Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation 9780748642861

Citation preview

Prosaic Desires

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Prosaic Desires Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation

Sara Crangle

Edinburgh University Press

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© Sara Crangle, 2010 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rose, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4085 0 (hardback) The right of Sara Crangle to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgments and Dedication Abbreviations

vii ix

Introduction: Mortal Self, Infinite Longings Productive Desires, Otherness, and Emmanuel Levinas Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation

1 9 19

1

Dying to Know Knowledge and Aesthetics Epiphanic Dead-Ends: Joyce and Woolf Stephen Dedalus and Schopenhauer Parodic Resurrection: Epiphanies in Ulysses Stephen and Nietzsche Bloom and Levinas Conclusions

28 32 36 40 49 55 60 64

2

Haunted by Boredom Gauging Boredom The Time Being Woolf’s Boredoms Orlando’s Regenerative Oak “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” Conclusions

71 76 78 84 89 91 98

3

Inclining Towards Laughter Modernist Laughter Stein Regales Q.E.D. and Solitary Risibility A Long Gay Book and Shared Laughter Two and Infinite Levity Conclusions

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104 110 114 119 122 127 133

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vi

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Contents

In the Meantime War, Angst, and Patience Between the Acts: Not Now Mrs. Reynolds: Not Yet Conclusions

139 142 147 157 168

Conclusion: Endlessnessnessness

174

Bibliography Index

194 211

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Acknowledgments and Dedication

First and foremost, I am indebted to Maud Ellmann for her continued support of this book, and for all of the lemonade and curried chicken sandwiches she fed me while discussing its inception. Peter Nicholls meticulously edited this work in its entirety, and for that, as well as for my introduction to pin-sharp Pride, I am grateful. Ian Patterson has been similarly generous in giving his personal time to read and edit my writing with canny good humor. Countless others have assisted along the way, including John Forrester, Anne Fernihough, Gillian Beer, David Trotter, Derek Attridge, and Rachel Bowlby. Bob Perelman made a typically offhand but discerning suggestion which became the foundation of Chapter 3. Audiences at talks I gave in Cambridge, Brighton, Zurich, Dublin, Vancouver, Ottawa, Birmingham, Philadelphia, and London also contributed to the formulation of this work. Appreciation must also be extended to the members of Queens’ College, Cambridge, who offered me the research fellowship that brought this project to fruition. Colleagues at the University of Sussex – particularly Pam Thurschwell, Keston Sutherland, Daniel Kane, and J. D. Rhodes – have since been fantastically supportive. Modern Fiction Studies published and gave permission to reprint the second chapter, which was awarded the Margaret Church Memorial Prize for best essay in that journal in 2008 (“The Time Being: On Woolf and Boredom” 2: 209–32). My thanks to their anonymous readers, and to the editors of Modern Fiction Studies for their kind recognition of my writing. Friends and family also deserve mention. Leanne Holt, Joseph Rosenberg, Mark Singleton, Sophie Read, Rebecca Stott, Melissa Plowden-Roberts, Michael Franklin, and most especially, Sam Ladkin, have sustained me throughout this project. And in a truly relentless, decades-long spirit of goodwill, my parents offered time and resources that directly facilitated the completion of this book.

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Acknowledgments and Dedication

As ever, the Rubys are a motivation both paramount and fundamental. Here words genuinely fail me.

This book is dedicated to Guthrie Ruby, for his intuitive grasp of infinite longing.

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Abbreviations

The following abbreviations have been used throughout: Joyce Stephen Hero A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Ulysses

SH P U

Stein The Making of Americans A Long Gay Book Mrs. Reynolds

MA LGB MR

Woolf A Passionate Apprentice The Voyage Out To the Lighthouse Mrs Dalloway The Waves Pointz Hall Between the Acts

PA VO TTL MD W PH BA

Heidegger Being & Time The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

BT FCM

Levinas Existence & Existents Time and the Other Totality and Infinity

EE TO TI

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x

Abbreviations

Nietzsche The Gay Science Thus Spoke Zarathustra Twilight of the Idols The Will to Power

