passage in which Homer's Odysseus, disguised under the appellation `no name', makes himself known to his enemy, Polyphemus: He could have escaped in silence, but he prefers to take his revenge to the limit: he is proud of his name, which up till now he has kept quiet about, and proud of his courage and ingenuity. He is `the man of no account', but he wants to make known to the tower of flesh just who is the mortal that has defeated him. (The Search, p. 22)

In The Search, the Cyclops perhaps represents fascism's brutal and unintelligent face; Levi confronts such a `tower of flesh' in the Kapo who takes him to see Pannwitz. In that chapter, Levi only releases his Ulyssean pride, the desire to name himself, at the level of narration. Not until the following chapter does the protagonist come to `name' himself through the recollection and recitation of Dante.37

The intersection of pathways As before, the chronotope of the Ulyssean sea-voyage does not cancel out alternative chronotopes. Anxieties about audience reception remain unalloyed, as Levi directs his last thoughts not to readers outside the experience, but to Charles, a fellow survivor. The Truce also concludes on a note of apprehension, as Levi relates the recurrent nightmare of return to a family who refuses to listen to his story. But near the end of

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The Truce, Levi describes his homeward crossing into Italy in terms that recall the multiplicity of pathways we have been exploring: As the train, more tired than us, climbed toward the Italian frontier it snapped in two like an overtaut cable . . . we knew that on the thresholds of our homes, for good or ill, a trial awaited us, and we anticipated it with fear. We felt in our veins the poison of Auschwitz, flowing together with our thin blood . . . We felt the weight of centuries on our shoulders, we felt oppressed by a year of ferocious memories . . . With these thoughts, which kept us from sleep, we passed our first night in Italy, as the train slowly descended the deserted, dark Adige Valley. (The Truce, p. 378)

This paragraph contains the resonances of all five chronotopes I have been discussing here. There is the sense of threshold crossing, of a journey of education with its mid-line `caesura' (the snapped cable), the sense of forever inhabiting an infernal, visionary world (Auschwitz `in our veins'), and alternatively of being placed on trial, of embarking on a voyage that may end in the submersion of identity (the `weight of centuries', oppression of memories, `the poison flowing'). Finally all these chronotopes are gathered into the narrative trajectory of an unfinalised katabatic journey (`the train slowly descended'). Turning back to The Search, we might say that Levi is approaching the base point of his spherical map, that he is about to encounter his Black Hole. But while this may be true, we also know from reading The Search and If This Is a Man, that even on that route there are many different pathways open to the journeying protagonist, narrator and reader. In Levi's company, we will have become canny and subtle travellers, able to make the lateral shifts necessary for survival, resistant to despair, curious about what metamorphoses lie ahead, excited by the prospect of an unfinalisable journey. Katabasis will have become a mental habit, a mode of existence, a timespace for discovering unlooked for connections, for making good the claim that `we are a single people'.

Notes 1. Primo Levi, The Mirror Maker, p. 127. 2. See Levi's If This Is a Man, p. 398; Ferdinando Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi, pp. 60±1; and The Drowned and the Saved, p. 114. 3. Even more particularly in the tradition of Dante is Levi's aim to represent Hell in clear and accessible writing. Levi thought that Paul Celan's obscure writing style was `to be pitied rather than imitated'; generally, one should aim for clarity: `since we the living are not alone, we must not write as if we were alone. As long as we live we have a responsibility: we must answer for what we write, word by word, and make sure that every word reaches its

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4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

Auschwitz as Hell target.' Levi, `On Obscure Writing', in Other People's Trades, pp. 161±2. See also Eugene Goodheart, `The Passion of Reason'. See Risa Sodi, A Dante of Our Time; L. M. Gunzberg, `Down Among the Dead Men: Levi and Dante in Hell'; Zvi Jagendorf, `Primo Levi Goes for Soup and Remembers Dante'; Mirna Cicioni, Primo Levi: Bridges of Knowledge; Nicholas Patruno, Understanding Primo Levi; Anthony Rudolf, At an Uncertain Hour; and Judith Woolf, The Memory of the Offence, especially Chapter 5, `A New Inferno', pp. 51±64. On this point, see Cicioni, and Judith Woolf, The Memory of the Offence, pp. 58±9. Woolf suggests another major parallel, that Levi's persona in If This Is a Man is `in the most serious sense, a comic persona; it signals a rejection of the nihilism and bitterness which ate up Jean AmeÂry' (p. 58). Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, p. 58. This quotation is from Levi's description of Conrad, a very important writer for illustrating `man retaining stature' (The Search, p. 63). Calvino writes, `Between these two poles . . . Levi traces . . . four lines of resistance to all forms of despair, four responses that define his stoicism' (The Search, p. 222). On changing attitudes to technology and science in the twentieth century generally, see Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. On the chronotope of the threshold, whose `most fundamental instance is as the chronotope of crisis and break in a life', see Bakhtin, `Forms of Time and of the chronotope', The Dialogic Imagination, p. 248. On the other hand, Dante knew that, theologically speaking, there are only three classes of souls, the damned, the saved and those who may yet be saved. Technically speaking, there is only one threshold crossing in Inferno, and that is the crossing into Hell. Theologically, the damned soul is sul fundo when he crosses the gate marked `lasciate ogne speranza', and Dante the pilgrim reaches that place very early on in the third canto of the poem. Sigmund Freud, `The Uncanny', The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, p. 220. In terms of its chronotope, the train journey constitutes a demonic inversion of the chronotope of the road, which Bakhtin describes in `Forms of time' (The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 243±5). The names of stations, spied through the slats, are signs that mark, instead of the possible digressions and subplots of a conventional adventure narrative, how the deportees are now absolutely cut off from such narrative possibilities. It might be added that the freight trains must figure as a dominant motif in Holocaust writing, because for those selected immediately to be gassed, this train journey was all there was; the sum total of their experience was this transportation out of historical time. It is partly because of this element of foreclosure or `entelechy' (fulfilling a pre-existent form) that Bakhtin viewed the genre of autobiography as lacking the potential to develop polyphony. See, for example, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 141. See Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives, p. 84, for another critical estimate of autobiography. On the chronotope of the vision, see Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination,

Notes

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

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pp. 155±7. On Levi's high estimation of Lucretius, see Peter Forbes, `Introduction' to Levi's The Search, pp. ix±x. See Kofman on the concentration camp as a `limit-experience' which tests humanity in a crucial way (Smothered Words, p. 60); and for a further development of this theme, see Todorov, Facing the Extreme. Levi was fascinated by Kafka's The Trial, though also resistant to it. See `Translating Kafka', The Mirror Maker, pp. 126±30. Levi thus addresses his German readers in The Drowned and the Saved: `I am alive, and I would like to understand you in order to judge you' (p. 143). Camon, Conversations with Levi, p. 13. See also Dalya Sachs, `The Language of Judgement: Primo Levi's Se questo eÁ un uomo'. I can think of only one case, one issue, on which Levi suspends judgment completely: `I ask that we meditate on the story of the ``crematorium ravens'' with pity and rigour, but that a judgment of them be suspended' (The Drowned and the Saved, p. 43). Bakhtin argues that the trial of the hero in conventional romance narrative involves the hero affirming his identity against alien forces. The identity he affirms is pre-existent to the moment of trial itself; hence his heroism consists of the strength to resist change. The reaffirmed self of romance narrative is thus ahistorical, or more exactly anti-historical. See The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 105±6. Instances of the term in Greek tragedy include: Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonnus, 1374, Antigone, 172; Euripides, Iphigenia in Taurus, 1229, Hippolytus, 316±18. The tragedians' usage of the term miaros was somewhat different to Plato's and Aristotle's; the latter understood it to mean someone who had intentionally committed a crime. For Aeschylus and Sophocles, the miaros seems to have been one who had committed a crime, whether intentionally or (like Oedipus) not. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, in Sophocles I: Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonnus; Antigone, p. 313. Compare (applied to Oedipus himself): Oedipus at Colonnus, 1374. Aristotle wrote, the `repugnant' (to miaron) `arouses neither fellow-feeling nor pity nor fear' (Poetics, 13.35 (1453a)). For Aristotle's well-known theory of katharsis, see Poetics 6.28. Levi learned from correspondence with another SS chemist, Dr Mueller, that Dr Pannwitz might not even have been responsible for Levi getting the job in the Auschwitz laboratory (which helped keep him alive in the winter of 1944). See The Periodic Table, p. 219f. The quotation is also used as an epigraph for two other works by Levi: Lilit and Other Stories and Moments of Reprieve. For Bakhtin, this chronotope would probably form a sub-class of the adventure chronotope. But it is clear that the voyage at sea had a particular meaning and resonance for Levi, which is epitomised in Dante's account of the last voyage of Ulysses. Losey, Jagendorf, H.S. Hughes and Sachs interpret Levi's Ulysses in line with the standard Italian Romantic reading of Dante, in which Ulysses is seen a noble character, unjustly condemned to Hell. By contrast, Risa Sodi takes a medievalist approach to Levi's Ulysses, arguing that `Farinata, Bruno Latini,

88

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

Auschwitz as Hell and Ulysses . . . have less to do with Levi's victims and more to do with his oppressors. They, too, suffer and it is just that they suffer' (A Dante of Our Time, p. 62). I find Sodi unpersuasive on this point, though, especially given Levi's positive remarks about Ulysses made elsewhere (for example, The Search, p. 22). Although Cicioni argues, I think correctly, that in If This Is a Man, this traditional interpretation is juxtaposed and held in tension with an image of `human existence in Auschwitz' (Bridges of Knowledge, p. 34). But as Tony Judt points out, the presence of Ulysses, `Levi's favorite literary figure and alter ego', is not confined to Chapter 11 of If This Is a Man. Judt notes that Polyphemus appears as the BlockaÈlteste in charge of the showers, and that numerous allusions to Ulysses's adventures appear in The Truce and The Periodic Table (`The Courage of the Elementary', p. 32). An example of sea-voyage as trial in The Search is Melville's Moby Dick, about which Levi writes, `the hunting of the whale is felt as a sentence and a justification of man' (The Search, p. 118). For example, Jagendorf rightly questions whether the prisoner Levi experiences any revelation of an epiphanic nature, and even if he does, how significant this revelation is if it cannot be passed on. Jagendorf's reading emphasises the lacuna [. . .] cloaking the nature of the prisoner's intuition (`Primo Levi Goes for Soup', p. 43). Compare Millu's Smoke Over Birkenau, p. 22. On Homer's Ulysses being moved to tears by hearing his own story narrated by another, see Cavarero, Relating Narratives, p. 17. Levi writes elsewhere, `we . . . speak also because we are invited to do so [like] Ulysses, who immediately yields to the urgent need to tell his story . . . at the court of the king of the Phaeacians' (Drowned and the Saved, p. 121).

Chapter 4

Surviving with Ghosts: Secondgeneration Holocaust narratives

Bog-boys and fire-children In Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Sethe is haunted by the flesh and blood ghost of her murdered infant; this ghost is represented as a grown woman who mysteriously surfaces out of the water at the beginning of the novel (p. 50). Like Dante at the bottom of Hell, Beloved exists somewhere between life and death (`I am not dead I am not' (p. 213)).1 Her existence is temporally arrested (`it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching' (p. 210)). And she is ready to surface from the depths at any point, to remind Sethe (and the reader) of her unjust death and the horrific beginnings of African American history. A number of novels about the Second World War also begin with children rising from graves of mud and fire to haunt the living with their first-hand knowledge of atrocity. William Golding's Darkness Visible (1979) begins in the middle of the London Blitz. His protagonist, a boy later given the name Matty, emerges from a street engulfed in flames: `where now, humanly speaking, the street was no longer part of the habitable world ± at that point where the world had become an open stove . . . right there . . . something moved' (Darkness Visible, p. 12). So impossible is it that a human child could have survived such conditions that Matty seems to be partly supernatural, a spectre sent directly from Hell. Looking into the flames, a fireman thinks he is looking at `a version of the infernal city' (p. 11). Because of his badly scarred face and body, Matty causes revulsion in people wherever he goes and eventually adopts a self-punishing Evangelism which leads inadvertently to at least one person's death in the novel.2 If Matty emerges from the inferno into a world beyond hope, Anne Michaels' first-person narrator, Jakob Beer, is exhumed to find himself in more fortunate circumstances. At the beginning of Fugitive Pieces (1996), Jakob pictures himself as a very small child, burrowing his way out of

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rubble after his native Polish city, Biskupin, has been reduced to sand. Comparing himself to `Tollund Man, Grauballe Man', he describes how, `bog-boy, I surfaced in the miry streets of the drowned city' (Fugitive Pieces, p. 5). In this novel, `no one is born just once,' but returning from the grave is not necessarily a good thing: `if you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull' (p. 5). The child Jakob turns out to be one of the lucky ones. Discovered, `stiff as a golem' (p. 12), by a Greek geologist named Athos, he is smuggled out of Poland and raised in safety on the island of Zakynthos. But Jakob himself is haunted by another child, the ghost of his fifteen-year-old sister Bella, who was killed by Nazis while Jakob hid in a cupboard. In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 (1969), Billy Pilgrim is another `Tollund Man', an American soldier who happens to be on the ground in Dresden when the Allied forces bombed the city to rubble (Slaughterhouse 5 (1969)). Billy miraculously survives the bombing but is stunned out of his wits by the enormity and senselessness of the destruction. This experience turns the man into a post-infernal child, as Billy abandons reason or logic for the uncomprehending perspective of an imaginary race of aliens, who dismiss all human tragedy with an indifferent shrug, `so it goes'.3 And finally, W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001) describes the story of a Holocaust survivor who, on reaching his retirement years, is suddenly made ill with the urgent desire to know the child he once was and the family to whom he belonged before his evacuation from Czechoslovakia to Wales. Near the end of his long odyssey across Europe, he is given a photograph of himself as a young boy. He only partially recognises the boy as his former self: spectrally present, but a different being, inhabiting a different world. The boy looks out at Austerlitz with challenging and accusing eyes, suggesting that it is partly his, the ghostly boy's, will that has driven Austerlitz to exhaustion and illness in an attempt to piece together his lost past. In Freudian terms, these ghostly children are signs of the return of a repressed trauma, distant or displaced from the immediate context of the narrative. As children who survived or just evaded the Holocaust, Austerlitz and Jakob Beer had little understanding of the events they witnessed at the time. The narratives in which they appear are fictions, not testimony, so in this sense too, their experiences are a degree removed from the actual, historical atrocity.4 Yet these child-like apparitions indicate that displaced trauma returns to interrupt the present, flooding it with images from another temporality: arrested, mythic and seemingly eternal. Such children do not grow up; they appear and disappear, always

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as they were at the time they were lost. Since their perspective on horror is innocent and uncomprehending, their questioning gaze can instantly undermine any retrospective illumination or evaluation of historical events which a distanced, adult observer may have acquired since the events themselves took place. The appearance of such ghosts propels the narrator and/or central protagonist of the narrative deep into a Dantean dark wood, a state of estrangement and confusion, from which only a descent journey into the ghost's home territory can release them. Reading descent narratives like Austerlitz and Fugitive Pieces in these terms invites comparison with psychoanalytic accounts of, and methods of treating, traumatic memory.5 Indeed, the psychoanalytic method of probing the hidden past to uncover forbidden or unbearable truth is itself a form of descent narrative; indeed, as James Hillman has shown, in developing this form of therapy, Freud was profoundly influenced by his reading of Virgil's Aeneid and other classical narratives.6 As Nicola King pointed out in Memory, Narrative, Identity, Freudian psychoanalysis embraces two contrasting models of memory: the archeological and the constructivist (p. 5). The one more fully developed by Freud himself is the archaeological model, in which the remembering consciousness digs backward in time to uncover an encrypted source of psychic pain (Memory, p. 12). The second approach, developed by Jean Laplanche and others from Freud's concept of nachtraÈglichkeit (`afterwardsness'), is the constructivist model, in which the trauma is produced retroactively by the remembering consciousness (Memory, p. 20). In the constructivist scenario, a `primal scene' does not become traumatic until some later event triggers feelings of horror about the earlier scene. In the context of the present enquiry, however, it is important to remember that both models require the analyst and analysand to initiate a descent journey into the past; the difference lies in the way they locate the source of pain, respectively, either within or outside the encrypted, primal scene. Though closely related to these psychoanalytic models, the emphasis in such haunted descent narratives as Beloved, Darkness Visible, Austerlitz and Fugitive Pieces is somewhat different, in that the source of trauma is not represented as inert matter, shaped by the backward look of the analysand, or buried deep within his or her unremembered past. In these haunted narratives, the underworld is an active presence; it expresses itself in a human form, with its own agency and will. The descent journey in such narratives is more markedly represented as a dialogic process, where the hero meets the ghost halfway along the underworld road.7 In this chapter, I will focus mainly on two such haunted or, to use Derrida's term, `hauntological' descent narratives: Sebald's Austerlitz and

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Michaels' Fugitive Pieces.8 I have chosen these two novels in particular because they provide contrasting treatments of the descent through memory, history and imagination to confront the trauma that Primo Levi, and millions of others, suffered directly. In the previous chapter, we saw how Levi's Holocaust testimony, when read through the filter of a later, more distanced work (The Search for Roots), represented Auschwitz not as a monolithic, absolute evil, but as a multi-layered constellation of chronotopes, through which many different routes through Hell are traceable by the contemporary reader. However complex this representation is, the relation of later generations of readers to the Holocaust is not static but ever-changing. To those who come after Levi, who have had no direct experience of the event or contact with survivors, the landscape of this Hell will have changed again. And for a second generation, one of the distinctive characteristics of the Holocaust is its looming absence, `looming' because its influence is still pervasively present, although increasingly beyond the reach of immediate experience. As William Bronk writes in `The Feeling', `One has a feeling it is like / that war whose last battle was fought long / after the treaty was signed. The imminence / relates to a past doom' (We Have Come Through, p. 32). The fact that this unspecified `past doom' has come unmoored from a specific address in time and space is precisely what gives it the power to haunt the speaker's present. Bronk returns us here to a `feeling' very like Levinas's il y a, the generalised sense of horror pervading every aspect of experience that was discussed in Chapter 1. Indeed, several recent studies have suggested that contemporary Western culture is essentially traumatic, at once dislocated from the specific sources of trauma and destined to go on reliving it.9 While dissenting from this view of generalised trauma, Dominick LaCapra concedes that `the after-effects ± the hauntingly possessive ghosts ± of traumatic events are not fully owned by anyone and, in various ways, affect everyone' (Writing History, Writing Trauma, p. xi). LaCapra himself is at pains to distinguish between the `victims of traumatizing events and commentators (or those born later)' (p. xi). Following his suggestion and to preserve the distinction between direct Holocaust testimony such as Levi's If This Is a Man, and literature about the Holocaust such as the two examples discussed in this chapter, I will refer to the latter as second-generation Holocaust narratives. It would be a serious distortion, however, to treat the distinction between testimonial and second-generation narratives as simply a distinction between fact and fiction, since Holocaust testimonies such as Levi's draw upon existing literary traditions and generic conventions while second-generation narratives are often obsessive about accumulating historical facts within the framework of fiction.10

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In psychoanalytic terms, Jakob Beer and Austerlitz might both be described as traumatised subjects, whose recurrent mental distress forces them to return to the past, in order to confront the sources of their pain. As I have suggested, Jakob and Austerlitz are driven to undertake this journey by underworld forces that appear to possess their own, separate wills and desires. The question facing both these descent protagonists is not simply whether they can uncover the hidden truths of the past, but how, and whether, they can learn to survive with their ghosts. Broadly speaking, Austerlitz traces a journey through Hell that resists all closure; Austerlitz's ghosts refuse to be appeased, and the protagonist himself is hollowed out, rendered spectral, by the growing burden of loss. In contrast to this tragically inflected narrative, Fugitive Pieces represents a comedic journey, in which the underworld ghosts release their hold on the protagonist, who goes on to find new love and hope in later life.11 While in psychoanalytic terms, the contrast between these two texts might be described as the difference between traumatic repetition and the successful working through of trauma, in fact the resolution of both these narratives is more ambivalent than either of these clinical outcomes might suggest. I have described Fugitive Pieces as a comedic narrative, but the novel is also deeply melancholy in tone, especially in Part II, which treats of the posthumous influence of Jakob Beer's work. And Austerlitz, while tragically unresolved, nevertheless contains passages of astonishing luminosity which linger well beyond the space they are given in the narrative. Taken together, the two novels also provide contrasting examples of the contemporary, secular sublime. With virtually no paragraph breaks in over four hundred pages, Sebald's Austerlitz conveys the sense of exhausted linguistic excess that compulsively covers over and conceals what it cannot name or possess.12 On the other hand, Michaels' fragmented prose, often set out like poems in short, widely spaced paragraphs ± Michaels was already an established poet when she wrote this novel ± gestures to the silences behind her broken and `fugitive' words. Both novels avoid the traditional forms of narrative closure that might be said to seal over past trauma.13 As discussed in Chapter 2, descent narratives are generically prone to tricksy exits, but neither of these novels forces a spectacularly swift or facile conclusion on the reader. In one case, the descent protagonist re-emerges from the Hell of his past; in the other, there is no return for the central protagonist but there is one for the narrator and reader. In both novels, the infernal journey consists of a quest for knowledge and understanding of a horrifying past. While this quest remains largely unfulfilled, Jakob and Austerlitz both gain partial knowledge and an unspeakable wisdom from their sojourn among

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underworld ghosts. What matters is not the arrival but the process of descent, and in Jakob's case, of reascent.

Vertigo and luminosity: W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001) tells the story of a retired architectural historian who, after a career of more than thirty years as a lecturer in Britain, sets out to discover the history of his childhood in Eastern Europe. As a Jewish child, he had been evacuated from Prague to Llanwddyn, Wales, in the late 1930s. Given a new name, Dafydd Elias, he lives an alias existence, with a new family, community and nationality. He successfully suppresses all memories of the past until he reaches retirement years. The novel begins with his search for roots that leads him on a katabatic journey across Europe, first to Prague where he meets his old nurserymaid, Vera RysÏanovaÂ, and visits the Czech concentration camp of TerezõÂn, and then to the new BibliotheÁque Nationale in Paris, where he hopes to recover documents relating to his father's disappearance. Austerlitz's quest is an impossible one; with every revealed clue, his sense of irrecoverable loss deepens. The knowledge he gains seems to flow through him like sand, and this, he comes to think, is true of every aspect of human experience. In a summation that echoes Lyotard's idea of `dispossession without return', the narrator reflects, `the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself' (p. 31).14 But while this theme is expressed in different ways by a number of characters, the novel continues to amass an extraordinary amount of factual detail pertaining to European architectural and military history, the history of Prague during the Nazi occupation, Welsh communities during the war and Paris in the 1960s. We also hear extensively about Austerlitz's student days, his recurrent attacks of hysterical epilepsy, his intellectual interests and his closest friendships. In the unnamed narrator, Austerlitz finds a kindred spirit to whom he can confide the details of his difficult and painful journey. As in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the reader learns of Austerlitz's story through the frame narrative of the narrator's own, distinctly similar descent journey. But unlike Kurtz, who remains invisible and almost inaudible at the heart of Marlow's narration, Austerlitz is vividly present in the narrator's discourse. The narrator reports his words directly, with only a terse `he said' here and there tagging many pages of Austerlitz's first-person narration. And again unlike Kurtz, Austerlitz is neither geographically distanced nor

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temporally sealed off from the narrator's account of their travels. They meet by chance in Antwerp, Paris and London, at random intervals over a period of years; at each meeting Austerlitz resumes the biography of his past and the story of his present quest. The narrator meanwhile pursues his own, more inchoate and haphazard journey, almost living, it would seem, to bridge the hiatuses in Austerlitz's narration. Along with the many hypodiegetic narratives embedded in Austerlitz's narration, this delicate but extensive tapestry of first- and third-person histories stretches right across the deepening abyss of silence and oblivion to which the world, in Austerlitz's view, is inescapably tending. Throughout Austerlitz, as in other Sebald novels, the sense of vertigo produced by gazing into this abyss of silence is pervasive and sometimes terrifying.15 At the same time, however, vertiginous terror also yields to luminous images of scenes and faces from the hidden past. In one inset narrative, for example, Austerlitz describes his friend Alphonso's research into the habits of night-flying moths. These moths appeared to leave trails of light behind them, `in all kinds of curlicues and streamers and spirals . . . which did not really exist, explained Alphonso, but were merely phantom traces created by the sluggish reaction of the human eye' (p. 131). These trails of moth light might be taken as a metaphor for the way forgotten faces and memories surface with ghostly luminosity from what would appear to be impenetrable darkness: `it was such unreal phenomena, said Alphonso, the sudden incursion of unreality into the real world, certain effects of light in the landscape spread out before us, or in the eye of a beloved person, that kindled our deepest feelings' (pp. 131± 2). Neither the terror of darkness nor the intensity of luminous recognition is permanent in Austerlitz. Indeed, each emotion seems to be drawn to the other extreme, so that vertiginous terror is constantly lapsing or katabatically inverting into recognition and vice versa. Throughout this ongoing process Austerlitz never reaches a rockbottom point of abject fear or revelatory knowledge (the equivalent of Kurtz's cry, `the horror, the horror!'), yet his descent journey does not lack shape or sense of progression. It takes place in two distinct stages as Austerlitz travels first to Prague in search of his lost mother and his childhood self, and then, after an interlude in London, to Paris in search of his lost father. At each stage, an episode of mental breakdown or overwhelming sense of alienation is followed by the perception of a twoway traffic passing between the ordinary world and an underworld of spirits. This perception most often leads to an encounter with some concealed or otherwise mysterious horror. It is usually at this stage that a guide, sometimes human, sometimes otherworldly, appears to conduct Austerlitz either safely past the danger or deeper into the abyss. Examples

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of the former include the violet-eyed archivist, Teresa Ambrosova (p. 209), and Penelope Peacefull, the antiquarian bookseller (p. 199). These minor characters with their irenic last names are pale imitations of the novel's Beatrice, Marie de Verneuil, a much-remembered friend of Austerlitz's youth, whom he sets out to find, along with the traces of his father, at the end of the novel. Generally under the aegis of one such guide, Austerlitz experiences a moment of luminosity comparable to the moth light alluded to above, which is followed or preceded by a vertiginous vision of revealed rather than veiled horror. From this more terrifying encounter, Austerlitz recovers, though shakily. After an interval, the second stage of the journey is initiated, and the cycle begins again. In the frame narrative, the narrator undergoes a similar series of experiences, in a parallel journey that leads from alienation or breakdown to horror at some veiled otherness, supernatural guidance, luminous insight and eventually the confrontation with revealed horror. As in Levi's The Search for Roots, the protagonist never arrives at the bottom of the map; the katabatic process merely shifts laterally from one phase of life to the next, or one character's life-story to another's. In order to demonstrate Sebald's innovative transformation of traditional katabatic topoi, I would like to focus on three of these experiences in more detail: the threshold crossing from dark wood to Hell proper, the vertiginous confrontation with horrifying otherness and the experience of luminous recognition set off by darkness. Regarding the threshold crossing, one might begin by recalling that, unlike Aeneas and other classical heroes, Dante does not initiate the journey into Hell; he finds himself lost, and soon learns that his descent has been decreed by the soul of his beloved Beatrice. In Freudian psychoanalysis, the unconscious is said to exert its pressure subterraneously, without the individual's conscious consent or understanding. At the start of their journeys, both the narrator and Austerlitz are subject to sudden and inexplicable illnesses, which a psychoanalyst would describe as the work of the unconscious as it displaces the effects of unacknowledged trauma in their respective pasts. The narrator `had begun to feel unwell' on the train to Antwerp (p. 1). And more forcibly for Austerlitz, `it was as if an illness that had been latent in me for a long time were now threatening to erupt, as if some soul-destroying and inexorable force had fastened upon me' (p. 173). This volcanic and inexorable force can be understood, in Austerlitz's case, as the gigantic recoil generated by accumulated suppressions of a prewar identity: `I sensed that in truth I had neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence, that all my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world' (p. 174). But in another sense, this dislocation

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has its source in the repressed memories not just of Austerlitz's past but of an entire buried world. If this is so, the immediate causes of Austerlitz's mental breakdown are external (as in Dante's Inferno) as well as internal (as in Freud's account of psychic disorder). As for the narrator, we never learn exactly why he feels unwell. He may be an evacuee with a similar suppressed history or, as seems likely, he may have absorbed Austerlitz's story to the extent that his friend's illness has become his own by the time he begins his narration. If this is so, then the narrator is also a figure for the reader in the text, saddened and made wiser, like the wedding guest in Coleridge's `Ancient Mariner', by listening to Austerlitz's story. In so far as he is both an individual character and an embodiment of postwar alienation, Austerlitz embarks on a Dantean journey that is at once personal and archetypal, remembering Dante's first line: `midway on the journey of our life' (my emphasis). Unlike Dante, however, Austerlitz is drawn down by the will of the underworld, rather than sent down by celestial imperative. Another typically modern feature of his journey is its belatedness. Austerlitz is much older than the middle aged Dante; `I . . . was only now being born, almost on the eve of my death' (p. 194). For these reasons, Austerlitz is less of a stranger to the underworld than Dante. Like the silenced ghosts of his past, he loses the power of coherent speech; `if language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares . . . then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl any more' (pp. 174±5). Aeneas and Dante find it difficult to narrate the descent journey, having returned from Hell; but for the haunted Austerlitz, speech becomes difficult on the journey itself. He resembles the Balzacian character, Colonel Chabert, whom he discovers towards the end of the novel, when reading in the BibliotheÁque Nationale.16 Paraphrasing Balzac's plot, Austerlitz explains how the colonel is mistaken for dead in battle, and then `years later, after long wanderings across Germany . . . risen from the dead, so to speak, [he] returns to Paris to claim his rights to his estates, to his wife . . . and to his own name' (p. 394). Austerlitz has also been living under an alias (Dafydd Elias) and cannot now lay claim to his real identity. Like Chabert, `he is presented as a ghostly figure' (p. 394). As early as the sixth form he is told his birth name, Jacques Austerlitz, by a headmaster but this information makes his former identity more mysterious rather than less: `I was convinced that no one else bore that name, no one in Wales, or in the Isles, or anywhere else in the world' (pp. 94±5). He learns that it is the name of a famous Napoleonic victory (p. 97), and much later, at the Austerlitz railway station in Paris, he has an image of his father departing from the station to an unknown destination. The name therefore links him to his father's

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disappearance and to European history, but in ways that he finds obscure and beyond his reach. From this dark wood of illness and alienation, Austerlitz begins his descent journey proper. He finds his entrance by chance, during his nocturnal wanderings across London. Liverpool Street Station, `with its main concourse fifteen to twenty feet below street level, was one of the darkest and most sinister places in London, a kind of entrance to the underworld' (p. 180). Under this site, we later learn, lie the burial grounds of Bedlam Hospital, which makes Austerlitz wonder whether the accumulated pain and suffering of the mentally ill are still to be felt in the station's deep concourse (pp. 182±3). As Austerlitz travels down the steeply banked escalators, he begins to search for familiar faces `among the passengers coming towards me in the tiled passages, on the escalators plunging steeply into the depths, or behind the grey windows of a train just pulling out' (p. 179). And when he learns about the Bedlam Hospital burial grounds under Bishopsgate and Liverpool Street, he feels `as if the dead were returning from their exile' (p. 188). Immediately after this, on an obscure impulse, he enters the disused and soon to be demolished Ladies' Waiting Room of Liverpool Street Station (p. 192). Here he suddenly remembers his arrival in Britain, as a child evacuee, and the room seems to him to `contain all the hours of my past life' (p. 192). At this point, the reader begins to feel that the `series of coincidences' leading to this and other revelations is the work of an invisible agency, the subterraneous pressure exerted on the living by many millions of unjustly condemned souls. Thus Sebald distinctively represents the katabatic topos of the threshold crossing as one that flows both ways between under- and overworlds. If Austerlitz is drawn into the abyss, this is in part because the souls of the dead gather at such underworld entrances, compelling the living to descend as they ascend. In Negotiating with the Dead, Atwood points out that the dead always return because they want blood (p. 149). In Sebald's novel, however, the dead return for the same reason that the living descend to Hell, to gain secret or forbidden knowledge and wisdom. The narrator is likewise drawn to the underworld by an obscure compulsion, as he relates at the start of the novel. He travels from the UK to Belgium `partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me' (p. 1). In Antwerp he visits the Nocturama, a zoo housing small, nocturnal animals, and is struck by the intense gaze of the caged animals: `several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking' (p. 3). This textual description is supplemented by

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four inset photographs, two of animals' eyes, two of philosophers', all of which stare fixedly out of the page at the reader. Unsettled by the animals' eyes, he makes his way to Antwerp Centraal Station, where he meets Austerlitz. Once again, one has the sense that this life-changing encounter has been orchestrated for the narrator by some invisible agency. In this case, the ghostly presence makes itself felt through the mute inquiry of the caged creatures. Austerlitz's friend Marie remarks later in the novel that `captive animals and we ourselves, their human counterparts, view one another aÁ travers une breÁche d'incompreÂhension' (pp. 368±9). From pigeons trapped underground to muzzled dogs in Prague, the many small creatures in Austerlitz convey the impression of a living, human world filled with the mute suffering of other species. The effect of the nocturnal animals' eyes on the reader is still more haunting, because the photographs show only fragments of four, unidentified faces. The lack of titles or other means of identification, along with their sometimes oblique connection to the immediate narrative context, divest the photographs in Austerlitz of the authenticating power they possess in other narratives.17 The photographed faces stare questioningly at the reader, just as the reader puzzles over the images, attempting to place them in the textual narrative. In the first chapter, it appears to be the Nocturama's staring eyes that propel the narrator towards his life-changing encounter with Austerlitz. Austerlitz himself becomes the narrator's underworld guide, explaining the architectural history and changing topography of Hell in the overworld. His lengthy commentaries on Breendonk, together with drawings and plans of the fortress, function in this way, as the narrator's introduction to Europe's recent, infernal history. Austerlitz's general theory is that fortresses, ostentatious palaces, museums, railway stations and other architectural structures in which military or economic power is concentrated will bring danger and suffering to those whom the buildings were originally designed to protect. Designed as a protective fortress and turned into a Nazi penal camp in 1940, Breendonk illustrates the principle `that the largest fortifications will naturally attract the largest enemy forces, and that the more you entrench yourself the more you must remain on the defensive' (p. 19). Drawn in by Austerlitz's commentary, the narrator soon visits Breendonk himself. Expecting a `star-shaped fortress' (an image recurrently associated with rationally constructed penal architecture), the narrator instead approaches `something hunched and misshapen: the broad back of a monster, I thought, risen from this Flemish soil like a whale from the deep' (p. 25). (In theological commentary, Jonah's whale is often glossed as a figure for the Devil, an association Melville exploits to the full in Moby Dick.18) Breendonk turns out to

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be more irrationally, infernally evil than the narrator had been led to expect. Entering the fortress is, for him, a descent into the Hell mouth. The absence of rational design, and the inversion of the building's original function from protective fortress to torture chamber, marks Breendonk out as a particularly twentieth-century form of gateway to Hell. As we saw with Levi's allusions to Dante, the concentration camp horrifically inverted traditional, theological conceptions of Hell, by turning it into a place which expressed a demonic inversion of divine Justizia. The horror of a place that witnessed the torture of the philosopher Jean AmeÂry and many others deepens when one learns that it was originally constructed as a place of refuge (p. 33). In the previous two chapters, I discussed the characteristics of katabatic religious conversion and secular inversion, both of which typically occur at the lowest point, the ground zero, of the descent journey. Whether involving the physical `upside-downing' of the hero, as in Inferno and Under the Volcano, or some radical mental inversion of perspective, as in Levi's The Search for Roots, the turn effects a reversal of the descent narrative's downward trajectory. In Austerlitz, at Breendonk and later at the new BibliotheÁque Nationale, we witness the demonic reversal of this process, the collapse of apparently solid ground into a psychological or historical abyss that produces a sense of vertiginous terror in the protagonist. The other kind of inversion, from descent to return, also occurs in Austerlitz, but there is no sense of rest or security to be gained from these moments of uplift, because the vertiginous turn downwards can recur anywhere and at any time. At best, one can hope for the kind of security exemplified in the family of fallow deer which Austerlitz photographs for Marie: `a living picture of mutual trust and harmony which also had about it an air of constant vigilance and alarm' (p. 68). In such places as Liverpool Street Station and the fortress at Breendonk, time seems to silt up in thick layers and place to become porous and insubstantial. The narrator is reminded of childhood fears by the smell of soft soap and an iron hook hanging from a ceiling at Breendonk (pp. 32±3). These remembered scenes, a laundry room and a butcher's shop, are not terrifying in themselves, but recalling them magnifies his horror of the fortress; `no one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open' (p. 33). The narrator leaves Breendonk feeling seriously ill. And in a similar way, Austerlitz feels `something rending within me' (p. 193) at Liverpool Street Station, when the sight of the Ladies' Waiting Room reminds him of his arrival as a child evacuee to Britain. In both episodes, a trapdoor has been opened to the buried past which cannot subsequently be closed.

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As Austerlitz pursues his journey eastwards across Europe and downwards into his past, he becomes increasingly subject to attacks of vertigo or `disjunction, of having no ground beneath my feet' (p. 154). But if he is saddened and horrified by the history of the war, this journey also brings him closer to the ghosts of his parents whom he so desires to find. By the time he reaches Prague, he feels that the border between under- and overworlds has become permeable, `as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like' (p. 261). He comes to see that the unreality of ghosts is nothing more than the effect of a screen separating two parallel worlds; as they seem unreal to us, `so we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead . . . only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision' (p. 261). Visiting the remains of the ghetto at TerezõÂn, he becomes convinced that the dead still exist beside the living: `it suddenly seemed to me, with the greatest clarity, that they [the dead] had never been taken away after all, but were still living crammed into those buildings and attics' (p. 281). Occupying the still centre of Austerlitz's terrors and hopes is the concentration camp of TerezõÂn, where his mother most probably met her death. Approaching the remains of the camp through the adjoining village, he photographs rows of closed doors and windows (included in the text, pp. 267±74), all connoting how the knowledge he seeks is sealed off from him. In TerezõÂn itself, however, the last trapdoor is opened, but, paradoxically, the knowledge he gains, while clarifying some aspects of the past, at the same time increases his sense of bewilderment. Poring over the display cases, the photographs and the documentation, he thinks, `I understood it all now, yet I did not understand it, for every detail that was revealed to me as I went through the museum . . . far exceeded my comprehension' (p. 279). Austerlitz finds no trace of his mother in the photographs or documents at TerezõÂn. When he retraces his evacuation route to Britain along the Rhine, he finds the repeat journey `hardly less terrifying than the first' (p. 319). And finally, when he attempts to find documents relating to his father at the new BibliotheÁque Nationale, he finds that the new building almost wilfully obstructs his efforts and he abandons them in exhaustion. If this is the spiral downwards from which Austerlitz never finally recovers, his journey nevertheless brings him to moments of rare clarity and understanding, as well as an intense sense of kinship with the underworld's suffering and questioning ghosts. While his questions about the fate of his parents go largely unanswered, he does make almost miraculous discoveries about who they were, how they lived in Prague

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and how they coped during the Nazi occupation. Vera RysÏanova is able to share detailed and intimate memories of their last days, as well as photos of his mother's theatre and himself as a child. Most miraculously of all, after many months of feeling unable to master or organise his speech, he discovers he can understand and speak Czech fluently. Time and again, he has the sense in Prague that he has found a place where he belongs. Deeply buried memories come back to him `luminously', as if haloed with benevolent power (p. 221). When Vera unearths a photo of Austerlitz as a boy, tucked in the pages of the Balzac novel, he sees the same luminous quality in the image, with `the boy's curly hair, spectrally light around the outline of his head' (p. 259). Austerlitz finds it mysterious how certain photographs `surface from oblivion . . . as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us' (p. 258). It is as if the page boy wanted to be found. Yet when confronted with this photograph, Austerlitz is not straightforwardly able to lay claim to a former, `authentic' identity. In the photo, he sees not the lost self for whom he has been searching but a stranger, theatrically dressed as a royal page for an event which he does not remember. Like many of the other photographed faces in the novel, the page boy looks directly and questioningly at the viewer. From his anterior temporal perspective, the boy seems to anticipate the tragedy ahead, challenging the viewer to intervene; thus Austerlitz `felt the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting . . . for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him' (p. 260). The gaze is estranging for a number of reasons: first and foremost, Austerlitz knows he is powerless to avert what, from his perspective, has already happened; and secondly, the boy in the photograph, though appearing to possess a will of his own, fails to recognise Austerlitz as himself. He challenges him as a stranger to his own imminent tragedy. The sense of not belonging, therefore, returns with full force: `I have always felt as if I had no place in reality, as if I were not there at all, and I never had this impression more strongly than on that evening . . . when the eyes of the Rose Queen's page looked through me' (p. 261). Thus Austerlitz finds that, not only is it impossible to lay claim to the dead, but also any encounter with their spirits is likely to dispossess the living. Despite what he learns from Vera about his parents, this experience and the visit to TerezõÂn leave Austerlitz depressed and once more dislocated from reality. A second kind of vertigo assails him, as he becomes convinced that the demands of the dead for justice and coherence can never be met by the living. He recovers at the Romford asylum in Denbigh, however, and is soon ready to embark on the second stage

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of his journey, to Paris in search of his father. This section of the novel is mostly taken up with memories of his youth in Paris, with the onset of hysterical epilepsy and the saving ministrations of Marie de Verneuil. After one such attack, he is nursed back to health by an eighteenthcentury book on healing which Marie finds for him (`by immersing myself in the better world of this little book . . . I regained my lost sense of myself and my memory' (p. 379)). Together he and Marie listen to circus performers who manage to conjure an `extraordinarily foreign nocturnal music . . . out of thin air' and for the first time in his life, Austerlitz feels his heart `contracting in pain or expanding with happiness' (p. 383). The little book and the circus music are luminous interventions in the gathering dark; while they belong to Austerlitz's past, the fact that he is able to retrieve such memories alleviates the weight of his present impasse in the labyrinths of the new library. Austerlitz's departure from Paris is a Ulyssean setting forth into the unknown from which it seems unlikely he will return. He hands the narrator the keys to his house in London and his photographs (`which, one day, would be all that was left of his life', p. 408). The narrator's return to the fortress at Breendonk appears to bring the narrative full circle to its beginning. Once again, he experiences vertiginous horror at its infernal appearance. But this time he does not cross the moat or pass through the dark gate into the fortress. He remains on a bank beside the moat and begins to read a book, Dan Jacobson's Heshel's Kingdom, given to him by Austerlitz (p. 412). Jacobson relates the flight of his family from Europe to South Africa and his own visit to see the diamond mines near where they lived. The chasm of the mines was `Jacobson's image of the vanished past of his family and people which, as he knows, can never be brought up from those depths again' (p. 414). Such an image might also serve for the lost past in this novel which, as Austerlitz finds, can never be compensated for or recovered. On the other hand, the gift of this book, from Jacobson to Austerlitz and from Austerlitz to the narrator who reads it in lieu of descending into Hell, illustrates the way that characters are sustained by this interlinking of narratives across a chasm of loss. Whereas Morrison's Beloved ends with the reflection that `it was not a story to pass on', Sebald's Austerlitz shows stories being passed on right up to the last page of the novel. And as Austerlitz concludes, with the narrator having read only as far as Chapter 15 of Heshel's Kingdom, the reader is left with the sense that this passing on of stories will continue indefinitely.

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From depth to ascent: Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces Canadian poet Anne Michaels' first novel Fugitive Pieces (1996) is, like Austerlitz, a descent narrative which attempts to piece together fragmented memories of the Second World War. As in Golding's Darkness Visible, Michaels follows the unfolding of this process over two generations. Her novel relates two connected but distinct descent narratives: in Part I, the history of a poet named Jakob Beer, who is rescued from a Polish city by Athos Roussos, a Greek geologist (both men later emigrate from Greece to Canada); and in Part II, the life of a young Canadian lecturer named Ben, who is inspired by reading the poet's memoirs to begin his own descent into the past, beginning on the Greek island where Athos had raised Jakob. The two parts, the one relating Jakob's life and the other his influence after death, are linked by a prefatory paragraph which explains the circumstances of the poet's death: Jakob had been fatally injured when struck by a car in Athens at the age of sixty. Thus, as in Austerlitz, the central protagonist's narrative is told as a ghost story, a story about someone who from the beginning the reader knows to be irrecoverably lost. Like Austerlitz, Jakob Beer is a fictional child survivor of the Holocaust. If his story is haunting, he is also haunted by the past. Whereas Austerlitz sought to recover lost memories, Jakob knows and remembers too much; as a small child, he had been a witness to his family's murder by Nazis. But like Austerlitz, for whom knowledge served `as a substitute or compensatory memory' (p. 198), Jakob has buried his memories of his family's death under an `avalanche of facts: train schedules, camp records, statistics, methods of execution. But at night, my mother, my father, Bella, Mones, simply rose, shook the earth from their clothes, and waited' (p. 93). This state of false consciousness is eventually disrupted, as in Austerlitz, by the intervention of the dead. Here, too, ghosts have their desires, their own reasons for surfacing from the past (`It's no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world' (p. 53)). Not only do human ghosts retain memory and desire, so too do the places where tragedy has occurred: `place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment. Eskers of ash wait to be scooped up, lives reconstituted' (p. 53). The dead souls of Fugitive Pieces are more quiescent than those haunting Austerlitz; as the above quotation indicates, what they are patiently waiting for is to be pieced together by the living. Jakob's descent journey, then, has a double aim: to recover himself (his mental health and sense of identity), and to piece together the `fugitive pieces' of his murdered family, in particular his sister, Bella. His descent

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journey thus combines two traditional katabatic aims, to recover the self and to recover the lost beloved. The myth of Orpheus is one important model for such descents, but there are many others. In Areopagitica (1644), Milton compared the task of the seventeenth-century truth-seeker to that of the Egyptian Isis, who wandered the world, gathering up the limbs of the mangled body of Osiris (Milton, Complete Prose, Vol. 2, p. 549). The myth of Isis, allegorised as a truth-seeker, provides perhaps the closest mythic analogue to Jakob Beer's story. Like Isis, Jakob gathers up fragmentary images of his sister Bella, and Ben in turn collects and publishes Jakob's memoirs, which constitute the bulk of the novel. The character in the novel who initiates the retrieval of the `fugitive pieces' of the past is Athos Roussos, the geologist who excavates the buried boy Jakob from the rubble of the demolished city. As we have seen, several different kinds of descent journey are represented in Fugitive Pieces: geological excavation, poetry writing, travel from central Europe to the cradle of Mediterranean civilisation, and travel from old Europe to the New World (and back again). But the unifying thread in all this is Jakob's narrative which comprises a descent journey in three, relatively distinct stages: (1) his apprenticeship with Athos; (2) writing the poems for his collection, Groundwork; and (3) his relationships with two women, Alex and Michaela. The fourth stage of the descent concerns his afterlife, when the young lecturer Ben becomes the curator (excavator, preserver and carer) of Jakob's memory. Athos initiates the first stage of the descent and plays the role of Virgil (`my own private guide and companion' (p. 97)) to Jakob's Dante. The geologist teaches Jakob the katabatic principle that `truth speaks from the ground' (p. 143); learning how to read geological eras through rock formations is Jakob's first lesson in reading and preserving the past. For a survivor who distrusts human communication, too, the language of geology is trustworthy because it is non-verbal.19 `This was my truth', Jakob writes, `that my life could not be stored in any language but only in silence' (p. 111). Geology eases Jakob away from traumatic repetition of the past, because its aim is in a very literal sense to reveal, not bury, the earth's secrets. Moving from the Greek islands to Toronto, Jakob and Athos discover a modern, New World city that is nevertheless scarred with ravines and cliffs that expose its primordial past.20 So Athos shows Jakob `Toronto cross-sectioned; he ripped open cliffs like bread, revealing the ragged geological past' (p. 98). When thus measured in geological time, Jakob finds that twentieth-century history shrinks, if not into insignificance, at least into a manageable perspective; as he says, `Athos's backward glance gave me a backward hope' (p. 101). This saving shift in perspective arising from geological exploration can also be found in many other

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modern descent narratives, from Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth to Margaret Atwood's Surfacing.21 If Dante aspires higher than his pagan guide, Jakob `aspires' lower. He regains the will to live in Athos's care, and in the chapter `Vertical Time' (Part I) he even finds temporary parent surrogates in Athos's Athenian friends. In the Inferno, the verticalisation of time condemns the damned souls to Hell forever; in the afterlife, sins committed once are revealed to have an infinite consequence. In Austerlitz, the pervasive sense of vertigo is always a fear of falling into an endless depth. Fugitive Pieces inverts the demonic value attached to this depth image, and turns vertical time into a figure for redemption. Rather than unfolding in a linear sequence, history stacks up with repeat encounters, characters and choices (hence, `verticalises'). But in Michaels's novel, this means that the self-defining moment of choice and loss will come round again. In his first wife, Alex, he sees the features of his murdered sister, and this repetition disturbs him. But later echoes of his sister will be welcomed as signs of her presence surviving in his new life. The rationalist Athos helps Jakob through the first stage of his recovery by helping him to search the past dispassionately and scientifically. After Athos's death, Jakob writes, `In his research, Athos descends so far that he reaches a place where redemption is possible, but it is only the redemption of tragedy. // I knew that, for me, the descent would go on and on' (p. 120). In Terry Eagleton's view, tragedy goes lower than this and its redemptive powers are stronger.22 But Michaels indicates her more restricted definition of tragedy in the next section of this passage. Jakob adds, `in my thinking I started with the last question, the ``why'' he hoped would be answered by all the others. Therefore I began with failure and had nowhere to go' (p. 118). The tragic imagination, Michaels implies, organises experience rationally; its aim is always to answer the question why just men and women suffer. But such tragic reasoning is an ineffectual tool for Jakob, whose loss is deeper, and who also has to answer not only for his own trauma, but that of his family.23 Over the next stage of his descent journey, Jakob opens himself to the influx of these other, ghostly agencies. These he collects in poems, which a friend describes as `ghost stories', later to be published under the title, Groundwork. As the katabatic title suggests, these poems concern Jakob's past, his upbringing on Zakynthos, his lost city in Poland and the scene of his family's murder. The poems themselves are not reproduced in the text, appropriately enough, as Jakob explains that they are intended to convey the silences behind their words (p. 112). He uses English in verse as `a sonar, a microscope . . . to capture elusive meanings buried in facts' (p. 112). Or, more desperately, he wants `a line in a poem

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to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God' (p. 112). His friend Maurice comments, ```These aren't poems, they're ghost stories''' (p. 163). For the reader, too, they are ghostly, sensed perhaps only in the lyricism of Michaels' prose. More importantly, they are ghostly to Jakob; at this stage he allows himself to be haunted by the primal scene of his sister and parents' deaths. He begins to pull away from his first wife, Alex, both because she is a wordsmith, a punster, while he is trying to work `with silences' and because she wants him to set aside the past. Instead, he becomes fixated by the scene of murder, `focused on that historical split second: the tableau of the haunting trinity ± perpetrator, victim, witness' (p. 140). As long as this `tableau' remains fixed, singular and absolute in his mind, Jakob will remain traumatised, living an eternal Hell. But he comes to see that the historical second is always already `split': `Every moment is two moments' (pp. 140, 161). Quoting Einstein, Jakob explains that every occurrence contains both the event which in itself is amoral, and the witnessing of the event, which is moral and judgmental (p. 161; see also p. 138). In the `tableau' of aggressor± victim±witness, each of these figures is an actant in the event; but each can also impose their own interpretation of the event, which happens at the time but also retrospectively through memory. Jakob looks at photographs of Nazis with their victims and sees recorded there a `precise moment of choice' (p. 166). In such moments, Jacob thinks, the aggressor knows that his actions are contradictory, that he is killing human beings as if they were inhuman. In order to carry out the act, he has to resolve the contradiction and choose to believe his victim is inhuman. Jakob says, `There's a precise moment when we reject contradiction. This moment of choice is the lie we will live by' (p. 166). But if the event is separable from its interpretation, then it is not absolute or inevitable. As the example of Athos demonstrates, others faced with the same situation acted differently. Thus, `If the evil act can't be erased, then neither can the good' (p. 162). The burden of interpretation gets passed on to the witness, whose choice is whether to remember the evil or the good act, and how to interpret the amoral event. At this point, Jakob begins to exploit the logic of katabatic inversion which we discussed in earlier chapters; thus `we look for the spirit precisely in the place of greatest degradation' (p. 167). The most daring passage in the novel is that which probes deepest into Holocaust history, to represent the deaths in the gas chambers. Unlike Levi, Michaels does not shrink from describing how the bodies looked and imagining the last thoughts and cries of the dying. Riskiest of all, she reads the upturned faces and limbs on the bodies as a gesture of aspiration, an impulse towards ascent even in this most abject of deaths.

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She has Jakob imagine, `When they opened the doors, the bodies were always in the same position. Compressed against one wall, a pyramid of flesh. Still hope . . . The terrifying hope of human cells. // The bare automatic faith of the body' (p. 168). The kind of faith Michaels describes here is beyond the redemption offered by formal tragedy because it is beyond human reason or conscious choice. But it is also beyond any religious faith in the soul's transcendence; it is `the moment when our faith in man is forced to change, anatomically ± mercilessly ± into faith' (p. 168). By `bare automatic faith', Michaels seems to mean the basic instinct to life found in atoms, molecules, the smallest units of organic matter. Spirit itself, she suggests, is divisible into sub-human parts, each of which contains the instinct to live, to ascend. Only in this sense does this `moment of utmost degradation' contain `the most obscene testament of grace' (p. 168). If this is grace, though, it lacks a human face. As a response to human, mass-scale murder, it seems to me wholly inadequate. But I see this passage as a culmination of the second stage of Jakob's descent journey rather than its resolution. Jakob himself indicates that he cannot sustain this atomistic vision (`Even as I fall apart I know I will never again feel this pure belief' (p. 169)). The third stage of his journey is the Ulyssean one; it involves narrating his despair to someone else and entering her narrative in turn. Like Ulysses before the Phaeacians, Jakob finds an eager and willing listener in Michaela, who becomes his second wife. She evinces an `empathetic unsettlement' in LaCapra's terms, a responsiveness to Jakob's trauma that falls short of total identification (Writing History, p. 41). On the other hand, she offers him her own temporal depths: `in Michaela's eyes, ten generations of history' (p. 178). Fugitive Pieces demonstrates, then, that the haunted Jakob cannot escape Hell just by coming to terms with his own, individual loss. The decision to `cross over the boundary of [another's] skin' (p. 185) is as crucial as deciding to read (or make) history positively. Jakob reads Michaela's past as an alternative history to his own, one that can offset his without effacing it: `in Michaela's face, the loyalty of generations, perhaps the devotion of a hundred Kievan women for a hundred faithful husbands . . . in her hair the scents of fields and pines, her cold, smooth arms carrying water from springs' (p. 178). Most importantly, hers is a history without massacres; `there is no tinge of death in Michaela's skin' (p. 181). As a result of his involvement with Michaela, Jakob's relationship with his own ghosts changes. From the first, he is anguished by the thought that they may not even welcome his traumatic obsessions; it might be `as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to remember them' (p. 25). Eventually he discovers that he has misunder-

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stood his dead sister's signals; `like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world' (p. 170). Contrary to Austerlitz, then, Fugitive Pieces represents a descent journey in which the underworld willingly releases its hold on the hero. In fact, it is only by making the return journey that the hero can put the dismembered ghost to rest. His relationship to Bella, his lost sister, thus changes in time but it is never set aside. If he achieves a degree of selfpossession, Jakob, like Austerlitz, remains possessed by others. This is demonstrated in the briefer Part II of the novel, when Jakob's story is relived in the next generation. Ben's circumstances bear an uncanny resemblance to his mentor's: he discovers he has lost a sibling in the Holocaust; this puts a strain on his marriage; and he is eventually healed in Greece. Michaels emphasises the parallels between the two lives, by repeating the Dantean titles of the subsections in Part I (`Drowned City', `Vertical Time') in Part II. Like Jakob, Ben balances his sense of loss, not by shutting out the past, but by digging into other, contiguous histories. He remembers the forgotten words of his (living) wife, Naomi, `If I can't find you, I'll look deeper into myself. If I can't keep up, if you're far ahead, look back. Look back' (p. 292). Unlike Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, Fugitive Pieces represents looking back not as a sign of failure but as one of connection. Besides demonstrating the idea that people do not wholly possess their own lives, one might wonder why the second part of the novel is necessary and what it adds to Jakob's story. On the model of Paul Celan's famous poem, `Death Fugue' (1947), Fugitive Pieces imitates the fugue form's repetition of central motifs. On this fugal principle, Michaels writes that `good is proved true by repetition' (p. 162). Discovering that Jakob's insights mirror his own, Ben in Part II reflects that `truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time' (p. 251). This technique of thematic repetition, borrowed from the formal repetition of the fugue form, conveys Michaels' understanding that `questions without answers must be asked very slowly' (p. 159).24 What emerges here through repetition are the hidden histories of the Holocaust, such as Jakob's rescue by Athos or Jakob's slow recovery to health. Michaels does not ignore the vertiginous nature of loss, represented so powerfully in Sebald's Austerlitz. But Fugitive Pieces also measures depth of grief in terms of the upward arc of the journey. Ben reflects, `It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent' (p. 250, emphasis in original). In Paradise Lost, Milton describes Jacob's ladder as a gateway

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through which a constant stream of traffic passes between mortal and immortal realms: The stairs were such as whereon Jacob saw Angels ascending and descending, bands Of guardians bright, when he from Esau fled To Padan-Aram in the field of Luz, Dreaming by night under the open sky, And waking cried, This is the gate of heaven.

Paradise Lost, 3.510±15

Such is the constant, depth movement between memory and the present which Jakob Beer experiences, although for him the ladder is simply the gate of living. Together Austerlitz and Fugitive Pieces demonstrate that looking back at the Holocaust from a distance of thirty years or more, it may still not be possible to discover a ground zero to this experience, nor an exit gate that would provide closure or coherence to this twentieth-century manifestation of Hell. Nevertheless, without resorting to mythic absolutes, one can show that this Hell was actually lived, that it can be imagined and narrated, and that such narratives must indeed be passed on.

Notes 1. Compare Dante's `I did not die and I did not remain alive' (Inferno, 34.25). 2. Golding's life (1911±93) spans almost the entire length of the twentieth century and much of his work reflects on its horrors. From his most famous work, Lord of the Flies (1954), to his posthumously published novel, The Double Tongue, Golding characteristically yokes together the sacred and the secular, investigating religious faith in the context of historical tragedy, and blending realist and mythic narration. As Bakhtin wrote of Dante, Golding habitually juxtaposes historical chronotopes with those of vision literature. The title of Darkness Visible is borrowed from Milton's description of Hell fire in Paradise Lost, 1.62±7. 3. Billy's incomprehension over the bombing of Dresden is echoed by the pessimistic, autobiographical narrator, who introduces the novel with a comparison to the Biblical story of Lot's wife: `Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back . . . But she did look back, and I love her for that . . . So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.' The narrator goes on to underline the parallel with his own backward look at the war; `this book . . . is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt' (Slaughterhouse 5, p. 16). Abel Gance's famous film, J'Accuse (1938), also represents ghosts of soldiers returning to accuse the living (see my Chapter 1, note 28). 4. On fictional representations of the Holocaust, see Sue Vice, Holocaust Fiction. London: Routledge, 2000. On fictional narratives of trauma, see Whitehead, Trauma Fiction.

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5. On Fugitive Pieces and memory, see Nicola King, ` ``We come after'': remembering the Holocaust', in Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (eds), Literature and the Contemporary, pp. 94±108. On representing trauma in Austerlitz and Fugitive Pieces, see Whitehead, pp. 117±39 and 48±80, respectively. 6. See James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, Chapters 2 and 3. Hillman points out that Freud makes the unconscious responsible for intense suffering, as does the region of Tartarus (p. 17); in `The Psychopathology of Everyday Life', he describes the descent to the id through the cracks and crevices of consciousness, in terms of heroes finding their way into Hades through caves and holes (p. 18, apropos of which, katabasis, the Greek term for an infernal descent journey, can also mean simply a `cave-mouth'); the unconscious is said to be extra-temporal, like Hades (p. 19); and the Ego behaves like a traditional descent hero who `must meet the raging demands of the repressed, where ``wishes appear to rise up out of a positive Hell'' ' (p. 19, quoting Freud's Introductory Lectures, p. 143); the epigraph to Freud's Traumdeutung is also from Virgil's Aeneid (`if I cannot move heaven, I will move Acheron [the underworld]'). In sum, Hillman argues, Freudian psychology is persuasive `because of the metaphorical substructure in the theory, which evokes in our memorial psyche the archetypal realm of the underworld' (p. 23). 7. In the underworld, Aeneas meets Deiphobus, a son of Priam killed in the Trojan war, `his whole body mangled and his face cruelly torn, the face and both hands, ears lopped from his head, and nostrils shamefully slit' (Aeneid, 6.494±7, my trans.). Aeneas excavates Hades for knowledge of his future, but he is also shocked into remembering his past. The challenge to overcome the trauma of such encounters has to be faced again in the difficult narration of the descent journey. 8. For Derrida's `hauntology' see Specters of Marx, p. 10. 9. See, for example, Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative History; James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse; Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory; and LaCapra, Writing History, pp. 10±11. 10. But on testimony as a new kind of history-writing, see Felman and Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature. 11. See also Ann Parry, ` ``. . . to Give . . . Death a Place'': Rejecting the Ineffability of the Holocaust: the Work of Gillian Rose and Anne Michaels'. 12. The two separate journeys of Austerlitz, to Prague and Paris, are separated by an asterisk break (*) in the text. Clusters of inset photographs also break up the flow of words throughout the novel at irregular intervals. With the exception of such interruptions, the narrations of Austerlitz and the narrator proceed without rest or pause. 13. LaCapra argues that the working through of trauma in narrative can sometimes seem specious, producing `an unwarranted sense of spiritual uplift' as in (in his view) the ending of Spielberg's film, Schindler's List or the second half of Benigni's film, Life is Beautiful (Writing History, p. 14). 14. On `dispossession without return' see Lyotard, `The Jewish Oedipus', p. 405, and my Chapter 1. On the `defeat' of memory, see W. G. Sebald, `Memory's Defeat', trans. Michael Hulse, PENA, 1 (2), 2001, pp. 77±9. See also Carol

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

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Bere, `The Book of Memory: W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants and Austerlitz'; and Tess Lewis, `W. G. Sebald: the Past is Another Country'. Vertiginous time-space is arguably the dominant chronotope of a number of Sebald's novels, especially The Emigrants (1996), Vertigo (1999) and After Nature (2002). Honore de Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert (1832). See also Stefanie Harris, `The Return of the Dead: Memory and Photography in W. G. Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten'. Melville's Moby Dick (1851) is a seminal descent narrative itself, and is alluded to in Gray's Lanark, Levi's The Search for Roots and other contemporary katabases. See Meira Cook, `At the Membrane of Silence: Metaphor and Memory in Fugitive Pieces'. See also Paul Malone, `The Geography of Identity in Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces'. On nineteenth-century geological excavation as a descent into Hell, see Rosalind Williams, Notes On the Underground, particularly Chapter 2, `Excavations I: Digging Down to the Truth.' See, for example, Sweet Violence, p. 41, where apropos of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, he describes tragedy as a `via negativa of self-division' and `a whole-hearted surrender of itself to its opposite' in which `Spirit finally triumph[s].' Likewise Christ's death is tragic, if it is understood as living through `the destitute condition of humanity . . . to the extreme limit of a descent into the hell of meaninglessness and desolation' (ibid., p. 37). For a study of Michaels' novel as a form beyond tragedy, see Annick Hillger, ` ``Afterbirth of Earth'': Messianic Materialism in Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces'. On the doubled form of the novel, see also Barbara Estrin, `Ending in the Middle: Revisioning Adoption in Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments and Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces'.

Chapter 5

Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness

In Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (1998), Marya Hornbacher writes, `I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed . . . It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back' (p. 10). This amalgam of allusions to Virgil, Dante and Lewis Carroll is a common feature of contemporary autopathographies, or memoirs of mental illness.1 Such narratives represent Hell as a condition of actual, contemporary Western existence, and not only a concept of the afterlife imagined by theologians, mythographers or writers of fiction. Unlike the second-generation Holocaust narratives that were discussed in the preceding chapter, these personal memoirs describe infernal states of which the writers have, or claim to have, first-hand knowledge and experience. Nevertheless, it is striking how frequently these autobiographical accounts of mental disorder, addiction, neurosis and psychotic breakdown are structured and narrated as journeys of descent into the underworld and return. Contemporary Western culture has not only been characterised as traumatic, as noted in the previous chapter; it has also been described as generally psychotic. Whereas the early twentieth-century subject was alienated, the postmodern subject is typically schizophrenic, according to such theorists as Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Gilles Deleuze and FeÂlix Guattari.2 As Deleuze and Guattari claim, `the schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the very limit of capitalism; he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfilment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel' (Anti-Oedipus, p. 35). If schizophrenia is indeed a `surplus product' of Western capitalism,3 its effects are also experienced by non-Western subjects as well. In Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, for example, the Bombayite Gibreel Farishta develops a form of cultural schizophrenia when he migrates to Britain; `his sense of self' becomes split `into two entities, one of which he sought heroically to suppress' (p. 340). For Gayatri Spivak, Rushdie's novel demonstrates how `empire messes

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with identity', and she gives The Satanic Verses a notional subtitle, `imperialism and schizophrenia'. Other critics, however, have objected to the appropriation of the schizophrenic as the symbol of a general cultural psychosis. In Shattered Selves, for example, James Glass argues that by making a cultural hero of the schizophrenic, Deleuze and Guattari are guilty of `distort[ing] a process that in its reality portrays loss, despair, impotence, and futility. The actual, physical face of madness is never shown in Anti-Oedipus' (p. 148). Glass may be less than accurate when he suggests that most poststructuralist descriptions of the fragmented self are celebratory; for example, the painfully disabled `schizo' of Anti-Oedipus can hardly be equated with the ecstatically dispersed self of Roland Barthes' text of bliss.4 As Mark Currie points out, for Deleuze and Guattari `the schizophrenic is not so much nature's poststructuralist sociologist as the product of a schizoid culture.'5 Nevertheless, Glass is right to remind us that genuine, individual psychosis is of an entirely different order of suffering, and needs to be clearly distinguished from the general, cultural malaise of advanced capitalist countries. The slick, morally vacuous, murderous protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991) inhabits a Hell far shallower than anyone who has actually suffered from psychotic disorder, as the memoirs discussed here amply demonstrate. Yet there are undeniable connections between actual sufferers and what Deleuze and Guattari term the schizoid cultures in which they live. In Anti-Oedipus, they suggest that `schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency' (p. 246). It is for this reason, they point out, that schizoid capitalist cultures are paradoxically so intolerant of real schizophrenics; `capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit, by substituting for it its own scale' (p. 246). Or, in the terms of the present discussion, schizophrenics and other sufferers of mental disorder inhabit the Hell that contemporary Westerners fear most, as being potentially the most familiar and the most estranging threat to Western conceptions of individual identity. Furthermore, in suggesting that schizophrenia is the exterior limit or future vanishing point of capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari call attention to the sense of displaced temporality that features so strikingly in contemporary, Western autobiographical accounts of mental illness. In Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen remembers feeling that when the patients of McLean's Hospital watched news reports of the Vietnam War, they were seeing something unfold on TV that they had already experienced for themselves:

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Things happened that had not yet happened in the world we'd come from. When they finally happened outside, we found them familiar because versions of them had already been performed in front of us. It was as if we were a provincial audience, New Haven to the real world's New York, where history could try out its next spectacle. (Girl, Interrupted, p. 28)

Kaysen goes on to describe incidents of skin scalding and bare-handed killing at the hospital which anticipated the military brutality in Vietnam and Cuba that the patients later witnessed on TV. In Gary Saul Morson's view, contemporary postmodern narrative is afflicted with the `disease of too much presentness', one of whose manifestations is a sense of `desiccated present tense', where the present is experienced as a prologue or epilogue to another time.6 In Kaysen's narrative, the psychotic patients appear to be suffering from a temporal disease that is akin to this postmodern desiccated present, but is even more closely linked to the time sense of Dante's damned souls, who can predict the future but are ignorant of the immediate, historical present. Many contemporary accounts of mental illness are strikingly reminiscent of the Hells of classical and medieval Christian katabases. In Beyond the Darkness (1995), for example, mental illness is represented as a form of living death, as Hell is for the damned souls in Dante's Inferno; Angie Fenimore writes that during her suicidal depression, `I saw myself as dead in every sense that really mattered' (Beyond the Darkness, p. 73). And in Prozac Nation (1994), Elizabeth Wurtzel recalls, `I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part . . . was a mere formality' (p. 19). If the deeply depressed are `the walking, waking dead', as Wurtzel describes them, then their condition is not unlike the shades who inhabit the Land of the Dead, paradoxically unable to die themselves (ibid., p. 19). Like the souls in Dante's Inferno who experience their metaphysical tortures viscerally, mental illness memoirs vividly convey how psychic disorder can be experienced as bodily torment. Linda Hart's Phone at Nine Just to Say You're Alive (1995) is a journal recording an elevenmonth struggle with schizophrenia, suicidal depression and psychosis. In the journal, Linda records smelling rotting corpses and imagines `infestations of vermin' on the floor and on meat left out in the open (pp. 43, 89). She feels her own body `rotting away' (p. 194) and her stomach distending with maggots (pp. 194, 206±7, 233). She associates this `hell' of physical contamination and dissolution with illustrations of Dante's Inferno which she remembers from childhood; `There were people with severed limbs sitting beside boiling swamps' (pp. 20±1).7 The landscape of her illness is similarly infernal, with `deep dark fog, murky swamp lands' such as one finds `on holiday with the Devil' (p. 20). Her sense of

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horror is pervasive and ill-defined, as Levinas describes the horror of il y a. On bad days, Linda's separate torments accumulate into a composite nightmare: `Salt water, snot, soggy tissues, huge stone, maggots, voice telling me vile things' (p. 212), a vision corresponding to what Levinas calls `the return of being to the heart of every negative movement' (`There is', p. 36). Another distinctive characteristic of late twentieth-century mental Hells may be that they feel insignificant compared to the `real thing' which, again like Levinas's il y a, is felt to have happened somewhere outside the patient's individual frame of reference. This does not lessen the suffering of those who pass through such Hells; in fact, it would appear to make it worse. Sarah Kofman described her father's death in Auschwitz as `my absolute', a personal absolute that intersected with `the absolute of history'. On the other hand, in Wasted, when Marya's mother says accusingly to her anoretic8 daughter, `you looked like an escapee from Auschwitz' (p. 175), the comparison seems shockingly incommensurate; in this case Marya's absolute worst experience fails to intersect with history's absolute. In his memoir, Lewis Wolpert describes the depressive state as `absurd' because `the feelings and thoughts of the depressive can bear so little relation to reality' (Malignant Sadness, p. 2). Yet he still thinks of depression as `the worst experience of my life. More terrible even than watching my wife die of cancer' (p. vii). In Girl, Interrupted, Kaysen feels that her psychosis is a middle-class luxury (`we were safe in our expensive, well-appointed hospital, locked up with our rages and rebellions') compared to the suffering that went on in Vietnam (`They got cracked skulls, black eyes, kicks to the kidneys' (pp. 92±3)). And yet if the modern, Western sense of identity depends on securing individual autonomy, affirming one's ordinary working and family life and avoiding suffering, as Charles Taylor suggests, then a serious mental illness may well be regarded by many Westerners as the worst form of Hell because it deprives the sufferer of his or her psychic autonomy (Sources of the Self, pp.12±13). This is, at any rate, how psychic breakdown is often perceived in Western cultures, though elsewhere it may be understood differently. In his memoir of depression, for example, Lewis Wolpert points out that the common term for depression in Japan is `interpersonal fear' (taijin kyoufu), a fear of mingling with other people lest they find your presence physically or in some other way offensive (Malignant Sadness, p. 34). Depressive Indian patients also experience more physical and fewer psychological symptoms than Western patients; for them, the primary treatments are drugs, herbal medicine and family support networks rather than psychotherapy of the individual patient (p. 168).

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But if loss of psychic autonomy merits the name of Hell in Western discourse, still the narration of mental illness in terms of a journey to Hell may strike some philosophers as misguided. To impose a narrative of any kind on madness, particularly one that describes self-loss as part of a linear journey (albeit a vertiginous one) is to `normalise', to make invisible, the psychosis itself. It might be argued that the descent journey, with its hinge-movement of conversion, its doubling back of the present on past selfhood, epitomises what all narration does to the subject; by imposing a retrospective unity on experience, it creates a false illusion of a metaphysically centred selfhood.9 Many memoirs of survival, whether of psychological or physical privation, do represent the self triumphing, sometimes naively, over adversity.10 Narrating the experience as a descent to Hell suggests that it is radically life-altering, and that its significance radiates outward to illuminate and explain the whole of a life, although the rest of the life story may remain untold in the illness memoir.11 From her sojourn in Hell, Angie Fenimore thus acquires an orthodox Christian perspective on human life when she discovers that `our time is but a heartbeat in the eternal scheme of creation, and yet it is the crucial moment of truth, the turning point. It determines how our spirits will exist forever' (Beyond the Darkness, p. 130). Just as the brief span of a human life determines the fate of an eternal soul, so the descent to Hell is the critical turning point in a human life which can determine its overall shape and meaning. Regarded in this light, the descent journey into madness is therefore particularly suspect from a poststructuralist perspective, for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, Derrida holds that madness is unrepresentable in any Western discourse including the language of psychiatry, because that discourse itself is rational.12 And on the other hand, Baudrillard argues against the narrativisation of the descent, and particularly the attempt to recover a self from the abyss. In `Paroxysm', for example, he urges us to `push the paradox to the limit', the implication being that one should embrace psychotic disorder rather than resist its disorienting effects.13 But both these positions, the one insisting madness is beyond language and the other that refuses to contemplate a return from madness, are in a sense as absolutist as the metaphysical position that would insist on fully present, entirely coherent selfhood. Madness is beyond language, but by the same token, everything is beyond language, since the signifier always falls short of the signified. As for Baudrillard's Nietzschean argument that radical philosophy should `push to the limit' of cultural breakdown, it seems to me untenable in a twenty-first-century context, when the world has already witnessed mass insanity beyond the limit at Auschwitz, Hiroshima and elsewhere.

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Of what value, then, is the organisation of psychotic disorder into a narrative of infernal descent and return? At a general level, contemporary studies of the relationship between narrative and medicine suggest that narrating the experience of madness may have a therapeutic effect on the psychotic patient. This theory is well supported by Hart's journal which, she writes, `has kept me on the edge of sanity. Without it, I believe I would have tipped over into the chasm of madness from where I could not be reached' (Phone at Nine, p. 205). In this journal, the quest for a coherent self is pursued day by day rather than imposed retrospectively as part of a polemical resistance to the experience of psychosis. To the charge that therapy places too much emphasis on the patient's recovery of socially normative behaviour, one might cite any number of illness memoirs where the recovered patient is far from socially conformist. In Phone at Nine, for example, the reader witnesses Linda emerging as a Farinatan rebel in Hell;14 the more she recovers, the more she challenges her institutionalisation. She refutes her diagnosis as inaccurate (p. 231), criticises the inadequacy of her therapeutic treatment (p. 238) and resists the staff's tendency to reduce her from person to a patient with no rights (p. 208). One could, however, cite contrary evidence suggesting that illness memoirs do not so much cure the patient as relive his or her self-dispersal in language. In what Andrew Wernick has aptly described as the `soft inferno of simulation', memoirs about food addiction can evince a corresponding addiction to linguistic excess.15 Hornbacher's memoir exhibits, at a formal and stylistic level, all the traits with which she characterises people with eating disorders (`extreme', `highly competitive', `perfectionistic', `tending toward excess' (p. 6)). Thus, for example, Wasted has two different subtitles, quotations from other katabatic writers heading every chapter, effectively two endings and innumerable fatal, revelatory turning points (despite her explicit disavowal that the memoir will contain any sudden revelations at all (pp. 279, 280).16 In a similar form of simulation, memoirs about depression can be `difficult, demanding', `self-involved' and `self-indulgent', all characteristics that are symptomatic of depressive illness, according to Elizabeth Wurtzel in Prozac Nation (p. 316). Moreover, it may be that contemporary readers devour such memoirs, not out of an altruistic desire to understand mental disorder better, but so as to simulate the experience of illness for themselves (and hence, on the analogy of how capitalism displaces schizophrenia, to block out real sufferers, or the thought of actually developing the illness in reality17). So while for some, the narration of the descent is a form of therapy, for others it can be a continuation of the Hell of illness. All the same, it is not

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necessary to choose between the two opposing philosophical positions outlined in the first chapter: descent as either self-possession or dispossession. Of relevance here is Daniel Dennett's striking definition of selfhood in terms of the Newtonian principle of gravity. While a centre of gravity `has no mass . . . no color . . . no physical properties at all, except for spatio-temporal location', it nevertheless performs a `defined, well delineated and well behaved role within physics'.18 So too, the self may be understood as an organisational impulse, one that gathers itself into a notional centre, or perhaps more than one centre, of gravity. If centred selves, like centres of gravity, are fictions, they are nevertheless useful and functional ones. As we know from the overturning of Dante and Virgil at the end of Inferno, descent narratives specialise in tracing the self's journey past a gravitational centre; the strange lightness of the damned, discussed in Chapter 2, is often a sign this zero point has been passed. Pursuing Dennett's analogy, we might further describe the descent to madness as a journey through and beyond the self's gravitational centre. Dante's ascent from Hell may be understood either as a journey which doubles back on itself and/or one which carries on down (in Dante's case, to the opposite hemisphere). Likewise, while katabatic illness memoirs generally conclude with a re-ascent from Hell, there is considerable ambiguity surrounding the orientation of the return journey. In mental illness memoirs, as in other katabatic narratives, there must be a return, but it need not be the same self who returns. Within the katabatic framework, then, there is room for much variation in the way psychosis and/or the recovery of health may be narrated. Far from evincing transcendent certainty about their surviving selves, most mental illness memoirs in fact express doubt whether their authors will be able to maintain a sense of `normality', and often fall short of explaining precisely how they recovered their health. In such texts, the boundary between normal and underworld selves is often represented as extremely unstable and permeable. Moreover, as we shall see in the following section, the journey down is not often conceived of as a single pathway, with a singular revelation and return. On the contrary, mental illness is represented as a descent to the underworld on a number of different levels, some of which are resolvable and some not.

Down the rabbit hole Freud's concept of the tiered psyche, with the conscious mind overlying the unconscious, not surprisingly weighs heavily in narratives which represent mental disorder as a state into which one descends. In other

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places and other periods, insanity may have been experienced as an aerial flight or the touch of God's hand, but since Freud, autobiographers of mental illness most often evoke a dark, downward journey.19 The Freudian concept of the unconscious is usually found hybridised with other katabatic models, notably Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (1897).20 Writers and directors, such as Jan SÏvankmajer in his surrealist film, Alice (NeÏco z Alenky, 1987), have reinterpreted the nonsense logic governing Carroll's Wonderland as an expression of the illogic of the psyche's underworld. `Down the rabbit hole', the title of the first chapter of Alice, becomes a metaphor for the descent into the Freudian unconscious in many twentieth-century narratives of mental disorder. In his short film, Down to the Cellar (1982), SÏvankmajer conveys even more effectively than in NeÏco z Alenky the sense of a child's innocence under threat through exposure to a subterraneous world of sexual and psychological violence. In Hornbacher's memoir, all three of these literary intertexts (Stevenson and both Carrolls) combine to produce an image of eating disorder as `a shimmery, fun house mirrorcovered hell' (p. 7) in which `the person who jumped through the door and grabbed me . . . was, unfortunately, me. My double image, the evil skinny chick who hisses, Don't eat' (p. 10). In mental illness memoirs, the experience of illness can be represented as Hell on a number of different levels. Frequently, the mental institution, or more precisely a graded series of institutions, constitutes the material world of Hell through which a mental patient descends. For example, Hart's journal represents the asylum and psychiatric ward in which she is hospitalised as a material inferno with upper and lower realms. The journal begins in medias inferni, in the Lower Hell of Brendon Ward, a secure unit for dangerous patients, where Linda is detained after attempting suicide. Linda calls Brendon a `hell hole' (p. 37) and believes she has been sent there as punishment (p. 14). Her incarceration is indeed infernal, rather than purgatorial, in the sense that it is patently not intended to cure the patient; Brendon Ward provides constant surveillance and drug treatment, but offers no psychotherapy or even conversation to its inmates. Linda is later moved to a psychiatric ward in a general hospital. This Upper Hell is presided over by a consultant psychiatrist Graham Drake, who doubles as Charon and Minos, administering drug treatments (which Linda thinks are too extreme) and ordering certain patients to be ferried across to Brendon. In this Upper Hell, the `punishments', though less severe, appear to be equally arbitrary and unjust. Patients are refused information about the long-term side effects of their drug treatments so that, while being exhorted to show adult self-control

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over their symptoms, they are required to submit like children to their medication (p. 263). Such gradation of mental institutions and psychiatric wards can be found in other memoirs, such as Carol North's Welcome, Silence and Hornbacher's Wasted. On another level, the illness itself is represented as a Hell into which the patient descends, enduring a succession of worsening symptoms, and these too may be graded in the manner of Dante's Inferno. For example, Hornbacher represents bulimia and anorexia as, respectively, Upper and Lower Hell. With bulimia, Marya enters the upper circles of Hell for the violent (bulimia `acknowledges the body explicitly, violently' (p. 93)), becoming both the perpetrator and victim of the damage inflicted on her body. Echoing Dante's shift from the fiery regions of upper circles to the frozen lake of Circle 9 (Lowest Hell), Marya describes her passage from bulimia to anorexia thus: Past the border of a fiery life lies the netherworld. I can trace this road, which took me through places so hot the very air burned the lungs. I did not turn back. I pressed on, and eventually passed over the border, beyond which lies a place that is wordless and cold, so cold that it, like mercury, burns a freezing blue flame. (p. 95)

In contrast to Dante's fearful pilgrim, however, Marya longs to reach this ultimate stage in the downward journey. With her inverted, underworldly perspective, she interprets the chill of anorexia as a `strange state of grace' (p. 6), which ensures a `complete removal of the bearer from the material realm' (p. 153). This `state of grace' is represented in quasi-religious terms, as Marya compares herself to the medieval martyr, Saint Margaret of Cortona, who starved herself to death in 1297 (Cortona's `A Letter to her Confessor' is quoted in Wasted, pp. 125±6). While Cortona died for her faith, Marya suggests that her desire for grace has been deflected onto the body through cultural pressures; `had I lived in a culture where ``thinness'' was not regarded as a strange state of grace, I might have sought out other means of attaining that grace' (pp. 6±7). A third pathway through Hell is the route traced by the patient, sometimes guided by a friend, doctor or therapist occupying the Virgilian role, to recover an original source of the psychosis. Hart's journal, for example, documents the descent through memory to confront an early source of trauma (her Virgil is Sheila, a friend who has survived psychic disorder herself). These analeptic passages are set off from the rest of the journal in italic case. While Hart excavates buried memories, recovering them in reverse chronological order according to the classic Freudian model, Lauren Slater constructs her earliest memories in her unreliably narrated memoir, Spasm, to which we will return below.21 On a fourth

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pathway, the body itself may participate dynamically in the descent journey, like that of the medieval sinner's body, described by Coelius Rhodiginus `in which tides run riot, and gales rage'.22 In Wasted, Hornbacher reflects that eating disorders may be a way of transforming an otherwise banal, shapeless existence into `a GRAND EPIC' (p. 281). In her anoretic phase, her body becomes the epic Marya longs for; she begins a countdown of her weight, and observes her body disappearing down the numerological scale: and then I hit bottom and thought: I think I'm dead. Finally. Fifty-two. Then everything goes white.

(p. 271)

Here, Marya's self-willed disappearing act also demonically imitates the shape-shifting of Carroll's Alice, who (in a bulimic phase?) burgeons to a height of nine feet and then anoretically shrinks to the size of a mouse. When Alice realises that holding the White Rabbit's fan is reducing her in size, she drops it immediately, `just in time to save herself from shrinking away altogether' (Alice in Wonderland, p. 17). Marya's self-inflicted white encounter brings her similarly close to the vanishing point. As we can see, mental illness narratives may trace different paths on their downward journeys. Nevertheless all the memoirs discussed in this chapter have one striking feature in common: the traits that take the protagonist down to Hell are, by and large, the same traits by which they emerge (if they emerge) from Hell at the end. In Marya's case, the trait that is subject to katabatic inversion is `obstreperousness' which, as she herself explains, `as a character trait is extremely exploitable in the energetic annihilation of one's own body and individual self, [but] is also very useful in other pursuits. For example, life' (p. 277). In the remainder of the chapter, I would like to focus in greater detail on three memoirs of mental illness: Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, an account of personality disorder; Carol North's Welcome, Silence, which is based on the experience of schizophrenia; and Lauren Slater's Spasm, which deals with epilepsy. In this discussion, for the sake of clarity, I will refer to the actual writer (including the writer of any extradiegetic material such as Forewords and Afterwords) by surname and the narrator and former-self-as-protagonist by first name, while fully acknowledging the fact that the clear-cut distinction between protagonist, narrator and author of an autobiographical narrative is one of the first things such memoirs call into question. They also invite the reader to ask whether a life-narrative can ever be `about' a single illness, or if the

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specific names we give to mental disorders in any way account for the complexity of the sufferer's experience. All three of these memoirs problematise commonly accepted Western cultural distinctions between mad and sane, outside and inside, reliable and unreliable histories and discourse, in ways that are sometimes reminiscent of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s, notably in the work of R. D. Laing and David Cooper. All three, moreover, follow the dynamic of katabatic inversion, in which an unexpected shift of perspective transforms an infernal impasse into an exit route, or alternatively an entrance into a newly enticing underworld.