GS Z ToI WP

Schopenhauer The World as Will & Representation, Volume I WWR I The World as Will & Representation, Volume 2 WWR II

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Introduction: Mortal Self, Infinite Longings

To begin: two disastrous tales of desires neither prosaic nor strictly modernist. Both arise in lesser-known novels by Thomas Hardy, books dedicated to an examination and excoriation of the most prevalent desires of Victorian fiction, namely, social mobility and love. The first is Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), which centers on Ethelberta Chickerel, one of ten children born to a butler. While working as a governess, Ethelberta marries into the wealthy family she works for, but loses her husband to fatal illness on their honeymoon. Under agreement that she never publicize her humble origins, she is taken under the wing of her new mother-in-law, who disapproves of Ethelberta’s published poetry and so bequeaths her only the lease of a London residence at her death. Ever enterprising, Ethelberta feigns nobility in this residence, hires her siblings as staff, and determines to find a husband who will support her family in the style to which she would like them to become accustomed, although they appear quite blissfully impoverished. The rest of the novel is consumed with the pursuit by various aspirants to Ethelberta’s beautiful, and beautifully played, hand; Hardy busies himself throughout satirizing the transparencies of lower- and upper-class aspiration. Amidst the all-pervading longing for success, Ethelberta stands out as a figure “with a white round neck as firm as a fort,” in possession of a gift of self-command so powerful as to make her life distinctly uncomfortable, if undeniably interesting (63). So authoritative is Ethelberta that her sister conflates her with Providence, claiming, “Berta will never let us come to want” (411). Ethelberta is the living embodiment of a very deific wilfulness. In Ethelberta’s view, the human will supersedes any so-called natural force, so that even “the question of getting into love or not is a matter of will” (74). Her eventual attraction to an aged viscount – one Lord Mountclere – grows in proportion to her burgeoning awareness that he intends to yield to her every desire. Ethelberta perceives marriage

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as a means of accessing the capital that will enable her to realize her true aspiration: complete independence. Fundamentally, she seeks not a husband but an investor who will allow her to “organise her talent,” even as she ignores the inevitable dependence this process necessitates (220). Unsurprisingly, her bid for self-definition fails, and her defeat is signaled by a solitary, uncontained, risible outburst at the end of the novel. Having arrived at the belated realization that her chosen husband is but lecherous and old, Ethelberta construes a plan to escape his clutches just hours after their wedding. Mountclere catches her out and promptly details – with many gleeful giggles – the extent to which she is irretrievably imprisoned on his estate: “As if by an ungovernable impulse, Ethelberta broke into laughter also – laughter which had a wild unnatural sound; it was hysterical” (401). Mountclere is no longer amused but alarmed, and an agreement is hastily brokered between the two. At this juncture, it is clear that Ethelberta’s goal of independence has gone irrevocably by the wayside. Earlier in the novel, she asserts, Life is a battle, they say; but it is only so in the sense that a game of chess is a battle – there is no seriousness in it; it may be put an end to at any inconvenient moment by owning yourself beaten, with a careless ‘Ha-ha!’ and sweeping your pieces into the box. (141)

Ethelberta’s climactic hysteria is a far cry from this controlled risibility. A similar fate befalls Jocelyn Pierston of The Well-Beloved, Hardy’s singular exploration of sexual desire and romantic love. The novel is Hardy’s last, and was first published in serial form in 1892 and then as a book in 1897, with several significant changes, including a dramatically altered ending.1 Protagonist Jocelyn is a native of the Isle of Slingers who becomes a well-known sculptor. But art is only a secondary interest in Jocelyn’s life; far more consuming is his search for an ideal love. Jocelyn perceives what he terms “the well-beloved” in a succession of women; once discovered, the woman’s hold over him is total until her power fades, as it invariably does. In his pursuit of a beloved, Jocelyn is never satiated, never at peace; his restlessness remains through loves both passionate and practical. He structures his loving impossibly, not only through idealization but also because he decides early on that he cannot love women from Slingers because they lack refinement nor women from elsewhere because they are not part of his native land. His quest borders on the absurd: fundamentally, he longs for himself in the guise of another. Ethelberta wields her will in a bid for perfect autonomy; just as vexed is Jocelyn’s longing to be in love with another who will not challenge his sense of self. Frustrated by his inability to love enduringly, Jocelyn impetuously