Parallel worlds and protest culture: Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted In Girl, Interrupted (1995), Susanna Kaysen describes her two-year stay at McLean's Psychiatric Hospital in Boston, MA, at the age of 19±20, during which period she suffered from an illness vaguely diagnosed as `character or personality disorder' (p. 59). Narrated twenty-five years later, the journey of excavation in this memoir consists mainly of travelling the distance from present narrator to past self. In a prefatory biographical note, Kaysen explains that her memories of the period came back to her only many years later, after she'd obtained her 350-page patient file from the hospital, which she managed only with the help of a lawyer. If a lawyer was needed, the file was presumably not obtained without a struggle, and by including frequent extracts from these medical documents in her first-person narrative, Kaysen reproduces on a textual level the hostility between her former self and her doctors. The inclusion of transcribed medical records in the midst of her first-person narrative duplicates the way in which, as a young girl, her life story was interrupted by impersonal, authoritative discourses. But more than the descent into memory, the onset of the disorder itself is represented in Kaysen's memoir as a threshold crossing into another world. Echoing Virgil's sibyl, she begins with an address to her readers: `people ask, How did you get in there? . . . All I can tell them is, It's easy' (p. 5). For Kaysen, mental disorder is one parallel universe among many worlds of the powerlessness, `worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not it' (p. 5). In the parallel world of mental disorder, she writes, `the laws of physics are suspended' and bodies occupy time and space differently (p. 6). Susanna tells us that her `insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast'. As in many other

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representations of infernal time in prisons, camps and asylums, here the `slow' form of insanity is experienced as a temporal viscosity: `Experience is thick. Perceptions are thickened and dulled. Time is slow, dripping slowly through the clogged filter of thickened perception' (p. 75). Alternatively, as in representations of advanced capitalist time such as Alasdair Gray's Lanark, the other form of insanity is experienced as temporal velocity: `there is too much perception, and beyond the plethora of perceptions, a plethora of thoughts about the perceptions and about the fact of having perceptions' (p. 75). Like the commodity emptied of use value in late capitalism, these once meaningful thoughts are made meaningless through excessive, accelerated circulation (p. 78).23 Whether fast or slow, the thoughts circulating in Susanna's mind are psychologically and/or theologically hellish: `here comes the I'm-no-good thought. That takes care of today . . . The next thought, the next day, is I'm the Angel of Death' (p. 77). Kaysen's representation of `crazy' time and space thus bear some of the key hallmarks of infernal chronotopes encountered elsewhere in this study. In Gracefully Insane, McLean's is described as `the hospital of choice for the occasionally mad artists of Boston'.24 As is fitting for a graduate of McLean's, whose former patients include Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell, Kaysen is keenly aware of the generic categories of narrative in which her descent memoir might be classed. In `Etiology', she invites the reader to choose an interpretative frame for her protagonist: This person is (pick one): 1. on a perilous journey from which we can learn much when he or she returns; 2. possessed by (pick one): a) the gods b) God [. . .] d) the Devil [. . .] 5. bad, and must be isolated and punished, 6. ill, and must be isolated and treated by [. . .] 7. ill, and must spend the next seven years talking about it; 8. a victim of society's low tolerance for deviant behaviour; 9. sane in an insane world; 10. on a perilous journey from which he or she may never return. (Girl, Interrupted p. 15)

Besides satirising a number of clicheÂs about mental illness, this `Etiology' also concisely summarises the major late twentieth-century variations on the traditional narrative of the descent to Hell. Modern Hells are both material and psychological realms; the protagonists of modern descents are classed as either `ill' or `bad' or `victims'; they feel themselves to be

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supernaturally possessed; God is glimpsed in Hell rather than Paradise; they expose the unreality or insanity of the everyday world; and they `may or may not' return from the underworld. Representing her mental illness as a quest journey, Kaysen is inevitably influenced by Dantean themes and images, but Carroll's underworlds also provide an important intertext. Kaysen's memoir takes its title from a painting by Vermeer, in which a teenage girl looks up from her music lesson, as if at some intervention outside the frame. Susanna sees the painting hanging in the Frick Gallery in Boston first as a teenager herself and then sixteen years later. The girl in the painting is effectively Kaysen's Alice, looking out at her younger self from the wrong side of the looking glass, and warning her (p. 166) against `tumbling down a shaft into Wonderland' (p. 41). Only on the later visit does Susanna realise how the girl in the painting foreshadowed her own mental breakdown; both were `interrupted in the music of being seventeen' (p. 167). While there are no direct references to Alice herself in this memoir, there is nevertheless an insistent Carrollian theme about the dangerous attractions of tunnels and doorways leading to `crazy' worlds. Thus Kaysen writes, `most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening?' (p. 5, see also p. 159). Like Wurtzel in Prozac Nation, Kaysen records a specific shift from thinking about mental disorder as a playful non-reality, to `real' insanity (see p. 104). Once across the threshold, however, the `crazy' world appears less like a Victorian nursery fantasy and more like the two-tiered inferno found in other illness memoirs: `our doublelocked doors, our steel-mesh window screens, our kitchen stocked with plastic knives . . . our bathroom doors that didn't lock: All this was medium security. Maximum security was another world' (p. 47). Like Dante's devils and damned souls, the hospital staff are as much Helldwellers as the patients. For example, Susanna's companions agree that `Mrs McWeeney [a nurse] was a crazy person who had to earn a living. We weren't trying to get her decertified, we just wanted her off our ward' (p. 90). The various patient disorders are implicitly hierarchised, like sins: `Cynthia was depressive; Polly and Georgina were schizophrenic; I had a character disorder' (p. 59). Susanna initially thinks of her illness as one of the lighter `sins' in this tiered system of disorders: `when I got my diagnosis it didn't sound serious, but after a while it sounded more ominous than other people's' (p. 59). Like SÏvankmajer's little girl in the cellar, Susanna soon understands her predicament to be very serious. But her experience of disempowerment in hospital paradoxically

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produces a strong, dissenting voice. What she initially dissents from is her own self, or the self that produces `a Muzac medley of self-hatred themes' (p. 78). But eventually, she also dissents from her doctors' diagnosis, both as a patient at the time and later as narrator. She challenges the account in her files of the consultation which led to her admittance to McLean's; `That doctor says he interviewed me for three hours. I say it was twenty minutes' (p. 71). Unlike North's Welcome, Silence and Slater's Spasm, considered below, these discrepancies are not put down to patient delusion. Her own alternative account is given full, authoritative weight, and readers are challenged to choose between the two: `Do You Believe Him or Me?' (p. 71). Later, she points to the rift between medical treatments, on the one hand, of a mind ± which is understood as a system of vertical tiers, divided into superego, ego and id ± and on the other hand, of a brain ± which is comprised of chemicals and wired like an electric circuit (pp. 141±2). This dissenting stance also has an insistent political dimension. Together the patients watch news coverage of the Vietnam War, and they empathise with the powerless who seem to be falling into a parallel world like theirs, `tiny bodies [who] fell to the ground on our TV screen: black people, young people, Vietnamese people, poor people' (p. 92). They watch the war for signs of a power inversion that would signal a change in their own lives: `we were expectant. The world was about to flip, the meek were about to inherit the earth or, more precisely, wrest it from the strong, and we, the meekest and weakest, would be heirs to that vast estate' (p. 93). Most of the patients are deeply upset, for themselves as well as the tiny screen figures, when this fails to happen. The older narrator obviously has a clearer understanding of what was actually happening in the war than did the patients watching TV at the time. But there is a continuity of attitude between protagonist and narrator, a basically left-wing scepticism that informs her rational as well as mentally disordered thoughts. In fact it is this dissenting frame of mind, or `state of contrariety' that seems to propel her into madness and McLean's in the first instance: `All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No. // So the opportunity to be incarcerated was just too good to resist. It was a very big No' (p. 42). Yet in 1967, the year of her admittance, many `sane' people were saying `no' politically, to the American wars in Vietnam and Cuba, and socially, to the accepted sexual mores of earlier eras. And in `Elementary Topography', Kaysen implies that her doctor admits her to hospital as much for their political differences as for the state of her health: Even in lives like his, professional lives lived out in the suburbs behind shrubbery, there was a strange undertow, a tug from the other world ± the

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drifting, drugged-out, no-last-name youth universe ± that knocked people off balance. One could call it `threatening,' to use his language . . . It's a mean world out there . . . He can't in good conscience send her back into it. (pp. 39±40)

Susanna does enter this other world, though not in a manner she expects. But in her critique of her diagnosis and the deconstruction of her medical notes, Kaysen implicitly sustains the dissenting dialogue between overand underworlders, even after her return to health. On one level, this is a memoir with a clear resolution, and a definite recovery to health, even though Kaysen expresses this in sceptical tones (`my misery has been transformed into common unhappiness, so by Freud's definition I have achieved mental health' (p. 154)). The recovered Susanna is extremely wary of borderline states, with their shimmery tunnels leading back down into Wonderland. She insists on a clear separation between herself then and now, between the crazy and the sane: `insane people: I had a good nose for them and I didn't want to have anything to do with them. I still don't' (p. 125). But Kaysen ironises this recovered self's position, by overstating and exaggerating her intolerance of ambivalence. What the memoir as a whole suggests is that the underworld perspective, that of the politically and socially powerless, may well be the more insightful or truer one. Vermeer's painting, finally, epitomises this underworldly vantage point: `the girl at her music sits in another sort of light, the fitful, overcast light of life, by which we see ourselves and others only imperfectly, and seldom' (p. 168). Susanna spends a finite time in the underworld, two years of her adolescence, but twenty-five years later, she retains something of her underworldly perspective on her girlhood illness, the medical establishment and US politics in the 1960s, as well as the 1990s, the time of her narration.

The schizophrenic HyperReal: Carol North's Welcome, Silence Carol North is a psychiatrist who suffered from severe symptoms of schizophrenia as a younger woman. Her memoir, Welcome, Silence: My Triumph over Schizophrenia (1987) describes the onset of symptoms in her high-school years, the periods of hospitalisation and psychiatric treatment which interrupted her college and medical school educations, the worsening of the symptoms, and finally her unexpected return to health. In the Preface, North describes the memoir as her `personal story', recalled partly from her diary of the time, her own and others' memories and her medical records (p. 11). As the subtitle of the work indicates, this is a memoir with a strong linear narrative, tracing a

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descent into illness, with threshold crossing into a supernatural world, a prolonged period on the `rock-bottom' of mental illness (p. 121) and, very much in line with one strand of the katabatic tradition, a miraculous and singular re-ascent to the ordinary world. The medical records have been assimilated into the linear narrative, unlike other memoirs that reproduce medical documents verbatim in order to challenge them more polemically (such as Girl, Interrupted, Hornbacher's Wasted and Jenefer Shute's Life Size, a fictional memoir of anorexia). In Welcome, Silence, half-remembered conversations are expanded into fictional dialogue. The memoir is set within a frame narrative in which Carol, recovered from her illness and now a medical student, enters a psychiatric ward for schizophrenics and confronts her own memories and fears. So this is a narrative which, on the one hand, preserves a very clear boundary between then and now, sick protagonist and healthy narrator, and on the other hand, evinces deep understanding of, and empathy for, those on the other side of the boundary, both her former self and present sufferers of schizophrenia. In the frame narrative, the first patient Carol meets says to her, ` ``You-are-no-doctor-Carol-North-you-are-the-Devil'' ' (p. 21). To which her response is, `I thought he looked like the devil' (p. 22). This lightly comic touch is typical of North's memoir. The exchange encapsulates both the contiguities and the gaps between their perspectives; while each thinks the other is devilish, only for the patient is this a reality (not `looked like' but `you are'). Likewise, North's descriptions of her schizophrenic hallucinations are astonishingly vivid and immediate. But at the same time, the narrator preserves an ironic distance from her younger self, a distance heightened by her shift of roles from patient to trainee doctor in the intervening years. As a patient, Carol sees the world in terms of gods and devils, but as narrator, she maintains a balanced view of the medical profession, voicing criticism and praise of particular treatments and doctors. Far from glamorising her schizophrenic symptoms, North makes us feel the welcome of her return to ordinary consciousness. Here too the psychiatric hospital provides the physical topography for the descent journey. Like other memoirists, Carol associates the smells of the psychiatric ward with feelings of panic and hopelessness, `an overwhelming sense of despondency bordering on despair' (p. 20). Her admittance to hospital is represented as a threshold crossing into another reality: `A set of double doors swallowed me head first. Is this the entrance to Infinity? Here goes . . .' (p. 89). The hospital belongs to an earlier era, `some medieval mistake' (p. 88) in which infinite worlds are conceivable. Whether she is crossing into Hell or Heaven, Carol is at first

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unsure; `I didn't know whether existence in the Other World would be divinely magnificent, beyond human description, like heaven, or whether it would be like the worst imaginable hell' (p. 101). But if the latter, then her heroic task is to resist; `if it threatened to be hellish, I would have to try to prevent it' (p. 101). But more important than any physical topography is Carol's representation of schizophrenia itself as a nether world. In her memoir, schizophrenia is affiliated with the land of the dead, and as in medieval theology, this land is morally hierarchised into distinct regions of good and evil. As a child, Carol recalls, `I sensed a spiritual connection between myself and the dead' (p. 52). When listening to the Beatles song, `Here Comes The Sun', she would see an otherworldly, morally duplicitous sun, which `switched back and forth between being a good sun and an evil sun threatening to engulf me' (p. 65). To the schizophrenic, this other world is considered to be the real one, or as Carol calls it, the HyperReal. North's use of this term appears to telescope together two concepts: the Platonic Real, or the ideal world of forms of which our reality is but a distorted reflection, and Baudrillard's Hyperreal, the condition of postmodern capitalism in which `the real is no longer possible'.25 For Baudrillard, hyperreality is not Plato's idea of truth beyond the surface of things, but rather a hyped-up pseudo-reality, in which the image `bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum' (p. 173). To the narrator Carol, the delusions of her former self are pseudo-realities or simulacra. But to Carol the schizophrenic patient, her delusions are real in the Platonic sense. Hence her quest is to get behind the surface of the ordinary world, to access this hidden realm of ideal forms. She explains that her attempted suicide was an effort to cross over into the Hyperreal; `mine was a case of torment caused by my selective sensitivity to planes of existence beyond ordinary reality. The point of my actions hadn't been expressly to kill myself . . . The real issue was my need to break through to the ultimate reality' (p. 70). This ultimate reality also resembles the Freudian unconscious, in that irreconcilable truths coexist alongside each other; `on the Other Side I found that incompatible Truths could coexist without creating dissonance' (p. 190). Thus in Carol's hallucinations, the worlds of Freud, Plato and Baudrillard are hybridised to become part of a private, psychic drama. Carol resists her doctors' initial diagnoses, claiming `my problem was special, like no one else's in the world; in fact, it was out of this world' (p. 107). Like Neo in The Matrix,she feels she has a heroic role to play in mediating between the two worlds; either she has to disabuse us of our faith in a false reality (if the other world is good), or (if it is evil) she has to resist the other world's incursion on ours.

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The unpleasant feeling that things are not as they seem crept over me . . . I realized that special relativity had seized the world . . . and transported all people through time and space into the realm of the dead. Only somehow I hadn't made it; I had been dropped off prematurely in limbo, in a parallel existence where I was able to see what had happened to everyone else and yet was incapable of doing anything about it. (p. 78)

The patient Carol thus understands her position in the HyperReal world to be that of the descent hero in Hell: an observer rather than a participant, a weighted soul among the weightless shades of the afterlife, exempt from judgement but also powerless to change any aspect of the netherword. Her Dantean role is not to intervene, but to understand and communicate her unique vision: `only God and certain enlightened beings could absorb such contradictions without imploding in on themselves like a black hole' (p. 190). But despite her special role as observer and mediator between the two worlds, Carol is not exempt from physical torture in HyperReality, which in this respect is more infernal than paradisal. Like Susanna in Girl, Interrupted, as well as the souls driven by tempests in Dante's Vestibule of Hell, she suffers from an inner sense of accelerated time that makes all rest impossible: `my body was electric, buzzing: a sixty-cycle hum, serving as conductive material in a communications network that allowed forty billion messages to zoom back and forth between parallel universes and Other Worlds' (p. 116). Time also `accordions itself' between meals, leaving her no space or desire to eat (p. 117). Added to this, are the hostile voices which, as in Hart's memoir, seem to want to fragment her mentally and physically. ` ``We're winding up your muscles'' ', they tell her, ` ``Tighter and tighter and tighter, till they'll tear away from your bones'' ' (p. 120). Like Linda Hart, too, she feels her body is housing gigantic, swelling insects that would eventually burst from her organs (p. 127). What distinguishes Carol North's memoir from many others, however, is the humour with which she conveys her experience of this terrifying, HyperReal dimension. Often, this is expressed through the use of free indirect discourse, which creates an ironic distance between the two Carols, the younger patient and the older narrating self. Thus in the following example, one hears the narrator's disbelief even as she records the protagonist's insistence on credibility. The protagonist Carol is standing on broken glass, having smashed a vending machine in an attempt to pinpoint the source of its humming, Although the connection was subtle, I was astute; I could see the master plan here. I was standing on a cosmic junctional point where Other Worlds crossed through ordinary existence, and the broken glass was my ticket to a great seat in the auditorium of Infinity. (p. 135)

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At other times, the humour is broadly farcical, as she describes the antics ± a word that in itself associates theatrical farce with madness ± of the other patients on the chronic ward. On the day of their first, apprehensive visit to the ward, there is a commotion among the patients that confirms her parents' worst preconceptions about mental illness: `Just at this inappropriate moment, the greasy meatloaf lady came running through the dayroom without a stitch of clothing on, sat right down on top of a depressed fat lady who was passively vegetating in an easy chair, and then urinated right on the poor lady's lap' (p. 113). This kind of demonic, grotesque farce is characteristic of Dante's so-called `gargoyle' cantos (Inferno, 21±2), in which devils and damned souls chase each other through vats of boiling tar. It is a gallows humour that finds release from suffering through explosive laughter. Infernal farce of this kind is also a marked feature of Keenan's hostage memoir, An Evil Cradling, as well as many other accounts of mental torment.26 The outcome of Carol's psychomachia is not prescripted, or not, at any rate, from her (the patient's) point of view. Unlike Fenimore's Beyond the Darkness, it is not bound to a theological or psychoanalytic explanatory narrative. At an advanced stage of the illness, she recalls how `the Beings inserted cognizance into my head, the realization that my own self had dissipated into God and dispersed as a drop of water into a rain puddle. Suddenly I hated God, I hated being God. I had to get back to being myself' (p. 190). The inversion of perspective that starts her on the road to health comes from within the delusionary mentality of her illness (`I hated being God. I had to get back'). The narrator Carol never evinces any doubt that her miraculous escape from this tortuous HyperReality is to be welcomed. After the failure of many different kinds of treatment, both chemical and psychoanalytic, over a period of eight years, she is finally, quite suddenly cured by renal dialysis. The treatment lasts for twenty weeks, but her symptoms clear up after only two weeks. Carol writes, `for days I marveled that the Meanings and the Meanings behind Meanings had vanished' (p. 309). In contrast to Baudrillard (as paraphrased by Wernick), North represents the `soft inferno' of the HyperReal as a region with specific limits, beyond which lies ordinary reality. It is neither a metaphysical nor a general, cultural condition to which we are fatally bound. Nevertheless, Carol's recovery is represented as exceptional and unexpected; when the same treatment is administered to other patients, it fails to produce similar results. While doubts remain about the medical explanation, the memoir as a whole suggests that, as we saw in the example above, Carol recovers through exercising precisely those characteristics which were symptomatic of her illness. Just as in her delusional phase she saw herself

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occupying a unique role as mediator between two cosmoi, so after her recovery, she feels that she has a special calling to the psychiatric profession. In this profession, as the frame narrative suggests, her particular role will be to mediate between two worlds, having an intimate knowledge and experience of both. In the return to the frame, she relates how a schizophrenic patient tells her, ` ``You seem to understand everything I say ± and I can tell you mean it right from your heart. You've helped me more than any doctor I've ever had in the last twenty years'' ' (p. 314). While a patient, she had demonstrated maniacal energy, once cycling ninety-five miles in scorching heat, and well into the night, just to visit her doctor in a neighbouring city (p. 159). But it is the same marathon energy that makes her determined to keep out of institutions whenever she can, that drives her to apply to one medical school after another, although many reject her because of her history of schizophrenia. A chorus of doctors describe her as unusually determined (p. 142), `intensely motivated' (p. 139), with `too much motivation, drive, and goal-directedness' for a typical, schizophrenic patient (p. 315). Medically, this gives rise to questions about whether the diagnosis of schizophrenia was correct in her case. In terms of narrative logic, it raises questions about the carefully preserved boundary between Carol the patient and Carol the doctor. While being refused entry to medical school, Carol never has any selfdoubt that her mission is to help people in this line of work. She writes, `Granted I might have looked crazy to others, but I knew better' (p. 160). But against whom is the irony of the indirect discourse directed in this case? Is `knowing better' a sign of her craziness or lucidity in her illness? Once again, the narrative provides an example of katabatic inversion rather than transcendent conversion; the protagonist survives through exercising infernal capacities, but in an inverted direction, away from escape and towards participation in the ordinary world.

Falling into grace: Lauren Slater's Spasm: A Memoir with Lies Lauren Slater's Spasm: A Memoir with Lies (2000) is an autobiography of epilepsy told by an unreliable narrator. In the Afterward, as well as in various asides to the reader in the memoir itself, Slater insists that the narrator who goes by her name is indeed her autobiographical self. But as a child of the postmodernist era, she believes that autobiographies can lay claim to no more than a `narrative truth' about the experience of illness, as she explains in the Afterword (p. 219).27 Unlike North, Slater does not

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attempt to reconcile her subjective experience with an objective, clinical diagnosis, nor does her memoir claim to be `rooted in the latest scientific ``evidence''' (p. 223). Throughout Spasm, Slater gives the name of `epilepsy' to her experience of psychic upheaval, `the subtleties and horrors and gaps in my past for which I have never been able to find words' (pp. 219±20). But her panics, seizures and blackouts also stem from a more general, existential fear about the lack of solid ground beneath her feet, a moral framework or consensually acknowledged truth. In this respect, Slater's memoir provides another contrast with the two memoirs discussed above. For Carol North, there is a normal, ordinary reality beyond the Hell of schizophrenic HyperReality, just as for Susanna Kaysen there exists a moral world beyond the demonic insanity that took the US into war in Vietnam: we may not yet have emerged from that insane world-view, but her critique implies that a moral, non-infernal world does exist and that we could conceivably return to it. In contrast, Slater's memoir registers the modern subject's fear of emptiness, of there being no world beyond the present, unstable, epileptic one. As Charles Taylor puts it, the loss of a given, moral framework in twentieth-century experience can produce `a terrifying emptiness, a kind of vertigo, or even a fracturing of our world and body-space' (Sources of the Self, p. 18). In Spasm, Lauren fears this shiftiness, the lack of any fundamental truth or moral framework, in her relationships ± particularly with her mother, but also with herself and her slippery, true-or-false memories of past selves. Partway through the memoir, Lauren records being diagnosed with Munchausen's disease, or compulsive lying. Within the metaphorical framework provided by these two psychic disorders, epilepsy and Munchausen's, Slater attempts to convey how it feels to inhabit a self in whom one has no basic trust, a self who begins her life-story with the provocative, doubt-inducing line, `I exaggerate' (p. 3). As Alasdair MacIntyre writes of secular moderns generally, Lauren is on a `quest' ± for a believable, moral framework and a trustworthy self.28 On the basis of this existential uncertainty, Slater argues in the Afterword, `there is only one kind of illness memoir that I can see to write, and that's a slippery, playful, impish, exasperating text, shaped, if it could be, like a question mark' (p. 223). In the context of the present discussion, what is particularly striking about Slater's memoir is that, while illness may be `the ultimate narrative' (p. 222), the ultimate illness narrative is one that can be shaped as a journey of descent and return. Her memoir is divided into four parts, named after the four stages of an epileptic seizure, which together trace a classic katabatic movement from threshold crossing (`onset') and dissolution of selfhood (`rigid stage') to zero point (`convulsion') and return

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(`recovery'). In `onset', she describes her difficult relationship with her parents: her father, a brilliant but volatile teacher of Hebrew, and her clever, frustrated mother, `a hostess, a housewife, a schemer, an ideologue, [who] wanted to free the Russian Jews, educate the Falsaschias, fly on the Concorde, drink at the Ritz' (p. 5). As a child Lauren develops symptoms of epilepsy, and finding that they appeal to her mother's sense of melodrama, she learns to exaggerate the attacks. She is sent to St Christopher's, a Catholic school named after the patron saint of epileptics, in which epileptic children are taught how to fall without hurting themselves. In `Part 2: the rigid stage', her epilepsy worsens; diagnosed with Munchausen's, she also undergoes, or lies about undergoing, an operation on her brain which appears to cure the grand mal seizures. In `Part 3: the convulsive stage', she attends a school for young writers in Vermont, and has an obsessive affair with one of the instructors, also named Christopher. And in `Part 4: the stage of recovery', she attends Alcoholics Anonymous sessions, inspiring the group with a dramatically staged confession; when she finally admits she is not an alcoholic, they gently refuse to believe her real confession. One important way in which Slater's memoir differs from Baudrillard's Nietzchean postmodernism with its exhortation to embrace the limit is that in Spasm the protagonist desperately wants to inhabit a solid, dependable, fact-based reality. She struggles against a continual process whereby the facts of her life are exposed as fictions. For example, at the writer's camp in Vermont, Lauren decides to write autobiographical stories about her childhood rather than the lurid melodrama which got her accepted into the camp and sees this decision to reject fantasy in favour of the real as something of a watershed in her life. She proceeds to write a story about a cherry tree she remembers from childhood. Although her memories of this tree in her garden are vivid and symbolically important, her mother flatly insists it never existed. Is she to trust her mother's version of the past? Lauren's mother might also have merited the diagnosis of Munchausen's: `from my mother I learned that truth is bendable, that what you wish is every bit as real as what you are' (p. 5). The child Lauren's craving for solid truths, `for something safe and solid and absolutely absolute' (p. 68), becomes inextricable from her desire for recognition and love from her volatile mother (`Please please let her be pleased . . . I watched her like I should have watched my sinking sickening self' (p. 13)). Moreover, although her parents are orthodox Jews, Lauren herself finds her family religion alienating; `I couldn't connect to the high, clean whiteness of it all, the stern uprightness, I stinking and dark, a girl straight out of Gomorrah' (p. 195). Rather than connecting her to a communal, cultural history, Judaism intensifies her

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sense of alienation. Later she comes to identify instead with the `broken' figures of Christian faith: Christ on the cross and St Paul seized (as some conjecture) by epilepsy on the road to Damascus.29 At the AA meeting, realising that her true confession has been less persuasive than her faked one, Lauren fumes (`I felt furious, I mean furious that nothing would ever, ever change for me, that I would never land on the literal' (p. 212)) and despairs (`Inside of me, my heart crashed off a cliff again' (p. 207)). Everything about her experience inclines Lauren to agree with Kierkegaard, a well-known epileptic, whom she quotes as saying, ` ``The greatest lie of all is the feeling of firmness beneath our feet'' ' (p. 163). This was also a view held by the existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre who, like Kierkegaard, had a professional interest in epilepsy (it is a central theme in his monumental study of Flaubert).30 Lauren eventually comes to see her past, her family and the entire material world as epileptic: `The earth is a huge head, and it has tidal waves, erosions, seismic shudders that forever change its unfixed shape' (p. 214). Her response to this perception is at first Sartrean, in that she tries to compensate for inescapable, existential uncertainty by living her life `from death to birth', as Sartre tells us he determined to do in Les Mots.31 From the onset through to the rigid stage of her journey, Lauren mostly regards her epileptic seizures as a memento mori, as signs of the fragility of her existence and the destructibility of anything she holds dear. Midway through the rigid stage, she attends the funeral of a neighbour and imagines falling into the open grave. Or rather, she tells us she did fall in: `I buckled my knees, let my limbs loose in the way I had learned, and I collapsed down into the deep hole, the empty grave' (p. 57). At this point, she thanks all those who have contributed to making her well, in particular Leonard Kriegel for the inspiration of his book of essays Falling into Life, she climbs out of the grave, and with the flourish of hitting puberty at exactly that moment, announces the end of the memoir. And then she retracts this tale as a falsehood; `I thought about falling in. I imagined myself falling in' (p. 59). In contrast to Sartre, one might say, she finds she is unable to sustain the finality of the retrospective view. The philosopher's closural perspective is enticing but false for a protagonist who continues, wildly and messily, to fall into life rather than a literal or conjectural open grave. In the convulsive stage, another perspective on epileptic seizure or crashing descent begins to emerge: that it is not a premonition of death, but the paradigmatic experience of living itself. Here Lauren comes to associate the auras preceding her seizures with periods of intense creativity in her writing. The auras heighten her pleasure in language and her visual imagination; under their influence, `each pulse of pleasure was a

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word, and the words were turquoise, as beautiful and complex as the coral in the Caribbean Sea' (p. 111). Dostoevsky, Van Gogh and Lewis Carroll are invoked as fellow sufferers of the disease, who came to depend on their auras for producing creative work (pp. 23, 112). In this stage too, she `falls' in love with the writer Christopher Marin. When the affair ends unhappily (Marin is frightened off after he witnesses one of her seizures), Lauren writes, `If only I could learn to live here, in the chasm he cut, in the void out of which our world was born, if only I could. // I can' (p. 158). The little tank-engine shift from `if only I could' to `I can' constitutes a katabatic inversion, a radical shift in perspective on the idea of the epileptic fall to earth. For Lauren, this change of perspective means much more than a passive acquiescence to the conditions of her illness. While never glamorising epilepsy, nor hiding the ugliness and the sordidness of the seizures, she comes to see her illness as a fundamental expression of her longing for, as well as her distance from, solid ground. In a reversal of the symbolic negativity associated with female gender (to be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter), Lauren realises, `you are born with a hole in you, genetic or otherwise, and so you seize at this, you seize at that' (p. 156). Epilepsy forces her into a recognition of this longing, but also reveals the longing to be a source of strength rather than a loss: `epilepsy does not mean to be possessed, passively; it means to need to possess, actively' (ibid.). In the fourth, recovery stage of her journey, Lauren learns to exploit the double perspective ± perhaps an epileptic one? ± of Dante's `I did not die and I did not remain alive' (Inferno, 34.25). After her experience at the AA meeting, Lauren is confused and angry as my fact blew away, and I found myself back in the world I knew best, the strange, warped world, a world of so many stories ± I am an alcoholic I am not an alcoholic; I am an epileptic I am not an epileptic ± a world peopled with princes, with color, with cities of salt and perpetual, perpetual possibilities, plots unfolding one into the other. (p. 212)

In the mid-section of this passage, Lauren represents herself stranded between two versions of reality (`I am an alcoholic I am not an alcoholic'), an aporia that can never be resolved as her `others' (the AAers) will never confirm the inner narrative she has of herself. This in-between-ness resembles Milton's pagan god, Mulciber (or Hephaestus) who in Paradise Lost is portrayed arrested in mid-fall from Heaven, `from morn / To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, / A summer's day' (Paradise Lost, 1.742±4).32 But unlike Mulciber, who crashes into the solid ground of Lesbos and the poet's Christian judgment, Lauren never hits the ground

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of the literal or of unshakeable religious faith. But the second part of this passage orchestrates a katabatic turn on the aporia of narrative undecidability. As she realises she can't resolve her double vision, her anger dissolves into delight at the openness of narrative possibilities. The backward look of Lot's wife (alluded to in the phrase `cities of salt') becomes a positive example of the way the world, like Scheherezade's thousand and one stories, offers the self an infinity of contiguous, enfolded, sometimes mutually contradictory, narrative constructions. Of course, the idea of the self as an intersection of infinite narrative possibilities can be regarded as a demonic condition rather than a positive one. In Borges's famous story, `The Garden of Forking Paths', a murder takes place in one of an infinite number of possible temporal universes; but this single act, committed in a single, obscure corner of that labyrinth of narrative possibility, is the one act that must, fatally and inevitably, condemn Stephen Albert, the central protagonist, to death.33 As Peter Brooks comments, the figure of the Borgesian labyrinth serves to illustrate how the forking paths and crossroads of narrative are `both random and determined' (p. 319). But while Brooks defines plot as the combination of Freudian pleasure principle and death drive, a combination which translates into a tension between the conflicting drives toward deferral and closure, it is really the death drive that predominates in his conception of narrative identity. Citing Benjamin, for whom `death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell,' he states, `it is my simple conviction . . . that narrative has something to do with time-boundedness, and that plot is the internal logic of the discourse of mortality.'34 But Stephen Albert only `has to' die in `The Garden of Forking Paths' because he is caught in a textual labyrinth in which his death is decreed in advance. In Borges's figure of the labyrinth, as Adriana Cavarero points out, `it is not lives that produce stories; it is rather the stories that produce the characters who believe that they are alive' (p. 124). In Cavarero's view, narrative fulfils another desire, not the desire for closure or the certainty of the near-death perspective, but the desire to know the beginning of one's own story. Thus the beginning . . . is the essential chapter in which the self becomes narrated before even knowing herself to be narrated. The unity of the self, which the desire for narration makes manifest, finds in the others' tale her indispensable incipit, but never her final pleasure. (Relating Narratives, p. 86)

In any case, Borgesian ramified time can be interpreted less deterministically than Brooks suggests. For example, in an essay on Dante, Borges dismissed as a `false problem' the disagreement among scholars over whether Count Ugolino, depicted in the lowest circle of Inferno, had

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eaten his children before he died or not. In Borges's view, Dante's ambiguous explanation is meant to leave the matter undecidable; `Ugolino devours and does not devour the beloved corpses, and this undulating imprecision, this uncertainty, is the strange matter of which he is made.'35 One might object that even if we don't know whether Ugolino ate his children or not, Ugolino himself does; it is precisely this condition of having chosen which identifies him as a damned soul. (According to a 1995 report from the Church of England, `Hell is not eternal torment, but it is the final and irrevocable choosing of that which is opposed to God.')36 But this is the redemption, such as it is, that the `ambiguous time of art' (`Ugolino', p. 279) can offer Dante's Count; it can preserve him at the fork in the road, the condition of not yet having chosen. As Calvino noted in a commentary on this essay, `the concept of ramified time is dear to Borges because it is the one which dominates in literature.'37 Slater's Spasm suggests furthermore that real lives may be understood as ambiguous, undecidable stories, rather than stories to be read backwards, from the condition of having chosen.38 In this more positive sense, then, narrative truth allows Lauren to rewrite herself continually, to remain unbounded by the closural or `death drive' of narrative. This, too, is an insight that traditionally derives from an underworld journey. In Hades, the classical hero seeks to discover not only the secret of what happens after death, but also the mystery of where we come from.39 The last fall in Spasm is represented as a birth scene rather than a plummet towards death. The closing paragraph of the memoir rewrites the earlier scene, in which Lauren pretends to fall into an open grave. She concludes: You give up the ground, which you never really had to begin with, and something else takes over, and that something, with or without a face . . . that's the one fact I will ever and only have. I have the fact of falling . . . I will not win . . . If I am a gymnast, I will miss my mark, and fall, in my pale blue leotard, straight into the hole. Alice is there. The queen is there. My mother is there . . . I fell, and gave up the ground, and for that split second, spinning in utter space, I was nowhere, I was nothing, my mouth open round, like a zero, like 0, out of which the baby is born, the words spill, the planet pops, the trees grow, everything rising; real. (p. 216)

Here Slater refigures the earlier, Sartrean (imaginary) fall towards death, as a fall into recognition of her beginnings (where she will meet her mother and the childhood heroine, Alice). And it is from this point of beginnings that the hinge-movement of katabasis can operate, the fall becoming a rise, the fiction becoming `real'. But the claim to have discovered the real remains openly provisional; the only fact asserted with any certainty here is `the fact of falling'. Unlike many illness

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memoirs, Spasm does not hide the fakeness of its ending or the constructedness of her self-representation. In claiming epilepsy as a metaphor for the contemporary, postmodern condition, Slater lays herself open to the charge of fetishising mental illness as Deleuze and Guattari were accused of having done in AntiOedipus. But unlike Deleuze and Guattari, Slater is careful to distinguish between private histories, such as hers, which can afford to speak metaphorically of her own experience, and public ones, about which we should strive to reach a consensus and to name literal facts; even in the latter case, the ground is never solid but `we have to make choices to the best of our knowledge, name genocides and loves and hungers even while falling through them' (p. 220). And Slater does claim to write from direct experience, if not of epilepsy, then of mental disorder. She assures the reader, `I have been ill for much of my life' (p. 222). Her memoir enacts a katabatic turn on the experience of mental illness, so that a passive fall, a `seizure', becomes an active descent, a seizing of life with both hands. In a manoeuvre that will be explored in greater detail in the following chapter, she also makes the reversal dependent on the cooperation of her implied reader. As she once sought her mother's approval, so Lauren repeatedly invokes the reader's agreement and approval of her slippery, unreliable narrative: `even if I wanted to tell you this (and I do not want to tell you this; fall with me, please)' (p. 213). If memoirs are narratives which ask the question `who am I?', they depend on the possibility of hearing `one's own story narrated by another', as Cavarero argues (Relating Narratives, p. 136). Where the `I' is presented as fractured, undecidable, narratable rather than already narrated, the other is `no longer the rhetorical site of interrogation, but rather its decisive hinge' (ibid.). At the beginning of this chapter, I raised the question whether mental illness memoirs tended to reinforce the idea of a metaphysically unified self, because of their emphasis on the need for recovery of mental integrity and health. In terms of the katabatic tradition, do these descent texts validate only those aspects of the journey which give credence and authority to the present, narrating self? Close reading of illness memoirs suggested this not to be the case. The narrators of these texts recognise the fragility of mental health. The histories they relate demonstrate that the self is not something lost and gained in isolation, but rather constructed dialogically ± sometimes in fierce opposition to, sometimes with the empathetic support of others. None of these memoirs celebrate schizoid, seismic and fragmented states of mind as desirable in themselves. What is celebrated is the identity that emerges as a distillation of the experience of seizure, engulfment or fragmentation.

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And, as we have seen, there is much more at stake in these memoirs than developing a `core sense of self', at least if that is understood as pertaining only to the individual's personal history and immediate circumstances. Glass thinks we should not expect too much of fragmented selves and fractured egos; these cannot be the `vanguard of new political collectivities' (p. 16). He may be right about current sufferers of mental illness, but those who have written retrospectively about their experiences often highlight collective values and ideals. Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted is openly critical of the pro-war culture that turned a blind eye to so many different social underworlds in the 1960s, and still does today, while North's Welcome, Silence questions the psychiatric treatment of chronically ill patients. Slater's Spasm explores the illnesses of epilepsy and Munchausen's as metaphors for understanding the contemporary, existential condition. In all these memoirs, the experience of living through mental illness is represented as a descent into an infernal underworld. In all of them, too, the return from Hell depends on an inversion of perspective, a clarification and a reorientation of values, leading not to transcendence but to an affirmation of the everyday, material world.

Notes 1. On writing the self in contemporary autopathography, see Brendan Stone, `Starting to Speak', PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 2004. See also Thomas Couser, `Autopathography: Women, Illness and Lifewriting', Auto/Biography-Studies, 6:1, Spring, 1991, pp. 65±75. 2. See Jameson's The Political Unconscious and Deleuze and Guattari's AntiOedipus. For a comparative analysis of the alienated modern subject and the schizophrenic postmodern one, see David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 3±120 (especially pp. 41±65). See also Mark Currie, `Culture and schizophrenia', in Postmodern Narrative Theory, pp. 96±114. 3. Gayatri C. Spivak, `Reading The Satanic Verses', p. 114. 4. Barthes' text of bliss is one `that imposes a state of loss', `that unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions' (The Pleasure of the Text, pp. 14, 37). 5. Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory, p. 103. 6. Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom, pp. 173±233. On other postmodern, temporal foreshortenings, see Ursula Heise, Chronoschisms, pp. 6± 7, 44±77. 7. Hart refers to the dismembered souls in Dante's Inferno, 10. 8. `Throughout this book, I make a distinction between the words anoretic and anorexic. Though in common parlance the word anorexia is often used to describe a person . . . the technically correct usage of anorexic is as an adjective ± i.e., it describes a type of behaviour . . . whereas anoretic is a noun, the medical term for a person diagnosed with anorexia' (Hornbacher, Wasted, p. 2).

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9. Derrida critiqued the concept of a centred self, one which might be said to exist prior to action or discourse, in Writing and Difference (see p. 280). Kim Worthington summarises some pre-postmodern ideas of selfhood: `the belief in an I that thinks, in thoughts prior to linguistic expression, and in language as a neutral medium of communication ± where the core of the self is posited as a prelinguistic datum' (Self as Narrative, p. 67). 10. See, for example, Lance Armstrong, with Sally Jenkins, It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life. London: Yellow Jersey, 2000. 11. Compare Freccero's discussion of conversion narrative, which likewise accounts for the whole of a life's significance, while only directly relating one episode within it. See The Poetics of Conversion, p. 25, and Chapter 2 of the present study. 12. Taking issue with Michel Foucault's Histoire de la folie aÁ l'age classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), Derrida writes that `all our European languages, the language of everything that has participated, from near or far, in the adventure of Western reason ± all this is the immense delegation of the project defined by Foucault under the rubric of the capture or objectification of madness' (Writing and Difference, p. 35). For a discussion of the disagreement between Derrida and Foucault about whether madness can be represented in psychiatric or any rational discourse, see Bernard Flynn, `Derrida and Foucault: madness and writing', in Hugh J. Silverman (ed.), Derrida and Deconstruction. London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 201±18. 13. Baudrillard, `Paroxysm: interviews with Philippe Petit', in Selected Writings, p. 290. When asked by Petit to clarify what he means by `push the paradox to the limit', Baudrillard replies, `pushing to the limit means acknowledging this [the system's] irreversibility and pushing it to the limit of its possibilities, to the point of collapse. Bringing it to saturation point where the system itself creates the accident' (ibid., p. 290). 14. Farinata, the unrepentant Florentine leader, appears in Dante's Inferno 10. On his significance in Inferno, and the subsequent development of realist literature, see Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 151±76, and my Chapter 2. 15. On the transition in capitalist cultures from `representation' to `simulation' of reality, see Jean Baudrillard, `Simulacra and simulations', in Selected Writings, p. 173. The phrase, `soft inferno of simulation' is coined by Andrew Wernick in a review of Mike Gane (ed.), Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews. London: Routledge, 1993. See Wernick, `Baudrillard's remainder', in Reviews: R007, 17 November 1993, eds. A. and M. Kroker. Available online at: www.ctheory.net/text 16. For one example of such a turning point, see Wasted, p. 64: `my life split in half, finally and definitively, right there, seventh grade.' 17. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 246. 18. See Dennett, `The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity', p. 103. I am grateful to Brendan Stone for this reference. 19. On aerial journeys into the afterlife, see Zaleski, Otherworldly Journeys, pp. 45±60. 20. In Forbidden Knowledge, Roger Shattuck suggests that the fables of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde epitomise contrasting twentieth-century reactions to technological and scientific advancement; the first infantilises while the second demonises the new and

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

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unfamiliar (p. 3). For the female descent journey into madness, there are well-known literary precedents such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Yellow Wallpaper and the poems of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton; the connection between representations of women and representations of madness was first explored in Gilbert and Gubar's seminal study, Madwoman in the Attic. On the two contrasting models of memory, archaeological and constructivist, see Nicola King, Memory, Narrative, Identity, pp. 5±20, and Chapter 4 of the present study. Coelius Rhodiginus, quoted by Jeremiah Drexel, in De cultu corporis (1658), cited by Camporesi, Fear of Hell, p. 36. See Chapter 1, note 16. On the temporal accelerations of late capitalism, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernism, and my Chapter 7. Alex Beam and Alma Bond, Gracefully Insane. Boulder, CO: Public Affairs/ Perseus Books Group, 2002, p. 247. Baudrillard, `Simulacra and simulations', in Selected Writings, p. 180. Keenan recalls exchanges with fellow hostage John McCarthy during their imprisonment in Beirut, in which `profound meditations often degenerated into an exchange of foul-mouthed banter. ` ``You talk like you were born with marleys in your mouth'' . . . ``Marleys? . . . What in the name of fuck are you talking about, you ridiculous Irish aborigine.'' ``Marleys, you brain-dead piece of shit, are little coloured glass balls that children play with.'' . . . We hurled this abuse with such pretended vehemence and at other times with such perverse eloquence that the force of it and the laughter pushed back the crushing agony of the tiny space' (An Evil Cradling, pp. 126±7). On self as narrative, see Paul Ricoeur, `Life in Quest of Narrative' and `Narrative Identity', in David Wood (ed.), On Paul Ricoeur, pp. 20±33, 188± 200; and Kim Worthington, Self as Narrative. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 203. Thus Lauren thinks, `churches are places for the two-tongued and the fainters, for broken bodies.' She cites Jesus' healing of the epileptic boy (p. 195), and thinks of Christ himself as an epileptic, his body broken by the cross (p. 170). See Jean Paul Sartre, L'Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de 1821 aÁ 1857, 5 vols (The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert from 1821 to 1857, 3 vols in English, 1971±72). See Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 171, in which Sartre resolves to live `from death to birth', becoming `my own obituary.' See also Peter Brooks' discussion of this passage in Reading for the Plot, pp. 94±5, in the context of an argument that narrative possesses an innate death-drive, or desire for closure. In line with this idea, the film Magnolia follows the histories of several characters through flawed lives to the point where all the characters' plot lines intersect at the moment of their deaths. The booming narratorial voice-over, `Use that regret, use it!' drives home Sartre's point that one can construct a moral framework by living retrospectively, in the shadow of one's own death. (The film also revives the overtly didactic function of the medieval journey to Hell narrative.) To the archetypal psychologist James Hillman, `to live fully into the consequence of the finalistic view means to bear the perspective of Hades and the underworld toward each psychic

Notes

32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

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event. We ask: what is the purpose of this event for my soul, for my death?' (The Dream and the Underworld, p. 31). This passage, with its rhythm of arrested judgment followed by Christian correction, is the subject of a celebrated analysis of Paradise Lost by Stanley Fish, in his Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971. Jorge Luis Borges, `The Garden of Forking Paths', Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley. London: Penguin, 1998, pp. 119±28. Benjamin, `The Storyteller', in Illuminations, p. 94, quoted by Brooks in Reading for the Plot, p. 22. Borges, `The False Problem of Ugolino', The Total Library: Non-Fiction, p. 279. Gary Saul Morson's concept of `sideshadowing', imagining what might have happened in a historical episode where the outcome is already decided, gives an ethical inflection to Borgesian ramified time. See Morson's discussion of sideshadowing in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Narrative and Freedom, Chapter 3. Report quoted in `Weep and Gnash Those Teeth: Hell's Back', The Independent on Sunday, 2 April 2000, News, p. 3. Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics? London: Jonathan Cape, 1999, p. 242. A recent archaeological excavation in Italy claims to have discovered the body of the historical Ugolino; DNA tests on the body suggest that Ugolino had not, in fact, eaten human flesh before he died. See `Digging up the Dead', The Economist, 6±12 March 2004, p. 44. If the claim is true, then on this occasion, science has managed to extricate the human image from the ambiguous, infernally ramified time of literature. For a wider discussion of the aesthetics of undecidability, see Graham Falconer, `Flaubert, James and the Problem of Undecidability', Comparative Literature, 39:1 (Winter, 1987), pp. 1±18. For example, in the underworld, Aeneas is shown flocks of souls crowding a river bank, jostling to cross over and be born into another life. At this Pythagorean vision of reincarnation, the melancholy hero wonders, `why do these poor souls have such a fierce desire for the light?' (Aeneid, 6.721, my trans.).

Chapter 6

Engendering Dissent in the Underworld

As we saw in Chapter 1, the twentieth century has frequently been characterised as an infernal one, both by writers who lived through its worst horrors and ± since it is by no means clear that we have emerged from it ± those who are currently reflecting on it retrospectively. Against that background, I have tried to show that descent narratives can function either as the means of constructing an escape route from, or alternatively discovering a radical shift of perspective on, this historically infernal condition. However, in the traditional katabatic narrative, such descent journeys are not equally available to all. Female characters, by definition, are usually excluded from descent because they are already in the underworld; indeed, the underworld is symbolically what they are. Narratives of the Orpheus myth, for example, usually dispatch Eurydice to the underworld in the opening lines or paragraphs, if she is not discovered there already from the outset; in a sense, she has always already died.1 Or, as Cavarero wryly observes, `Orpheus inaugurates the stubborn tradition [of love poetry], which wants the loved woman to be a dead woman' (Relating Narratives, p. 94). While certain non-Western myths (such as the descent of Inanna to wrest power from the underworld goddess Erishkigal) ascribe the heroic role to a female character, it is only quite recently that mythic descent heroines have begun to gain currency in Western literature and culture.

Gender dynamics in the descent to Hell In the majority of ancient Greek myths which, as is now generally acknowledged, were to prove so influential on Freud and his successors in the psychoanalytical field, the descent hero is gendered male and the object of the quest as well as the medium through which the quest is realised is gendered female. Freud's account of the psyche's development

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to mature adult consciousness follows the young boy on the successive stages of a journey to selfhood, through identification with the mother, horror at her sexual lack, rejection of the identification and entry into the patriarchal role.2 Lacan's account of the psyche is synchronic rather than diachronic, but the stratification into female underworlds and male overworlds remains the same. It is the Woman's definition as `lack' that serves, symbolically, as the ground of patriarchal culture.3 For Lacan, real women (as opposed to the symbolic Mother) have a choice: they may consent to being fantasised by male subjects as feminine objects of desire, acceding to what Angela Carter describes as the metaphysics of sexual difference in which `man aspires; woman has no other function but to exist, waiting' (The Sadeian Woman, p. 4). Alternatively, as Drusilla Cornell writes in her gloss on Lacan, we can `reposition ourselves on the side of the masculine, appropriate the phallus, and thus become lawyers, doctors, professors . . . But then we will not be able to express our power as feminine' (p. 91).4 Such an alternative would appear to return us to the philosophical crossroads that was outlined in Chapter 1. For Lyotard, and some other postmodern theorists, the contemporary Western subject can respond in one of two ways to the twentieth century's infernal dislocations: it can claim possession of transcendental knowledge, the metaphysics of presence, and thus find an escape route from Hell; or it can admit its dispossession and choose to remain fragmented, disoriented, underworldly. Some feminists would argue that this dilemma presupposes a white, male, middle-class subject because, as Nicole Jouve tersely notes, `you must have a self before you can afford to deconstruct it'.5 My own view is that the dilemma facing a woman on entry into the patriarchal, symbolic order constitutes a heightened form of the more general twentieth-century dispossessions discussed by Levinas and Lyotard. In this reading, feminine dispossession should be regarded as a paradigmatic instance of twentieth-century dislocation rather than an exceptional one. Unlike the Dantean pilgrim who exclaims `I did not die and I did not remain alive', and whose sense of self ± the ipse, as opposed to the idem, as Paul Ricoeur distinguishes them in `Narrative and Identity' ± is preserved in the question, `who am I?', the traditional female wouldbe subject asks, rather, `what am I for?' (Milton's Eve indirectly receives an answer to the latter question when she overhears the archangel Raphael telling Adam: `Male he created thee, but thy consort / Female for race' (Paradise Lost, 7.529±30)). Even in the most extreme cases of deliberate dehumanisation of which the twentieth century affords such dreadful examples, the gendered dynamic of descent is not erased. Thus in Primo Levi's poem, `If This Is a Man', one cannot help but notice the

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greater abjection of the female prisoner than the male: `Consider if this is a man . . . / Who does not know peace / Who fights for a scrap of bread / Who dies because of a yes or a no. / Consider if this a woman, / Without hair and without name . . . / Her eyes empty and her womb cold / Like a frog in winter' (If This Is a Man, p. 7).6 In contemporary literature, the feminine continues to be largely excluded from the symbolic realm, in which an ipse can ask `who am I?', with whatever degree of anxiety about the possible answer, while the relegation of the feminine to the underworld is cast as the necessary corollary to a male hero's descent and return from Hell. To illustrate the strength of this traditional dynamic, three brief examples will suffice, although many more could be adduced. In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru, 1994), Haruki Murakami recounts the story of Toru Okada, a man whose search for his missing wife leads him on a labyrinthine journey through the literal and psychic depths of modernday Tokyo. Okada learns from his encounters with various semi-supernatural women that to recover his wife he has first to know the depths of his own soul. He explores this psychic terrain by shutting himself up for days in the bottom of a deep dry well. His personal quest to understand his dark side becomes interlaced with stories of sadistic brutality committed by Japanese soldiers in the Second World War. This magnificent and complex tale is nevertheless very simple and archaic in its treatment of gender. All the female characters in the novel are socially marginalised, the bearers of historical insight but never the actants. Like Persephone, the lost wife has become a sexual slave; in Kumiko's case, the Hades figure is her own charismatic and socially powerful brother. She too has to discover a deeper sense of identity in order to break free. But her dark side is specifically and limitedly sexual. We do not follow her journey, which in any case is mostly a passive waiting game. She will be free only when her husband knows himself and recognises her sexual nature. A similarly gendered dynamic operates, too, in Colum McCann's This Side of Brightness (1998). This is a double-plotted Orphic story of a black, turn-of-the-century New York City underground tunnel digger and his descendant, now living in the tunnels his ancestor helped to dig (an Orpheus, then, trapped underground). At the end of the novel, the descendant, known as Treefrog, emerges from the tunnels to resume a social existence in the `visible' world. But this modern Orpheus can return to the overworld only when he finds a Eurydice to leave behind. Treefrog has a brief affair with Angela, an addict trapped in an abusive relationship with her dealer. Finding that she cannot be easily reasoned out of a heroin addiction, he leaves her: `he blows her a kiss and then goes on . . . a great lightness to his body, not a single shadow cast in the tunnel. And at

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the gate he smiles, hefting the weight of the word upon his tongue . . . a single word, resurrection' (p. 248). Finally, in Kleinzeit (1974), a comedic version of the Orpheus myth (where Eurydice is freed from the underworld), Russell Hoban represents a white, middle-class Orpheus who is hospitalised with a serious illness, but returns from this underworld, bringing with him the nurse who helps him through to recovery. Hoban suggests that Kleinzeit's illness is an excessive, masculine ambition to succeed in the world. From his conversations with the angelic `Sister', he comes to see how `men are rotten clear through with being animate. Women on the other hand have not quite lost the health of the inanimate, the health of deep stillness. They're not quite so sick with life as men are' (Kleinzeit p. 150). In Hoban's reinterpretation of the Orpheus myth, his Eurydice (Sister) is praised for possessing the paradoxical vitality of deathliness. The lack of subjectivity in Sister is illustrated in her brief exchange with God: It is my opinion, she said to God, that nobody is healthy. Look at you, said God. Who could be healthier? Oh, women, said Sister. I'm talking about men. (p. 19)

Sister appears to be excluding herself from criticism, but she is also excluding women from the subject position of one who can be directly addressed: `Look at you', says God; `Oh, women', she replies. There is a similar slippage of address, from `you' to `they', in Freud's undelivered lecture, `Femininity' (1933). In a now notorious passage, Freud turns to his imaginary audience with this address: `nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem ± those of you who are men; to those of you who are women, this will not apply ± they are themselves the problem.'7 For Freud, women are `the problem', just as for Hoban, women are healthily inanimate. In both cases, the real subject of the descent is masculine. Notwithstanding Judith Butler's caveat that `a ``theory of self'' [is] . . . not reducible to a theory of gender', it can hardly be denied that twentieth-century psychoanalysis, with its rich inheritance of katabatic myths and narrative structures, encourages us for the most part to do precisely that, i.e. to conflate the symbolic category of `Woman' with that of `not-self'.8 Whereas the descent to Hell provided male writers of the twentieth century with a narrative structure capable of conveying the dispersals and dissolutions of modern identity while at the same time paradoxically claiming both authority over the fragmented self and a place in the patrilinear tradition, contemporary Western women writers are drawing on katabatic narrative to express the uneasy and contradictory relationship between female subjectivity and patriarchal culture.9 Some of these

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women writers exploit the underworldly, `feminine' position to critique different aspects of Western capitalism, especially its embrace of premodern, patriarchal ideologies. Some, too, are more aware of a paradoxical relation to Western capitalism than others. For Angela Carter, Western advances in science and technology (particularly relating to birth control) are the very ground that make modern, female subjectivity possible. In `Notes from the front line', she writes: The sense of limitless freedom that I, as a woman, sometimes feel is that of a new kind of being. Because I simply could not have existed, as I am, in any other preceding time or place. I am the pure product of an advanced, industrialized, post-imperialist country in decline. (Shaking a Leg, p. 40)

But while accepting, even revelling in the phantasmagoria of postmodern capitalism ± the infernal aspects of which will be explored in the next chapter ± Carter is also aware that its liberating excesses are not free of gender power relations. In the beginning of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), she imagines a phantasmagorical, capitalist city much like the futuristic New York into which Evelyn descends in The Passion of New Eve. But Dr Hoffman, the Satanic producer of entropic desires, is clearly no less patriarchal and authoritarian than the enlightenment rationalist Minister of Determination whom he deposes. Paradoxically demanding `absolute authority to establish a regime of total liberation' (p. 38), Dr Hoffman also unleashes the repressed, persecutory fantasies of a patriarchal, racist society. In Hoffman's enticingly liberated city, as Aidan Day points out, `there is not only promiscuous criminality, grotesquery and violence, but specifically there is uncontrolled violence, spiritual and physical, against the female' (The Rational Glass, p. 81). In The Passion of New Eve, Evelyn's subjection of his black girlfriend, Leilah, underlines the same point equally clearly. Given the tenacity with which patriarchal fantasies inhere in Western capitalism, some contemporary women writers have represented the descent to the underworld in positive terms, as the means of escaping this patriarchal, capitalist overworld entirely. In Joan Barfoot's Gaining Ground (1978), for example, a middle-class, professional, married woman named Abra withdraws, without warning, from her family, job and city life to take up subsistence farming in a remote cottage in northern Canada. It is only here, freed from marital and maternal bonds as well as the need to earn a living, that she is able to imagine and live through a non-exploitative relation with the natural environment. Much of the novel recounts her descent into a `natural' state and the slow metamorphosis by which she is transformed into the wild-looking, inarticulate

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creature her daughter is horrified to encounter in the opening chapter. At the end of the novel, she is momentarily persuaded by her daughter to leave the cottage. But seat-belted in the car, she is suddenly overwhelmed by the fear of returning to her old entrapments: `I am struggling, fierce now and full of fear, not just panic but far-deep fear, to get free' (p. 197). It is the wild animal's instinctual fear of the cage that compels Abra to turn her back permanently on family, work and social existence in a modern, capitalist city. While representing the feminist descent (and/or dissent) from capitalism in similar terms, that is as a retreat from a modern, Canadian city, to the northern wilderness, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (1972) is more specific in its critique of patriarchal power relations governing Western capitalism. The unnamed, first-person narrator is psychically alienated as the result of a recent abortion. She meditates ghoulishly on images of dead gods (p. 39) and severed women (pp. 70, 102), and associates herself with these truncated beings: `I was the wrong half, detached, terminal. I was nothing but a head, or no, something minor like a severed thumb; numb' (p. 102). Unlike Carter, for whom modern birth control is sexually liberating, this protagonist has been manipulated into playing a part in her married lover's fantasies. Because a child would be an embarrassment to him, she submits to the operation, which is likewise conducted by male doctors, `technicians, mechanics, butchers, students clumsy or sniggering practicing on your body' (p. 74). Made monstrous by this technological feat of non-birth, she feels implicated in the patriarchal fantasy of dominance over nature, especially the processes of reproduction. This complicity invades her like a kind of demonic impregnation: `they had planted death in me like a seed' (p. 138). By the lakeside in northern Quebec, she witnesses a similar readiness to dominate when an American party of fishermen kill and disembowel a heron: `Why had they strung it up like a lynch victim . . .? To prove they could do it, they had the power to kill' (p. 110). These `Americans' become metaphors for the patriarchal violation of nature, with which she again feels `a sickening complicity, sticky as glue, blood on my hands' (p. 124). Later, she realises `it wasn't the men I hated, it was the Americans, the human beings, men and women both' (p. 148). In this carelessly brutal exploitation of the environment, she sees her own dystopic future: `they're what's in store for us, what we [Canadians] are turning into' (p. 123). When a horrifying, foetus-like object floats up to her from the depths of the lake, she undergoes a mental breakdown (p. 136). She flees from her friends, forgets who she is and regresses to a wild state, becoming fearful of all enclosures. In this underworld, she comes to understand her father, who has mysteriously disappeared some months previously. She realises that

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he too has been displaced by this patriarchal rape of the earth; wherever he is, `he wants it ended, the borders abolished, he wants the forest to flow back into the places his mind cleared: reparation' (p. 180). But the narrator regresses further and deeper; she ceases to be a subject, enters the Lacanian underworld and carries on down: `I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning . . . I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow, I am a place' (p. 175). In contrast to Barfoot's Abra, however, Atwood's heroine remains in this pre-organic, pre-linguistic state for only five days. Regaining human consciousness, she knows she has no choice but to re-enter the social world. She is clear now, though, that her complicity in the abortion, and in larger terms the destruction of the natural environment, was a matter of her own choice. In the end she determines to `give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone' (Surfacing, p. 185).10 Yet her descent to a feral state has left her with a different understanding of the environment which she can henceforth use to position herself against the patriarchal instinct to dominance. This, again, is represented in terms of her capacity to give birth, though this time to a vital, rather than a deathly, vision: `I bring with me from the distant past five nights ago the time-traveller, the primaeval one who will have to learn, shape of a goldfish now in my belly, undergoing its watery changes' (p. 185). About this child/idea, she thinks optimistically, `it might be the first one, the first true human; it must be born, allowed' (p. 185). One of the limitations of this type of descent narrative, however, is its failure to acknowledge how inescapably capitalist are the subjects for whom this frontier vision looks so enticing. Both Abra and Atwood's narrator are city women who descend into a mythicised natural world unpopulated by other human beings. Rather than confront the Hell of their actual, material lives, they seek a utopian solution derived from a mythic underworld unconnected to their own worlds. The problem is not the invocation of a utopian perspective; I would agree with Seyla Benhabib that utopian visions have a significant role to play in ethical feminist literature and philosophy.11 The problem is rather that in these two descent narratives, the utopian vision does not evolve out of a historical engagement with patriarchal capitalism, but rather out of an act of seemingly total abstention. But such gestures beg the question, what pressures led these city characters to idealise a state of wilderness? What urban imagination has prompted the protagonists' flight, and what financial security, generated by a job in the city, has allowed the dream to be realised? It is partly this fantasy of a non-patriarchal, non-exploitative, natural underworld that Carter satirises in The Passion of New Eve,

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although neither Barfoot nor Atwood represent these otherworlds as mythic matriarchal realms, an idea that Carter travesties with particular gusto. In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to examine in greater detail three descent narratives in which the route to female subjectivity is down through patriarchal Hell, requiring a historically situated heroine's direct engagement with its fantasies and its nightmares: Naylor's Linden Hills, Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Notley's The Descent of Alette. Carter once wrote that `a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster', and in some respects the heroines of these four descent narratives do turn out to be monstrous beings (The Sadeian Woman, p. 27). Three are murderers, one becomes a terrorist, another ends up dead.12 But monstrous as they are, they challenge the Lacanian view that female characters (not to mention women writers and readers) can only choose between masculine possession of subjectivity and feminine subjection or dispossession. The choice of texts for discussion is necessarily selective; other descent narratives that could be invoked to challenge or qualify Lacan include: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, Janice Galloway's The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion and Monique Wittig's Across the Acheron.

Inside the hero's descent: Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills Perhaps no contemporary katabatic narrative illustrates more graphically than Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills the plight of a would-be heroine trapped inside the narrative of a male katabatic quest for self-knowledge. Linden Hills (1985) traces the journey of two young, African-American writers down through the streets of a wealthy, black suburb called Linden Hills. Taking on odd jobs as they descend, the boys are witness to the different ways in which the Hills residents betray their racial, sexual and personal identities in the pursuit of material wealth and social acceptability. At the centre and lowest point of this steeply tiered system of crescent drives lives Luther Nedeed, owner of the thousand-year (biblically symbolic of eternal) leases on Hills real estate. It is the Nedeed dream, dating back five generations, that sustains the Hills community: the dream of an autonomous, powerful black empire within the heart of white America. The boys' descent through Linden Hills is a fairly straightforward recasting of Dante for a contemporary, AfricanAmerican context. While there are precedents in African-American

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literature for rewriting Dante (Imamu Amiri Baraka's The System of Inferno, Ellison's Invisible Man and Morrison's Sula preceded Linden Hills), hers is by far the most intricately worked out imitatio of Inferno.13 One of the boys, Lester Tilson, is the Virgilian guide; a resident of the upper tiers of Linden Hills, he is marginally a member of this infernal community. The other, the novel's male central protagonist, is the Dantean Willie Mason, a working-class outsider, an oral rather than a literary poet and (the reader is led to assume) the future chronicler of this infernal realm. The details of the residents' `sins' and the nature of their contrapassos have been discussed at length by other critics and need not be rehearsed here.14 The most striking and original aspect of Naylor's novel is the secondary plot, which eventually takes over the primary one, concerning the mental descent journey of Luther Nedeed's wife, Willa, secretly locked away in the basement of her husband's house. It is Willie Mason who prophetically senses the presence of a woman, concealed somewhere in this inferno; the implicit goal of his journey is to recover this lost Eurydice, or (failing that) to discover an artistic form capable of narrating her story (their complementarity is emphasised in the similarity of their names). Willa Nedeed, then, is a character who is triply immured in a locked basement, her husband's corrupted dream of black autonomy and the descent journey of Willie Mason. The reason for her disgrace is that Willa, dark-skinned herself, has given birth to a pale-skinned son, whereas the patriarchal Nedeed dynasty requires a dark-skinned son from a pale-skinned mother (paleness symbolising `nothingness' to the Nedeed men). Each dark-skinned, first-born son inherits the name of the father, Luther Nedeed (connoting `de Eden'15), and this name, together with the son's dark skin, signifies the unbroken continuity of the patrilinear Nedeed empire. Willa's pale progeny offends Luther because symbolically it reveals what he already fears to be true: that the dream of his ancestors has long since been betrayed and is now indistinguishable from the (white) American dream of material success. Taking her readers inside the damaged consciousness of the incarcerated Willa, Naylor explores the process by which this Lacanian `nothing', uncannily haunting both Nedeed's failed patriarchal dream and Willie Mason's desire for a non-white European epic form, becomes a someone in her own eyes.16 By situating Willa's descent inside the male narratives (which are themselves implicitly located inside white America and the European katabatic epic tradition), Naylor suggests that the female journey is both more profound and more significant, the latter because until Willa finds her voice, her husband's vision will continue to collapse into that of white, capitalist America, and Willie's art will continue to fall

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short of its European predecessors'. In this sense, Willie's spatial descent through Linden Hills, at first the dominant plot of the novel, turns out to be the Virgilian sideshow to the dramatic, Dantean descent of Willa's mental journey through the past. Naylor also suggests that the feminisation of the male katabatic tradition, while important, will not be sufficient to disrupt its patrilinear circularity; Willie needs to confront Willa as a subject, not the object of his quest, before he can be profoundly changed.17 Cut off from the possibility of a spatial journey, Willa descends in time, leafing through the detritus in the basement to construct coherent narratives of the Nedeed wives through four generations. Three women's histories emerge from the fragmentary evidence afforded by notes inside a family Bible, recipes for enemas and aphrodisiacs, and mutilated photo albums. Willa's concern to recover the materiality of these women's lives contrasts sharply with Luther's obsession with the vision rather than the lives of his ancestors. Her painstaking reconstruction of these `her-stories' constitutes the first step in Willa's descent journey, whose goal is self-knowledge in the most primary sense: knowledge that she is a self. Ricoeur has argued that `the appropriation of the identity of the fictional character by the reader' is one form of self-knowledge, that understood as self-interpretation (p. 198). Willa is just such a reader, gaining an intuition that her own experience is interpretable, potentially narratable, through her reading of these earlier lives. Even though all of these examples trace a downward trajectory towards self-obliteration, they are still narratable lives. It is by their example that Willa reaches upward to the null-point described by Ricoeur, where the self can ask, `Who am I?' and receive the reply, `nothing'; Willa stared `at the gaping hole [in the photograph] that was once Priscilla McGuire, she reached her hand up and began to touch her own face' (p. 267). By rejecting this initial, intense identification with Priscilla, however, Willa slides away from the Lacanian sentence of being `nothing' to the possibility articulated by Cornell of being `anything'. Once again, this shift in consciousness is represented as a recognition of the material limits of the body, in this case temporal: `she knew she was dying . . . She could feel it happening: the passage of air through lung tissues that disintegrated a little with each breath; heart muscles that pumped and weakened' (p. 266). Even this negative possibility, that one can properly die, is a relief to the feminine spectre, trapped in a patriarchal fantasy. Here one might say that Willa enters the Lacanian mirror-stage, studying her reflection in a pot of water: `there was the outline of her hair, the shape of the chin . . . the profile of her nose and lips . . . No doubt remained ±

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she was there' (p. 268). But approached thus from below, the mirror stage functions in a somewhat unusual way, not to split the self but to confirm its material existence. The sight of her mirrored image provokes neither anxiety nor exultation (as it does in the Lacanian infant). Instead it produces two responses from Willa: she drinks (confirming her physical presence), and she thinks (confirming herself as an ipse): `raising the rim to her lips, she began to drink the cold, rusty water . . . She would take small sips, very small sips ± and think' (p. 268). The final stage in Willa's progression towards recognition of herself as an ipse is the act of laying claim to her past. Here she shoulders the responsibility for her descent down the twelve steps into the basement: `that action was hers and hers alone. The responsibility did not lie with her mother or father ± or Luther' (p. 280). Like Atwood, Naylor implies that if women are spectralised by patriarchal fantasies, this is partly because they comply with it. In Willa's case this self-judgment seems almost defiantly inaccurate. It might be argued that Willa consciously chose the desirable alliance with the rich Nedeeds, that coming from a comfortably off family, she had other choices. But clearly patriarchy reduces and distorts the choices that even wealthy women can make. Naylor herself illustrates this with the example of Lauren Dumont, a successful business woman and prominent Linden Hills resident, in short one who has chosen to join the `masculine symbolic'; she too is driven insane and kills herself. One could also question the judgment on philosophical grounds; is an action ever solely possessed, `hers and hers alone'? On the other hand, Willa's acknowledgment of responsibility is strategically narrow and literal: she admits to walking down the basement steps of her own volition, not to ruining her own life. This sense of possessing a will then virally infiltrates her unconscious being. Sleeping, she descends further, an unconscious journey in toward the power of will that had crept alone in primordial muck eons before being clothed with fins, scales, wings, or flesh. Then . . . out, toward the edge of the universe with its infinite possibility to make space for the volume of her breath. (pp. 288±9)

When Willa wakes from this sleep, she brings with her the primordial identity that Atwood's time-traveller also retrieves from a prehistoric past. In Willa's case, the primordial self is gendered; later, in her stubborn, almost witless, re-ascent, she will be compared to a giant Amazonian wingless ant queen, blindly dragging `her bloated egg sac as long as at least one leg is left uncrushed' (p. 300; see also p. 289). Like the queen army ant, she will be treading a warpath that specifically destroys and

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consumes male predators: `the deadly tarantula, the sleeping crocodile, the rifle-bearing hunter' (p. 297). Teresa Goddu has objected that these images associate Willa with an atavistic maternal impulse in a way that essentialises gender and demonises motherhood.18 The last stage of Willa's journey, which extracts the infinite possibility of being an `anything' from the experience of solitary self-reflection, does suggest that gender identity is something one extracts from the self like a buried splinter, rather than something one discovers in the performance.19 But in other ways, Willa's newfound sense of identity and will are relational constructs rather than Cartesian self-discoveries. As we have seen, she is first radicalised by reading the former wives' histories. Upon waking from the above mentioned sleepvision, she is delivered again into a specific, social context. Over the tannoy she hears her husband say, `It's Christmas Eve, Mrs. Nedeed', and with these words she is `immediately affirmed into a season and a direction' (p. 289). She affirms that she wants nothing more than to be `Mrs Nedeed', to clean her kitchen and her house (p. 280). In interview with Toni Morrison, Naylor has said that Willa's decision came to her, the author, as a surprise; she had planned a more radical, feminist enlightenment for her protagonist, `but Willa refused to do it'.20 On the one hand, then, what looks like a surprisingly conditioned response demonstrates Willa exercising her free will against her author's wishes. On the other hand, however, it demonstrates the accuracy of Butler's view that gender identity does not exist before the performance of it, and that we can only act within the limits of the social discourses that pre-exist and construct us.21 When Willa emerges from the basement, she appears to be exactly the monster that Carter predicts will be born in an unfree society: `her hair tangled and matted, her sunken cheeks streaked with dirt . . . breasts and stomach . . . hidden behind . . . sheer white lace' (p. 298). Despite his empathetic nature, Willie freezes in horror at this Gothic apparition, which he sees at exactly the moment Willa sees herself (in a mirror behind him). Not understanding or being able to guess at the history that produced such a monster, he fails to recognise Willa or intervene in the disaster that follows. Luther tries to wrestle her back downstairs, but her trailing lace catches fire. Together with the corpse of their son, this unholy trinity is consumed in flames. In handing the task of narrating the story on to the two boys, Naylor disappointed some of her readers; but regardless of whether or not Willa should have escaped the novel's apocalyptic ending, it is still her decision to walk upstairs that leads to the destruction of this particular, patriarchal empire.

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Hell and utopia: Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time Naylor usually takes her subject matter from working-class black experience (as for example in her highly successful collection of short stories, The Women of Brewster Place). The focus on middle-class alienation in Linden Hills is exceptional in her writing, and the allegorical anatomisation of middle-class `sins', in my view, lacks some of the power of her realist writing. More forcefully than Linden Hills, Piercy's novel conveys the sense of the constant drag downwards that patriarchal, corporate America exerts on its urban poor.22 Her protagonist, Connie Ramos, is thirty-seven years old and an unemployed Mexican-American living in New York City. The violent opening chapter of the novel portrays Connie attempting to shelter her pregnant niece from the younger woman's abusive pimp/husband and a male accomplice. Both women are beaten up; the niece is forced back into prostitution and Connie is carted off to hospital, where she is then sectioned to a psychiatric hospital in upper New York State. Piercy represents Connie's journey upstate as a descent into Hell. In terms that explicitly echo Dante's pilgrim at the beginning of Inferno, Connie reflects, `here she was with her life half spent, midway through her dark journey that had pushed her into the hands of the midwife in El Paso and carried her through the near West Side of Chicago, through the Bronx' (pp. 30±1). Her journey to the hospital is the more infernal because she has been sectioned here once before. There is an uncanny sense, then, of the inevitable return, of the underworld being the place where she belongs; `was there a once? The dreams surely began with an original; yet she had the sense, the first morning she awakened remembering, that there were more that she had not remembered, a sensation of return' (p. 33). For Connie, passing through the hospital gates is like reentering the Hell mouth: The gates swallowed the ambulance-bus and swallowed her as she left the world and entered the underland where all who were not desired, who caught like rough teeth in the cogwheels, who had no place or fit crosswise the one they were hammered into, were carted to repent of their contrariness or to pursue their mad vision down to the pit of terror. Into the asylum that offered none, the broken-springed bus roughly galloped. (p. 31)

Unlike the memoirists discussed in the previous chapter, Connie is institutionalised not because of mental illness, but because of her poverty and the brutality of a medical system that takes at face value a nephew's

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accusation of her violent insanity. More explicitly than those texts, then, the psychiatric hospital is represented here as the lowest circle of a patriarchal Hell, where the punishment meted out is both unjust and misogynistic. Although a fictional work, Piercy's representation is closely based on a historical account of medical treatments of women, as Sue Walker has shown.23 Her psychiatric institute is a Hell made immanent in history; it is a `place of punishment, of sorrow, of the slow or fast murder of the self' (p. 31). Like Dante's Inferno, the psychiatric institution is a vertically stratified, entirely separate world; `each patient rose and dropped through the dim rings of hell gaining and losing privileges, sent down to the violent wards, ordered to electroshock, filed away among the living cancers of the chronic wards' (p. 83). While Piercy makes it clear that women like Connie have been institutionalised on the basis of their gender, there is also huge discrimination on the bases of wealth, race and class. When Connie is transferred to a teaching hospital, she sees evidence of genuine medical care being extended to middle-class, short-term patients who receive proper assessment and a sensible drug regime; they are not stripped of their independence and their wards are left unlocked (pp. 194, 340). But for Connie and the other Latino inmates, the teaching hospital proves to be a lower Hell than the psychiatric institute. Without their consent, they are made the subject of crude psychological experiments, including having radio controlled implants placed in their brains to control their behaviour. Piercy shows that the women are treated in this fashion simply because they can be; poor, black and female, they are considered socially expendable (see pp. 32, 280). While Carter argued that the specularisations of Western capitalism can be particularly beneficial to women, Piercy's novel makes clear that these benefits are also very much dependent on class and wealth.24 For unemployed, Latino women like Connie, the US patriarchal, corporate system provides no such opportunities for gender reinvention: Whoever owned this place, these cities, whoever owned those glittering glassy office buildings in midtown filled with the purr of money turning over, those refineries over the river in Jersey with their flames licking the air, they gave nothing back. They took and took and left their garbage choking the air, the river, the sea itself. Choking her. A life of garbage. Human garbage. She had had too little of what her body needed and too little of what her soul could imagine. She had been able to do little in the years of her life, and that little had been ill paid or punished. (p. 280)

But if corporate capitalism is socially and economically stratified, in Connie's view the basic unit of this exploitative system is the inequality

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between men and women. In hospital, she sees the surgeons as demons: `Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior, they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel' (p. 282). And in the outside world, she reflects, `All my life I've been pushed around by my father, by my brother Luis, by schools, by bosses, by cops, by doctors and lawyers and caseworkers and pimps and landlords' (pp. 98±9). If Hell is to be changed, Piercy suggests, the change has to begin with a dismantling of this hierarchical power relation between the sexes. More explicitly than Willa, Connie suffers the psychic rape that to the archetypal mythologist is ground for revelation in the underworld.25 Like the other inmates, Connie is sent to the operating theatre for brain surgery. Semi-conscious throughout, Connie experiences the operation as a physical and psychic loss of identity: `terror cut through the veils of the drug like a needle penetrating the bone supposed to protect her fragile spongy brain. How much of her was crammed into that space?' (p. 281). After the operation, her sense of dislocation intensifies: `she felt distanced from her own life, as if it had ended with the implantation of the dialytrode. She could not resume her life. Therefore Connie was no more' (p. 302). If this is the nadir of her descent, it is important to note that she is transformed by the experience, not because she learns to like it, but because she discovers she can fight it. Unlike Barfoot's Abra and Atwood's narrator, Connie Ramos cannot simply abscond from the patriarchal Hell in which she is constituted as a non-self. Like Willa, she is radicalised from her position inside Hell, although the means by which she is transformed are different. Whereas Willa conjures a self from the fragmented records of past women's lives, Connie is metamorphosed by time-travelling into a gynandric, socialist, utopian future.26 In the company of an androgynous guide named Luciente, Connie visits (or dreams) the village of Mattapoisett, home to some six hundred people in the year 2137. Since Connie's Hell is urban and hierarchised, her utopia is rural and egalitarian. Wealth is distributed among the inhabitants equally. Madness still exists but here `going down' is devoid of social stigma (p. 65): `our madhouses are places where people retreat when they want to go down into themselves ± to collapse, carry on, see visions, hear voices of prophecy, bang on the walls, relive infancy' (p. 66). Likewise every aspect of the relation between the sexes, from romance to conceiving, bearing and raising children, to the sharing of space, work and wealth has been reimagined by this utopian community. The patriarchal nucleus of the traditional Western family unit is broken down and restructured. Each child is born in a tube and has three mothers, including males and females. With hormone supplements, both

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sexes are able to breast-feed the infants, and all three adults share in the raising of the child. The reinvention of sexual relations forms the basis for Piercy's vision of a more just and egalitarian society. As Luciente tells Connie, `the gift is in growing to care, to connect, to cooperate. Everything we learn aims to make us feel strong in ourselves, connected to all living' (p. 241). The goals of Luciente's world are not economic growth but ecological renewal: `someday the gross repair will be done. The oceans will be balanced, the rivers flow clean, the wetlands and the forests flourish. There'll be no more enemies. No Them and Us' (p. 328). To a later generation of readers, some of these ideals will seem not only impracticable but undesirable. But in my view, her 1970s utopian vision is still compelling because it presents a historicised vision of the future. Mattapoisett is not a perfect state; it is just one headed in a better, more sustainable, more equable direction. The ideal future is out of Luciente's reach, as she tells Connie, `I can't know that time ± any more than you can ultimately know us. We can only know what we can truly imagine' (p. 328). Connie also visits an alternate, nightmare future, in which the present capitalist Hell has worsened and intensified. In this dystopian future, Luciente has become Gildina, and patriarchal capitalism has reached its logical extreme. Mattapoisett has become literally a vertically tiered city, with different levels for different income brackets: The richies don't live down here . . . The air's too thick, like they say. Not in here, of course, Middle- and upper-level flacks are all conditioned. But you should see where I was born! You're born coughing and you pass off to Geri coughing, like they say. I always thought the sky was yellow till I came here. (p. 291)

What matters for Piercy is not how realistic or plausible these utopian and dystopian futures are, but how they move the heroine to take action in her immediate circumstances. If in Lacan's view self-consciousness is structured in terms of an anticipated belatedness, a future anterior sense that strictly limits the subject's present existence, then futurist narratives such as Connie's sci-fi dream-visions have an important role to play in disrupting this sense of temporal predetermination.27 In between the time-travelling episodes, Connie continues her fight to survive in the mental hospital. The intermittent conversations with the two women from her possible futures give her the strength to resist the numbing effects of the dialytrode which, eventually, the doctors are forced to remove. Whereas Willa regains her historical being through an engagement with the past, Connie enters the historical present by learning to imagine possible near futures. Thus, I would take issue with Shands' argument

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that linear, historical time is being `sabotaged' by a kind of `women's time' in this novel (p. 79). Shands cites Kristeva, who identified two types of time linked with female subjectivity: `the ``cyclical'' and the ``monumental,'' the former being linked with ``cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm'' and the latter ``all-encompassing and infinite like imaginary space'''.28 But `monumental' time is precisely what defines the patriarchal, capitalist Hell that Connie is trying to escape. And while the community of Mattapoisett aligns itself with ecological and biological `life rhythms', it also has a strong sense of a historical past and future. In my reading of Piercy, Connie's aim is to return to chronological time, not escape from it. Once she begins to fight against her doctors, Connie finds her entry into the future blocked. Whether externally or unconsciously produced, the visions force Connie to return to her present. Once again, this descent journey ends with a monstrous new birth. Having poisoned and killed the four doctors, Connie hardens herself against emotion and hope: `war, she thought. I'm at war. No more fantasies, no more hopes. War' (p. 338). The final chapter consists of excerpts `from the Official History of Consuelo Camacho Ramos', detailing the history of her medical treatment at Rockover and the teaching hospital. As in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, the concluding medical report interrupts the narrator's focalisation through Connie, and cuts her off from the reader. But the History also reveals that Connie does survive. Since she cannot escape Hell, she becomes a terrorist of the underworld.

Dante upside-down: Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette Alice Notley's narrative epic, The Descent of Alette (1992), describes the descent of the eponymous heroine through a series of underworlds, from a nightmarish subway filled with trapped, half-metamorphosed souls, to the palace of a tyrant who keeps them forever travelling underground. Of all the descents discussed in this chapter, Alette is the only one to adopt the mythic model of a female descent journey, that of Inanna, although, as we shall see, there is also a sustained, critical dialogue with Dante's Inferno. Notley's underworld is bisexual, housing a `first mother', a tyrannous patriarchal god and (not the same thing) a `first father'. For Notley, the `first mother' is a positive figure, but her heroine must negotiate with all three of these divinities, female and male, before she can leave the underworld. That is to suggest that Notley represents the individual as a

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sexually hybrid being, containing male and female attributes, masculine and feminine characteristics. The principal task of her descent heroine, Alette, is to integrate the characteristics of her `first parents' in herself. By successfully hybridising their strengths, she will acquire the power to overthrow the tyrant who rules both under- and overworlds. At the beginning of her descent journey, Alette meets a woman like Barfoot's Abra, who has voluntarily withdrawn from society. ` ``Under'' ``my shawl'' ``I try to be, I'' ``am'' / ``another world'' ``a woman's world ± '' ', she says to Alette, before walking unsteadily away, ` ``afraid'' ``we would corrupt her'' ``corrupt her world''' (p. 14). Alette, however, rejects this decision to withdraw into the self, or into a monolithic view of gender. Moreover, rather than fearfully withdrawing from a society which appears to be beyond all hope of change, Alette's journey brings her into confrontation with the worst aspects of the capitalist city from which she comes. She acquires the art of disobedience by travelling through Dis (Hades). In her essay The Poetics of Disobedience, Alice Notley describes The Descent of Alette as `an immense act of rebellion against dominant social forces, against the fragmented forms of modern poetry, against the way a poem was supposed to look.'29 Alette's unusual form expresses the poem's reach towards a difficult and hard-won sense of wholeness. The narrative is divided into four untitled books, and each of these contains about forty untitled sections (or cantos) of stanzaic, unrhymed, long-lined verse. What is unusual is Notley's use of double quotation marks to mark off the rhythmic units or feet in the line. When these are combined with single quotation marks to distinguish different speakers, the lines fairly bristle with punctuation. In a prefatory note, Notley explains that the marks are intended to make us read slowly (which they certainly do), and articulate the verse rhythm at a specific pace. Furthermore, they are a reminder that the poem's speaker, Alette, is not the author, and that the narrative is `not a thought, or a record of thought-process, this is a story, told' (`Author's Note'). Given the poem's emphasis on the speaker's `I', both these points are important. In interview, Notley has expressed a preference for the term `soul' rather than `self' (which she dismisses as narcissistic);30 for her, a soul is `a corporeal reality or solidity', `a very tangible . . . mystical place'.31 In The Descent of Alette, the protagonist's identity is remarkably fluid. At times she seems to represent a plurality of characters (` ``I saw that'' ``my hands' outlines'' ``were several'' ``& seemed blurred'' ' (p. 47)); at other times, she is defiantly individual. According to Notley, the poem is `narrated by an I who doesn't know her name and whose name when she finds it means appendage of a male name [in French, -ette is added to masculine words to make them feminine

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and/or diminutive, as in babette, for example]' (The Poetics of Disobedience, p. 1). `Alette' is also a portmanteau word derived from `Alice Notley', but Notley insists that `her important name is I. I stand with this, and with the urgency that saying I creates, a facing up to sheer presence, death and responsibility, the potential for blowing away all the gauze' (Poetics, p. 1). The quotation marks around Alette's narration thus reinforce the point that she is a constructed character, that what integrity she achieves is provisional and relational. Likewise the poem strives towards epic wholeness, but the intrusive punctuation prevents the reader from assuming this to be a natural, universal or inevitable form. Mikhail Bakhtin controversially argued that lyric poetry tends toward monologism, creating a speaking `I' whose authority is never challenged by other voices.32 In this respect, The Descent of Alette could be described as an anti-lyric poem. Not only anti-lyric, Alette might even be described as anti-language, with its shackled poetic feet and crippled long lines. In The Poetics of Disobedience, Notley writes, `like many writers I feel ambivalent about words, I know they don't work . . . I tend to think reality is poetry, and that it isn't words' (p. 3). The unusual verse form of Alette makes readers feel this distrust of words, yet also conveys the narrator's desire to get beneath words to a subterraneous, sublinguistic `reality'. The subterraneous reality is solid and corporeal though, not a world of disembodied, Platonic, ideal forms. In Alette, language must be escaped because it belongs to someone else: ` ``The tyrant'' ``owns form'' ' (p. 25); ` ``All stories,'' ``all drama,'' ``all poetry'' come from / here now''' (p. 134). The `tyrant' is a fictional character in Alette's underworld, the demonic Other whom Alette must kill to return safely to the surface. Allegorically, he represents a broad swathe of evils: the political and economic leadership of Western capitalism, the spirit of corporatism generally, and the ` ``endless male / will'' ' expressed in Western art and culture (p. 6). Linguistically speaking, the `tyrant' is also any literary tradition to which Alette's descent narrative might be aligned. In a subsequent epic narrative, entitled Disobedience (2001), Notley writes about literary `Greats': `Fuck 'em ± / they aren't ``great'' on the newly discovered / planet beneath Orion; and deep deep inside me, in the caverns / I haven't heard of them. I've only heard of the unnamed there' (Disobedience, p. 97). In interview, Notley disavows the influence of Dante on Alette (`I wasn't reading Dante when I wrote it'),33 although she proceeds to outline the ground of her poem's substantial dialogue with the Commedia: `I was trying to stand Dante on his head ± I was trying to reverse things so that the Paradiso was down instead of up, and was dark instead of light.'34 The topography of Alette's underworld does indeed constitute an

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`upside-downing' of the Commedia, although one might counter that this strategy of inversion is itself Dantean and characteristic of katabatic narrative more generally. The first book of Alette discovers the protagonist trapped underground, in a surreal subway system filled with hybrid, metamorphosing creatures: a woman and child on fire (p. 25), a man turning into a fish (p. 16), a woman becoming an eagle (p. 26), people encased in ghosts (p. 12), ant-faced and spidery crowds and a drugged female serpent (p. 13). Like the damned souls in Inferno, these people live an eternity of suffering; ` ``It is a kind of'' ``forever:'' ``nearly since'' ``the world / began'' ' (p. 90). But Notley's infernal subway is not a place to which people go in the afterlife nor is it a condition suffered by a few unfortunates. It is an allegorical representation of the way life already is in Western capitalist countries. Alette simply wakes to find herself in this twentieth-century, infernal condition. In an echo of the first line of Inferno, she begins, ` ``one day, I awoke'' ``& found myself on'' ``a subway, endlessly''' (p. 3). And yet, by juxtaposing `one day' with `endlessly', she suggests that there is a historical beginning to this condition, and there may conceivably be an end. Like the pilgrim, Alette discovers that ` ``Down'' ``is now the only way'' ``to rise'' ' (p. 26); but as her condition is already infernal, she has to journey deeper into Hell, and indeed underneath Hell itself. Like other descent heroes, she is told that hers is a rare journey, with an uncertain outcome: ` ``We don't know how / you'll return'' (``It has been doneÐ'' ``Stories vary'' ``as to what / happens . . .'') ``But you will'' ``descend'' ``into an unknown'' ``unlit world''' (p. 41). But Alette's journey takes her first to a purgatorial middle ground (Book Two), and then to an underground paradise (Book Three). Purgatory here consists of a network of caves (as in Carter's The Passion of New Eve) which ` ``are something like'' ``our middle depths'' ``or middle psyche''' (p. 47). Passing through these caves as if through a series of dreams, Alette learns more about the history leading to her infernal condition; she begins to remember elements of her own past and survives a number of threatening encounters. The caves are full of other suffering souls who differ from those in the infernal subway mostly in their recognition that they are trapped within the tyrant's rule and consciousness. Eventually, Alette passes from these to a deeper place, where she becomes at once a singular and plural being. Thus Notley relocates the whole of Dante's immortal cosmos underground, and realigns the triptych of cantiche into a single, downward trajectory. But while Alette consciously inverts the topography of Dante's Commedia, it also embraces the whole trajectory of Dante's spiritual journey to a degree that is very rare in a late twentieth-century descent narrative.35 The primary characteristic of Notley's Hell (Book One) is the condition

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of existing in and for another's will. Thus the tyrant encases souls in suits made to fit himself: ` ``he encased many'' ``men not so'' ``uncomfortably'' // ``But others,'' ``especially women,'' ``looked as if they'' ``suffered from'' // ``trying'' ``to fit inside'' ``this other''' (p. 12). This situation is exacerbated in a capitalist system of exchange value, since the virtual products of white-collar labour are immeasurable and can therefore potentially enslave us endlessly; ` ``see them'' ``perform actions'' ``without objects'' // ``As if in pantomime'' . . . ``Perform motions'' ``of working'' // ``Work invisible'' ``keyboards'' ``carry invisible'' ``files'' ' (p. 19). Working in this system leaves us fragmented and alienated from our bodies and minds; instead we have a ` ``Life of bits & pieces'' / ``cars & scenes'' ``disconnected'' ``little dreams'' ``False continuum'' / ``mechanical time''' (p. 4). As in Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, ecological destruction is perceived to be a by-product of this patriarchal, capitalist alienation: ` ``we cannot rise, as we should'' ``We cannot pass through'' // ``the tyrant's world's new fabrics'' . . . ``He has changed'' ``the chemical'' ``composition'' ``of everything'' ``but spirit'' ``but our souls'' . . . ``we are all // trapped below'' ``We can only go'' ``down'' ``farther down ± ''' (p. 26). In such an economy (as we shall see in the next chapter) all are ghosts, but women are more so than others: ` ``for ages'' women have ``danced'' ``Nothing'' ``but sex'' while their heads ``played audience'' ``to the achievements'' ``of males''' (p. 91). If the fragmentation of female subjectivity is the root of the problem, then her psychic re-memberment is also the means by which society can heal itself. In The Passion of New Eve, Carter's fictional Hollywood icon Tristessa is a perpetually grieving figure, carrying the burden of her culture's grief. In Alette (as in Atwood's Surfacing), women also carry the guilt for imperial wars and exploitation of the poor. But Alette's first step towards emancipation is to learn to reject this burden. She objects, ` ``I've never'' ``been allowed'' / ``to participate'' ``in the decision to go to war ± '' . . . ``How dare he'' ``implicate me'' ``In such evil?'' ' (p. 51). By the time Alette reaches the deepest level of her underworld, she has inverted grief and complicity into a radical sense of lightness: ` ``I felt unburdened'' ``& even buoyant''' (p. 86). It is precisely because she has not been allowed to participate in the atrocities of the past that Alette can enter history lightly at the end of the poem. The lowest layer of Notley's Hell/Paradise (Book Three) is the place of Alette's ` ``deepest origin'' ' (p. 47), a dark forest with a deep black lake at its centre. Here she meets a headless woman, her `first mother', and a talking owl, her `first father', who describe the original fragmentation of gender and the fall into `history as eternity'. Her first heroic task is to restore the head of her `first mother'. Following Lacan, Notley represents