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decides to marry a childhood friend for whom he feels no overwhelming desire; this woman is abruptly abandoned when he meets Marcia Bencomb, another short-lived manifestation of the well-beloved. We meet Jocelyn again twenty years and many loves later. Sudden news of his first fiancée’s death reignites his passion for an idealized memory, one readily transformed into the most ideal beloved of all. Returning to Slingers to attend the funeral, Jocelyn falls in love with the dead woman’s daughter, a woman who shares Jocelyn’s predilection for seeking – and not finding – a Platonic ideal in any number of available partners. Discovering she is pregnant by one of her boyfriends, Jocelyn forces them to marry. Another twenty years pass; Jocelyn, now sixty, returns to the Isle and, astonishingly, falls in love with the granddaughter of his first fiancée; all three generations of women conveniently possess the same good looks, and the same name, Avice. Although Jocelyn’s junior by forty years, this Avice also agrees to marry him, but instead runs away with Marcia Bencomb’s stepson. In the final version of Hardy’s novel, Jocelyn resigns himself to purpose-oriented love, ultimately marrying Marcia to stave off loneliness in old age – a final hopeless gesture in a life of deferred satisfaction. The first version of The Well-Beloved ends differently. When young, beautiful Avice III evades her promise of marriage to Jocelyn he attempts suicide, an attempt that fails but leaves him badly injured. As Jocelyn regains consciousness, he discerns Marcia’s voice in his sickroom and asks to have his bandages removed in order to see her. In the original novel, Jocelyn married Marcia as a youth, and their union was never legally dissolved; as such, watching Marcia, he realizes his wife was – not Avice, but that parchment-covered skull moving about his room. An irresistible fit of laughter, so violent as to be an agony, seized upon him, and started in him with such momentum that he could not stop it. He laughed and laughed, until he was almost too weak to draw breath. Marcia hobbled up, frightened. “What’s the matter?” she asked; and, turning to a second nurse, “He is weak – hysterical.” “O – no, no! I – I – it is too droll – this ending to my would-be romantic history! Ho-ho-ho!” (248–9)

As in Ethelberta, this final, solitary laugh is prefigured by an earlier incident: detailing her own endless pursuit of love to Jocelyn, Avice II shakes with scarcely restrained laughter. Jocelyn does not join her because he considers this trait in himself the most serious aspect of his doomed existence. But by the end of the novel Jocelyn is overtaken by the sheer ridiculousness of his life-long pursuit; his hysteria signals the dissolution of his sexually desirous yet adamantly autonomous sense of self. Neither ambition nor sexual love satiate the protagonists of Hardy’s

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novels; instead, what emerges is recognition that the self is torn apart by obsessive focus on a single desire. While these novels are not touted as among Hardy’s finest fictional achievements, their very laboriousness usefully exposes his fascination with grand narratives of desire, a fascination that ultimately inspires his renderings of everydayness and the endless nuances of human emotion.2 Hardy’s Ethelberta and Jocelyn are far from alone in their willfulness, or in their failure: the vexed relationship between a longing self and an autonomous subjectivity has been an intellectual and creative preoccupation since antiquity. But while early modern thinkers readily describe human yearnings as infinite in kind, since the nineteenth century, power and sex have circumscribed most discussions of desire.3 Power comes to the fore in the Victorian era, and not coincidentally, stories of social mobility like Ethelberta’s are increasingly prominent throughout this period.4 Narrative preoccupations echo contemporaneous philosophy, of which Hegel’s master–slave relation provides a cogent example. For Hegel, the subject longs to overpower the other in order to achieve a coherent sense of self, even as this desire for wholeness can never come to fruition because the subject remains reliant upon the other’s separateness and recognition. Hegel’s premise that desire can be equated with power is not significantly countered until the advent of psychoanalysis, which firmly establishes the cultural importance of sexual desire. In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud famously claims that the repression of sexuality drives all facets of society, which, in turn, ‘can conceive of no more powerful menace to its culture than would arise from the liberation of the sexual impulses and a return of them to their original goal’ (17–18). While works like Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) hint at a variety of motivations for our habitual behavior – among them, irritation, distraction, ambition, haste, dislike, pride, and binding social restrictions such as poverty – Freud nevertheless continually privileges direct and indirect engagement with sexuality as the foundation of our everyday motivations. Thus, for Freud, “there is no sphere in which the view that accidental actions are really intentional will command a more ready belief than that of sexual activity” (Psychopathology 165). In psychoanalysis, desire comes into being primarily through prohibition of the sexual; as in Hegel’s philosophy, Freud’s desire is founded on lack and assumes that we want what we can never fully possess. From these perspectives, Hardy’s Ethelberta and Well-Beloved are straightforward representations of a pervasive belief that desires of a powerful, sexual, and self-affirming nature are doomed by definition.5 While not abandoning the significant debt any consideration of modernist longing owes to Hegel and Freud, this book explicitly counters