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this figure as a fragmentary, pre-Symbolic being, lacking autonomous agency almost since the dawn of human history. This figure tells Alette: I endured'' ``that dance'' ``I danced'' ``& I dance'' ``Nothing'' ``but sex'' ``My head gradually'' ``over ages'' ``disattached from'' ``my body'' ``as if by the will'' ``of everyone'' ``My body'' ``still danced thenÐ'' ``but my head'' ``played audience'' ``to the achievements of males'' ``See it there?'' ' [. . .] Then one day'' ``I walked carrying'' ``my own head'' ``down through darkness below the earth,'' ``to this place'' ``And was forgotten,'' ``Mostly forgotten,'' ``above the ground'' ' (p. 91)

Alette retrieves the first mother's head and restores it to the truncated body, and here she assumes her underworld task is complete. ` ``I thought my journey'' ``might end with you'' ', Alette says, but the first mother replies, ` ``you must take action elsewhere'' ' (p. 99). Alette still has to experience the proper death denied to the Lacanian spectre of the feminine. As when Dante arrives within sight of the heavenly Rose in Paradiso, the black lake at the centre of Alette's underworld is the symbolic space in which Alette undergoes a blissful, rather than a demonic, metamorphosis. And yet, the goal of such a transformation in Alette is not towards transcendence of the material world, but fully inhabiting it. Just before her ordeal in the lake, Alette sits listening to voices coming from a nearby wood and reflects that she may be in something like heaven: ` ``Perhaps heaven'' ``is voices, . . . ``speaking voices,'' ``not singing voices'' ``Perhaps // paradise'' ``is just like this'' ' (p. 103). That they should speak, not sing, underlines Notley's distance from Dante's vision, and indeed that of classical epic which is traditionally sung not spoken.36 Alette, who is now also partly the first mother (p. 102), suffers a `little death' at the hands (or talons) of her owl-father. Shortly afterwards, she is thrown into the ` ``infinitely'' ``deep'' lake' which, the owl tells her, ` ``connects with'' ``the great darkness,'' ``connects with'' ``one's death'' ' (p. 105). Here Alette loses consciousness of everything but ` ``Fire &'' ``my screaming'' ' (p. 108). Although ``effectively dead'', her senses revive while she is still in the lake. She feels that she has become, ``pure sight'' . . . ``seeing,'' ``with no object'' ``whatsoever'' ``Nothing to see,'' ``nothing to be:'' ``There was'' ``an other thoughÐ'' ``the light which lit me'' ``& I loved it'' ``most purely'' ``though I'' ``was also it'' `` `Is this'' ``the deepest darkness?'' ``I [/] asked it'' ``It is,'' ' ``it said,'' ``in no voice at all'' (p. 111)

In this paradisal ecstasis, Alette feels the barrier between self and other dissolve, or rather finds it to be non-existent. She both is, and loves, this

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other. The apex of Dante's paradisal journey is such a meeting with the beloved; by placing it here at the nadir of the descent and displacing the demonic Other to another, unessential position, Notley clearly signals her revision of Dante's Commedia. The after-effects of feeling ` ``at peace with'' ``being'' ' (p. 111), moreover, are quite different for Alette and for Dante in Paradise. While Dante's happiness disappears when he is made to return to earth, Alette shivers ` ``with pleasure'' ``to be entrapped'' ``by flesh'' ' (p. 113). In Alette, the separation of body and soul is an infernal condition; just as the two genders should be integrated in each of us, and as each should feel a connection to an amoral, animal state of being, so we should exist in the flesh, not separate from the limitations of time and historical circumstance. These ideas, clearly not Dantean ones, align the poem with her other major literary model, the descent of Inanna, whose influence Notley willingly acknowledges.37 In this Sumerian narrative, the goddess Inanna has to shed one layer of clothing after another as she descends to confront her sister Erishkigall who is Queen of the underworld. Each layer also represents an aspect of her strength, so that by the time she gets to Erishkigall she is powerless to overcome her enemy. Like one of her castoff clothes, she is hung on a peg for many days until finally someone begs for her release. After this, she seizes the immortal power she came for, and returns to the overworld to rule for many years as a wise and just queen. In other words, Inanna descends not to escape the world, but to extend her power in it. Her reasons for confronting Erishkigall are earth-bound, practical ones. Alette's willing return to the flesh in Book Three, and to ordinary existence in Book Four, are similar to Inanna's return in that both heroines embrace, rather than transcend, material reality. Alette's entry into history, via the tyrant's death, is a violent one. But Notley represents this as a different order of violence. Before killing him, Alette reflects, ` ``I understood'' ``what to do now'' ``& searched myself'' // ``for a cruelty'' ``& temporary'' ``heartlessness'' ``I didn't know of'' / ``in myself:'' ``my owl self'' ``had to do this'' . . . ``But I thought'' ``my / woman's body'' ``had factually'' ``to do this'' ' (p. 143). As we have seen in earlier narratives, Notley strategically hybridises her heroine with an animal species, to give her the power and moral right to change the human species as a whole. Moreover, the murder is not literal but figural; if in Carter's New Eve the mythic Mother turns out to be a `figure of speech' (p. 184), here the patriarchal tyrant turns out to be another mirage. Alette locates the heart of the tyrant in a magic shrub and tears it up by the roots. When the sleeping tyrant wakes to find himself dying, he reproaches Alette, ` ``How could you be'' ``this cruel?'' // ``And do you not'' ``kill yourself?'' ``your own culture . . .'' ``soul's breath?'' ' But Alette

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replies, ` ``I'm killing no one'' ``You are not real'' ' (p. 144). The tyrant is one of many ``forms in dreams'' (p. 144) who can be dispatched by an artist capable of imagining different forms. In this inversion of Lacan's concept of the specular feminine, Notley specularises the patriarch and then dispatches him as an unnecessary and outmoded idea of otherness. Dante's pilgrim experiences a fleeting vision of paradise by learning to accept divine will as his own. By contrast, Notley's Alette rediscovers paradise by steeling herself to commit murder and to be disobedient to any form of external authority. If Dante aims to demonstrate the justness and beauty of the cosmos as seen by God, Notley's protagonist sees its ugliness, destroys Hell, and changes the world forever.38 As Alette leaves the tyrant's house, she sees the tormented souls, previously trapped in the subway, flooding up to the open air: ``The street was'' ``already'' ``filling up'' ``with people'' ``They knew he must be dead'' ``Stood staring into'' ``the clear air:'' ``it was early'' ``in the morning'' ``The sky was jeweled blue, rich blue'' ` ``What we can have now','' ``a woman said,'' ``is infinity'' ``in our lives''. (p. 147)

In orthodox Christian theology, `infinity' is specifically a feature of paradisal time, whereas infernal time is `endless'. In restoring `infinity' to the lives of the damned, Alette is completing the trajectory of Dante's journey from Hell to Paradise (with the obvious contrast that she saves not only herself, but all those trapped in Hell). But the oxymoronic phrase, `infinity in our lives', makes clear that is a mortal, human condition, not an unearthly one. Some readers may find, despite the radiance of the final lines, that the return to historical time is too easily achieved in the fourth book of Alette. The surprising facility of the return is, as we have seen elsewhere, a marked feature of katabatic narratives. But as with Slater's Spasm discussed in the previous chapter, Alette lays bare the constructedness of its ending. Alette's return from Hell is so impossibly victorious, so richly complete, that it cannot, in my view, be mistaken for reality. But in its utopian invocation of the possibility of `infinity in our lives' it cuts across late twentieth-century expectations of doubled, irresolute, murky or ambiguous endings. In the Petrarchan clarity of its vision (`the sky jeweled blue'), it defies the need for compromise, prevarication, double standards or tolerance of oppression. Notley has the boldness to imagine a katabatic heroine who can invert the darkest of all possible worlds into a realm of buoyancy and light. While this chapter has presented a wide spectrum of views on the gender dynamics of the descent to the underworld, it is also important

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to acknowledge the common ground shared by all these katabatic narratives. A common starting point seems to be that patriarchy, and patriarchal capitalism, offer women a half life at best, a state of inbetween-ness which for many equates to an existence in Hell. Furthermore, one might venture a further generalisation that a common goal of the descent includes discovering a mode of being that is relational rather than fathomlessly self-reflexive, and materially grounded in history rather than transcendent. The three narratives I have chosen to discuss in greater detail also share a utopian impulse, although these are worked out in very different contexts and with different degrees of hybridisation with other generic world-views, whether realistic, science fictional or visionary. This utopian strain is important because, to borrow a sentiment from a character considered in the next chapter, neither a subject nor a society can come into being before it is imagined.39

Notes 1. In Virgil's Georgics, Eurydice dies as a result of stepping on a poisonous snake while fleeing from Aristaeus. This scene is narrated in three lines (4.457±9), while the response of Orpheus fills another eighty (460±529). 2. See, for example, Freud, `Femininity', in The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis, pp. 412±32. 3. See Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. 4. Cornell, `What is Ethical Feminism?', in Benhabib, Feminist Contentions, p. 88. 5. Jouve, White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue, p. 7. Judith Butler, however, challenges the assumption that you must `have' a `self' before you act; see her `For a Careful Reading', in Benhabib, Feminist Contentions, pp. 134±5. 6. On gender representation in Holocaust literature, see Joan Smith, `Holocaust Girls', Misogynies, pp. 86±96; and Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, Women in the Holocaust. 7. Freud, The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis, p. 413. 8. Drusilla Cornell, however, makes `upside-down' use of Lacan in her psychoanalytic approach; she reasons that `if woman is lack . . . she can ``be'' anything' (Feminist Contentions, p. 87). This is a thesis that Angela Carter explores provocatively in The Passion of New Eve, where a man in drag epitomises ideal femininity and a castrated misogynist becomes the new century's Eve. But even Carter's Eve, synthetic woman par excellence (p. 125), calls a halt to the endless challenges of gender metamorphosis. Finally, she wonders, `should we . . . put [all the symbols] away, for a while, until the times have created a fresh iconography?' (p. 174). 9. See also David Pike's analysis of the descent narratives of Christine de Pizan and Virginia Woolf (Passage Through Hell, pp. 134±202).

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10. For a similar view, see Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life, pp. 16±17. 11. Benhabib, `Feminism and Postmodernism', Feminist Contentions, p. 30. 12. Compare Alasdair Gray's Poor Things, a reworking of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which a beautiful, humane female monster named Bella becomes free once she realises she is the product of a human creator. 13. Naylor continued this practice in Mama Day, which is a rewriting and revision of Shakespeare's The Tempest. 14. See, for example, Catherine Ward, `Linden Hills: A Modern Inferno'; Nick Havely, ` ``Prosperous People'' and ``The Real Hell'' in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills'; Margaret Earley Whitt, Understanding Gloria Naylor; Luke Bouvier, `Reading in Black and White: Space and Race in Linden Hills'; K. A. Sandiford, `Gothic and Intertextual Constructions in Linden Hills'; Virginia Fowler, Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary. Fowler summarises Naylor's debt to Dante under three headings: Naylor re-imagines Dante's moral geography, adapts his narrative strategy of the journey into and through Hell and offers an allegorical warning to her African-American readers (Gloria Naylor, pp. 61±2). One might add that unusually, for a twentiethcentury narrative, Naylor represents Hell as a just place; each of the selfbetrayals perpetrated by the characters living in Linden Hills earns the betrayer an exactly appropriate psychological torment. In contrast to Morrison's Sula, the novel's other major textual influence, Linden Hills applies Dante's concept of contrapasso with rigorous literalness. 15. Nedeed is an inversion of de eden, because ` ``the Nedeeds are the Satanic rulers of this false paradise'' ' (Naylor, quoted by Fowler, p. 64; Ward, p. 70n). Nedeed males also conceive children under the sign of Capricorn, because the goat's sign is traditionally associated with the Devil (Fowler, p. 70). Nedeed's street address is 999 Tupelo Drive, which upside-down is 666, the biblical sign of Satan (Ward, p. 69n; Fowler, p. 64). Tupelo is both named after a Mississippi town, from which the Nedeeds originate, and a pun on Dante's `two pillars' at the entrance to the lower city of Dis (Bonetti's interview with Naylor, quoted by Fowler, p. 64). 16. Willie rejects the totalising canvas of Milton's Paradise Lost, saying to himself, `it would take an epic to deal with something like What has this whole week meant? He'd have to leave that to guys like Milton. No just find something small and work from there' (Linden Hills, pp. 275±6). 17. Willie is represented as in some respects the feminine poet, complementary to the masculine Lester. The homosocial, possibly homosexual, nature of their friendship has been explored by Henry Louis Gates in `Significant Others'. Notably, the exit of the boys together from Linden Hills echoes the departure of Milton's Adam and Eve from Paradise. Compare Milton's closing lines with Naylor's: `They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way' (Paradise Lost, 12.646±9); `Each with his own thoughts, they approached the chain fence . . . Hand anchored to hand, one helped the other to scale the open links. Then, they walked out of Tupelo Drive into the last days of the year' (Linden Hills, p. 304). 18. Teresa Goddu, `Reconstructing History in Linden Hills', p. 226. 19. Compare Judith Butler who asks, `what notion of ``agency'' will that be which always and already knows its transcendental ground, and speaks only and always from that ground? To be so grounded is nearly to be buried: it is

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20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Engendering Dissent in the Underworld

to refuse alterity, to reject contestation' (Judith Butler, `For a Careful Reading', in Feminist Contestations p. 131). On katabasis in Naylor's earlier work, see Montgomery, ` ``The Fathomless Dream'': Gloria Naylor's Use of the Descent Motif in The Women of Brewster Place'. Naylor, `A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison', p. 211, in Danille Taylor-Guthrie (ed.), Conversations with Toni Morrison, pp. 188±217. `A subject . . . is performatively constituted . . . To be constituted by language is to be produced within a given network of power/discourse which is open to resignification . . . ``Agency'' is to be found precisely at such junctures where discourse is renewed' (Judith Butler, `For a Careful Reading', Feminist Contestations, p. 135). Piercy has also experimented with katabatic narrative structures and motifs in other novels, for example: Going Down Fast (1969) and He, She and It (1991). In Marge Piercy: An Overview, Sue Walker discusses Piercy's debt to Phyllis Chesler's Women and Madness (1972), a historical investigation into the medical treatment of women diagnosed as mentally ill. Compare Cornell: `the word ``feminist'' is itself intimately related to the democratic revolutions in the West. But it is precisely the ``westernization'' of the term that has made some women of color suspicious that it cannot be separated from its Western roots, and more specifically from the Imperialist imaginary' (`Rethinking the Time of Feminism', Feminist Contentions, p. 147). On this theory, see James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, p. 49; and Evans Lansing Smith, Rape and Revelation, pp. 2±3, 30 and passim. While Piercy herself describes this utopian state as androgynous, Shands argues that it maternalises men, so that its `operating principle might be called ``gynandric'' rather than gynocentric or androgynous' (The Repair of the World, p. 76). For an overview of the critical debate over the novel's genre, see Shands, pp. 65±6. For a feminist analysis of Lacan's concept of future anteriority, see Cornell, Feminist Contentions, p. 153. Kerstin Shands, The Repair of the World, p. 79, quoting Kristeva, `Women's Time', pp. 18±19. Alice Notley, The Poetics of Disobedience, p. 1. Alice Notley, `Interview with Maureen Holm', p. 2. Alice Notley, `Interview with Jennifer Dick', p. 4. Bakhtin, `Discourse in the Novel', The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 296±7. Notley, `Interview with Jennifer Dick', p. 5. Ibid., p. 5. Notley cites the Paradiso as her favourite book of the Commedia, which in itself is an unusual preference for a late twentieth-century writer. See Notley, `Interview with Jennifer Dick', p. 5. For example: `Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles' (Iliad, 1.1); `Of arms and the man I sing' (Aeneid, 1.1); `Of man's first disobedience . . . Sing, Heavenly Muse' (Paradise Lost, 1.1ff.). On the influence of the Descent of Inanna on Alette, see Notley, `Interview with Maureen Holm', p. 2. Unambiguously victorious conclusions are more characteristic of children's

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descent narratives than highly politicised, feminist ones. Recent examples of the former include Kenneth Oppel's Firewing, Pullman's The Amber Spyglass and Rushdie's Haroon and the Sea of Stories. 39. What Thaw actually says is, `if a city hasn't been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively' (Lanark, p. 243).

Chapter 7

Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots

In Alasdair Gray's Lanark, the ceiling of artist Duncan Thaw's studio is scrawled with quotations, two of which read: GOING DOWN TO HELL IS EASY: THE GLOOMY DOOR IS OPEN NIGHT AND DAY. TURNING AROUND AND GETTING BACK TO SUNLIGHT IS THE TASK, THE HARD THING. Vergil HUMANITY SETS ITSELF NO PROBLEM WHICH CANNOT EVENTUALLY BE SOLVED Marx (Lanark, p. 283)

Gray yokes together Virgil and Marx (along with Freud, Dante, Blake and many other katabatic luminaries) in order to underline the ways in which postmodern capitalism may be understood as a contemporary, secular form of Hell.1 In the other narrative strand of this mammoth, passionately socialist, sardonically self-questioning novel, the hero Lanark lives in a dystopian city without sunlight or love. The task he sets himself is to understand how the city came to be like this, and how it, or he, can be returned to the ordinary paradise he sometimes remembers from an earlier life. Lanark's Unthank is a fantastical, futuristic version of Thaw's 1950s Glasgow, which Gray represents as similarly lacking in human affection, freedom and creativity. As his name suggests, Thaw's task is to release the frozen core of humanity in himself and his environment. He proves to be a spectacular failure in this, and his alter ego, or perhaps post-ego, Lanark fares little better. And yet the novel as a whole is richly affirmative of ordinary virtues and pleasures: individual autonomy, breathable air, the affection between a father and son, light and architectural grace. While it is important, as we found with Notley's Descent, to understand the infernal condition to which Western society and economics can reduce us, it is even more necessary to recognise the transformative possibilities of the journey through Hell.

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Lanark is one of many contemporary novels that represent aspects of Western, and Western-style, capitalism as Hell. While capitalism has brought Westerners many benefits, it has also produced some of the world's worst contemporary evils, including vast inequalities between the rich and poor, the virtual and actual enslavement of millions of people to sustain an affluent few in the West, as well as global environmental damage. The Glasgow of Gray's adulthood is a classic example of a postindustrial city, with a definite `before' and `after' identity. `Before', there was well-paid, above-ground work in the shipbuilding industry; by English standards, the shipworkers were well educated and politically active. `After', there was virtually no work for anyone; 1970s Glasgow was a victim of global capitalism and its consequences. The damage to the environment represented in the fantasy section of Lanark also reflects what was happening to Scottish natural resources at the time. The apocalyptic fires and floods that threaten to overwhelm Unthank at the end of Lanark are produced not by God but by irresponsible politicians and businessmen. Gray, like other writers, portrays nuclear `accidents' as manifestations of Hell on earth.2 No one living in Glasgow in the 1960s, as Gray did, could be unaware of the fact that the American Polaris submarines, with their primed nuclear missiles pointing at Russia, were anchored 20 miles down the Clyde. Glaswegians were, by definition, a prime target for a pre-emptive counterstrike, and the CND was particularly active locally. Gray's first readers, then, might be expected to agree with Steiner's view that the twentieth century is the first to perceive advancements in science and technology as infernal as well as enlightening (In Bluebeard's Castle, p. 103).

Karl Marx's katabasis As we saw in the previous chapter, the feminist critique of patriarchy often broadens into an attack on capitalism's global exploitation of the poor. But the idea that the entire capitalist economic system, together with the postmodern culture it has helped to produce, constitutes a spatially tiered, temporally arrested, punitive, ethically bankrupt Hell is one that can be traced, directly or indirectly, to Marx's writing. As Derrida writes, `all men and women, all over the earth, are today to a certain extent the heirs of Marx and Marxism,' that is heirs of a worldview or totalising project that is uniquely `non-religious' and `not mythological' (Specters, p. 91). Twentieth-century experience teaches us that Hell exists in the material world, but Marx provides us with the secular framework for understanding and narrativising that experience.

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And yet, like Freud's, Marx's materialist vision continues to draw much from the medieval Judeo-Christian conception of a vertically tiered cosmos. On the most basic level, in Marx's Capital the bourgeois capitalist economy is represented as a two-tiered system consisting of a superstructure, where capitalists exchange commodities to create surplus value, and a base, where labourers manufacture products with a concrete use-value, which acquire the phantasmagorical exchange-value of commodities once they enter the capitalist market. Like the two-tiered psyche (conscious and unconscious) conceived by Freud, the different levels of Marx's bourgeois economy are separated from, and largely invisible to each other. The consumer of the commodity cannot know the true cost, in terms of human labour, of what she is about to consume because the product's use-value is concealed beneath its market-determined price. Marx's strategy of resistance to this blind exploitation of human labour is one of exposure and demystification. By exposing the base to the superstructure, the real conditions of labour to the consumers of commodities, capitalism's spectral powers could be overcome. Again, there is strong parallel here with Freud, for whom probing the unconscious is meant to relieve the psychotic patient's symptoms. Along with Williams and Pike, what I would stress here is that the resistance to capitalist economics requires a descent journey into the underworld, which for Marx means the workplace, the site of production itself.3 Thus near the beginning of Capital, he takes his reader by the hand, as it were, and leads him down into Hell: Let us therefore, in company with the owner of money and the owner of labour-power, leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice, `No admittance except on business'. Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is itself produced. The secret of profit-making must at last be made bare. (Capital, pp. 279±80)

As Pike shows, Walter Benjamin interprets this passage as the start of a classical-medieval descensus ad inferos, and the `no admittance' sign as an echo of Dante's famous inscription, `abandon all hope, you who enter'.4 Like the protagonist Dante, Marx's implied reader has to be exhorted to recognise his true self in the underworld:5 If . . . the German reader pharisaically shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural workers, or optimistically comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad; I must plainly tell him: De te fabula narrator! [this story is being told about you] (Capital, `Preface to the First Edition', p. 90)

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Marx wrote that `in all ideology men and their relations appear upsidedown as in a camera obscura'. To see them right side up, we must examine not their thoughts and utterances, but their `historical lifeprocess' (`Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy', p. 32). This passage reproduces in secular terms an image of upsidedown-ness that is common in religious conversion narratives, most notably Dante's Inferno. Looking back on the journey through Hell from the end of the cantica, the reader is meant to understand that the character Dante has been travelling upside-down up to the point where he reaches the bottom, or base, of Hell. It is not until he has grasped the thighs of the labouring Satan that he is able to see the world aright and upright. Earlier in the twentieth century, Benjamin re-read Marx's infernal workplace as a transformative space into which one descended to release the forces of revolution (see Pike, Passage Through Hell, p. 212). The question must be raised, though, whether this vertically stratified representation of capitalism pertains as well to the global economics of the late twentieth century and if not, whether Marx's proposed descent to the underworld of the workplace retains any of its transformative potential for the rootless, postmodern subject. Would a descent to the workplace have any effect on the hero of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991)? As the first chapter indicates (with the words `Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here' scrawled in red letters on the wall of a bank), he already lives in Hell, yet he continues to exist, slick, brand-conscious and murderous, without any indication that he is capable of sinking into despair, pity or Marxist enlightenment.

Postmodern Capitalist Hell: Alasdair Gray's Lanark Addressing the first part of the question raised above, then, one might ask: in what ways do contemporary writers represent late twentiethcentury, flexible postmodern capitalism specifically as an infernal condition? In the following discussion, I adopt the distinction that David Harvey makes between Fordian or modern capitalism (pre1970) and flexible postmodern capitalism (post-1970).6 The latter, Harvey writes, `rests on flexibility with respect to labour processes, . . . greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation, . . . [and] ``time-space compression'' ' (The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 147). While rigid or Fordian capitalism produced fixed hierarchies in the workplace that could easily be associated with Dante's circles of Hell, it is really only with flexible capitalism that we get the terrifying collapses of time and space which are the chronotopic basis

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of the infernal (that is, the eternally suffering) condition.7 In Chronoschisms, Ursula Heise argues that rapid advances in science and technology have contributed to a distinctly postmodern sense of time, in which we have to contend not only with the `shortening of temporal horizons' but also with `the co-existence of radically different times scales from the nanoseconds of the computer to the billions of years in which contemporary cosmology calculates the age of the earth and the universe' (pp. 6± 7). Such vastly contrasting timescales can scarcely be comprehended, and yet contemporary science holds them to be equally, incontrovertibly real. As Borges intimates in `The Aleph', to be able to be everywhere at once, see all things at once, experience all forms of time at once, is to see the universe as God sees it; but for a human being such a perspective would be infernal rather than divine.8 Whereas in `The Aleph', `Borges' and his rival Daneri speculate about an alternative reality in which spatial distances and temporal distinctions have collapsed, the inhabitants of Unthank actually live in a world which is hurtling toward this postmodern vanishing point. In the fourth book of Lanark, those with any form of income live in cars rather than houses; their windscreens are giant TV screens which project into the car images of home interiors, gardens, even holiday scenery, as well as local and international news (pp. 446±54). Although thus permanently mobile, Unthank citizens never actually go anywhere because simulated reality has made travel redundant. Space becomes violently unstable at the end of the novel, when huge sections of the city are pitched at odd angles due to recurrent earthquakes. But the temporal dislocations are even more striking, illustrating a `widening and deepening of capitalist social relations with time' which Harvey argues is characteristic of Western economies since the 1970s (The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 344). The two things that everyone in Unthank wants are money and time, as the many advertising billboards indicate (`MONEY IS TIME. BUY TIME FOR YOUR FAMILY FROM THE QUANTUM CHRONOLOGICAL. (THEY'LL LOVE YOU FOR IT)' (p. 432)). And yet ironically, no one has either of these desired goods. There is no sunlight with which to measure days or seasons, and by Council fiat the clocks have all been stopped, so no one `has' time. Lanark's job as a grade D inquiry clerk in Book 4 is to `give the appearance of listening closely' and to `kill hope slowly, so that the loser has time to adjust unconsciously to the loss' (p. 439). As Gilchrist explains to Lanark, `it's impossible to pay a monthly or yearly sum when we can't even measure the minutes or hours' so no one is ever paid an actual wage (p. 437). Instead, the society operates by a system of credit which deducts energy from the future life of the debtor. In postmodern capitalism, writes Harvey, `the future has come to be

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discounted into the present' (The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 291). In Unthank, this principle operates literally. As a result of his credit deductions, Lanark begins to experience rips and tears in the chronological sequence of his life toward the end of Book 4.9 Leaving his wife and baby son in the Cathedral for what appears to be a short interval, for example, he returns to find the boy half-grown and his wife living with another man. Due to the instability of time, Lanark finds it impossible to sustain real relationships; instead he is repeatedly drawn to or seduced by robots masquerading as female secretaries or prostitutes. Even food in Unthank fails to provide real sustenance. Those on security benefits are fed `threein-one' bread, which tranquilises against the cold but damages the intelligence of the consumer. When Lanark hears about this he says, `This is Hell.' Jack, a new acquaintance, laconically replies, `there are worse hells' (p. 432). The existence of better and worse hells is a theologically unorthodox, but recognisably Dantean notion to which Lanark adapts very quickly.10 This jostling, overcrowded, unstable city of chimeras and flat-screen fantasies is not democratically unreal. On the contrary, time, space, technology and political power are hierarchised to an extreme degree. If capitalism is carnivalesque, then in Lanark, as in Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, the carnival is firmly controlled from the top down. Unthank itself is held in thrall by the Council and the Institute, a seat of government and a scientific research centre located beneath the city. This tiered system suggests, in more general terms, how capitalism's collapse of spatial distances (through faster travel times, speedier deployment of local labour supplies and so on) leads to new spatial hierarchies. As Harvey writes, `the diminution of spatial barriers results in the reaffirmation and realignment of hierarchy within what is now a global urban system' (The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 295). In Lanark, it is the buried centre of power, the Dis of this dystopia, which dominates Unthank and Provan, and all the other cities constellated on the mountain slopes above it. Even within Unthank, it would be difficult to remain unaware of the hierarchisation of space. The city itself is hilly, and virtually every movement described within it is vertical. Characters are depicted ascending and descending stairways, canal banks, and hillsides. The normal way to leave Unthank is downwards, through mouths that gape open suddenly in floors, back streets and cemeteries to consume the weakest of its inhabitants. Thus in Gray's novel, postmodern capitalism assumes the form of Dante's funnel-shaped Hell. Moreover, in the third book of Lanark (which is also the first part of the novel, where the reader actually begins), Gray depicts nearly all his characters suffering from what he elsewhere describes as `Dante's bad

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mental states' (Axelrod, `An Epistolary Interview', p. 2). There are four diseases afflicting the population of Unthank in Book 3. Each disease represents a character imbalance, an excess or lack of certain qualities; thus `dragonhide' (coldness, too much regard for one's self) contrasts with `mouths' (no sense of self at all), and `twittering rigour' (dogmatism, excessive national pride, devotion to high principles) contrasts with `leeches' (parasitical behaviour, no principle at all). Those who are worst affected by disease are swallowed by the gaping Hell-mouths that channel them down into the sinks of the Institute. There they are recycled into the food, heat and electricity which sustain the Institute and Council. Gray's `bad mental states' are not morally hierarchised (as they are in Naylor's Linden Hills, for example) but those suffering from the diseases of excess (dragonhide, twittering rigour) are less easily recycled, therefore they are less likely to end up as human food, and more likely to be inducted into the Institute±Council complex as doctors or political delegates. At whatever level they survive, however, the populations of Unthank, Provan and all the other cities constellated around the Council exist so as to sustain this underground centre of scientific, technological and political power. Thus Lanark represents capitalist exploitation as infernal, with its ceaseless feeding off weaker and undefended peoples, spaces and natural resources. But the most frightening aspect of Gray's postmodern Hell is that it inflicts suffering casually, without malevolent intent. Unlike the nightmare future Orwell imagines in 1984, for instance, there appears to be nobody in charge of Gray's Hell. Like Naylor's fifth Luther Nedeed, Gray's ninth Lord Monboddo is the patriarch who ostensibly governs both Council and (eventually) research institute. But while he crests the wave of capitalist expansion, Monboddo does not govern its behaviour. He neither approves nor disapproves of the Hobbesian principle that drives his nation-state, expressed in the statement, `man is the pie that bakes and eats itself, and the recipe is separation' (p. 411 and elsewhere). When, at the end of the novel, Lanark accuses Monboddo of creating a cannibalistic society, the leader replies fatalistically, `it is a sad fact of human nature that in large numbers we can only organise against each other' (p. 550). Lanark retorts that this social organisation is not natural but consciously constructed; `our nations are not built instinctively by our bodies, like beehives; they are works of art, like ships, carpets and gardens. The possible shapes of them are endless' (p. 550). In the frontispiece illustration to Book 4, Gray reproduces Hobbes's image of the state as Leviathan, along with a quotation encircling the giant's head: `By Arts Is Formed that great Mechanical Man called a State, foremost of the Beasts of the Earth for Pride' (p. 355). But if this monster

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with closed eyes was produced by human artifice, by Lanark's time, it has an internal momentum that far exceeds any individual, human control. As a symbol of evil, this blind, mechanistic giant is both distinctively postmodern and recognisably medieval. Dante's Lucifer is notably lacking in rationality or will, in contrast with early modern representations such as Milton's in Paradise Lost (1667) or Daniel Defoe's in The History of the Devil (1726). And in postmodern narratives, it is often a monstrously corruptive system rather than an individual intention or act that is represented as evil. The modernist in Borges concedes the possibility that the labyrinthine universe really does make sense, really is perfectly ordered by a divine Being ± although if it is so, this can only be horrific for us mortals. But at least the Borgesian labyrinth, for example in `The Garden of Forking Paths', is a complex structure created by a rational mind. Likewise, in Borges's stories, every labyrinth has its minotaur (even if, as in `Asterion', the minotaur is the first-person narrator himself). But for Thomas Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49, the labyrinth is an infernal figure for the world's lack of telos or meaningful pattern. In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipaa descends paranoically through a labyrinth of clues pertaining to her former lover, the US Postal Service, and her own identity, but she never discovers an exit or a centre to this ontological maze.11 There is no centre and no Minotaur in Barth's short story `Lost in the Funhouse' and other classic American postmodern fictions. While the infernal labyrinth is not an invention of postmodernity, any more than is the concept of a mechanistic state and economy, these images express something of the paradoxical nature of living in a specifically postmodern economy.12 We are free to go in whichever direction we choose, but none of them leads out of the market. Lanark's future wife, Rima, refuses to eat the food in the Institute once she realises it is made from processed human flesh. Midway through her journey, however, she gives up on her protest, because there is nothing else to eat and seemingly no other system in which to live. In response to the global economic disaster caused by his state's irresponsible exploitation of natural and human resources, Monboddo designs what he calls his `Laputa project' (after Swift's fantasy realm in Gulliver's Travels), which rather than regulating capitalist expansion, extends it vertically into outer space. Although aborted, this project raises the nightmarish possibility of the skies being hierarchised into layered cities, as happens in Connie's dystopian future, in Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and in Gray's short story `The Axletree' (Unlikely Stories, Mostly, pp. 67±84, 233±71). But if this is a representation of a possible, dystopian future, the state as mechanised beast is also an allegorical representation of the present economy, especially when viewed from `below'. To a death-row prisoner,

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`it's almost as if this machine, the corrupt system, has gained a life of its own like some malevolent god that everyone is terrified of, afraid to defy' (Welcome to Hell, p. 29). To preserve his sanity, the prisoner has to believe `that God is going to free me from within the belly of this beast' (Welcome to Hell, p. 26). Not unlike this actual prisoner, fictional Thaw imagines global corporations swelling and consuming each other until nothing survives but one gigantic flea louse, `a titan curled round the equator like a grub round a pebble' (Lanark, p. 233). In a lecture on Baudelaire's `Satanic Verses', Jonathan Culler argues that Baudelaire's characterisation of Satan has a particular contemporary relevance, though many have dismissed this aspect of the modernist poet's work as outmoded. If, as Baudelaire foretold, we have reached a time in which `everyone feels the Devil and no one believes in him', perhaps we should understand by this term not an individual agent of evil, but all those impersonal forces, `history, classes, capital, freedom, public opinion . . . which seem to control the world and give events meaningful and often oppressive structures' (p. 19). Baudelaire's prophetically contemporary Satan, argues Culler, is not an individual, sentient being, but all these `infernal accumulations we characteristically feel but seem unable to control' (p. 20). But if the Devil is defined as broadly and as vaguely as the `infernal accumulation of impersonal forces' leading to oppression and exploitation, is there any point in retaining the medieval rhetoric? Does this rhetoric provide us with any leverage that would help to demystify postmodern capitalism once we have granted its spatiotemporal resemblances to classical and medieval underworlds? This leads me to the second part of the question I raised earlier: does Marx's idea of a descent journey through the economy retain its usefulness, its didactic function and its promise of revolutionary transformation in the context of postmodern capitalism? For Marx, the workplace was Hell but it was incontrovertibly real; it was the source of true value and ontological being, in contrast to the phantasmagoria of cultural exchange. But from the postmodern perspective, everything ± even the workplace, even one's apparently core identity ± is constructed, a product of exchange, phantasmagorically infernal. But if our economic condition is inescapably infernal, is a descent journey desirable or possible? `After all,' David Pike writes, `one cannot descend from hell' (Passage Through Hell, p. 217).

Lanark's search for roots Descending from Hell, however, is precisely the task facing Gray's eponymous hero. In Book 3, Lanark decides to leave Unthank by

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voluntarily jumping into one of its Hell mouths. He undergoes the experience of disorientation, annihilation and rebirth suffered by most katabatic heroes when they reach the base of Hell: The sides [of the gullet] contracted and crushed him harder than ever. Most senses abandoned him now. Thought and memory, stench, heat, and direction dissolved and he knew nothing but pressure and duration. Cities seemed piled on him with a weight which doubled every second . . . all time, space and mind would end unless he moved but it had been aeons since he could have stirred toe or eyelid. And then he felt like an infinite worm in infinite darkness. (Lanark, p. 49)

After this, Lanark wakes up in the Institute; his dragonhide is cured but he has entered a much more infernal world. He has to eat recycled human flesh, and as a doctor, to make sure his dying patients are not cured. Lanark insists on leaving the Institute, but finds the Council still more corrupt. Next, he takes himself with Rima down an Oz-like, yellow-lined road through an `inter-calendrical zone', where they get lost in time, separated, give themselves up to despair and then encounter themselves as separate people occupying different time zones (Lanark, pp. 375±97). This dispiriting experience is followed by a number of other abortive attempts to escape or transcend their infernal condition. Finally, though, Lanark decides that they will be best off in Unthank; `it may be bad but the badness is obvious, not gilded with lies' (p. 552). Lanark's multiple descent journeys lead full circle to his original Hell. Lanark is a socialist novel written in a decade when the British Left was losing political credibility (published in 1981, it anticipated the Thatcherite decade to come); it is also a Scottish nationalist novel written around the time of the failure of Scottish devolution in 1977. In my view, Lanark is not so much a postmodernist novel, as a critical forecast of what Glasgow might become if it yields to the hyper-capitalism approaching like a tidal wave from the south.13 Lanark desperately wants to return to a prosaic time before Unthank's, a time regulated by clocks, meaningful employment and family relationships. But even Lanark's desire for roots may be understood as a product of his postmodern experience of amnesia and rootlessness. As Harvey points out, postmodern capitalism can paradoxically produce a desire for anti-postmodern roots, for `secure moorings in a shifting world' (The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 302). But, writes Harvey, `the irony is that tradition is now often preserved by being commodified and marketed as such. The search for roots ends up at worst being produced and marketed as image, as a simulacrum or pastiche' (p. 303). So if `wherever capitalism goes, its illusory apparatus, its fetishisms,

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and its system of mirrors come not far behind,' then where, asks Harvey `can real change come from?' (pp. 344±5). Gray's response to this question in Lanark comes close to the position articulated by Derrida in Specters of Marx, in the sense that both writers katabatically invert rather than attempt to transcend or reject outright the speculative logic of capitalism. Marx thought of money as possessing spectral powers, explains Derrida. In Capital, he expressed the wish to be rid of the ghosts of antiquated modes of production: `We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif! (`the dead man seizes the living!', `Preface', Capital, p. 91). Ideally not only these remnants, but the whole spectrality of capitalist exchange would be dialectically overcome by the revolution of the working class. If Marx's vision no longer seems credible in the West after 1989, Derrida suggests that we are not yet finished with Marx. Precisely now, when it is apparently `too late for Marxism', the spirit of Marx should be invoked, to resist the injustices of unregulated, global capitalism (Specters, p. 88). So from the underworld of earlier twentieth-century history, Derrida paradoxically conjures the ghost of a ghost-hater to haunt our postmodern, already spectral economy. Specifically, what should be revived is Marx's spirit of self-critique and his sense of needing to `bear witness' to justice (p. 88). The conjured ghost of Marx should be distinguished, however, from other spirits of Marxism, those that rivet it to the body of Marxist doctrine, to its supposed systemic, metaphysical or ontological totality . . . to its fundamental concepts of labor, mode of production, social class, . . . its apparatuses (projected or real: . . . the dictatorship of the proletariat, the single party, the State, and finally the totalitarian monstrosity.) (Specters, p. 88)

So it is not the solid body of Marxist doctrine, but the disembodied, secular messianic promise in Marx's writing to which we are all heir in Derrida's view. And Derrida is not alone in thinking this. Among other philosophers, Terry Eagleton revives the spectre of Marx in Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Eagleton proposes an `idea of the tragic' that combines Freudian/Lacanian, Marxist and theological models of the descent to Hell (for examples, see pp. 233, 145 and 37, respectively). For Eagleton, the serious function of tragedy in a postmodern context is to remind us that even global capitalism can be brought down to earth: `The structure of a world increasingly governed by the greed of transnational corporations is one which has to be broken in order to be repaired' (Sweet Violence, p. 296). Rather than tragedy, David Harvey favours a return to realism and the `counter-attack of narrative against the image' (The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 359). But ironically, the genre that seems

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to be mounting the most insistent challenge to capitalist excess currently is not realism or tragedy but the one most sympathetic to capitalism's entire `illusory apparatus', that is fantasy. Lanark begins with fantasy and only later shifts to realism, in my view, because the former is the genre that is most closely mimetic of late twentieth-century experience within a flexible capitalist economy. Transient celebrity such as Lanark achieves in Book 4 is the reality of our world; a sense of historical connectedness and narrative coherence is arguably harder to find. In the context of speculative capitalism, realism is the fantastical genre, providing the illusion of material solidity and permanence that the actual world lacks. Out of chronological sequence, Lanark begins with Book 3, in medias res, not because the entire story cycle is known in advance as in traditional Homeric epic, but because Lanark is a hero who does not remember his origins (arriving in Unthank at aged twenty-one, he has no memories of his prior existence). He is therefore a typically postmodern, amnesiac subject, but he is striving to become real (or at least realistic). Having failed to find a way out of Hell by descending to the Institute and refusing to join the Institute in its infernal task of recycling human energy, Lanark demands to be given a personal history. He is granted an oracle which, contrary to convention, narrates his past rather than the future, and at this point in the novel, Gray switches genres to realistic narration (p. 123). With the Oracle as guide, Lanark thus descends into the story of Duncan Thaw, the protagonist of the central sections of the novel, Books 1 and 2 (Lanark's four books are arranged unsequentially, 3, 1, 2, 4, although the chapters are numerically sequenced from 1 to 44). Before this, the Oracle tries two other genres, modernist stream of consciousness (adopting `the voice of a precocious child', p. 104) and documentary narrative (adopting `a dry academic voice', p. 105). But Lanark insists on having both a dramatised narrator (`who are you anyway?') and a specific, social context (`Could you not start by telling me something of the geographical and social surroundings?' p. 105). In other words, nothing but realism will satisfy him. Before immersing Lanark in the realistic Glasgow of the 1950s, however, the Oracle makes a brief detour through his own life, beginning with his unhappy old age and ending with his recollection of contented, infant consciousness (pp. 107±17). This compressed narrative mirrors Lanark's own life, but in the extreme form of a fable; it provides an exemplum not only of Lanark's past but his future. Due to an unloved childhood, the Oracle tells Lanark, he came to prefer abstract numbers to human affection; the pursuit of profit in a virtual marketplace suited him perfectly, until he began literally to lose his place in the material world. In

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the last stages of abstraction, even `the pressure on my feet [from the ground] vanished. I neither fell nor floated. I had become bodiless in a bodiless world. I existed as a series of thoughts amidst infinite greyness' (p. 111). This is one of the possible futures awaiting Lanark's world, and as the Oracle shows, it stems directly from a past like Thaw's: security in a mother's love, abandonment, expectancy of epic grandeur met by dullness and narrow poverty, compensatory fantasies, the lure of money and abstract numbers. Thaw-Lanark and the Oracle follow a similar `path from the sunlit roses' of the nursery to the `grey void' of the working world. The Oracle specifically identifies his endlessly drifting condition as infernal: `Death is the only dependable exit, but death depends on the body and I had rejected the body. I was condemned to a future of replaying and replaying the tedious past . . . I was in hell' (p. 116). From Lanark's point of view, the switch to realistic narration represents the possibility of discovering an explanation for his present condition and a possible return path to Thaw's sunlit world. But the running title to the Prologue (`Can Lanark Lead Him [the Oracle, and possibly Thaw] Out of Hell? Can He Help Lanark Out of Hell?' (pp. 116±17)) suggests a more complex relation between the realist and fantastical sections than Lanark yet realises. If a disappointed realist (the young Oracle or Duncan Thaw) can conjure infernal fantasies, then the process can also work the other way; desperate fantasists (such as Lanark) can as hopelessly dream of social realist utopias. A return to straight social realism is neither possible nor desirable, as Lanark demonstrates; rather, Gray invokes the spirit of realism to haunt, disrupt and reinvigorate the postmodern, fantastical world. If Lanark had expected an easy exit from Unthank via realist enlightenment from Duncan Thaw, the first major obstacle he encounters is Thaw's own intense hatred of and resistance to Glasgow's postwar, social realist ideals. Thaw's father, who survived trench warfare in the First World War, has an optimistic, secular belief in historical progress; ` ``modern history is just beginning. Give us another couple of centuries and we'll build a real civilization!'' ' Even if ` ``a few damned power cliques start an atomic war'' ', humanity will survive and ` ``ordinary folk will . . . start the steep upward climb once more'' ' (p. 295). But Duncan Thaw rejects this Scots determination to thole it, come what may; ` ``I'm sick of ordinary people's ability to eat muck and survive . . . Only human beings have the hideous versatility to adapt to lovelessness and live and live and live while being exploited and abused by their own kind'' ' (p. 295). If Thaw senior can cautiously justify Stalin's brutal regime in the 1930s, Duncan Thaw denounces the Soviet solution as the worst of patriarchal nightmares (p. 297). When challenged to produce his own

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solution, Thaw articulates the spirit of a Marxist world-view, stripped of its material apparatus and even its textual authority; Thaw admits, `I haven't read Marx but ± '' ' (p. 325). But if, as Derrida argues, Marx's spectre enjoins us to bear witness to justice, then Duncan Thaw is one of Marx's haunted heirs. What the world needs, he declares, is `memory and a conscience' (p. 296). Lanark carries this socialist ideal forward into the fantastical sections of the novel. His primary aim in the slate-clean Institute is to remember who he was and what the world once was, and his conscience militates against recycling human flesh for a living. In contrast to Lanark, however, Thaw disdains the ordinary challenge of earning a living. What he craves is the power of myth and fantasy to (as he sees it) transform reality on a global, or national, or at least city-wide scale. In the novel's most celebrated passage, Thaw claims that Glasgow will not be recognised as a magnificent city `because nobody imagines living here' (p. 243). Thaw is a fantasist capable of imagining entire fictional worlds, but they all suffer from being disconnected to his actual world or anyone in it. In all his fantasy worlds, he governs as the sole dictator; sometimes he is a benign, sometimes an evil leader. The single element that constantly disrupts Thaw's fantasies is chronological and historical time, the kind of time that Lanark's fantastical world lacks. As a painter, Thaw chooses a visual over a narrative form of storytelling, but his epic murals of biblical and mythic scenes repeatedly give way to a narrative impetus. The human subjects depicted therein begin to move (`They fled along towpaths, over bridges, and collected on heights' (p. 279)), the elements of water and fire burst out of the frame, and time and again the paintings refuse to be completed. Thaw tries to achieve the total perspective of Dante as God's narrator, or Borges's infernal aleph. Painting Glasgow's Blackhill locks, for example, he attempts to represent the scene `from below when looked at from left to right and from above when seen from right to left' (p. 279). In the church mural, the last work he paints before his death, he wrestles with Old Testament scenes, attempting to make them more just and complete than the biblical narrative itself. Thaw claims, `we're making our own model of the universe'; his model, unlike God's, `must be made perfect. When a thing is perfect it is eternal . . . its perfection is safe in the past' (p. 337).14 The patriarchal God, whom Thaw defies, repeatedly interferes with the youth's ambitious project, meddling with his sense of justice and just proportion, marring the completed scenes by introducing another narrative development. Thus `his trouble began in the background where history was acted in the loops and delta of the river on its way to the ocean. The more he worked the more the furious figure of God kept popping in and having to be removed' (pp. 320±1). Thaw becomes

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obsessed with the idea of giving back to God His own creation, `when I've put it in decent order'. For a hallucinatory hour or two, he even feels like a divine Creator; `as he lay with closed eyes his mind circled the chancel walls with lazy power' (p. 338). But what he fails to notice is that God interrupts his work, not to insist on perfection, but to introduce imperfection and dynamic narrative development. In other words Thaw's God expresses Himself as human time, the very element Thaw is determined to exclude from his painting. Time is what could and to a degree does humanise Thaw, eroding his arrogant confidence in the solitary artist's genius. A little earlier, Thaw breaks down when he finds two photographs of his dead mother. In one photograph, she is youthful, in the other middle aged, and Thaw wonders, `were they [people's faces] like different sides of the globe with time turning the gaunt face into the light while the merry one slid round into shadow? . . . He thought, ``Oh no! Oh no!'' and felt for the only time in his life a pang of pure sorrow without rage or self-pity in it' (p. 316). And in the final weeks of his life, he does meekly accept help and food from two parishioners he previously dismissed as trivial-minded. But his unwillingness or inability to connect with people, particularly with the woman he loves, Marjorie Laidlaw, finally drives him to madness. In a chilling revision of Dante's last canto, Thaw feels the city of Glasgow assuming the funnel shape of Hell around him: `the city was forcing itself into the sky on every side. Factory, university . . . ridges of tenements, parks loaded with trees ascended until he looked up at the horizon like the rim of a bowl with himself at the bottom' (p. 348). Here while crouching like Satan at the base of this Hell, he hears the strange, crow-like voice which leads him to either murder or believe he has murdered Marjorie. Thaw finally achieves his wish by escaping the temporally determined world and escaping into a realm of pure fantasy. But having conjured a mythical Hell, Thaw hits its rock-bottom and there experiences something of a katabatic inversion. The inversion is firstly physical and geographic: `he thought of going to London, of sliding down the globe into the cluttered and peopled south, but at the station the needle of his mental compass swung completely and pointed to the northern firths and mountains' (p. 351). As we have seen elsewhere, Thaw feels the lightness of the damned; but in this context, the northern orientation also indicates his determination not to escape a Scottish inferno by fleeing to England. His katabatic inversion is also mental. For once he resists asking his father for financial support. And although his death by drowning may have been suicide, the final scene represents him fighting against the tug of the sea. Echoing Achilles' hubristic wrestling match with the river Skamandros (Iliad, 12.233±4), Thaw cries

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out to the waves, `you can't get rid of me!' And since the only clue to Lanark's previous existence is the sand in his pockets, the sea arguably does not `get rid of' Thaw but rather transforms him and sends him back as Lanark. In this line of interpretation, Thaw's bloody-minded determination to keep fighting is what produces the Lanark of the fantastical books.

Can realism lead fantasy out of Hell? Can fantasy help realism? Perhaps the metamorphosis into Lanark is Thaw's `way out' of Hell, as the title of Chapter 29 suggests. But is Thaw's story of any use to Lanark? And more broadly speaking, are the descent into earlier twentieth-century history and the genre shift from fantasy to realism useful as strategies of resistance to postmodern disorientation? The Oracle tersely concludes that Thaw `botched his end' and consequently `set no example' (p. 219). Lanark, too, finds the conclusion to the Thaw narrative `unsatisfying'. To commit suicide after murdering someone would be just, but Lanark says he cannot respect `a man who drowns himself for a fantasy' (p. 357); fantasy, after all, is what Unthank produces to excess. When Rima objects that the Oracle's narrative was about her past, not Lanark's, the reader cannot help but wonder whether the realist section of the novel is anything other than a character's fantasy (p. 357). But any reader who has reached this stage of Lanark knows not to accept one character's opinion as certain or authorial truth, first, because that opinion will probably be contradicted by someone else, and secondly, because the first character will probably change his or her mind. Lanark and Rima's scepticism about Thaw's narrative seems designed to provoke debate about the efficacy of searching for roots in the past or in social realism. The lack of critical consensus about how the two halves of the novel are related is another indication that the novel intends to provoke dialogue rather than provide single answers to these questions. Cairns Craig, for example, argues that the novel's splitting of a central protagonist into two characters reflects the schizophrenic divisions of Scottish culture in the 1970s.15 In Stevenson's view, entropic forces eventually pull the novel apart, while for Lumsden and Bernstein, narrative closure prevails over entropy.16 Lumsden interprets closure as a retreat into conservatism, while Bernstein sees it as redemptive. The interpretive debate takes place inside the novel as well. Gray has his fictional author, Nastler, say in the Epilogue that Thaw is based autobiographically on himself, while Lanark is Thaw `with the neurotic

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imagination trimmed off and built into the furniture of the world' (p. 493). Nastler's editor questions the compositional integrity of the novel, arguing that the Thaw and Lanark sections are only `cemented by typographical contrivances' (p. 493). But Nastler maintains that the fantastical narrative is a macrocosmic repetition of the realist one: `the Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by your [Lanark's] narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason' (p. 484). But as we learn, even the `author' Nastler does not have the final word. He is surprised to learn that Lanark has a son, and the ending to Lanark's narrative does not go according to his plans. Unthank narrowly escapes the apocalypse he has prepared and Lanark lives to see light and time returning to the city. In terms of narrative sequence and causality alone, the two sections of the novel can be, and have been, interrelated in different ways. A number of possibilities could be and have been suggested. First, Lanark may have invented Thaw to give himself a biographically plausible past. In this case, only the fantastical sections are intended to be read as `real'. Secondly, the character Lanark may be a fiction, hallucinated by Thaw while he lies sick in hospital. In this case, when Lanark is described dying in Book 4, what is actually happening is that Thaw is dying in hospital. Yet again, Thaw may have died in the sea at the end of Book 3, but in his dying moments dreamed up Lanark as his might-have-been future self. These last two readings would suggest that only the realist sections are intended to be read as `real'. Fourthly, Thaw may really be Lanark's younger self. This would explain Lanark's sense of deÂjaÁ-vu when glimpsing Provan in sunlight (`all my life I've wanted this, yet I seem to know it well' (p. 471)) or hearing news of his own imminent death (`Like a mother's [Thaw's mother's] fall in a narrow lobby, like a policeman's hand on his shoulder [Thaw's anticipated arrest], he had known or expected this all his life' (p. 559)). If this were so then, both sections of the novel would be equally `real', but Glasgow would have shifted to a more extreme, more fantastical stage of capitalist socio-economics. Finally, the two worlds might be understood to coexist simultaneously, either as micro- and macrocosmic versions of the same reality, or as an allegorical version of Glasgow (Unthank) side by side with a realistic version of present-day Glasgow. Alternatively, Unthank might be Glasgow in the eternal realm, already suffering the contrapasso of Glasgow's bad mental states. This would explain Gray's emphasis on micro- and macrocosmic correspondences, his tendency to view individual characters as worlds (p. 316) or landscapes (p. 511). Each of these readings is critically defensible. Thaw's example suggests to me that the search for roots cannot recover an integral past identity; what it can uncover are different desires and an

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altered perspective on the present. What is particularly important is that Lanark's and Thaw's worlds are shown to be chiastically interdependent. In postwar, prosaically-minded, petit-bourgeois Glasgow, Thaw desires epic-scale vision, absolute truth and mythic finality. Thaw's desperate imagination therefore conjures Unthank on the verge of apocalyptic destruction. In fantastical Unthank, Lanark desires realism's chronological coherence and the prosaic moral goods of light, daily employment and human love. Lanark's nostalgic desire for a pre-fantastical past conjures the Oracle's vision of Thaw in postwar Glasgow. Taken together, the two narratives show how capitalist socio-economies are fuelled by contradictory human desires, for mythic permanence and for historical change, for individual heroism and epic fantasy as well as for material security and commonly acknowledged moral values. I have suggested that Thaw articulates a spectral Marxism in his desire to bear witness to an ideal of human justice, and that Lanark inherits this uncompromising stance. A second way in which Lanark conjures Marx is by submitting every interpretive device, every choice of form and structure, every moral value articulated in the novel to a relentless self-critique (compare Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 88). Of all the katabatic narratives discussed in this study, Lanark is the most relentlessly self-questioning. Structurally, as we have seen, the realist and fantastical sections of the novel raise many questions about narrative coherence and integrity; the fantastic books ironise the generic assumptions of realism and vice versa. But this spirit of self-critique pervades the novel at every level. Gray's characters spend most of their time embroiled in arguments, about everything from religion, politics and art to asthma, sex and food. The fictional editor of the epilogue notes that Lanark is influenced by three postwar socialist novels by Orwell, Koestler and Mailer, representing `dialogue under threat' (see Gray's footnote 6, p. 489). But Gray's novel can also be related to an older tradition of dialogic katabasis, which we find, for example, in the Book of Job, Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Dostoevsky's polyphonic novels. Mikhail Bakhtin argues that `in its structure Job's dialogue is internally endless, for the opposition of the soul to God ± whether the opposition be hostile or humble ± is conceived in it as something irrevocable and eternal' (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 280). And Dostoevsky emulates this open-ended structure, Bakhtin argues, creating characters as `free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him' (p. 6). Likewise, Gray's protagonists ostentatiously rebel against their biological, theological and literary creators, as well as political and spiritual leaders. Lanark argues with Ozenfant, Monboddo and his author, Nastler. Value

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judgments made by one character are constantly opened to question, ridicule or contradiction by another. Dialogue is thus more often a forum for disagreement than accord in Lanark, just as dialogism is for Bakhtin. In Gray's novel, dialogue functions as a katabatic inversion of the principle of separation on which capitalist exploitation of labour operates. Most of the events in the novel have ambiguous or inconclusive outcomes; we never learn, for example, whether Thaw was a murderer, whether he committed suicide or even whether he died in the sea. Much more significant than the unresolved crises of plot are the arguments they provoke among the novel's characters. Moreover, unlike the dialogue in Inferno, no one position is privileged clearly over another's. For example, from one perspective, Thaw's battle with temporality seems misguided and in any case doomed to failure. But Gray draws us into this hubristic perspective, making us feel its validity. The contest between image and narration, space and time, takes place on other levels, for example in the relation between the five frontispiece illustrations and the narrative to which they allude in the novel. Quite the reverse of imposing hermeneutic closure on the narrative as Lee argues, these drawings heighten the conflict between image and narration.17 All five illustrations contain static, heraldic elements, with space being distributed vertically through columns, upheld swords, pairs of allegorical figures sitting or standing upright, and so on. The blazon effect is heightened by the use of boxed captions and inset frame within the drawing's main frame. But some of the illustrations, particularly the titlepages for Books 1 and 4 (one realist and one fantastical book) contain strong narrative elements as well. The title page to Book 1 is particularly dramatic in its juxtaposition of heraldic and narrative representations. Here the heraldic space, marked off by a pair of columns, is represented being overwhelmed by an influx of narrative activity: the jaws of a whale opening, the sky darkening, lightning striking, Hobbes's Leviathan looming in from the right of the drawing, Glasgow being flooded by the rising sea and tiny figures gesturing energetically in all directions. Of course, this impression of movement is created, in part, by the words I have chosen to describe the images. But Gray's juxtaposition of different types of imagery provokes the reader's engagement in this formal conflict, as do his verbal descriptions of Thaw's visual art. As Nastler points out, even the conventional marks of narrative are static; only the reader's moving eye and mind infuse them with temporality (p. 485). In the Epilogue, the distribution of print into three columns for lecture and dialogue, marginalia and footnotes again forces the reader to choose between lateral and vertical movements, down and across the page.18 If the illustrations and typography force us into a debate over forms of

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representation, the conflicts and arguments between characters also draw us into dialogue over the fundamental values represented in the novel. Nastler wants to have written `a story in which adjectives like commonplace and ordinary have the significance which glorious and divine carried in earlier comedies' (p. 494). This statement elevates modern demotic realism over Dante's divine comedy (although it omits to credit Dante with creating a middle style for his contemporary readers). Nastler's affirmation of ordinary values is echoed by several of the fictional characters. Lanark's son, for example, tells his father, `the world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied' (p. 554). Lanark has his doubts about this sentiment, however. Earlier, he rejects the daily struggle for ordinary dignity as fine empty talk (p. 55). Compared to Thaw, he is much more willing to undertake `ordinary jobs'; as argued above, Lanark is trying to recover precisely the spatial and temporal ground which makes the `commonplace' life possible. But he is still drawn to the epic perspective, to broad landscapes and riotous colour, preferably viewed from a great height and distance. Thaw and Lanark both conspicuously lack heroic qualities, but the novel as a whole takes seriously their quixotic search for epic grandeur. As the Oracle says of his mother, `She expected splendour. Most of us expect it sometime or other' (p. 115). While Thaw fails to become a famous artist, and Lanark fails to achieve political renown, their failures are integral to the sense Lanark conveys of a dialogue that is still ongoing and a historical process that is still far from complete. Lanark demands of Nastler, `I want to know why your readers in their world should be entertained by the sight of me failing to do any good in mine' (p. 485), a question which applies even more forcibly to the Thaw section of Lanark. Nastler's feeble answer, that `failures are popular', may be intended as an ironic comment on Glaswegian cultural negativity in the 1970s, but it cannot account for Lanark's enormously positive impact on Scottish readers and writers from the time of its publication to the present day. As mentioned above, the katabatic narrative of endless dialogue is modelled on the Book of Job as well as Dante. And the story of Orpheus likewise provides a classical model for Lanark's representation of a failed, or more importantly incomplete, descent journey. The failure of the protagonists to achieve their epic ambitions does not invalidate those ambitions; rather it shows that they are rarely achieved individually or in the space of a single life. When Gray has Rima object that Lanark tailors the Oracle's narrative to suit his own needs, he lays his novel open to a dialogue with other (non-male) perspectives, as Janice Galloway suggests in her Introduction to the 2001 Canongate edition of Lanark.19

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Moreover, Lanark demonstrates that when the epic ambition is pursued unilaterally, its realisation may turn out to be a nightmare. Thaw sees this in his nearly finished church mural, and denounces it as the `warped rat-trap world of a neurotic virgin' (p. 340). If a return from Hell is possible, Lanark suggests in Marxist spirit, the return will depend on a mutually shared vision of a just society. In the early twenty-first century, such an idea is hardly a commonplace one, whatever Nastler says. The trilogy of Matrix films traces the much more prevalent narrative of a singular hero's journey towards fulfilling his preordained, Christ-like destiny. It is possible, of course, to mythicise failure as well as success, though this is perhaps more likely to occur in Britain than North America. But Lanark does not just represent failure, or infernal repetition of the same questions. The surprise escape from apocalypse at the end of Lanark indicates, first, that there is a causal as well as an allegorical or typological relation between the two parts of the novel (the descent to 1950s Glasgow has somehow had a steadying effect on unstable Unthank) and, second, on a personal level, that Lanark manages to improve on Thaw's life. The repetitions of the father±son conflicts in the novel are not circular but cyclical. Moreover, Thaw dreams of creating an ordered cosmos, `a harmony of soft blue, brown and gold enlivened here and there by sparks of pure colour . . . bodies in a depth of tender light, sharing space with clouds, hills, plants and creatures' (p. 340). And Lanark gets to experience this vision directly: `Drunk with spaciousness he turned every way, gazing with wide-open mouth and eyes as light created colours, clouds, distances and solid, graspable things close at hand' (p. 558). At the end of the novel, things are changing rapidly in Unthank, although not due to Lanark's political contretemps with Lord Monboddo. Sludden restarts the clocks, announcing, `Eternity, for Greater Unthank, is drawing to an end' (p. 453). Rather than swallowing up the human population, Monboddo agrees to exploit Unthank for its oil reserves. Sludden is deposed, millions of lives are saved, and the city descends into factionalism and anarchy. Amid all this chaos, Lanark dreams that he sees his son climbing Ben Rua and reaching the summit in sunlight. This vision is enough to make him forgive `Mr cause' or God, not for the world's suffering (`If the poorest orphan in creation has reason to curse you, then everything high and decent in you should go to Hell') but for his own: `This is my best moment. Speaking purely as a private person, I admit you to the kingdom of Heaven' (p. 515). As Craig argues, this episode illustrates history repeating itself as redemption, because earlier, Duncan Thaw climbs Ben Rua to spite his father and experiences a bitter disillusionment on its summit.20 Moreover Lanark's fantasy for

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once blends into reality, as his son Sandy appears at his side when he wakes up. Like Aeneas carrying his aged father out of Troy, Sandy helps Lanark to the safety of high ground, `labouring uphill for the slope of the floor was against them' (p. 554). The high ground is the Glasgow± Unthank Necropolis, the return to which constitutes another redemptive repetition since it is here that Lanark began the first of his many descent journeys into Hell (p. 46). In Lanark, the postmodern distortions of time and space, the ravenous growth of corporate capitalism and the divisiveness of an individualist ethos produce in the eponymous hero an opposing desire for rootedness, for a sense of place, meaningful work and close human relationships. Lanark's search for these ordinary moral goods leads him into a series of descent journeys, the most extensive of which is a journey into his own (real or imagined) past. For the reader, this journey into Thaw's history also requires a generic shift from fantasy to social realism. But Thaw resents the economic hardship and, more especially, the narrow cultural expectations of Glasgow in the 1950s. His desire to escape this shipwrecked and flightless existence inverts the original direction of Lanark's search for roots. In a fantastical existence, our desires are for ordinary moral goods and material groundedness, but a realist culture also produces an intense desire for fantasy, myth and epic grandeur. The one set of desires unendingly inverts into the other, and there appears to be no escape from this infernal sense of incompletion. On the other hand, several lines of continuity are established between the two worlds and the two dissatisfied protagonists. Thaw and Lanark are inheritors of certain values which, following Derrida, I have characterised as spirits of Marxism haunting postmodernity. Among those values are an ideal of justice, a habit of self-critique and a belief in the necessity of interdependency and dialogue. As in other narratives discussed in this study, Lanark dramatises a shift in perspective on the infernal condition rather than a heroic escape from Hell altogether. In Gray's novel, a spectral realism is deployed to haunt the fantasy-bound, postmodern capitalist imagination.

Notes 1. Other katabatic narratives alluded to in Lanark include: Dante's Inferno (Lanark, p. 204), the Biblical books of Job (p. 187) and Jonah (p. 47, p. 488), Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (passim), Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell (pp. 204±9, p. 499), Goethe's Faust (p. 399), Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (p. 391) and Melville's Moby Dick (the whale appears on the title page frontispieces to Books 3 and 1; Lawrence's essay on Moby Dick is cited on p. 497). To these allusions in the

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

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diegesis, the Epilogue adds an extensive list of Lanark's `plagiarisms', many of which represent Hells of one kind or another and descent journeys to underworlds, for example, Hobbes's Leviathan (p. 489), Freud's lectures and case studies (p. 488), Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (p. 487), Jung's Night Journey of the Hero (p. 491), Kafka's The Trial (p. 491), H. G. Wells's science fiction (p. 498) and children's katabases such as The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland (p. 487), The Water Babies (p. 491), The Golden Key (p. 493) and The House With Green Shutters (p. 486). Gray also places Lanark in the tradition of `dialogue under threat', along with Orwell's 1984, Koestler's Darkness at Noon and Mailer's Barbary Shore. Lanark's representation of the afterlife as infernal rather than paradisal is `plagiarised' from Wyndham Lewis's The Human Age, Flan O'Brien's The Third Policeman and William Golding's Pincher Martin. Glasgow and Unthank are both identified as Necropoles or cities of the Dead (p. 191), of destruction (p. 483) and Hell (pp. 45, 46, 160). In this vein, too, Peter Reading juxtaposed scenes of post-nuclear devastation and urban vagrancy with allusions to Dante's Inferno in his jeremiad, `Perduta Gente' (1989). Williams and Pike both discuss this passage from Marx's Capital as a modern descent into Hell journey; see Williams, Notes on the Underground, pp. 47±8; and Pike, Passage Through Hell, p. 216. Marx is quoted by David Pike in Passage Through Hell, p. 216, as part of an analysis of how Walter Benjamin interprets Marx's Capital as a descensus ad inferos, pp. 203±47. In the same way, Reading's narrator points the finger at his middle class reader in `Perduta Gente': `Don't think it couldn't be you ± /bankrupted, batty, bereft' (Collected Poems, p. 173). See Harvey's analysis of Fordian or pre-1970s modernist capitalism (pp. 125±40) and postmodern or flexible capitalism (pp. 142±200) in The Condition of Postmodernity. Taylor Hackford's film The Devil's Advocate (1997) portrays the head of a powerful New York City law firm John Milton (Al Pacino) as a modern day Lucifer. Pacino's Milton hires Floridan lawyer Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) and tempts him into a life of high profits and shady legal dealing. The law firm is represented as a capitalist Hell of the rigidly Fordian kind. The company is patriarchally structured, its workforce strictly hierarchised. The lawyers' (all male) wives are given money but absolutely no autonomy; they all become Milton's mistresses. The spatial symbolism of the film is Fordian, with Pacino tempting Reeves on the rooftop of a commanding skyscraper and Reeves eventually renouncing his tempter on a spiral staircase leading down to the ground and a virtuous life among `ordinary folks'. See Chapter 2, note 14. Compare J. Hillis Miller's celebration of postmodern, anti-linear narrative forms in Ariadne's Thread, Story Lines. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 1±25. Milton's Belial, too, points out there are worse Hells (Paradise Lost, 2.196±7). See also David Seed, The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.

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12. On earlier representations of infernal and divine labyrinths, see Penelope Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages. 13. Cf. Randall Stevenson, `Alasdair Gray and the Postmodern', in Crawford (ed.), The Arts of Alasdair Gray, pp. 48±62. 14. Cairns Craig criticises this hymn to `grave-yard art' which achieves perfection only in the past. See Craig, `Going Down to Hell is Easy: Lanark, Realism and the Limits of the Imagination', in Crawford (ed.), The Arts of Alasdair Gray, pp. 90±107 (p. 102). 15. Craig, `Going Down to Hell is Easy', p. 92. 16. See Stephen Bernstein, Alasdair Gray; see also Randall Stevenson, `Alasdair Gray and the Postmodern' (pp. 48±63) and Alison Lumsden, `Innovation and Reaction in Alasdair Gray' (pp. 115±26), both in Crawford (ed.), The Arts of Alasdair Gray. 17. See Alison Lee, Realism and Power: Postmodernist British Fiction, p. 99. 18. Vertical typography is employed still more dramatically in Gray's 1982, Janine, to signify Josh's descent into madness (pp. 179±85). 19. An extract of Galloway's introduction to Gray was also published as `Glasgow belongs to us', in The Guardian, 12 October 2002, Review. 20. On this scene, see Craig, `Going Down to Hell is Easy', p. 106.

Chapter 8

East±West Descent Narratives

A week before the start of hostilities in Iraq in March 2003, a BBC reporter interviewed American soldiers about their mental preparations for war. Among the images filmed by the camera crew, and televised on BBC News on 10 March, was that of an American soldier sitting in the desert, reading Dante's Inferno in an English translation. One can only speculate as to why that particular US soldier was reading the Inferno at that moment in Iraq. What seems more certain is that by televising the image of the soldier reading Dante, the BBC was inviting us to think about the invasion of Iraq in terms of a Dantean descent to Hell. Moreover, given the widespread public protests in Britain against the war and the BBC's willingness to challenge the government on its decision to invade, one might also conclude that this figure of the descending military hero ± the new crusading pilgrim with his Dante in hand as a guide through Hell ± was intended to be viewed as an ambivalent figure. For whom would this Western descent narrative prove to be Hell: for Saddam's regime, for the Iraqi people or for the Western invaders themselves? Despite the differences in historical contexts, comparisons with Vietnam were ubiquitous in the US and UK media. Beside the American soldier and Dante, then, many viewers may have sensed the ghostly presence of another descent hero, Captain Willard, played by Martin Sheen in Francis Ford Coppola's anti-Vietnam war film, Apocalypse Now (1979).

Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Western descents to the East Like Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1899), on which it is closely based, Apocalypse Now represents the descent of a Western, imperial hero into a demonic Southern/Eastern underworld.1 The hero's task in

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both cases is to retrieve the empire's lost beloved. In Marlow's case, the beloved is the brilliant entrepreneur, the ivory trader Kurtz; in Willard's case, it is the brilliant military commander, Colonel Walter Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando). Willard's quest is the more insidiously double-edged from the start, as he is sent both to kill Colonel Kurtz (the beloved Other) and to celebrate Kurtz's illustrious military record. Made four years after the end of the war, Coppola's film laid bare one of the katabatic principles underpinning the American war in Vietnam, that in the descent to the demonic East, America would come to know its true, heroic self. Both Conrad's novella and Coppola's film portray the reversal of this imperial katabatic objective. In confronting Kurtz, Marlow and Willard instead come to know that they are dispossessed, that the military dream of impregnable selfhood is a delusion, that the demonic lies in the heart of the West, not the alien East. The opening sequence of Apocalypse Now conveys on many different levels the contemporary Western sense of dispossession, of being always already in Hell. We first hear the extradiegetic music of Jim Morrison and The Doors singing, `this is the end, my friend'. Against the backdrop of the Vietnamese jungle, American military helicopters are first heard, then seen, approaching. A chopper blade fades into an image of a ceiling fan. Willard's face appears, upside down; he is smoking and staring at the fan with glazed eyes. To the right of Willard's upside-down face there appears the dim and fleeting outline of a Buddha's head, right-side up, which is quickly displaced by the sound of Kurtz's voice, caught on tape-recorder. The Doors' song, the military helicopters and the trees in flames combine to represent Vietnam as a scene of apocalyptic destruction, brought on by the American presence in Vietnam. Willard's upside-down face bears the blank, crazed expression of a descent hero already transformed into a damned soul. The film notably lacks the frame narrative of the novella, in which Marlow is first portrayed, telling his sea yarn to a group of listeners on board the Nellie, a ship moored at the head of the Thames. Having returned from the journey up the Congo River, Marlow therefore sits poised on the threshold of another descent into river darkness. But Apocalypse Now lacks even this sense of a threshold crossing into Hell; Willard is in Saigon, and inside Hell, from the start. The displacement of the Buddha's head by the sound of Kurtz's voice also connotes that this is a narrative of Western damnation which will lack any redemption from the East. In `Contingent Foundations', Judith Butler compared the US media's coverage of the 1991 Gulf War to a camera strapped on the nose of a smart bomb. `The visual record of this war,' she wrote, was `not a reflection on the war, but the enactment of its phantasmatic structure'

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(Feminist Contentions, p. 44). The fantasy was that the divine word of the military, masculine, Western subject could immediately be translated into a deed, an action `whose obliterating power at once confirms the impenetrable contours of its own subjecthood' (p. 45). By contrast, the UK media's coverage of the war in Iraq in 2003 lacked none of the anxious consciousness of the possibility, if not of military defeat, then of psychological dispossession. This was another descent into the same enemy territory. Could the son (George W. Bush) fulfil the military dream that had eluded the father (George Bush Sr)? What effect would this unilateral action, whether legal or not, have on the credibility of international law and the authority of the UN? What Brandoesque bulk might loom out of the desert to teach us that Western aspirations in the East were as demonic as the devil we were intending to depose? The trouble with this kind of anxiety, however, is that it is easily reabsorbed into the military dream of (self-)possession. For a start, the risk of dispossession is measured only in terms of possible damage to the Western self, never to the Eastern other. The Other, in fact, is hardly registered at all by the dispossessed military subject. Just as in Heart of Darkness, Africa fades into a metaphor for the darkness of the European soul,2 so in Apocalypse Now, Cambodia is finally reduced to a stage-set for a ritual re-enactment of T. S. Eliot's death of the Fisher-King. Moreover, the risk of dispossession can be used to make the heroic military descent into Hell seem all the more heroic. Along with Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now is watched by American soldiers in their preparations for war because such films, the soldiers say, `celebrate the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills'.3 As I argued with respect to the gender dynamics of descent in Chapter 6, the imperial or military narrative of a Western descent into the demonic East cannot be dismantled by the metamorphosis of the Western subject alone. Inside the Western narrative, there needs also to be recognised the voice of an Eastern subject, pursuing the trajectory of its own descent. The descent of a Western, military, masculine subject to a demonic East is just one strand of a broader family of narratives in which the journey eastward is represented as a descent into the underworld.4 More broadly speaking, this sub-genre of katabatic narrative figures the descent across the globe either eastward or southward as a journey into the unconscious.5 From E. M. Forster's A Passage to India to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (which unsurprisingly enjoyed a huge revival in Jackson's trilogy of film adaptations, screened from 2001, as the military action began in Afghanistan and Iraq), the dark subcontinent is represented as the source of the West's evil and its truth. For Conrad's Marlow, the Congo represents `something great and invincible, like evil or truth,

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waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic [Western, imperial] invasion' (Heart of Darkness, p. 85). The territory represented in Western twentieth-century literature and film as the sub-continental unconscious to the West stretches across a vast range of actual geographical regions, from South America to Africa, India, Korea and China. Many of these representations are positive, and celebrate the Eastern or Southern unconscious as the source of Western creativity, universal psychic truths or hidden sexual desires. Of a 1950s trip to India, for example, Octavio Paz enthusiastically recalls `falling into that panting maw', in which the universe appeared to him as `an immense, multiple fornication'.6 Whether fearfully like Miss Quested, or wisely like Mrs Moore in Forster's A Passage to India, Western subjects are portrayed being drawn to the edge of an Eastern or Southern abyss from whose depths can be glimpsed the exotically dark, mythically hydra-headed, seethingly promiscuous shapes of the Western unconscious.7 Since September 11th 2001, terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalist organisations have added fuel to this conception of the East or South as the unconscious of the Western subject. Viewed within the katabatic structure of Marxist or Freudian thought, the Islamic terrorist is a symptom of the repressed Western unconscious.8 Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is one major manifestation of the subterraneous, viral forms of evil about which Western subjects are currently most anxious; other forms are medical (cancer and AIDS) or technological (computer viruses).9 The `viral' evil of terrorism, however, is perceived to derive from an Eastern or Southern source which then infiltrates the Western subject, erupting to the surface from within and below. This particular conception of the demonic East or South has an extraordinarily vigorous currency today, in part because, I would argue, it draws upon so many different strands of katabatic mythic and organisational narrative structures, including Marxist, Freudian and Lacanian conceptions of the underworld. Joss Whedon's representation of `The First', the original architect of evil, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer provides a good example of a popular Western representation of viral evil. The First announces its arrival in the town of Sunnydale, California with a cryptic message to Buffy: `from beneath you it devours'.10 In Buffy, the First exerts pressure on Buffy and her friends subterraneously, either by appearing in the form of a close friend who has died or by causing dissention and self-doubt among the Slayer `potentials'. The First's supporters consist of prehistoric vampires forged underground out of earth, bones and blood, and blind, scythe-bearing monks who multiply in number whenever one of them is caught and killed. Unlike Tolkien's orcs and wraith-lords, these agents of the First are not explicitly Eastern

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or Southern in origin, but they are a nameless, viral, terroristic form of evil, attacking `from beneath' with the intention of destroying all forces for good, beginning with the quintessentially Western, kick-ass heroine, Buffy. Within the framework of the Orientalist (West to East) katabatic narrative, first theorised by Edward Said, no symbolisation of the Eastern subject is possible, because to be Eastern is to exist in the realm of the unconscious.11 Just as women must choose between masquerading masculinity and accepting non-subjectivity in the patriarchal economy, so the `oriental' must either mimic or accept subjugation by the Western subject.12 According to Gayatri Spivak, no reconceptualisation of the Western self (she uses this term rather than subject) can alter the plight of the Eastern non-self within this imperial economy, `because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolute Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self.'13 As I have argued, Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now are explicitly anti-imperialist narratives that nevertheless can be reabsorbed into the psychic drama of the Western, imperial subject. Most contemporary postcolonial theorists would, of course, reject the premise of a choice between mimicry and subjugation for non-Western subjects. But if the Orientalist economy is to be dismantled, it is not enough for the Western, imperial subject to welcome disruption and dispossession by its Eastern unconscious. The trajectory of another katabatic journey needs to be recognised, that of the Eastern subject's journey into the West.14 Salman Rushdie's fiction is particularly important in this regard, because it explores the idea of an Easterner's emigration to the West in terms of a descent to the underworld. Moreover, in representing the migrant's journey, Rushdie draws on the katabatic models of both Western and Eastern myth and literature, and thus hybridises the frequently monologic structure of the katabatic quest to `know oneself'.

Salman Rushdie's disoriented subjects In The Jaguar Smile (1987), Indian-born Rushdie expresses his sense of sharing a common, underworldly perspective with Nicaragua and other Latin American countries: Those of us who did not have our origins in the countries of the mighty West, or North, had something in common ± not, certainly, anything as simplistic as a unified `third world' outlook, but at least some knowledge of what weakness was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be there, on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel. (p. 12)

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Much of Rushdie's fiction explores the contours of that Eastern and Southern consciousness, with its understanding of what the world is like when `viewed from underneath'. As the retrospective past tense of the above passage indicates (`how it felt to be there'), Rushdie is an Easterner who has completed the Western transitus, who has for many years lived and worked in the West. His perspective on the journey from East to West is therefore, in some respects, westernised, but Western identity in his fiction is always constructed, always internally displaced. He is therefore in an ideal position to trace the westward, migratory journeys of selfdiscovery that counterpoise, disrupt and sometimes violently transform the descent journeys to the East we have so far been considering. For a start, Rushdie's Indian characters are exceptionally prone to violent displacement and disorientation themselves. The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) begins with an earthquake erupting in Mexico on 14 February 1989. Straightaway, Rushdie has the ground crack open to devour his rock-star heroine, Vina Apsara, on the same date that Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie for the alleged blasphemy of The Satanic Verses. But long before (and after) Rushdie's nine-year exile from the visible world, his characters were dodging the threats of Scylla and Charybdis, of being shattered to pieces or drowned. In the final pages of Grimus, the entire world is obliterated by misty whirlpools. `Midnight's children', the generation born at midnight on India's independence day, are likewise drowned in the `annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes' (Midnight's Children, p. 463). In Haroon and the Sea of Stories, the ocean is choked and clogged by a stream of bad stories. As for the threat of psychic and physical dismemberment, The Satanic Verses begins with the explosion of a plane in mid-air, from which the two Indian protagonists, Saladin and Gibreel, fall to earth, landing in London. In The Moor's Last Sigh, Vasco Da Gama carries a needle inside his body that works its way inward until finally `he simply burst' (p. 432). In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the narrator Rai describes human life as a `bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumbling apart' where `our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away' (p. 543). But even this is a slighter view of the dislocations to which characters are actually subjected in the novel; some have their brains knocked out with cricket balls, others are suffocated with pillows and still others are blown up with bombs. The `felt shape of human life' in The Ground Beneath Her Feet is one of a violent sequence of bomb-blasts and drownings. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rai defines disorientation (`loss of the East') in terms of the loss of a navigational reference point: `lose the east and you lose your bearings, your certainties, your knowledge of what

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is and what may be, perhaps even your life' (p. 176). In the context of a descent narrative, disorientation also suggests, of course, an orientation towards Dis or the underworld. Thus Rushdie prepares the ground for what looks like a defence of the postmodern dispossessions mourned by Lacan and celebrated by Baudrillard, among others: `what if the whole deal ± orientation, knowing where you are . . . what if it's all a scam? . . . Suppose that it's only when you dare to let go that your real life begins? When you're whirling free of the mother ship?' (pp. 176±7). Despite the American sci-fi imagery, however, this disorientation differs significantly from the postmodern dispossessions of the subject described by Lacan, because the other world that seizes and disorients the migrating subject is not the extratemporal, mythic realm of the unconscious, but rather another equally present, actual, historical world. Near the end of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rai is contacted by an alien being who leaves him a message on video. She explains that the recent spate of earthquakes in Mexico and elsewhere are signs of their two worlds colliding, neither more real nor more self-conscious than the other. But only the one world will survive the collision: `you will continue and we will come to an ending, to the edge, to grief' (p. 508). The migrant subject, the one who has floated free of the mother ship, knows itself to be vulnerable to other, competing subjectivities; nothing in this metamorphic world is to be taken as pre-existent, or natural, least of all the actual, geographical coordinates of the psychic journey of descent. For many of Rushdie's migrant characters, geographical border crossing constitutes a threshold crossing from one reality into another. In this scenario, the East figures as the original Paradise and the West becomes the Hell into which the traveller descends. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the three main characters, Ormus (Orpheus), Vina and the narrator Rai all emigrate from Bombay to the West, Ormus and Rai living for a time in England and then all three settling in New York City. Theirs is a three-tiered journey, from the Paradise of 1950s multicultural Bombay at the world's periphery, to the Limbo of 1960s Britain (`it may pretend to be swinging but I know it's just plain hanged' (p. 251)) at the world's rim, to the Inferno of New York City at the centre of the modern world. Beneath this (to Rushdie) quintessentially American city, a lower and more powerful Hell opens up: `death-worshipping Mexico' (p. 456), where the Greek gods are made to look weak and ineffectual (compared to Mexican gods, says Vina, ` ``Apollo's just a theatre, Poseidon's an adventure, Hermes is a fucking silk scarf' (p. 456)). In The Satanic Verses, having been dropped from the sky into London, Saladin is immediately pitched into the city's social underworld where he suffers beatings by the police and other racial discrimination; under the pressure of this cultural

Salman Rushdie's disoriented subjects

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demonisation, he is gradually transformed into the very devil the Londoners fear. Meanwhile, Gibreel is pressed towards an opposite transformation, becoming an archangel, a prophetic dreamer and, eventually, Saladin's nemesis. Each of these metamorphoses occurs as a result of competing cultural pressures on the migrant subject and the choices he makes in response to such pressure. The migrant's westward journey is thus represented in conjunction and competition with other journeys, other descents in search of selfhood. At the same time that Ormus, Vina and Rai are drawn westward in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, America is being drawn to the East. Rushdie redraws American history to accommodate the immigration of his three protagonists to New York. It is just after the Vietnam War: in this bereft moment, rudderless America is unusually open to the paradoxes of Ormus's songs; open, in fact, to paradox itself, and its non-identical twin ambiguity too. The U.S. Army (and its rock songs) went into one East and came out with a bloody nose. Now Ormus's music arrived like an affirmation from another East to enter the musical heart of Americanness, to flow into the river of dreams. (p. 378)

The first East, that of Vietnam, dispossesses the Western subject, but the second East (in Rushdie's fiction) is welcomed with open arms, as an affirmation of the subject. But this process is no longer unilinear and unidirectional. Ormus has also sought out the West to affirm the music surfacing from his own unconscious. Rushdie's conceit in this novel is that the Parsi Indian boy Ormus knows the lyrics of Elvis and Bob Dylan before he hears them singing the songs; in his own mind, and soon in everyone else's, he is the `secret originator' of American rock music (pp. 89, 95±6). On one level, Ormus (or Rushdie) is simply claiming that 1960s rock music was universal, not Western; it crossed all frontiers and `belonged equally to everyone' (p. 96). But the novel's initial conceit is far stronger than this. Ormus's foreknowledge suggests that this Western music about crossing frontiers comes into being only because it is first dreamed up in the East and for the East. Thus when Ormus seeks out New York, it is not to mimic Western music (or subjectivity); it is to find the music that already emanates from his own unconscious. The transformational space in which these two descent journeys intersect, the West seeking a new East, the East seeking itself in the West, is New York City, which predictably, turns out to resemble Rushdie's lost Paradise, `impure old Bombay where West, East, North and South had always been scrambled, like codes, like eggs' (pp. 95±6). About New York City, Vina objects, `It can't be the edge as well as the center' (p. 378).15 But Yul Singh, the Dis of this infernal city, responds, `Sure it

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can, my pretty . . . take a look around' (p. 378).16

The migrations of Orpheus in five acts: Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie retells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as a contemporary love story about a pair of Indian rock musicians. The Bombayite Ormus (Rushdie's Orpheus) and the GreekAmerican-Indian Vina (his Venus or Eurydice) migrate to New York and together form VTO (denoting `Vina to Ormus', among other things). This fictional band has acquired legendary fame by the time the novel begins and recalls the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Madonna and other British or American rock stars. Rushdie's primary model for the journey of the singers from India to the West is Virgil's narration of the descent of Orpheus to the underworld in Georgics, 4.315±566 (this text is recounted by Rai at the start of Ground Beneath, pp. 21±2). There are also supporting allusions to Dante's Inferno; the narrator, Rai, a Bombayite photographer in love with Vina, begins his recollection of her life with this consciously Dantean gesture, ` ``So I stand at the gate of the inferno of language, there's a barking dog and a ferryman waiting and a coin under my tongue for the fare'' ' (p. 21). In adopting these Western models for his westward descent narrative, Rushdie sets himself against the position articulated by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon dismisses Greco-Roman myth as irrelevant to the actual experience of intellectuals from formerly colonised nations. `At the moment that the native intellectual comes into touch again with his people,' Fanon writes, `all the Mediterranean values . . . become lifeless, colourless knick-knacks . . . because they have nothing to do with the concrete conflict in which the people is engaged' (pp. 38±9). But for Rushdie, myths are stories that can be claimed and rewritten by different cultures in different contexts. Like the music celebrated by the novel, they are in some respects crossers of all frontiers. In any case, Ormus Cama is a mythological hybrid, derived from a fusion of the Western Orpheus with the Eastern Hindu god of love, Kama, who is rescued from the underworld by his wife, Rati, goddess of music (p. 148). And, as Vina points out, their relationship also bears resemblance to the Mexican myth of the snake-god Quetzalcoatl, who flies to the sun and shakes it until it rains musicians. Vina tells Ormus, `I'm the snake-god, and you, you are the music' (p. 94). Vina is even more of a mythological hybrid than Ormus. Since she dies in the first chapter, broadly speaking, she represents the Eurydice of the novel, the lost beloved whom Ormus

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recalls in music and Rai, `standing at the gate of the inferno', attempts to revive by narrating the novel. To an extent, Vina is also a contemporary icon of tragic female celebrity, recalling Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana (the former satirised by Carter in the figure of Tristessa in The Passion of New Eve).17 But in Rai's representation of her, Vina herself refuses any shadow of tragedy; she emerges as a larger-than-life figure, a human goddess resembling the Hindu Rati, Sumerian Inanna, GrecoRoman Demeter and Venus, as well as the Egyptian pharaoh Queen Hatshepsut. Increasing the dizzying effect of this layering of mythic analogues, Rushdie makes the characters aware of the correspondences and has them debating their competing claims to various mythical characters' roles. For James Wood, the characters' awareness of their mythical analogues detracts from their credibility and depth. `Self-awareness kills the novelistic,' he argues, contrasting Ormus and Rai unfavourably with the unselfconsciously mythic Stephen Daedalus of Ulysses.18 On the other hand, one could make the case that a novel, and especially a postmodern novel, is most novelistic precisely when its characters become most self-aware.19 And the important point in Rushdie's novel is that mythic identity is not a given; it is actively and dialogically chosen, as one among competing narratives. The three protagonists, Ormus, Rai and Vina, all contend for the starring role of Orpheus. Ormus is the brilliant lyricist and guitarist, Vina the divine singer and Rai the photographer of catastrophes and death scenes, and the chronicler of VTO's rise (or rather descent) to fame. All three lose their heart's desire, and search an underworld to recover their loss or sublimate it in art; all are fundamentally transformed by their underworld encounters.20 While The Ground Beneath Her Feet celebrates, even polemically insists on, the hybridisation of Eastern and Western myths, Virgil's Georgics, 4, is undoubtedly the major sounding board for the novel's dialogue with the katabatic narrative tradition. Fittingly, the descent of Orpheus in Virgil's Georgics also provides a counterpoint to an imperial descent narrative, that of Aeneas to Hades (narrated in Virgil's Aeneid, 6). That the later, epic descent of Aeneas is intended to contrast with the earlier narrative of the singer's descent seems clearly indicated by the Aeneid's verbal and thematic echoes of Georgics (for example, Virgil's original name for Creusa, the wife of Aeneas, was Eurydice).21 In terms of the present discussion, we might identify Virgil's Orpheus as the dispossessed subject, the one made vulnerable by loss and eventually claimed by the underworld, and Aeneas as the self-possessed, imperial subject who sublimates his loss (of Creusa, Troy and later Dido) into a dream of patriarchal empire.22 In Chapter 6, I discussed the limiting gender

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dynamics of traditional katabasis, encoded, for example, in the Orphic model of descent (Eurydice is always already lost so that Orpheus can return as the famous musician). Given this general framework, however, Virgil is relatively even-handed in his treatment of the pair of lovers. His Orpheus is also lost from the beginning of the narrative, which is related retrospectively to Aristaeus by Proteus; Orpheus's death by drowning is described in terms that echo the second death of Eurydice, dissolving into mist; and both lovers' ghosts are appeased by the sacrifices of Aristaeus. For Virgil, if not for Ovid or later writers, Orpheus is the hero dispossessed by loss, who lives but is later claimed by the underworld to rejoin his wife. During the fall of Troy, by contrast, Virgil's Aeneas is told by his household gods to escape the city with his family. Emblematising the structure of the patriarchal family, he carries his father on his back and holds his son by the hand, and he tells his wife to follow behind. In the darkness, confusion and noise, Creusa is lost and, as Aeneas sorrowfully recalls, `nor did I look back for my lost one, or cast a thought behind' (Aeneid, 2.741). Once he notices she is gone, Aeneas does go back for Creusa. But rather than an underworld god, ready to bargain over terms, he meets the larger-than-life ghost of his dead wife, who insists on his departure for the greater glory of Rome. He learns that `the mission is what matters', as Buffy puts it.23 Aeneas reluctantly takes possession of himself and his destined future. The descents of Orpheus and Aeneas thus represent contrasting responses to the questions that pressed upon Virgil and his contemporaries, witnesses to a recent, violent change of government from Roman Republic to Augustan empire. In what sense does retaining an attachment to the past, the lost Other, dispossess present selfhood? On the other hand, what are the costs of self-possession, and singularity of political vision? Like Virgil's Aeneid, Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet presents the descent of a contemporary Orpheus in counterpoint to an imperial descent narrative. As mentioned above, when Ormus descends into America, he finds America returning from the Hell of Vietnam coming to meet him from the opposite direction. America's loss of selfesteem finds its echo in Ormus's loss, first of Vina's love and then of her life. Rather than present this situation as a choice between possession and dispossession, however, Rushdie complicates the Orphic model by triangulating its perspective. In addition to Orpheus (Rushdie's Ormus), we have the perspective of Aristaeus (Rushdie's Rai), in Virgil's text the survivor of both lovers' deaths, a compromised figure (his pursuit of Eurydice led to her death), but one who nevertheless is able to return to ordinary life, who is not transformed into either an immortal artist or an

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epic, imperial hero. Moreover, Rushdie's Ormus chooses neither selfpossession nor dispossession by the underworld. Rather, he resists a series of contrasting forces, some of which threaten to contain and finalise his sense of self, others which threaten a dispersal of selfhood. In response, he alternately risks crossing the threshold into other worlds, and withdraws defensively into his private, imaginary world. In a typically Rushdian gesture, Rai borrows from theology to express a secular rhythm of psychic dispersal and retrieval. Drawing on Greek kenotic theology, Rai says that at times, `we experience kenosis, an emptying' in which `things lose meaning, they erode'; then in a succeeding cycle, we reach `plerosis, the filling of time with new beginnings', `a time of superabundant power, of wild, fruitful excess' (p. 113).24 In Rushdie' treatment of the Orpheus myth, the descent to know the self and recover the beloved articulates just such a diastolic±systolic rhythm. The descent of Ormus (with corresponding descents by the other two characters which, for reasons of space, will not be discussed in detail here) falls into five distinct stages: first, the threshold crossing into the underworld (migrating westward); second, the encounter with Dis at the nadir of the descent (confronting patriarchs of the music business, Western-centrism and other obstacles); third, looking back to Vina (which parallels Rai's backward look to Bombay); fourth, psychic dismemberment (losing the self to music, the lost Other, the music audience's need for transcendence); and fifth, the return of another (in this case not Ormus, but Rai).