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recent approaches towards desire. For it seems significant to ask, as does Judith Butler in Subjects of Desire, “Is it necessarily the case that desire is not only founded by prohibition, but structured in terms of it? . . . And is satisfaction always so phantasmatic?” (204). Nor does it seem possible that, as Foucault argues, all discussions of desire – including the psychoanalytic – are tailor-made to fit discourses of power. Theories of desire are so often steeped in grandeur: ignoring the fact that Freud’s work unearths a plenitude of daily human longings, his critics have yielded to his emphasis on sexuality, and as a consequence, psychoanalysis is generally equated with considerations of sexual desire.6 Without overlooking the importance of these watersheds in intellectual history, this work rejects these all-encompassing views, instead seeking out everpresent, myriad longings as they arise in the modernist literatures of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and, ultimately, Samuel Beckett. With no small sense of the irony inherent to the enterprise, Prosaic Desires foregrounds and celebrates human passions that are emphatically banal, nebulous, and ephemeral, but nevertheless fundamental. The writers considered here are extremely attentive to the quotidian; from the countless examples of prosaic desire considered in their books, I specifically isolate the desire for knowledge, the wish to escape boredom, risibility, and anticipation. My argument emerges from an understanding that in eschewing many facets of the nineteenth-century narrative tradition, modernist experimental writers prove less concerned with love and ambition and more attuned to yearnings just as incessant but far more everyday. In the process, interest in the autonomous individual wanes, and is replaced by a productively insatiable desirousness focused on otherness. Close examination of diverse desires in modernist literature offers the possibility, then, of extending the current understanding of longing, and of the longing self. A rethinking of desire culminates also in the philosophy of the modernist period. The post-Kantian tradition that includes Hegel proves exceptionally focused on the machinations of human desire, so that Schopenhauer (whose work Hardy read), perceives the world as shaped by the will, while his student Nietzsche perpetuates belief in the Übermensch, or the individual defined by a will to power. And, of course, Freud’s psychoanalytic revolution is predicated on examining the minutiae of the desiring self. It is from this welter of discussion that Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical thinking emerges; his major ideas were formulated during the Second World War. Levinas conflates the endlessness of longing with our lived experience of time, arguing that we experience the infinite when we allow desire for the other to define our mortal selves. Levinas’s desire crucially and productively