Threshold crossing Orpheus's descent into Hades is not so much a confrontation with death (that comes later in the story) as a transitus into another reality. Its equivalent in Judeo-Christian theology is the pascha of Passover or Easter, and in Parsi religion, the passage of the soul across Chinvat Bridge.25 This is the type of border-crossing Rushdie explores repeatedly in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, The Moor's Last Sigh and The Satanic Verses, whose modern analogue he finds in the migrant's disorienting passage across Western borders. On the flight from Bombay to London (Ground Beneath, Chapter 9), Ormus feels as if he is passing through an invisible skin or membrane in the sky. When he disembarks from the plane, he finds that the solid world has melted into air: `as his own feet move gingerly forward, he feels small pieces of England solidify beneath them. His footprints are the only fixed points in his universe' (p. 268). From this point, Rushdie begins to re-angle the novel's relation to historical reality, so that the reader is also disoriented by a familiar

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yet defamiliarised world. As Ormus composes his early hit song, `Shouldn't Be This Way' (p. 184), the reader finds that Kennedy is not killed in Dallas, Nixon was never President, Lou Reed is female, and Britain joined America in the war against Vietnam (this last distortion has, of course, become easier to imagine after September 11th). Whatever pleasure Rushdie's readers derive from these distortions of history, however, Ormus hates, fears and resists these initial feelings of disorientation. As reality cracks and splinters under his feet, Ormus reacts by contracting into himself: `never look down . . . That way you won't see the danger, you won't plunge through the deceptive softness of the apparent into the burning abyss below' (p. 268). It is at this threshold stage that the migrant feels most exposed to what, in the West, is characterised as viral evil: forces that attack by stealth, devouring `from beneath you'. In The Satanic Verses, when Gibreel first arrives in London, he feels exposed to this other, subterraneous reality: `the visible world . . . seemed to be sticking up through the atmosphere like a profusion of hot icebergs, and he had the idea that everything continued down below the surface of the soupy air' (p. 21). Fokkema described Rushdie's characters in The Satanic Verses as tragic postmodern constructions, internally fragmented and lacking autonomous essence.26 But this is really to describe their perception of the Western environment, not their inner consciousness. Both Gibreel and Ormus resist tragic, postmodern self-dispersal. Autonomy is an ideal that Ormus clings to when everything around him challenges his right to exist.

Ground Zero Autonomy is not the endpoint of Ormus's journey, but the first stage in the `bouncey-castle' sequence that constitutes a migrant's life-shape in this novel. The next decisive stage of his journey is the encounter with the Western patriarch (in the Orphic myth, the hero's encounter with Dis, King of Hades).27 At least two characters occupy the Hades role in The Ground Beneath Her Feet: first, Mull Standish, who produces a radio programme from a boat moored off Lincolnshire (p. 271), and second, Yul Singh, the powerful, wily producer who heads an entertainment empire based in New York City. While rooted in contemporary British offshore pirate station reality, Mull Standish's boat is an allegorically stagnant Argo in which Ormus will never sail anywhere. Likewise, Singh fleeces Ormus and Vina financially (pp. 373±409), and engineers the pact of celibacy between them, seeing that it will be good for business (pp. 346±72). But while both

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men attempt to fashion their brilliant proteÂge into a singularly purposive, marketable icon, Ormus stubbornly resists being thus steered. Standish accuses Ormus of drifting artistically, and advises the threshold-crosser to commit himself to one direction: `What's the most dangerous thing you can do? Do it. Where's the nearest edge? Jump off it' (p. 303). But faced with such an ultimatum, Ormus refuses to comply: What I want the music to say is that I don't have to choose . . . I need it to show that I don't have to be this guy or that guy, the fellow from over there or the fellow from here . . . I'll be all of them, I can do that. Here comes everybody, right? (p. 303)

Technically, Ormus avoids `having to choose' by evolving a system of `bouncing down' sections of music from four mixer tapes onto one (p. 300). This system involves risk, because once `bounced down', the original recording cannot be recovered. Either the polyphonic sound works, or nothing remains but a cacophony of musical scraps. In this way, Ormus develops his `dazzling plural voice' (p. 299). In New York, VTO continues to develop this pluralist sound. Critics hail their music as a mingling of Apollo and Dionysus, a marriage of the Spiritus Humanus with the Spiritus Mundi (pp. 392±3). Together Ormus and Vina give a voice to the desire for border crossing, or still more, for the dissolution of boundaries between Eastern and Western worlds. Tim Parks takes the quotation above, about `bouncing down', to be a statement of Rushdie's own aesthetic. This aesthetic, writes Parks, requires `everything . . . to be maintained in a fizz of promise, potential, multiplicity, and openness' (pp. 12±13). But in my view, this is to mistake one stage of this Orphic katabasis for another postmodern aesthetic, this time in its comedic aspect: that if the self lacks essence, it can play at being anything it likes. But when Ormus bounces all these voices down onto one single tape, he is not becoming many voices; all the parts are still sung by Ormus. What he is immediately responding to is the threat of selflimitation and finalisation. At a similar stage in the narrator's descent, a master photographer advises Rai, ` ``Find your enemy. When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for'' ' (p. 223). Rai and Ormus both follow this advice to the letter (in doing so, they claim their likeness to the novel's many fist-shaking gods, including Shiva, Dionysus, Prometheus, Jason, Medea and Quetzalcoatl). Since the fatwa of 1989, the threat of being silenced as an artist has been a recurrent theme of Rushdie's fiction. Rushdie has complained that the reception of his work was distorted and obscured by the `dark theological cloud' that descended over The Satanic Verses.28 All the same, the threat of silence produced an untethered fury of sound from Rushdie

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as a writer, just as such a threat produces a dazzling plural voice from Ormus in The Ground Beneath Her Feet.29 But if `promise, potential, multiplicity' is not Ormus's own aesthetic, perhaps it is that of the novel as a whole? Rai tells Vina that `metamorphosis is what supplants our need for the divine' (p. 461). And certainly, Rushdie suggests that the concept of metamorphic identity can get us beyond the idea of singular, revelatory conversion. This idea is supported by Marina Warner's thesis in Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds. Warner argues that `metamorphic writing' flourishes `in transitional places and at the confluence of traditions and civilisations' in periods of cross-cultural fertilisation and migration (p. 18). Texts like Ovid's Metamorphoses dramatise the Pythagorean concept of metempsychosis, in which souls are continually reborn into different physical forms. The self told in such metamorphic writing is fluid, unfinalised, migratory, a hybrid of different cultures in transitional stages. In contrast to much postcolonial theory today, metamorphic writing represents the exchange between different cultures in positive terms emphasising the attraction, fascination and pleasure felt on both sides in confronting otherness (p. 20).30 In later European history, argues Warner, metamorphic writing was suppressed and distorted by Judeo-Christian and later Freudian emphasis on the importance of a unified, integral self (p. 203). Once the Judeo-Christian schema is imposed on the colonial encounter, the `protean energies of transformation and sexuality are translated into hellish imagery' (p. 35).31 Unlike the converted, religious hero, the migratory metamorph recognises no singularity or finality of experience. For Dante, arriving at the nadir of descent reveals the true self, which must then be brought to the surface intact, untouched by further experience. By contrast, the metamorphic journey is endless, the soul constantly pressed into one new form after another. As Ovid's Pythagoras says at the end of Metamorphoses, `Nor does anything retain its own appearance permanently. Ever-inventive nature continually produces one shape from another' (15.251±2). Ted Hughes described Ovid as a writer interested in `passion where it combusts, or levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural' (Tales From Ovid, ix±x), a description which applies remarkably well to Rushdie's fiction. Rushdie's admiration for Ovid is evident throughout The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet. And mutation, whether essential or superficial, is undoubtedly a driving force in Ground Beneath, which Warner cites as an example of metamorphic writing (Fantastic Metamorphoses, p. 208). When Vina and Ormus complete their `journey to the center of the earth' (Ground Beneath, p. 373), what they discover at Ground Zero is a transmogrifying Pleasure Island,

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presided over by an arch-metamorph, Yul Singh. In this carnivalesque space, genders, races, fictions and histories mutate into each other, producing strange and comically hybrid forms. Here Ormus meets guitarists who think they are from Mars, rock-fans who worship the Divine Mother Goddess-Ma, and an Amos Voight character who runs a studio called Slaughterhouse-22 (pp. 376±7). But while it is undoubtedly the centre of metamorphic energy in the novel, `Sam's Pleasure Island' is not the novel's destination, any more than it is the Orphic hero's. By the time he gets to New York, Ormus has already passed beyond this purist strain of Pythagoreanism. Having sworn himself to ten years of celibacy without Vina, Ormus's music speaks of private loss; the Quakershaker album is `celibate misery speaking, the . . . pain of unconsummated love'.32 The theme of loss and death at the heart of the book is what renders its metamorphic energies infernal at every shift and turn. For this reason Virgil's account of Orpheus, rather than Ovid's equally famous version, is the more important intertext for The Ground Beneath Her Feet. In Metamorphoses, 10, Ovid's Orpheus leads a rich existence after the death of Eurydice, becoming not only a famous musician, but also a respected shaman, a pederast and an intradiegetic narrator of other tales of marvelous transformation. Only in Virgil's account is death experienced as a calamitous, irreversible transformation, and a caesura in the life of the survivor. In any case, in my view, Warner does somewhat overstate the case for unalloyed metamorphic writing. The idea of reincarnation, of metamorphosis beyond death, whether considered as a pagan, Buddhist or Christian concept, allows the believer to pursue the path of selfenlightenment from here to eternity, with little need for addressivity, for a sense of accountability to time or place. In this respect, Warner's idea of metamorphosis resembles Bakhtin's early theory of carnival (later discarded), in which `the human body not as the mortal husk of an individual bound to suffering, and articled to an end, but as the collective great body of the people.'33 Recognising no individual selfhood, carnival is indifferent to death, or rather `kills and gives birth' in the same `ironic and gay' spirit (Rabelais and His World, p. 435). But as Morson and Emerson point out, `individual responsibility entirely disappears from view when the individual is merged into the great body of the feasting people'.34 Warner comments that Ovid `often seems remarkably indifferent to responsibilities and judgment' (p. 39), but the reverse is surely true of Rushdie's fiction. Few characters are as opinionated, as politically aware and as quick to judge as Rushdie's. Indeed for Rushdie, metamorphosis seems to be precisely that force which precipitates his characters into

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taking a stand, making an irrevocable choice. Hours before her death, Rai tries to convince Vina that metamorphosis is a kind of human-scale `revelation' (p. 462). He is talking not about the ordinary, quotidian changes . . . nor even about the adaptive, chameleon natures which have become so common during our migrant century; but about a deeper, more shocking capacity, which kicks in only under extreme pressure. When we are faced with the Immense. At such a hinge moment we can occasionally mutate into another, final form, a form beyond metamorphosis. A new fixed thing. (p. 461)

Ever the opportunist, Rai is attempting to persuade Vina to abandon Ormus, to accept the `hinge moment' and become his (Rai's) lover. The pressure he exerts has unexpected results, however. Thrown off-balance by Rai, she sets off on a night spree with an unknown Mexican and both are killed in the earthquake. Vina's `form beyond metamorphosis' turns out to be death, which for him is a final severance. As he has said to Vina, `We're not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape. We're not science fiction. It's like when coal becomes diamond. It doesn't afterward retain the possibility of change . . . It's done' (p. 462). At the Ground Zero of this novel, Ormus reacts to Yul's manipulations by insisting on his right for his music to be `everybody'. But faced with the dissipating, protean energies of Yul's underworld court, Ormus withdraws into himself and his private narrative of desire and loss. In this way, Rushdie does not reject the metamorphic world-view altogether, but he gives the notion of shape-changing a new historical weight, a greater sense of finality and accountability.

Looking back With the death of Vina in Mexico, Ormus faces a different order of loss, and his response to this `pressure of the Immense' is again different. This is the moment when, for Ormus, `coal becomes diamond'; he finally decides what he is for, and he is `done'. This section of the novel corresponds to what I have identified as the third decisive moment in Orphic katabasis, when the hero looks back at his beloved. Virgil describes Orpheus, when he looks back, as `immemor heu!' (`alas, unmindful', in Fairclough's translation, or `forgetful' (Georgics, 4.491)). Primarily, this points to the fact that Orpheus has forgotten the one prohibition, but it may also be inferred that Orpheus is immemor in the sense that his very devotion will change the nature of the thing he loves. For Rushdie, looking back on the home country is a central and fundamental aspect of migrant experience. In Imaginary Homelands, he

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writes that `Exiles or emigrants or expatriates' are often `haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back' (p. 10). More than this, the propensity for backward-looking is what makes migrants of us all. Thus `the past is a country from which we have all emigrated . . . its loss is part of our common humanity' (p. 12). So looking back becomes an indispensable part of the `great work' of living. According to Rai, it is the secular artist's alternative to theology: `turn right on this forking path and you find god; turn left and there is art, its uncowed ambition, its glorious irreverent over-reach . . . our imagemaking is an indispensable part of that great work of making real' (p. 466). But given that the past is something we continually `make real', how does one reconcile individual with collective memory? Rushdie defends the historical errata of Midnight's Children, claiming that `whenever a conflict arose between literal and remembered truth, I would favour the remembered version' (Imaginary Homelands, p. 24). But in The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, he dramatises the conflict between warring imperatives: to attempt to retain one's private vision of the past, or to allow it to change, to allow oneself to change with relation to it, to allow the present and the collective to modify the individual's past. In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie presents this as a choice of faith between two kinds of ideas: one that `compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society' and one that is `cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed' that would `rather break than sway with the breeze' (p. 335). Saladin is the Aristaean hero who chooses the first of these ideas (`the inconstant soul, the mutability of everything' (p. 288)), while Gibreel is the Orphic hero who chooses constancy and, consequently, is broken. Thus the narrator explains: Gibreel . . . wished to remain, to a large degree, continuous ± that is, joined to and arising from his past . . . so that his is still a self which, for our present purposes, we may describe as `true' . . . whereas Saladin Chamcha is a creature of selected discontinuities, a willing re-invention; his preferred revolt against history being what makes him, in our chosen idiom, `false'. (p. 427)

By making Saladin the `jackpot boy' (Ground Beneath, p. 563) and Gibreel the one who dies, The Satanic Verses weighs in favour of discontinuity over the continuous soul. But this is perhaps to be expected from a narrative purportedly narrated by Dis, Shaitan or Satan (the royal `we' in the quotation above). In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Vina's death is a second loss (after the celibacy pact); it is loss squared for Ormus. Now he is under pressure to answer whether, for him, `death is more than love or is it' (p. 202). In

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Plato's Symposium, in a passage somewhat misrepresented by Rushdie, Phaedrus argues that Orpheus was a coward because he lacked the courage to kill himself, to rejoin Eurydice in the underworld.35 Rushdie, however, is unequivocal on this point: suicide is never a gift of love. He has Ormus and Rai choose instead between two types of `making real': remaining as fixed and faithful to the past as possible on the one hand, and allowing the present to infiltrate and adulterate the memory on the other. Although polar opposite types, Rai and Ormus both respond as Orpheus does, by looking back. Rai says, `Ormus and I . . . are both trying to cling to the reality of the woman we loved, to preserve and deepen her memory. And yes, we both yearn for resurrection, for her impossible return from the dead' (p. 477). After Vina's death, Rai's thoughts turn back to India; home and lover are thus associated in a single nexus of desire. Rai desires: Home as another lost jewel, as something else swallowed up, by time, by choice. As something else now unavailable, glowing up through the water like sunken gold, breathing painfully under the plowed earth like a lover gone down to Hell. (p. 492)

But Rai succumbs to the instinct to make Vina `mean' something. He mounts a photographic exhibition in her memory, and then essentially gets on with the business of living. This is to look back `forgetfully', to accept that such backward looking changes and distances the lost beloved (incidentally, it also reproduces the traditional gender dynamic of the Orphic descent; by her death, you shall know yourself). Ormus's choice is represented as the more difficult to sustain. After Vina's death, he rejects the external world almost entirely. In his music, he recreates a distilled image of the past (`All my life, I worshipped her. Her golden voice, her beauty's beat. How she made us feel, how she made me real, and the ground beneath her feet' (p. 475)); and in life, he attempts to recreate Vina by hiring impersonators to perform in her place. Ormus chooses his fantasy of the past as reality: The show, the music, was home. Outside that fiction, the cosmos was a fake. He stood on his imagination, on what he had conjured out of nowhere, what did not, could not, would not exist without him. Now that it had been made, he existed only within it. Having created this territory, he trusted no other ground. (p. 559)

Ormus's backward look, then, constitutes his most centripetal act. He affirms himself and the consistency of his own vision, in defiance of Vina's changefulness and even her death. Paradoxically, by refusing to

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relinquish her memory, Ormus also effaces the reality; like Virgil's Orpheus, he is immemor, forgetful in his remembrance.

Dismemberment Like the emigrant from Bombay who creates an `India of the mind', Ormus turns the Vina of his imagination into his sole reality. In this way the artist contributes to the `great business of making real'. But the final turn of the Orpheus myth demonstrates how the opposing dynamic continues to exert pressure; we are continually made real by the material world. What I referred to as the fourth defining moment of Orpheus's journey is his sparagmos or dismemberment at the hands of an angry mob. In Georgics, 4, Proteus explains how Orpheus was resented for his indifference to women after Eurydice's death; finally, he is ripped limb from limb by Bacchantes (Georgics, 4.520). These women cast the severed limbs of the poet into the River Hebrus. The head of Orpheus continues to sing as it floats downstream. One interpretation of this conclusion is that art is immortal, able to transcend death. At the equivalent moment in Dantean katabasis, the inverted pilgrim begins to climb up toward the antipodean sky, where transcendent grace lifts him out of a state of sin. But another interpretation of Orpheus's death suggests that the final movement is not towards transcendence, but downwards into human hands and the Heraclitean river of time. In my reading of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie opts for the second of these interpretations. The major representation of Orphic dismemberment in the novel is the appropriation and distortion of Vina's memory by millions of fans after her death. Rai thus describes her posthumous deification: `Vina in death is assailed by a second seismic force, which swallows her up all over again. Which swallows her up and regurgitates her in a thousand thousand hideous pieces' (p. 477). In medieval commentary, the sparagmos of Orpheus is frequently glossed as a prototype of the Christian Eucharist. Rushdie likewise represents Vina's metamorphosis as a form of sacrificial offering to a divine power. But the divine power here is not God the Father but humanity, collectively amassed to express its insatiable `need for last things' (p. 467). In this novel, religious worship has been transmuted into secular forms of adoration, which are ritually enacted in secular, democratic venues; `The favored centers of congregation are not the high places of the world; not the palaces, parliaments, houses of worship or great squares . . . The crowds begin, instead, to gravitate to stadiums, arenas, parks, maidans' (p. 481). This representation of the secular religious spirit differs from Judeo-

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Christian theology in its emphasis on the plurality of the god to be worshipped and the dialogic construction of secular adulation. To take the latter point first: VTO fans make gods of Ormus and Vina, particularly Vina after her death. But to the musicians, the massive audiences they face are also gods: demanding, fickle, merciless, sometimes bloodthirsty gods. Mira discovers this when a crowd turns against her for not being able to reproduce Vina's particular quality of voice. Sensing their hostility, Mira takes a dive straight into the audience while Rai strains to see what is happening: I can't see what she can ± the anger in many of the faces below her helpless body ± I can't feel the hands that are starting to claw at her body . . . when she stands up we can all see the cuts on her midriff, her back, even her face, her long dark hair is blowing wild and ragged at her back and the bustier has gone, but she won't stop singing, she doesn't miss a beat. (p. 551)

Mira's scornful reaction to rejection is what, in Rai's view, convinces everyone she will be a star in her own right. So the relation between star and audience is dialogic, not only in the sense that each has to appease the divinity of the other, but also in the sense that this relationship is often agonistic, edgy and self-defensive. Moreover the star's deification is always risky, because the god that bestows her divine status is itself multiple, subject to fractious disagreement, and possessive in a myriad different ways. Thus the crowds are initially placated by the memorial concerts devoted to Vina: `in the packed stadiums, the sound systems offer her music to the crowds. This gift is accepted' (p. 481). But later, just as happened to Princess Diana, Vina's image is seized upon by millions and finally ripped to shreds. Playing at Knebworth in November 2003, as part of a national tour, the British popstar Robbie Williams performed in front of a colossal backdrop representing himself as a winged Lucifer. While Robbie gyrated at the front of the stage, the backdrop combusted into virtual flames, creating an image of the demonic star, still furiously singing, being dragged down to Hell. An ocean of fans watched this spectacle with what seemed like paroxysms of joy. Rushdie's Ground Beneath Her Feet explores the heart of this phenomenon, the secular but quasi-religious desire for collective engulfment in a sacred spectacle. As Ormus realises, it is the desire for metamorphosis into the extra-temporal realm of myth or fantasy that survives in the secular imagination. Rushdie suggests that individually, we have a need for superheroes and semi-divinity, and collectively we create this aura of religiosity around certain people, events, sights or sounds. But the collectivity also then acquires the power and substance of a hydra-headed god, one that requires its quotient of

The migrations of Orpheus in five acts

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human sacrifice. Succumbing to the desire for this kind of sacred metamorphosis is risky and dangerous, but it is at least a dialogic and democratic process, in Rushdie's view. In his 1994±95 world tour with Mira, Ormus achieves an almost miraculous balance between two opposing appetites, his own desire for the Vina of his imagination and her fans' desire for `Vina Divina', the projection of a mythic icon that can be collectively adored. Once again, the audience is represented as a dangerous, even bestial god which the artist must placate. The title of the touring performance is Into the Underworld, which suggests that for Rushdie, Orpheus's confrontation with the Bacchantes constitutes a final stage in his descent to Hell, this time to confront a mass of humanity rather than a single, patriarchal underworld god. Because of the bright lighting, Ormus can only see the first few rows of the audience and beyond it a great roaring beast he had to tame, to play as if it were an instrument, but this was something he knew, this was his real life. The lion tamer in the lion's cage, putting his head in the jaws of the beast, knows that this is his true reality . . . So also Ormus in the bubble of the show was perfectly comfortable, perfectly at home, and by general consent his performances were extraordinary, his guitar never more achingly clear . . . his singing never so subtle or so strong. (p. 559)

Previously encased in a sound-proof bubble on stage in order to protect his damaged ears, Ormus has come to embody the artist's detachment from the real world. But on the Underworld tour, Ormus arranges to have this bubble craned out over the heads of the audience. As a result, `bubbled Ormus no longer seemed separated from the action; the bubble became a metaphor of life, of his continued membership in the world of the living during his adventure in the country of the dead' (p. 561). By this means, the self-sealed memorialist is brought into a kind of community with the heterogeneous crowd. What catastrophe does for Ormus, then, is to force him out of the migrant's, and the artist's, condition of metaphysical weightlessness into a new social connection.36 Under the gaze of the crowd, Ormus becomes the consummate singer ± that is, a complete and finalised artist. The Underworld tour is Dis-oriented, in that Ormus uses it as a bridge to come closer to Vina, to be finished and complete, like her: `each night's show was not only a gift to Vina but a step towards the oblivion, the not-being, where she lay with his joy in her keeping' (p. 560). When a Vina impersonator shoots and kills Ormus, Rai offers us this explanation: `I think [Vina] came and got him because she knew how much he wanted to die' (p. 571). Besides

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rehearsing the old dynamic (that Eurydice lives in the underworld), this explanation, if true, would simply turn death into life upside-down, erasing the sense of tragedy, the need to face consummate endings. But this metamorphic perspective is finally neither affirmed nor denied.

Return of another How does love or art survive death? By repeating itself in a new historical configuration, the last section of Rushdie's novel suggests. `Certain patterns recur, seem inescapable' Rai says. `Fire, death, uncertainty. The carpet whipped out from under us to reveal a chasm where the floor should have been' (p. 313). Against these fatal explosions and drownings, Rushdie works the love-triangle of Vina±Ormus±Rai into a new pattern. Rai, the photographer of historical catastrophes, survives the catastrophe of Vina and settles into a rooted, ordinary life. In the last chapter, Ormus and Vina are dead, but Rai has found hope (`Rai' meaning hope, p. 18) in the young Mira, who, happily enough for him, looks remarkably like Vina and differs chiefly in her fidelity to him. Rai has also become Music to Mira (p. 573), and Mira's child Tara looks even more like Vina, except that she shares Rai's tone-deafness. Many readers may find this conclusion yields too great a prize to Rai, the `jackpot boy'. But these recombinations of previous patterns and characters serve to demonstrate that art survives, not through transcendence, but by being unpluggable, by repeating itself in new generations and new versions of old cities. As a whole, then, The Ground Beneath Her Feet reconciles the position of the backward-looking descent hero with that of the forward-looking one who finally chooses metamorphosis over fidelity to the past. The sense of rootedness in ordinary life is provisional, and Rai's family, consisting of himself, Mira and her child, is a `family of the modern epoch: elective alliances against terror or despair' (p. 567). One might point out that the ordinariness which Rai settles for is specifically American in emphasis; it consists of `drinking o.j. and munching muffins . . . having the tv on at breakfast' (p. 575).37 But in more general terms, this is a polemically secular response to the intrusions of the `Immense' upon the fabric of everyday existence. It is not that Rushdie denies the potency of such underworld forces. On the contrary, by the end of the novel, even the rationalist Rai believes in multiple, palimpsest realities. But the underworld is no longer conceived of as solely demonic; nor are its revelations absolute or final. As Rushdie later wrote in response to the events of September 11th, `how to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized.' In his reascent from Hell, Rai passes by the fork in

Notes

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the road leading to a tragic, traumatised fixation with the past, and he passes the fork leading to an absolutist break with the past. His route leads him back to ordinary pleasures (`kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion') such as any New Yorker might experience today. In this novel, New York is both edge and centre, both quintessentially western, and another manifestation of Rushdie's paradisal 1950s Bombay. As Rai says, `a kind of India happens everywhere . . . everywhere is terrible and wonder-filled and overwhelming if you open your senses to the actual's pulsating beat' (p. 417). Rushdie's fantastical fictions tend eerily to anticipate historical events, and his two turn-of-the-century novels, The Ground Beneath and Fury (2001), are no less prescient in the way they represent subterraneous forces ripping through the fabric of ordinary New Yorkers' lives.38 But even these novels did not foresee the way in which a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001 would be interpreted as an eruption of Eastern Hell in the heart of the Western world. Nor can he have foreseen how this experience would precipitate a full-scale assault by a Western coalition of nations on the forces of darkness imagined to be lurking like rats or swarming like insects in the numberless, nameless holes and caves of northern Afghanistan and the trackless deserts of Iraq.39 In the Epilogue, I consider the ways in which the events of September 11th and its aftermath have taken the shape of a new, and at the same time depressingly familiar, descent journey into the East in search of a lost, Western identity.

Notes 1. On Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a narrative of descent to the underworld, see Thale, `Marlow's Quest' (pp. 154±61), Lilian Feder's `Marlow's Descent Into Hell' (pp. 162±70), and Robert Evans, `Conrad's Underworld' (pp. 171± 84) collected in Stallman (ed.), The Art of Joseph Conrad. 2. Chinua Achebe has argued that Conrad represents `Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril.' See `An Image of Africa', p. 257. For a less extreme, postcolonial reading of Heart of Darkness, see Robert Burden, Heart of Darkness, pp. 78±82. 3. In his memoir, Jarhead: a Soldier's Story of Modern War (New York: Scribner, 2004), Anthony Swofford, a lance corporal in a US Marine Corps platoon stationed in the Gulf in 1991, recalls that his platoon watched American war films for three days before the start of the Gulf war: `We concentrate on the Vietnam films because it's the most recent war, and we rewind and review famous scenes ± Robert Duvall and his helicopter gun-

220

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

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ships in Apocalypse Now; Willem Dafoe getting shot by a friendly and left on the battlefield in Platoon; Matthew Modine talking trash to a streetwalker in Full Metal Jacket . . . Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended.' (This edited extract from Jarhead was published in The Guardian, as `The Sniper's Tale', 15 March 2003, Weekend Section.) See Henk Vynckier, `Exotic Hades: The Representation of Alien Lands as Underworlds in European Literature'. For a discussion of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and its relation to Darwinian and Freudian thought, see Cedric Watts, A Preface to Conrad, pp. 92±5. For psychoanalytic readings of Heart of Darkness, see Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, pp. 1±55, and Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, pp. 238±317. Octavio Paz, `Introduction' to Henri Michaux's Miserable Miracle, p. xi. Michaux's mescaline-induced meditations, first published in French in 1972, constitute a mental descent journey of a modernist kind. Michaux explores the psychedelic edges of his consciousness in the confident modernist belief that the greatest art is produced from willed acts of self-annihilation. Michaux's contrived breakdowns, to me, read like masquerades of actual drug addiction, but many writers, like Paz, have written glowingly of Michaux's verbal collage descriptions and illustrations of hallucinogenic states. In his essay, `On Adventure', Rushdie notes that in modern times, the tradition of adventurous `Houdini' travel of the kind intended to stimulate `change, difference, strangeness, newness, risk and achievement', has become `by and large a movement that originates in the rich parts of the planet and heads for the poor' (Imaginary Homelands, p. 224). For an economic analysis of this global movement from West to East and South, see Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 294±6. See Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, p. 81. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 7, Part I, Episode 2 (`Beneath You'). See Edward Said's Orientalism. Homi Bhabha argues that the mimicry by the colonised of the coloniser's discourse is `a form of defensive warfare'; `When the words of the master become the site of hybridity ± the warlike sign of the native ± then we may not only read between the lines, but even seek to change the often coercive reality that they so lucidly contain' (`Signs Taken for Wonders', p. 104). Gayatri Spivak, quoted by Benita Parry, `Current Theories of Colonial Discourse', p. 38. The coming-to-self of an Eastern subject can, of course, be represented in the terms of an absolutist conversion narrative as well. See Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. Inconsistencies in the spelling of `center/centre' are one of the symptomatic features of this `Hello, America' novel. The novel's central conceit that rock music originated in Bombay may be outrageous, but locating the start of the infernal journey in the East is historically defensible. The two oldest katabatic narratives extant are the Sumerian cyclical epic poems of c.3500±2500 bc, recounting the descents of Inanna (or Ishtar), Queen of Heaven, and Gilgamesh, King of Uruk

Notes

17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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c.2700±2500 bc. That Hesiod and Homer knew versions of these Mesopotamian myths is widely accepted among classical scholars (see Clark, Catabasis); in a sense, then, the music of the underworld did infiltrate the West from the East. `I'd actually devised the book, and, indeed, written an earlier version of what happens after Vina's death before Princess Diana's accident . . . but then the real-life event happened, which was on a scale so much greater than anything I'd envisaged. It shocked me because it seemed as if it jumped off my pages into the real world . . . Princess Diana's accident . . . made me think again about what I'd written and actually rewrite it on a bigger scale' (interview with Peter Kadzis). James Wood, `Lost in the Punhouse', p. 98. According to Bakhtin, the novel's particular function is to make every other literary genre `more conscious; it forces them to better perceive their own possibilities and boundaries, that is, to overcome their own naivete ' (Problems of Dostoevsky's Discourse, p. 271). Just as Rushdie allows his characters to mythicise themselves, so (he argues) a textual representation of rock-music allows author and reader to mythicise their own rock sound. To the question, ` ``Est-il difficile, pour un eÂcrivain, d'eÂcrire sur la musique?'', Rushdie responded, ``C'est la pire difficulte qui soit, car les lecteurs ne peuvent pas entendre la musique . . . Mais, finalement, cette contrainte preÂsentait un grand avantage: je n'ai pas eu aÁ deÂfinir preÂciseÂment l'identite musicale de mon groupe. Son identiteÂ, metaphorique, refleÁte l'histoire du rock'n'roll'' ' (interview in Le Monde, `Livres: Salman Rushdie, enfant du rock'). Having argued the benefits of non-actualisation, it is curious that the author then welcomed U2's recording of a song called `The Ground Beneath Her Feet', based on Ormus's lyrics in the novel. Vina has claim to be Orpheus (as Rai tells her, p. 460), in that she rescues Ormus from the underworld three times in the novel. At the age of twelve, she rescues Ormus by persuading him to stop listening to the whisperings of his dead twin brother and to start writing music (Ground Beneath, pp. 112± 3). Later, she wakes him from a three-year coma (p. 321). Finally, Vina returns from the grave to fetch Ormus down into the underworld; or so Rai interprets Ormus's death (he is gunned down by a Vina-impersonator (p. 571)). See W. W. Briggs, `Narrative and Simile from the Georgics in the Aeneid', Mnemosyne Supplement, 58, 1980, pp. 1±109 (99). Although some Virgil critics read the descent of Aeneas as a journey of dispossession as well. For an overview of this `Harvard pessimist' school of interpretation, see W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 7, Part 2, Episode 17 (`Lies my parents told me'). On Gottfried Thomasius's kenotic theology, see Gaster and Welsh, God and Incarnation in Mid-Nineteenth Century German Theology (cited in my Chapter 1). On the Judeo-Christian transitus at Easter (where pascha means `crossing'), see Freccero, The Poetics of Conversion, p. 67. Ormus's mother compares her flight to London with the Parsi soul's passage across the Bridge of Judgement: `We, too, are travellers between the worlds, we who have died to

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

East±West Descent Narratives

our old world to be reborn into the new, and this parabola of air is our Chinvat Bridge' (p. 255). Fokkema, `Post-Modern Fragmentation or Authentic Essence?: Character in The Satanic Verses', pp. 51±63. The equivalent episode in Inferno is when the pilgrim comes face to face with Lucifer, in the lowest circle of Hell (Inferno, 34). Rushdie, interview with Kadzis. Compare Rushdie's recent novel about New York City entitled Fury. Such an attraction is epitomised in the figure of Cortez, `when with eagle eyes / He star'd at the Pacific ± and all his men / Look'd at each other with a wild surmise', in Keats' `On Looking into Chapman's Homer' (1816, ll. 11±13; The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams. London: Norton, p. 769). See Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, p. 36, for a critique of Dante's emulation and demonisation of Ovid. Rushdie here cites the Orpheus of Milton's `L'Allegro', `Untwisting all the chains that tie / the hidden soul of harmony' (p. 390; L'Allegro, ll. 143±4). Morson and Emerson's paraphrase, see Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 93; see also Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 435. Although Pythagoras is more a mystic than materialist philosopher, his doctrine of metempsychosis is often elided with Heraclitus's concept of time as unending flux (that you can never step in the same river twice. For Bakhtin, the presiding genii of carnival are Rabelais' `youth of antiquity' and Heraclitus's `playing boy' (Rabelais and His World, p.147; see also pp. 82, 435). Compare Warner's reading of Kafka's metamorphoses, in which Ovidian optimism `withers in the grip of twentieth-century despair; and a Judaeo-Christian hierarchy of being, with unclean beasts . . . at the very bottom, replaces the Heraclitean vortex' (p. 114). For a comparison between Pythagorean and Heraclitean philosophies, see Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, pp. 182±201. As Morson and Emerson go on to argue, in carnival, `There is no longer a self, there is only the carnival mask; other people can accomplish what ``I'' can if they adopt my festive clothes. Carnival as a whole appears to offer a perfect ``alibi for being'' ' (Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 95). Orpheus `found a way to enter Hades while still alive'. Plato, Symposium, p. 12 (see also my Chapter 1). Tim Parks strongly objects to Rushdie's description of Plato as the `ayatollah of love'. He rejects Rushdie's reading of Plato entirely: `We shall pass over the bullying techniques of agglomeration and inflation . . . It is the sheer rashness of Rushdie's writing that takes the breath away. I shall not presume to come to Plato's defence' (The New York Review, p. 16). The subject feels `responsibility' [otvetstvennost'] at the moment `where the ought-to-be (obligation) in principle confronts me within myself as another world.' Bakhtin, `Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity', in Holquist and Liapunov (eds), Art and Answerability, p. 119. The `addressivity' [obrashchennost'] of an utterance is its `quality of turning to someone' (Bakhtin, `The Problem of Speech Genres', Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, p. 99). When, at the end of such a novel, Rushdie attempts to convince his readers that ordinary love is better than Love on the heroic scale, I am reminded of

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Rushdie's own reaction to the ending of The Wizard of Oz, which tries to persuade us (in Rushdie's view) that the dream of Home (`There's no place like home') is better than the dream of Away. Rushdie asks, `How does it come about, at the close of this radical and enabling film, . . . that we are given this conservative little homily? . . . Are we to believe that Dorothy has learned no more on her journey than that she didn't need to make such a journey in the first place? . . . `Is that right?' Well, excuse me, Glinda, but is it hell' (Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz, pp. 56±7). 38. In The Satanic Verses, the poet Baal foresees that his godless narratives will `in all probability mean his death' (p. 379), as the publication of the novel very nearly led to the end of Rushdie's. Anticipating the planes' collision with the Twin Towers, The Satanic Verses also begins with his two central characters metamorphosing into each other as they tumble from the exploded carcass of an airplane. The Ground Beneath Her Feet depicts the death and apotheosis of a Diana-like celebrity, months before Princess Diana's fatal car crash. See note 17. 39. Art Spiegelman's cartoon strip, `In the Shadow of No Towers', parodically represents terrorists as clouds of hornets attacking Uncle Sam and a pair of chubby children (the `cuddly Tower Twins'). Uncle Sam blasts them with insecticide, but finds he has mistakenly poisoned an `Iraknid' (a spider bearing the face of Saddam) instead. See `In the Shadow of No Towers', 15±30 November 2002.

Epilogue

Katabasis in the Twenty-First Century

This book has explored the idea that modern, Western secular cultures have retained a belief in the concept of Hell as an event or experience of endless, unjust or unspeakable suffering which occurs in actual, human lives, and which has, in particular, been realised or made immanent in twentieth-century history. Within this historic context, the descent to Hell has emerged as one of the important narratives by which late twentiethcentury Westerners come to know themselves as coherent selves. While perception of the different ways in which we are already in Hell is a characteristically late twentieth-century insight, the decision to embark on the journey of descent is one mode of actively responding to the prevalence of the infernal. As Notley's heroine says, ` ``Down'' ``is now the only way'' ``to rise'' ' (The Descent of Alette, p. 26). From the nineteenth century to the present day, Marx's writings on the capitalist economy, reinforced by psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity, have contributed to the valence of the idea that a descent into Hell can be the means of recovering ± or discovering ± selfhood. But these more recent frameworks have combined with earlier literary and religious models of katabatic narrative to produce the notion of a self made ethical by its encounter with the underworld. By way of conclusion, I wish to discuss a recent, historical example of an infernal encounter being refashioned into the narrative of a journey of descent and return. The political context of terrorist attacks on Western cities from 2001 to the present, and the US-led military response to these attacks, should underscore the continuing relevance of the narratives of descent we have been discussing. Moreover, the ways in which September 11th and its aftermath have been fashioned into the narrative of an infernal encounter and a heroic, retaliatory raid on the underworld should convince anyone still needing to be convinced that Hell, in our time, is much more than a fable.