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overturns the philosophical focus on demarcating an autonomous self, and his ideas follow the presentation of the desiring self in modernist literature. As such, it is via modernist writing, and with Levinas’s philosophical revolution in view, that this work asks, Must desire always feed sexuality or power? Must it always fulfil a lack? Can desire be an end in itself? and, importantly, Must desire always serve the subject? In Robert Pippin’s history of early to postmodern subjectivity, he argues that the “completion of philosophical desire” has always been driven by a desire for autonomy (Modernism 48). Clearly, it is this very drive for autonomy that unfolds in Hardy’s Ethelberta and Well-Beloved. But in portraying characters destroyed by their willfulness, Hardy significantly questions this route to self-affirmation. Of course, modernists were not completely disinterested in ambition and love. But like Hardy, writers like Woolf, Joyce, and Stein challenge the possibility that desire is necessarily or ideally sourced in lack, or as a means of shoring up the individual. Instead, their presentations of desire incorporate, then abandon, nineteenth-century models of desire, culminating in an approach whereby longing becomes a conduit to considerations of individuals defined by an endlessly unknowable and desirable other. Hardy’s writing offers a wonderfully representative precursor to this modernist desire-driven shift in focus from self to other. In particular, Ethelberta’s and Jocelyn’s hysterias point to the impossibility and tragedy of solitary longing. In striving to define themselves by grand narratives of desire both protagonists fail; in response to that failure, they turn to one of the prosaic desires central to this study: risibility, or the desire to laugh. This solitary mirth only confirms their isolation, and readily turns into hysteria. By contrast, modernist writers frequently illustrate how shared risibility fulfills, even as it remains inevitably and productively insatiable. A generation earlier, Hardy tends to focus on ways in which the self is defined and obliterated by desire. For instance, in The Return of the Native protagonist Eustacia Vye puzzles over the possibility of “a strange sort of love, [one] entirely free from that quality of selfishness which is frequently the chief constituent of the passion, and sometimes its only one!” (208–9). Just as love affirms and fractures the self, so too does the narrator in A Pair of Blue Eyes describe upward mobility as the mere “metamorphos[ing of] the unit Self into a fraction of the unit Class” – the ambitious self is necessarily divided by aspiration to become part of a larger whole (87). While critics have frequently commented on Hardy’s interest in the “unit Self” – the self isolated, the bodily self, the self in relation to the external world – what recurs in assessments of Hardy is his emphasis on the ordinary life of the individual.7 As Raymond Williams puts it,

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Hardy, “more than any other major novelist . . . succeeded . . . in centring his major novels in the ordinary process of life and work” (The English Novel 116). In Hardy’s quotidian fictions, small, urgent feeling figures prominently; he claims he restricted his settings to Wessex in part because the exploration of such a limited geographical area underscored the irrefutable throbbing of “domestic emotions” (Personal Writings 46). Hardy depicts characters struggling to give voice to their emotion in an increasingly sceptical age, as when in Far From the Madding Crowd Gabriel refrains from speaking to Bathsheba, as “he would as soon have thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse mesh of language” (19–20). Hardy wants his characters to express their longings; his condemnation of the upper classes is often attached to a presumption of their inexpressiveness. In Ethelberta, for instance, a group of socialites “enjoy themselves as far as it was possible to do so in a neutral way – all carefully keeping every variety of feeling in a state of solution” (91). In The Well-Beloved, Jocelyn’s worldliness is signaled by his icy response to a girlfriend’s exuberant greeting; later, her mother scolds her for forgetting that Jocelyn mingles with urbane women who think it “vulgar to smile broad!” (9). In this context, Ethelberta’s and Jocelyn’s hysterical laughters constitute an even graver giving way. Hardy’s struggle to counter Victorian reserve indubitably fosters his exploration of desirous extremes and prosaic longings. In Jude the Obscure, Jude Fawley yearns for knowledge, as does Tess Durbeyfield of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, who eagerly absorbs whatever she can from Angel Clare. Tess’s much-quoted access to “the ache of modernism,” her understanding of the “feelings . . . of the age” Angel attributes to not only to her inquisitive nature, but to her Sixth Standard training; like Clym Yeobright of Return of the Native, Tess wants to know about the world and teach others who share her yearning (180, 88). Another quotidian longing Hardy explores is boredom, which, as J. Hillis Miller points out, figures in Hardy’s work as a companion to love: “Again and again the same pattern manifests itself. Ennui, lassitude, an inner emptiness, and a vague yearning for some grand adventure – these negative qualities predispose Hardy’s characters to the fateful beginning of a new infatuation” (Thomas Hardy 117–18). Less dramatically, “bore” also features in Ethelberta as a recently popularized term; newly arrived in London, Ethelberta is constantly visited, a situation her brother finds “a regular bore.” “A regular what?” asks his sister, to which he responds “Bore! – Ah, I forgot, you don’t know our town words” (148). In Hardy, boredom – the desire for any desire at all – afflicts the leisured classes, and, increasingly, the masses; in Tess, the narrator identifies

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“the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilised races with the decline of belief in a beneficent Power” (174). Come the modernist period, boredom is considered a widespread crisis; Hardy’s work delineates its outset. Risibility is another Hardy interest, and not only as evinced in fits of self-denouncing hysteria. Hardy locates the desire to laugh most readily among his rural workers, where it surfaces among the banter of shared rest and celebration. Hardy deplores solitary or restrained laughter, while uncontrollable laughter is a tendency exhibited by his fools, a group including the village idiot in Under the Greenwood Tree and Ethelberta’s constantly giggling husband. While risibility is a more implicit gauge of character, some banal longings surface still more selfconsciously in Hardy’s narratives, as in a concerted, proto-modernist description of anticipation in A Pair of Blue Eyes. When the Swancourts decide to take a steamer to add interest to a journey to London they are surprised to find themselves delayed at the outset. Watching the flurry of workers and machinery which inhibits their passage to the boat, Mr. Swancourt finds the faces of other travellers “not worth looking at. The expression ‘Waiting’ was written upon them so absolutely that nothing more could be discerned there.” These people have been sacrificed to the “throng,” their time subordinated to the machinations of modernity – here anticipation arises in Hardy’s writing as a direct consequence of an increasingly urban, technical age (277). Historical factors thus also contribute to a growing interest in prosaic desires. Hardy’s articulation of the difficult relationship between contemporary life, the self, and everyday longing proves prophetic; Woolf acknowledges his influence in her 1925 manifesto “Modern Fiction,” where she writes, “we reserve our unconditional gratitude for Mr. Hardy” (The Common Reader 146). In Hardy’s writing, the will – however driven, however besotted – is not controlled by Providence or God, but nor is it solely under the control of any mortal being. As an early creator of secular fictions, Hardy’s pitting of endless longing against mortal time takes on an increasing sense of urgency. Haunted by rapid and overwhelming changes – industrial, economic, moral, and religious – his characters regularly turn to a beloved figure as a substitute for God, “someone who exists within the everyday social world, but who radiates a seemingly divine light upon it” (Miller 114). In the process, individual autonomy is called into question in favor of ‘the immediate and actual relationships between people, which occur within existing contemporary pressures’ (Williams 113). The pursuit of a sustaining infinite via everyday desires and social relations in turn permeates Hardy’s descendents – modernist writers and philosophers. In what

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follows, I will use Levinas’s work as both point of culmination and focus in order to sketch out an intellectual history that bears upon modernist approaches to time, longing, self, and other.

Productive Desires, Otherness, and Emmanuel Levinas Born in Lithuania of Jewish parentage in 1906, Emmanuel Levinas moved to France in 1923 to study philosophy. His earliest work focused on the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl; he was also, briefly, an eager student of Martin Heidegger at Freiburg. Levinas took French nationality in the thirties, married, and worked as an educator; at the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the French military, was taken prisoner, and spent the rest of the war in a German camp. While interned, Levinas began writing Existence and Existents and Time and the Other, books that articulate the foundations of his philosophy. Levinas’s work conflates our endless desire for otherness with our lived experience of the infinite. He argues that the subject is always beholden to the other, and as such, we are defined by otherness. In staking this claim, Levinas forgoes the articulation of an autonomous, rational subject that has dominated Western philosophy since its inception. As a counter to the prominence of existentialism in his day, Levinas rejects the possibility that our lives emerge from and unfold against a backdrop of nothingness. For Levinas, we exist against a pervasive vigilance, a presence, against which we are always objectified. In Levinas, otherness is inescapable, even when we are most alone. Where traditional philosophy pursues knowledge, Levinas privileges goodness before all: as such, his radical ethics have been labeled “postrational.”8 Eschewing objective fact is now a central tenet of most theoretical writing, but Levinas was among the first twentieth-century thinkers who called certainty explicitly into question, and he exerted a substantial influence on postmodernists like Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida. In a homage written after Levinas’s death in 1995, Derrida credits him with introducing Husserl and Heidegger to France, and suggests that, more importantly, the reverberations of his thought will have changed the course of philosophical reflection in our time, and of reflection on philosophy, on what orders it according to ethics . . . according to another thought of the other, a thought that is newer than so many novelties. (Adieu 4)