September 11th: the first circle

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September 11th: the first circle The attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001 was for many survivors and witnesses an instance of Hell made immanent at the start of the new century and millennium. Witnesses of the two planes crashing into the Twin Towers, the steel skyscrapers crumpling in a wave of heat, the dust clouds choking the city, registered both shock at the unexpectedness of the catastrophe and recognition of its infernal magnitude. Uncannily, this contemporary instance of Hell seemed to manifest many of the images and topoi of already imagined medieval visions of Hell, as well as recent Hollywood disaster movies such as The Siege (1998), Towering Inferno (1974) and the Die Hard series (1988±2005), which had fictionalised just such a devastating terrorist attack. From Dante, Bosch, Brueghel and Michelangelo, as well as these more recent fictions, one recognised the heat and flames (`opulently evil, with their vampiric reds and blacks'1), the crowds of souls amassing in terror, the verticalisation of space into distinct levels or circles of entrapment, the physical torments of burning, suffocation and dismemberment, even the still living bodies fatally plummeting to earth from the windows of the towers.2 The novelist Peter Carey was in New York City on the day and described the faces of those returning from the scene as survivors of an otherworldly journey: `you could recognize these people straight away, the blankness, but also sometimes the frank appeals for human contact . . . These people have felt horror, they are like no other crowd I have ever seen'; they had `see[n] hell arrive just down the road'.3 When another novelist, Jay McInerney, described New York as a Dantean `city of the dead', he was referring not only to those who died in the attack, but also to those who descended into its horror and survived.4 And perhaps even more medieval than modern was the Western perception of a demonic will orchestrating the tragedy; rather than the modern era's banality of evil, as Susan Neiman noted, here was evil expressed with `awesome intentionality'.5 In the classical katabatic tradition, the analogous episode is the witch Allecto's furious eruption from the underworld, who for sheer love of destruction causes civil war in Italy and wreaks havoc and death on Aeneas's allies (Aeneid, 7.323±571). Not only an instance of Hell, however, September 11th was interpreted by some commentators to be a sign of a pre-existent infernal condition. Blind to the toll of Western capitalism on the developing world, it was argued, Americans were forced to confront the truth of this evil as it exploded to the surface on September 11th. As Martin Amis concisely put it, `America, it is time you learned how implacably you are hated' (`Fear

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and Loathing', p. 2). Although vilified for their views, the writer Susan Sontag and historian Chalmers Johnson argued that American-led globalisation had produced its own nemesis in fundamentalist terrorism.6 Invoking a comparison with The Matrix, where Neo wakes up to the reality of his post-Apocalypse world, Slavoj ZÏizÏek averred that the destruction of the Twin Towers should return us from the fantasy of the digitised First World, to the Third World's `desert of the real'.7 More generally, September 11th was viewed as a nightmare awakening from a dream of security and peace, an awakening that brought to the surface the accumulated memories of the century's worst horrors. In his 2003 comic strip, `In the Shadow of No Towers', Art Spiegelman (author of the Holocaust strip, `Maus') represents his autobiographical persona drowning in a sea of newsprint, an electric drill splitting open his skull, as paranoid reflections on the century's atrocities overwhelm him: `the killer apes learned nothing from the twin towers of Auschwitz and Hiroshima . . . And nothing changed on 9/11. His ``president'' wages his wars and wars on wages ± same old deadly business as usual.'8 Like Primo Levi waking from a dream in which he wakes up to find himself once more in Auschwitz, Spiegelman's persona experiences September 11th as the traumatic return of earlier, twentieth-century atrocities.9 He becomes paralysed by a wave of undifferentiated fear, which returns him `to the heart of every negative movement' (cf. Levinas, `There is', The Levinas Reader, p. 36). Whether interpreted as an instance of underworldly, fundamentalist Hell disrupting Western secular democracy, an eruption of Western capitalism's repressed unconscious, or a traumatic return to the century's accumulated memories of atrocity, September 11th made it clear that the time is now undeniably out of joint, that the Western world has changed, become more fearful. Spiegelman's strip represents America after September 11th as an upside-down world, in which sword-rattling creatures crowd the skies, armed with Bibles, wooden swords and guns, crying `redemption!', `pre-emption!' and `Halleluiah! We're falling up!'10 He sees the country as schizophrenically split into two nations, one red (prowar and/or Republican) and the other blue (anti-war and/or Democrat). Like the alien in Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, he watches in horror as the reality of `blue America' fragments and disappears.11 After September 11th, then, America, Britain and other Western democracies woke up to find themselves in a twenty-first century Hell. As we have seen elsewhere in this study, this awareness of being in Hell prompts the beleaguered subject to respond by journeying down deeper into Hell, in the hopes of mastering, or escaping, or righting this upside-down world by means of a via negativa. When Martin Amis described September 11th

Afghanistan and Iraq: there and back again (again)

227

as only `the first circle' of Hell, he meant primarily that things could have been much worse. But recuperated into a narrative of descent, September 11th became the `first circle' in a different sense: a point of departure, a threshold crossing, from which the epic journey of descent would begin.

Afghanistan and Iraq: there and back again (again) The US and UK military assault on Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan in 2001±2, and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, can be read as a descent narrative of epic scale and ambition. In broadest terms, the heroic aim of the descent was to wage `war on terror', a phrase which revealingly confuses the demonic object of the quest (the terrorists) with the damaged subject to be salvaged from the journey (the terrorised). While the imperialist legacy of this katabatic journey from `civilised' West to monstrous, hydra-headed East was clear from the start, it remained (and still remains) open to interpretation whether this would be a narrative of possession or dispossession, a unifying victory for Western subjectivity, or a dispersal of subjectivity in a chimerical underworld of disappearing demons and WMDs. Invoking the inner logic of katabasis in his speech to the Labour Party Conference in October 2001, Prime Minister Tony Blair determined `that out of the shadow of this evil, should emerge lasting good'.12 The legacy of September 11th should be `a new beginning where we seek to resolve differences in a calm and ordered way'; and towards that aim, `the action we take [in response to September 11th] will be proportionate; targeted'.13 Similarly, President George W. Bush promised a measured, rational response, saying, `we're angry at the evil that was done to us, yet patient and just in our response'.14 On 19 September 2001 more than a hundred US combat and support aircraft, and a naval taskforce were dispatched to the Middle East and Indian Ocean. This military operation was given the codename `Operation Infinite Justice' (later changed to `Operation Enduring Freedom'), recalling the famous inscription over Dante's gates of Hell (`JUSTICE MOVED MY HIGH MAKER', Inferno, 3.4). On 30 October 2001, in a revival of Vietnam war tactics, US B-52 bombers carpet-bombed the area north of the Afghan city of Kabul, and on 11 January 2002, captured prisoners were flown to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were (and at the time of writing still are) held without trial or recourse to US or international law. On 5 September 2002, the new leader of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt, allowing US and UK administrations to claim that their targeted, military action had been largely successful. As a narrative of self-possession, the next stage of the journey

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becomes somewhat confused. With no immediately discernible casus belli, the US and UK declared war on Iraq, denounced by George W. Bush in 2002 as a `rogue state' in an `axis of evil'.15 Baghdad sustained a night of heavy shelling, designed to induce `shock and awe' in the enemy. This was the US military's way of saying, in Buffy's terms, `They want an Apocalypse? Well, we'll give 'em one.'16 Saddam's regime collapsed with unexpected swiftness and Western TV audiences had the satisfaction of seeing an American soldier clambering up a colossal statue of Saddam, like Dante climbing out of Hell on Satan's torso, to drape an American flag over the fallen dictator's face (hastily replaced by an Iraqi one, after shouted instructions from below). In what should have been the final episode in this descent to Hell narrative, Saddam Hussein himself was discovered, trapped like a `rat in a hole', arrested and taken into custody by US soldiers. Here, then, was George W. Bush fulfilling the patrilinear dream of the father, George Bush Sr, who had tried and failed to subdue Saddam in 1991. And this was the sought-after closure on September 11th: a tyrant brought to justice, the underworld beaten into submission. On the other hand, the same narrative could be read as a journey of dispossession, a descent without return. In pursuit of the elusive demon Osama bin Laden, the US and UK rained down a fortune's worth of bombs on a poverty-stricken, already bomb-blasted country. While many terrorist cells were reportedly destroyed, the main architects of September 11th apparently escaped killing or capture in Afghanistan. In the Iraq war, the ostensible reason for the offensive strike by the US and UK, that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) capable of being deployed against the West in forty-five minutes, was not substantiated by any subsequent discovery of stockpiled weapons in the defeated country. Like Osama, the WMDs simply vanished into thin air. Most bewildering of all, the humiliating capture of Saddam failed to stem the tide of resistance to the `American occupation' of Iraq. Iraqi insurgents persisted in characterising their Western deliverers as imperialist aggressors and infidels. Just as the killing of Duncan brings Macbeth no relief from his fears, so the capture of Saddam signally failed to assuage Western fears of terrorism.17 Indeed, many people in the US and UK began to wonder to what extent Saddam had anything to do with alQuaeda, or any of the terrorist groups orchestrating suicide missions in New York, Bali, Madrid and elsewhere. Even the `moral' victory in Iraq, the overthrow of a genocidal dictator, has been flawed by subsequent events. The `people of Iraq' turn out not to have been souls trapped in Hell, awaiting Western deliverance; rather than flowing up toward to the light of Western democracy, Iraqi subjects are pursuing the history of their own grievances, with many leaders demanding the restitution of

Global fear and its inversions

229

religious law. And George W. Bush, whose sole objective on the eve of American elections was to see this narrative end by June, 2004, once again found himself and his soldiers lost in an Eastern labyrinth.

Global fear and its inversions The argument of this book, however, has been to demonstrate that katabatic narratives can yield more complex and nuanced understandings of the self in extremis than either of these stories, the one of possession, the other of dispossession. Theologically speaking, Hell is a region not of death itself, but of the fear of death, and this, specifically, is what September 11th brought to Western countries, and thence to Easterners fearing reprisals from the West. Around three thousand people died in the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, which in the history of natural and man-made catastrophes is not a high figure (fortytwo thousand died in the Iranian earthquake on 26 December 2003, but this event did not contribute to a global climate of fear). As Wole Soyinka has explored in his 2004 Reith Lectures, a climate of fear has distorted, exaggerated and compromised the legality of Western responses to September 11th and subsequent terrorist attacks.18 While the literary texts I have been considering in this study are not political tracts, they do, in my view, shed a more subtle and refracted light on recent events in America and the Middle East than either of the narrative constructions I have sketched out above. Realising that, in Critchley's paraphrase of Levinas, `without trauma, there would be no ethics', looking back on September 11th can also be the means of deepening our understanding of the catastrophic forces to which many people in the developing world are vulnerable in their everyday lives: not only terrorist attack, but civil war, despotism, poverty, disease and starvation (Ethics±Politics±Subjectivity, p. 195). Primo Levi regarded Auschwitz as the Black Hole of modern European history, but he turned this image of absolute, singular negativity into a sign of human relatedness. If Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is currently the West's Black Hole, then this image too can be inverted into a sign of our connectedness to the East. If every historical moment is split, as Anne Michaels suggests in Fugitive Pieces, then the memory of September 11th can also return us, not to the trauma of Western dispossession, but to the unfinished narrative of Palestinian subjectivity. Instead of chasing demons eastward or westward, leaders of Western and Arab countries might take this crisis as a sign of the need for a return to the necessary, difficult task of creating an internationally recognised Palestinian state. (A different fork in the

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road was taken by Ariel Sharon who, by ordering the assassination of the spiritual leader of Hamas, Ahmed Yassin on 22 March 2004, `opened the gates of Hell', according to a Hamas supporter.19) If, as Slater writes in Spasm, the Earth is best understood as a seismic and unstable ground, then we should recognise the quixotic nature of Western attempts to defeat or cure terror; what we have, as Slater writes, is `the fact of falling' (p. 216). Like Alette, who painstakingly pieced together the fragments of her mythic first parents, leaving the tyrant to the final act where he could then be dismissed as unreal, Western leaders might now begin to reassemble, from the wreckage of the Twin Towers, the shattered fragments of international law and multilateralism. Having repeatedly failed in his attempts to achieve heroic epic stature, Gray's Lanark eventually wins what is in any case his real heart's desire, ordinary sunlight, breathable air and human love. After September 11th, responding to the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's call for a united stand on `what we are against', Salman Rushdie asked himself, `what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend?' Rushdie's checklist underlined the importance of ordinary, daily freedoms: `bacon sandwiches, disagreement, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought'.20 In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, he showed how a descent journey into the West, or East, could be the means of a threshold crossing into a richer, more complex engagement with historical, material reality. The twentiethcentury's descent into the underworld may not be over yet, but there are many routes through it which still beckon the adventurous traveller.

Notes 1. Martin Amis, `Fear and Loathing', The Guardian, 18 September 2001, G2, p. 2. 2. On the last image, compare Steve McQueen's film, Caribs' Leap (2002), which portrays an entire community of Caribs leaping from Morne Sauteurs in Grenada rather than be colonised by the French in 1651. 3. Peter Carey, `We Close Our Eyes and Say a Prayer, Although I Don't Know Who I'm Praying to. There Is No God', The Observer, 23 September 2001, p. 24. 4. Jay McInerney, `When Seeing Is Believing in the City of the Dead', The Guardian, 6 October 2001, Saturday Review, p. 12. 5. Neiman contrasts the old-fashioned evil of September 11th, in which `the clearest use of instrumental rationality was matched by the clearest flaunting of moral reasoning' with Arendt's famous thesis about the banality of evil in the Holocaust (Evil in Modern Thought, p. 283; citing Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem).

Notes

231

6. Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, `First Reactions', 24 September 2001; Chalmers Johnson was criticised for implying that `America had it coming' in his book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. London: Time Warner, 2002. 7. See Slavoj ZÏizÏek, `Welcome to the Desert of the Real', in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. 8. Art Spiegelman, `In the Shadow of No Towers', Episode 8, London Review of Books, 25: 13, 10 July 2003, pp. 20±1. 9. See Primo Levi, The Truce, in If This Is a Man (1995), pp. 279±80. 10. Spiegelman, `In the Shadow of No Towers', Episode 7, London Review of Books 25: 10, 22 May 2003, pp. 20±1. 11. Spiegelman's persona says, `when the planes hit those towers I got knocked into some alternate reality where George W. Bush was president'; now, `my ``leaders'' are reading the book of revelations . . . I'm reading the paranoid science fiction of Philip K. Dick' (ibid., Episode 7, pp. 20±1). 12. Tony Blair's speech was published in full in The Guardian. See `Text: Tony Blair's statement', The Guardian, 7 October 2001, Special Report: Attack on Afghanistan. 13. Ibid. 14. George W. Bush, `The Network of Terrorism: An Attack on the Civilized World', speech delivered on 11 October, 2001; available online at http:// usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/terrornet/ (accessed 16 November 2001). 15. George W. Bush, 2002 State of the Union Address. The term `axis of evil' was coined by speechwriters David Frum and Michael Gerson and was intended, Frum said, to remind Anglo-Americans of their Second World War enemies, the `axis powers'. See Julian Borger, `How I Created the Axis of Evil', The Guardian, 28 January 2003, G2. On the absence of a casus belli, see David Hare, `Don't Look for a Reason', The Guardian, 12 April 2002, Comment and Letters. 16. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 7, Part 1, Episode 10 (`Bring on the night'). 17. In Levinas' reading of Shakespeare's Macbeth, this realisation comes to Macbeth as a return of being to the horror of il y a (`There is', The Levinas Reader, p. 33; see also my Chapter 1). 18. Wole Soyinka, `The Changing Mask of Fear', was the first of a four-part lecture series entitled `The Climate of Fear'. Lecture 1 was delivered at the Royal Institution, London, 9 March 2004, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 7 April, 8.00 p.m. 19. George Wright, `Israel Assassinates Hamas Leader', The Guardian, 22 March 2004, Special Report: Israel and the Middle East. 20. Rushdie, `Let's Get Back to Life', The Guardian, 6 October 2001, Saturday Review.

Appendix

Primo Levi, `Map of reading', from The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology, trans. Peter Forbes. London: Allen Lane, p. 9. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd and Ivan R. Dee, Publisher.

Bibliography

A note on the dates: in the case of pre-contemporary texts, the date of original publication is given immediately after the author's name, followed by the date of the edition cited and/or consulted in this study in closed parentheses. In the case of contemporary (post-1945) texts, the date in parenthesis refers to the date of the edition cited; the original publication date is given at first mention in the study.

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Carter, Angela (1996) Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories. London: Vintage. Carter, Angela (1998) Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings. London: Vintage. Carter, Angela (2000) The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. London: Virago. Cocteau, Jean (1934) La Machine Infernale. Paris: Editions Bernard Brasset. Coetzee, J. M. (2000) Disgrace. London: Vintage. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1798, 1985) `The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', in Coleridge: Poems and Prose Selected by Kathleen Raine. London: Penguin, pp. 37±55. Conrad, Joseph (1899, 1988) Heart of Darkness, ed. R. Kimbrough. London: Norton. Dante Alighieri (1314, 1989) The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles Singleton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 6 vols. Darwin, Charles (1871/74, 1998) The Descent of Man, intro. by H. James Birx. New York: Prometheus Books. Daudet, Alphonse (1930, 2002) In the Land of Pain (La Doulou), trans. Julian Barnes. London: Jonathan Cape. Defoe, Daniel (1726) The Political History of the Devil, as well Ancient as Modern, in Two Parts. London: T. Warner. DeLillo, Don (1991) Mao II. London: Jonathan Cape. DeLillo, Don (1998) Underworld. London: Picador. Doctorow, E. L. (1982) The Book of Daniel. London: Pan Books. Doherty, Catherine de Hueck (1981) Poustinia. Collins: Glasgow. Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1864, 1991) Notes From the Underground and The Gambler, trans. Jane Kentish. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1871, 1992) Devils, trans. Michael R. Katz. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1879±80, 1968) The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David Magarshack. London: Penguin. Ellis, Bret Easton (1991) American Psycho. London: Picador. Ellison, Ralph (1965) Invisible Man. London: Penguin Books. Ellman, Lucy (2003) Dot in the Universe, London: Bloomsbury. Eliot, T. S. (1922, 1971) The Waste Land, and other poems, intro. Vasant Shane. London: Faber. Euripides (428 bc, 1995) Hippolytus, intro., trans. and commentary Michael R. Halleran. Warminster: Aris & Phillips. Euripides (c.414 bc, 1978) Iphigenia at Aulis [in Tauris], trans. W. S. Merwin and George E. Dimock, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press. Faludy, George (1963) My Happy Days in Hell. London: Readers Union Andre Deutsch. Fenimore, Angie (1995) Beyond the Darkness: My Near-Death Journey to the Edge of Hell and Back. London: Simon & Schuster. Forbes, Peter (ed.) (2003) We Have Come Through: 100 Poems Celebrating Courage in Overcoming Depression and Trauma. Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books. Frankl, Viktor (1946, 1964) Man's Search for Meaning. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

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Index

n stands for note `Abandon Hope,' 174, 175 abortion, 149±50 Achebe, Chinua, 219n2 Achilles, 186±7 Acts 9 & 22, 46 Ad Ora Uncerta (Levi), 80 Adorno, Theodor, 25, 28 Aeneas, 2, 6, 32, 43, 45, 50±1, 96, 97, 111n7, 143n39, 193, 205, 206 Afghanistan, 2, 198, 227 Africa, 198, 219n2 African-American literature, 151±2 Alette see Descent of Alette, The (Notley) Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 44, 120, 122 Amber Spyglass, The (Pullman), 23 American Psycho (Ellis), 114, 175 Amis, Martin, 48, 225, 226±7 Ancient Mariner, The Rime of the (Coleridge), 1, 80, 82, 84, 97 anorexia see eating disorders Antelme, Robert, 57±8, 59 Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 4, 196± 200 archaeology, 3 architecture, 99 Arendt, Hannah, 29, 230n5 Areopagitica (Milton), 105

art, 13, 23, 190 in Lanark (Gray), 185±6 see also Botticelli; Vermeer ascent, Michaels' treatment of, 107± 8; see also return from Hell Atwood, Margaret, 14, 26, 98, 106, 149±50, 154, 160, 164 Auerbach, Erich, 49 Augustine, St, 32, 46 auras as times of creativity, 135±6 Auschwitz, 6, 15, 20, 29, 58, 60, 92, 116, 117, 229 as Hell, 63±88 see also concentration camps; Levi Austerlitz (Sebald), 7, 90, 91±2, 93± 103, 104, 109 autobiography, 27; see also autopathography autopathography, 113±43 defined, 113 Avernus see Hell Bakhtin, Mikhail, 6, 8, 42, 47±50, 51, 53±4, 64, 75, 162, 189±90, 221n19, 222n33 Balzac, Honore de, 97 Barfoot, Joan, 148±9, 150 Barolini, Teodolinda, 51 Barth, John, 179 Barthes, Roland, 114

254

Hell in Contemporary Literature

Baudelaire, Charles, 180 Baudrillard, Jean, 117, 129, 131, 134, 141n13, 202 BBC, 196 being (il y a), 30, 35, 92, 116 Beloved (Morrison), 14, 89, 103 Benhabib, Seyla, 150 Benjamin, Walter, 11n7, 32, 137, 174, 175 Bernstein, Stephen, 187 Beyond the Darkness (Fenimore), 15, 47, 115, 117, 131 Bhabha, Homi, 220n12 BibliotheÁque Nationale, Paris, 101 Billington, Michael, 38n1 black holes, 15, 66, 67, 85, 229 Blair, Tony, 227 Blake, William, 189 Blanchot, 35 Blixen, Karen, 2, 60 body, imagery of, 20±1, 115 Borges, Jorges Luis, 27, 39n22, 51± 2, 137±8, 176, 179 Botticelli, Sandro, 20, 26±7 Breendonk fortress, 99±100, 103 British Broadcasting Corporation, 196 Bronk, William, 92 Brooks, Peter, 137 Buddhism, 21 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon), 5, 199±200 Bush, George W., 2, 8, 198, 227, 228, 229 Butler, Judith, 147, 155, 197±8 Calvino, Italo, 52, 66, 138 Cambodia, 198 Campbell, Joseph, 9, 40n35 Camporesi, Piero, 13±15, 18, 22, 44 cannibalism, 179, 181 capitalism, 27, 149, 150, 157, 162, 163, 164, 172±3, 224, 225±6 schizophrenia as product of, 113, 114 see also Marx, Karl

Captain Willard, 4, 196±7 Carey, Peter, 225 carnival, 8, 177, 211, 222n33 and n34 Carroll, Lewis, 44, 120, 122, 125, 136 Carter, Angela, 145, 148, 149, 150± 1, 155, 157, 163, 164, 166, 168n8, 177, 205 Cavarero, Adriana, 8, 37, 137, 138, 144 Celan, Paul, 85n3, 109 Chabert, Colonel, 97 ChreÂtien, Jean, 33 Christianity, 21 Christ's crucifixion, 32, 135 chronicity see time chronotopes, 8, 42±62, 68±85, 175± 6 defined, 6, 42 in Lanark (Gray), 193 Levi on Auschwitz, 66 see also time Clark, Raymond, 41n40, 50 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1, 80, 82, 84, 97 colour prejudice, 29 Commedia see Divine Comedy, The (Dante) concentration camps, 16, 19, 23, 25; see also Auschwitz; Breendonk; TerezõÂn Conrad, Joseph, 4, 28, 94, 196 contrapasso and Dante, 25±6 in Lanark (Gray), 188 in Linden Hills (Naylor), 152, 169n14 conversion, 32, 46±7, 175 versus inversion, 52±4 Cooper, David, 123 Coppola, Francis Ford, 4, 196±200 Cornell, Drusilla, 145, 153, 168n8 corporeality, 20±1, 115 Craig, Cairns, 187, 192

Index `creative illness,' 45 Critchley, Simon, 35 Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon), 179 Cuba Guantanamo Bay, 60, 227 war in (1967), 115, 126 Culler, Jonathan, 180 Dante Alighieri, 1, 45±6 affinity with Dostoevsky, 53±4 Botticelli drawings of, 26±7 contrapasso, 25±6 see also Divine Comedy, The Darkness Visible (Golding), 89, 104 Darwin, Charles, 3, 29 Dead Man Walking (Robbins), 17 death, 23 death row (US), 17±18, 20, 22, 23± 4, 179±80 deconstruction, 33, 34, 35, 36, 145 Defoe, Daniel, 179 Deleuze, Gilles, 7, 113, 114, 139 Demeter, 2 Dennett, Daniel, 119 depression, 33, 116, 118 Derrida, Jacques, 8, 30, 34, 36±8, 117, 141n12, 182, 185, 189, 193 descensus ad inferos see katabasis descent see katabasis Descent of Alette, The (Notley), 5, 7, 14, 151, 160±8, 172, 224, 230 Devil see Satan Devil's Advocate, The (Hackford), 194n7 devolution, Darwin's theory of, 3 dialogue, 189±90, 191, 194n1 Diana, Princess of Wales, 205, 216, 221n17, 223n38 Dis see Hades dismemberment, 215±18 Divine Comedy, The (Dante), 39n22, 47±8, 51, 52, 191

255

Notley, 162, 163, 166 see also Dante; Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso (its three parts) Doctor Faustus (Mann), 29, 38n1 Doctorow, E. L., 4 Doherty, Catherine de Hueck, 21 Don Giovanni (Mozart), 44 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 27, 53±4, 136, 189 Dr Faustus (Marlowe), 45 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson, R. L.), 120 Drexel, Jeremiah, 19 Drowned and the Saved, The (Levi), 75, 81 dystopias, 14, 28, 149, 159, 177; see also utopias Eagleton, Terry, 44, 106, 182 earthquake, imagery of, 201 eating disorders, 113, 118, 120, 121, 122 education chronotope, 70±2, 85 Einstein, Albert, 107 Eliot, T. S., 44 Ellis, Bret Easton, 114, 175 Ellison, Ralph, 4, 29, 48 epic, 45, 165, 191, 192 epilepsy see Spasm (Slater) ethics, 35, 37 Eurydice, 34, 37, 144, 146±7, 152 Rushdie, 204 see also Orpheus evil, 29±30, 31±2, 37, 225, 227 axis of, 228, 231n15 see also Neiman eyes, imagery of, 98±9 failure to ascend, 192 Fanon, Frantz, 204 fantasy, 183, 185, 186, 197±8 and realism, 184, 187±93 fascism, in Mexico, 29 Faust, 13, 29, 38n1, 45 feminism see gender

256

Hell in Contemporary Literature

Fenimore, Angie, 15, 47, 115, 117, 131 films, 4, 15, 17, 142n31, 194n7, 225 katabatic, 4, 11n12 war, 40n28, 196, 198, 219n3 see also Apocalypse Now; Buffy the Vampire Slayer; J'Accuse; Lord of the Rings, The; Matrix, The; Star Wars; SÏvankmajer, Jan flesh, imagery of, 20±1, 115 Forbes, Peter, 33 Forster, E. M., 198±9 fortress of Breendonk, 99±100, 103 Foucault, Michel, 141n12 Fowler, Virginia, 169n14 Frankl, Victor, 60 Freccero, John, 32, 46, 47, 51 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 19, 28±9, 31, 35, 111n6, 119±20, 144±5, 147, 174 Aeneid's influence on, 91 uncanny, the, 69, 82 Frye, Northrop, 9 Fugitive Pieces (Michaels), 7, 89±90, 91±2, 93±4, 104±10, 229 fugue, Michaels' use of, 109 fundamentalism, Islamic, 15; see also September 11, terrorism Gaining Ground (Barfoot), 148±9, 150 Galloway, Janice, 191 gas chambers, 107±8 Gatterman, Ludwig, Practical Manual for Organic Chemists, A, 77 gender, 7, 144±71 geology, 105±6 Georgics (Virgil), 205 ghosts, 35, 36, 89±112, 90, 91; see also Marx, Karl Specters . . . (Derrida) Gibson, Mel, 15 Gilgamesh, 2, 220n16

Girl, Interrupted (Kaysen), 116, 122, 123±7, 130, 140 Giuliani, Rudolph, 1, 17, 18 Glasgow, 172±3, 181, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194n1 Glass, James, 114, 140 God, 125 in Lanark, 185±6 Goddu, Teresa, 154 Golding, William, 89, 104, 110n2 Grace, Sherrill, 57 gravity and self, 119 Gray, Alasdair, 5, 7±8, 26, 124, 169n12, 172±3, 175±87 Gross, Kenneth, 25±6 Ground Beneath Her Feet, The (Rushdie), 4, 5, 8, 201±19, 226, 230 ground zero, 100, 110 Ground Zero (Rushdie), 208±12 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, 60, 227 Guattari, FeÂlix, 7, 113, 114, 139 Gulf War (1991), 197±8 Hackford, Taylor, 194n7 Hades, 3, 28, 30, 36, 37, 38, 46, 111n6, 138, 161, 177, 202, 208 Hamilton, Ian, 10 Hamlet, 34±5, 36±7 Handmaid's Tale, The (Atwood), 160 Hart, Linda, 20, 115, 118, 120±1, 130 Harvey, David, 8, 175, 176±7, 181± 2 haunting see ghosts Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 4, 28, 44, 50, 94, 196±7, 198±9, 200 Heaven see paradise Heise, Ursula, 176 Hell Catholic, 1, 13, 14 Christian, 2; Biblical sources, 22±3 Church of England, 138

Index funnel-shaped, 177, 186 iconography, 44 immanence of, 6, 16, 21, 29, 157, 225 Judeo-Christian, 32 meanings of, 18±19, 50 medieval, 14, 18, 23 nineteenth century, 3 postmodern, 8, 172±95 secular, 16 size of, 19 topography, 44 twentieth century, 4, 5, 6, 8, 14± 15, 16, 18, 25, 28, 29, 144 Heracles, 2, 37 heraldry, 190 Heshel's Kingdom (Jacobson), 103 Hillman, James, 9, 91, 111n6, 142± 3n31 hinge-movement, 4, 45, 59, 138, 212 Hiroshima, 25, 117 History of the Devil, The (Defoe), 179 Hoban, Russell, 147 Hobbes, Thomas, 178, 190 Hobbit, The (Tolkien), 45 Holocaust, 28, 29, 30, 48, 57±60, 230n5 gender in literature of, 168n6 second generation narratives, 7, 89±112 see also concentration camps; If This Is a Man (Levi) homelessness, 28 Homer, 2, 35, 37, 45, 52 Hornbacher, Marya, 113, 116, 118, 120, 121, 122 hostage memoirs, 131, 142n46 Hughes, Ted, 210 humour, 130±1 Hyperreal, 129, 130, 131, 133 If This Is a Man (Levi), 4, 6±7, 17, 18, 19, 20, 29, 64, 67±85, 145± 6

257

il y a, 30, 35, 92, 116 Imaginary Homelands (Rushdie), 213 immanence of Hell, 6, 16, 21, 29, 157, 225 Inanna, Queen of Heaven, 2, 144, 160, 166, 220n16 India, 198, 199 mental illness in, 116 Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, The (Carter), 148, 177 infernal journey genre defined, 42±3; or see katabasis Inferno (Dante), 2±3, 5, 18, 24±5, 46, 49, 53, 96±7, 119, 137±8, 175, 190, 196, 210 concentration camps, 23 `gargoyle cantos,' 131 Gray, 177±8 Hornbacher, 121 hybridity in, 32 Kaysen, 125 Levi, 7, 63, 68±9, 72±3, 74, 75, 80±1, 83 Lowry, 54, 55 and mental illness, 115 Naylor, 151±2 Notley, 160 Piercy, 156 Rushdie, 204 Slater, 136 see also Divine Comedy, The intuition, 81±2 inversion, 59, 100, 175, 197 versus conversion, 52±4 infernal, 54±7 katabatic, 67, 107, 123, 163, 167, 186, 190 Invisible Man, The (Ellison), 4, 29, 48 inward turn, 27±8 Iraq war (2003), 16, 18, 196, 198, 227±8 Isis, 105 Islamic fundamentalism, 15; see also September 11; terrorism

258

Hell in Contemporary Literature

J'Accuse (Gance), 40n28, 110n3 Jacobson, Dan, 103 Jaguar Smile, The (Rushdie), 200 Jameson, Frederic, 7 Jason, 2 Job, 18, 32, 33, 40n35, 66, 67, 189, 191 Jonah, 32 Joseph K, 82 Journey to the Centre of the Earth (Verne), 44, 60n6, 106 Jouve, Nicole, 145 Juno, 32 Kafka, Franz, 82 katabasis, 41n40, 174 descent journeys, 21, 27, 28, 31±8, 133±4, 180±1 meanings of, 2, 19, 111n6 three movements of, 45 in twentieth century, 224±31 katabatic imagination, 1±11 katabatic narratives allusions in Lanark (Gray), 193n1 features of, 42±3 oldest extant, 220n16 Kaysen, Susanna, 7, 114±15, 116, 122, 123±7, 133, 140 Keenan, Brian, 131, 142n26 Kierkegaard, Sùren, 135 King, Nicola, 8, 91 Kleinzeit (Hoban), 147 Koestler, Arthur, 189 Kofman, Sarah, 25, 57±9, 67, 116 Kriegel, Leonard, 135 labyrinth, 179 Lacan, Jacques, 19, 35, 145, 151, 152, 153±4, 159, 164±5, 167, 168n8, 202 LaCapra, Dominick, 92 Laing, R. D., 123 Lanark (Gray), 5, 7±8, 26, 124, 172±3, 175±87, 230 Lee, Alison, 190

Levi, Primo, 4, 6±7, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 29, 60, 63, 92, 145±6, 226, 229 black holes, 15 Leviathan, 178±9, 190 Levinas, Emmanuel, 30±1, 35, 116, 145 Lewis, C. S., 5, 9±10 lightness, 20, 53, 119, 186 Linden Hills (Naylor), 5, 14, 48, 151±6, 178 Liverpool Street Station, London, 98, 100 looking back, 37, 109, 110n3, 137, 212±15 Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 5, 198, 199±200 Lowry, Malcolm, 4, 29, 45, 48, 54±7 Lucifer see Satan Lumsden, Alison, 187 Lyotard, Jean FrancËois, 30, 33±5, 37, 94, 145 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 30±1, 228 McCann, Colum, 146 McInerney, Jay, 225 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 133 Magnolia (Anderson), 142n31 Mailer, Norman, 189 Mann, Thomas, 29 Marin, Christopher, 136 Marlowe, Christopher, 13, 38n1, 45 Marukami, Haruki, 146 Marx, Karl, 3, 7, 8, 29, 31, 173±5, 224 Specters of Marx (Derrida), 36±8, 182, 185, 189, 193 Matrix, The (Wachowski Brothers), 4, 26, 129, 192, 226 memory see trauma mental illness, 7, 113±43; see also psychiatric hospitals in Austerlitz (Sebald), 95, 97, 102± 3 in India, 116

Index Metamorphoses (Ovid), 210, 211 metamorphosis, 64, 81, 148±9, 163, 165, 187, 216 Rushdie, 202±3, 210, 211±12 Warner, 210 Mexico, fascism in, 29 miaros, 78, 87n24 Michaels, Anne, 7, 89±90, 91±2, 229 Michaux, Henri, 220n6 Midnight's Children (Rushdie), 201, 213 Milton, John, 13, 20, 44, 105, 109± 10, 136, 145, 169n17, 179 Mirror Maker, The (Levi), 72, 76, 83 mirrors, imagery of, 153±4 Morrison, Toni, 14, 89, 103 Morson, Gary Saul, 42, 115, 143n35, 211 moths, imagery of, 95, 96 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 44 Mr Palomar (Calvino), 52 Munchausen's disease (compulsive lying), 133, 134, 140 music, 203, 204, 209, 216 Naylor, Gloria, 5, 7, 14, 48, 151±6, 169n14, 178 Nazism, 29, 58; see also concentration camps; Holocaust Negotiating with the Dead (Atwood), 98 Neiman, Susan, 8, 25, 29±30, 31±2, 57, 225 Night of the Eagle (Hayer), 13 9/11 terrorist attacks see September 11 1947, 29 1984 (Orwell), 178 Nocturama Zoo, Antwerp, 98±9 Norden, Eduard, 43 North, Carol, 7, 121, 122, 126, 127±32, 133, 140 Notley, Alice, 5, 7, 14, 151, 160±8, 172, 224 nuclear weapons, 173

259

Occidentalism, 5, 8, 186±223 Odysseus, 2, 24±5, 33, 35, 37, 63, 80±4 Oedipus, 33, 34, 35, 55, 77±8 Oracle (in Lanark), 183±4, 187, 191 Orientalism, 5, 8, 196±223 Orpheus, 2, 8, 33, 34, 37, 44, 144, 146±7, 191, 212, 214, 215, 217, 222n35 Ormus (Rushdie's Orpheus), 202, 204±12 see also Eurydice Orwell, George, 178, 189 Osama bin Laden, 228 Other, the, 5, 34, 198, 206 Ovid, 210, 211 Palestine, 229 paradise, 26, 27 Paradise Lost (Milton), 20±1, 44, 109±10, 136, 145, 169n17, 179 Paradiso (Dante), 20, 26, 27, 39n22, 162, 165, 167; see also Divine Comedy, The Parks, Tim, 209 Passage to India, A (Forster), 198±9 Passion of New Eve, The (Carter), 148, 150±1, 163, 164, 166, 168n8, 205 Passion of the Christ, The (Gibson), 15 Paul, St, 2, 32, 135 Paz, Octavio, 179 penal system, 23; see also death row Periodic Table, The (Levi), 6, 64, 79 personality disorder, 122, 123±7 Phone at Nine Just to Say You're Alive (Hart), 20, 115, 118, 120±1 photographs, 101, 102, 103, 186 Piercy, Marge, 7, 14, 151, 156±60, 170n22, 179 Pike, David, 9, 28, 32, 46±7, 174, 180 Plato, 129, 214, 222n35 Poe, Edgar Allen, 11n13

260

Hell in Contemporary Literature

Poetics of Disobedience, The (Notley), 161, 162 Poor Things (Gray), 169n12 poverty, urban, 156 Prague, 101±2 prisoners see death row Prozac Nation (Wurtzel), 115, 118, 125 psychiatric hospitals, 120±1, 156±7 Bedlam, London, 98 McLean's, Boston, 114±15, 123, 124, 126, 128±9 see also mental illness Pullman, Philip, 23 punishment, 23; see also death row Purgatorio (Dante), 26, 48; see also Divine Comedy, The purgatory, 26, 163 Pynchon, Thomas, 179 Pythagoras, 210, 222n33 Quint, David, 45 re-ascent see return from Hell Real, the, 35, 129 realism, 49, 183, 184, 187±93 and fantasy, 187±93 return from Hell, 1, 33±7, 43, 44, 45, 94, 119, 167, 192, 193 Rhodiginus, Coelius, 21, 122 Ricoeur, Paul, 8, 145, 153 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 37 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The (Coleridge), 1, 80, 82, 84, 97 Robbins, Tim, 17 roots, search for, in Lanark, 180±7; see also Search for Roots, The (Levi) ch.3 Rushdie, Salman, 4, 5, 8, 113, 200± 19, 230 affinity with Latin America, 201 fatwa against, 201, 209 Saddam Hussein, 196, 228; see also Iraq War (2003)

Said, Edward, 200 Sartre, Jean Paul, 40n30, 135 Satan, 5, 27, 44, 46, 47, 179, 180, 186, 216 Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 113± 14, 201, 202±3, 208, 209, 210, 213, 223n36 Saul see Paul, St schizophrenia, 113, 115, 122, 127±32 and capitalism, 113, 114 science and technology, 15, 141n20, 173, 176; see also black holes; Gatterman Scottish culture, 187 Scottish nationalism see Lanark (Gray) sea-voyage chronotope, 80±4, 85; see also shipwreck search for roots, in Lanark (Gray), 180±7 Search for Roots, The (Levi), 64±5, 66, 67, 69, 80, 81, 84, 85, 92, 96, 232 Sebald, W. G., 7, 90, 91±2 selfhood, 2, 3±4, 18, 19, 27±8, 117 and gravity, 119 and mental illness, 139±40 postmodern, 141n9 self-questioning, 189 as soul, 161 September 11, 1, 5, 8, 17, 33, 199, 223n38, 224±7, 228, 229, 230 Rushdie, 218±19 Shakespeare, William, 30±1, 34 Shands, Kerstin, 159±60 Sharon, Ariel, 230 Shattuck, Roger, 141±2n20 shipwreck, imagery of, 193; see also sea-voyage chronotope Simpson, John, 16, 18, 39n8 Singleton, Charles, 43, 60n5 Slater, Lauren, 7, 121, 122, 126, 132±40, 167, 230 Slaughterhouse 5 (Vonnegut), 90, 109

Index Smith, Evans Lansing, 9 Smothered Words (Kofman), 57±9 socialism see Lanark (Gray) Sodi, Risa, 63 solitude, 20 Sophocles, 34 Soyinka, Wole, 229 sparagmos see dismemberment Spasm (Slater), 121, 122, 126, 132± 40, 167, 230 spatial compression, Hell as, 19 spectres see ghosts Spiegelman, Art, 223n39, 226 Spivak, Gayatri, 113±14, 200 staining (pollution), 77±9, 80 Star Wars (Lucas), 4, 5 Steinberg, Paul, 74, 78 Steiner, George, 6, 16±17, 23, 29, 173 Stephenson, Pamela, 45 Stevenson, Randall, 187 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 44, 120 suicide, 214 Surfacing (Atwood), 106, 149±50, 164 survivors descent and return, 33 guilt, stain see miaros SÏvankmajer, Jan, 4, 120, 125 Szymborska, Wislawa, 30 Taylor, Charles, 8, 17, 18, 19, 25, 27±8, 116, 133 telling the self, 27; see also autopathography TerezõÂn, 101, 102 terrorism, 199, 224±30; see also September 11 in Piercy, 160 testimony, 6, 7 Holocaust, features of, 57±8 see also Beyond the Darkness (Fenimore); If This Is a Man (Levi) Thaw, Duncan see Lanark

261

Theseus, 2, 37 This Side of Brightness (McCann), 146 Thomas, Keith, 16±17 Thorne, Kip, 15, 39n14, 66, 67 threshold chronotope, 68±70, 71, 82, 85 threshold crossings, 8, 197 Kaysen, 123, 125 North, 128±9 Rushdie, 202, 207±8, 230 Sebald, 96, 98 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll), 120 time, 106, 107, 115, 130, 159±60, 176, 177, 185, 186; see also chronotopes arrested, 21±2 infernal, 123±4, 167 in Inferno (Dante), 60n5 ramified, 137±8, 143n35 reversed, 121, 142n31 Time's Arrow (Amis), 48 Tolkien, J. R. R., 45, 198, 199± 200 trains, imagery of, 19, 69, 85, 86n13 and n14 trauma, 7, 31, 33, 35, 90±1, 92±3, 96±7, 121, 226, 229 trial chronotope, 74±80, 82, 83±4, 85 Truce, The (Levi), 6, 20, 29, 69, 84± 5 Tug-Boat (Vercel), 66, 67 Tugdal, 24 Twin Towers see September 11 tyrant, the, 162, 164, 167 Ulysses see Odysseus Ulysses (Joyce), 205 uncanny, the, 69, 82 unconscious, the, 19 Under the Volcano (Lowry), 4, 29, 45, 48, 54±7 underworld see Hades; Hell

262

Hell in Contemporary Literature

United States politics see war, in Cuba (1967); war, Vietnam utopias, 150, 158±9, 167, 168; see also dystopias vampires and Marx, 40n31 Van Gogh, Vincent, 136 Vercel, Roger, 66, 67 Vermeer, 125, 127 Verne, Jules, 44, 60n6, 106 verticalisation, 48, 49, 53±4, 55, 63± 4, 106, 190 and capitalism, 175, 179 and mental illness, 126, 157 vertigo, 95, 96, 100, 101, 102, 103, 112n15 via negativa, 21, 59, 112n22 Vietnam War, 114±15, 126, 133, 196±7, 203, 206, 227 Virgil, 6, 32, 121, 205, 211, 212, 215 vision chronotope, 72±4, 75, 85 Vision of Tugdal, 24 visual images see art; films Vonnegut, Kurt, 90, 109 Walker, D. P., 22, 23 war, 55 in Afghanistan (2001±2), 2, 198, 227 in Cuba (1967), 115, 126 First World, 40n28 Gulf (1991), 197±8, 219n3 Iraq (2003), 16, 18, 196, 198, 227±8 Second World, 7, 28, 29, 89, 146

Vietnam, 114±15, 126, 133, 196± 7, 203, 206, 227 war films, 40n28 use in training of US soldiers, 196, 198, 219n3 Warner, Marina, 210 Wasted: a Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (Hornbacher), 113, 116, 118, 120, 121, 122 Wasteland, The (Eliot), 27, 44 weightlessness, 20, 53, 119, 186 Welcome, Silence (North), 121, 122, 126, 127±32, 140 Wernick, Andrew, 117, 131 whale, imagery of, 99 Whedon, Joss, 5, 199±200 Willard, Captain, 4, 196±7 Williams, Robbie, 216 Williams, Rosalind, 3, 9, 31 Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The (Marukami), 146 wisdom literature, 50 Wizard of Oz, The (Rushdie), 223n37 Wolpert, Lewis, 116 Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy), 14, 151, 156±60, 179 women see gender Wood, James, 205 workplace as Hell, 7, 11n7, 174, 175, 180 Worthington, Kim, 141n9 Wurtzel, Elizabeth, 115, 118, 125 Wytwycky, Bohdan, 23 Zaleski, Carol, 20 zoo, imagery of, 98±9