Levinas believes the other is always a mystery to us, and as such, remains eternally novel; his twin preoccupations with otherness and

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the unknown intensify as his work develops. In Existence and Existents (1947) Levinas defines the other as unknowable; in Time and the Other (1947) he argues that the other’s unknowability generates a constant sense of newness, an endlessness he conflates with a wonderfully insatiable, infinite desire for that other. In later works such as Totality and Infinity (1961), desire is explicitly couched as obligation, an ethics that also eludes our full comprehension; come Otherwise than Being (1974) Levinas suggests the self is gloriously imprisoned, even hostage; here he applies unknowability to the spontaneity of spoken discourse. Levinas’s most prominent later writings extend theories of the unknown to God. Levinas’s ideas are very much a product of his Judaism, although for the most part he separates his thinking on religion from his more strictly philosophical work. It is unquestionable that Levinas’s writings are an explicit counter to the horrors he witnessed during the Second World War, a violence he attributes in large part to totalizing systems of thought – such as philosophy itself – that his own deliberately inconclusive, ethical work strives to undo.9 Levinas’s thinking is shaped by historical event and responds to some of the key ideological debates of the first half of the twentieth century. In articulating a radically new program of human longing and experience, Levinas incorporates past thinking that presents desire erotically, powerfully, and with autonomous subjectivity well in view; as such, the post-Kantian German philosophical tradition, with its pronounced emphasis on the individual will, is a particularly dominant influence. Levinas’s adamantly ethical longing is arguably as totalizing as that of his predecessors: his is another all-encompassing narrative of desire. But Levinas abandons the self-affirmation desire is often intended to yield. In so doing, Levinas is clearly influenced by the ideologies of modernism, a period in which subjectivity is continually under fire. Modernists such as Woolf, Joyce, and Stein break the ground that Levinas cultivates, and do so by abandoning grand narratives of desire and the subject in favor of prosaic longings and a centralization of otherness. While vestiges of self-serving absolutism remain – Stein’s promotion of her own genius comes readily to mind – an ideological shift toward other-defined everydayness also occurs. The modernist emphasis on a direct relationship between lived time and the passions is far from new: creation myths engage in precisely this formulation, and these sorts of ancient sources, in turn, are wellknown modernist preoccupations and influences.10 Plato’s Timaeus is a ready example of the fundamental association between mortality and desire. In this narrative, as in so many myths of origin, the world is not eternal and nor are its inhabitants. Instead, all earthly bodies are finite, and the human body, “endowed with the . . . faculty of sensation . . .

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as well as with desire and its mixture of pain and pleasure” gains entry to the infinite realm only through a cautious exercise of passion (57). Humanity’s eventual recognition of this state of affairs – post-lapsarian or otherwise – generates a fundamental conflict: a longing for the infinite ironically determined by endlessness, a perpetual struggle to control desires that can never be fully satisfied. Finitude and insatiability thus became paramount concerns in religious and philosophical thought, as well as in narrative.11 Levinas both recognizes and rejects the vexed quality of this relationship in “Infinity,” an essay detailing a brief history of the ways philosophy, or knowledge, and religion have conceptualized the eternal. For Levinas, in its earliest manifestations, the infinite resided only in that which exceeded “human measure or limits” – the infinite was deific, transcendent, beyond human reach (Alterity and Transcendence 54). Pre-Socratic thinkers were fond of infinitude; for instance, in the sixth century bce, Anaximander described a principle called Apeiron which he considered the irreducible, fecund source of all things. Later classical thinkers were less enchanted with the eternal, preferring concepts that could be determined and completed. Levinas points out that Plato is the first to situate the infinite beyond lived existence; in Platonic idealism, the infinite is metaphysical, not actual. But although it goes unmentioned in Levinas, something of the pre-Socratic Apeiron surfaces also in The Republic. Here Plato delineates a tripartite psyche divisible into the reasonable mind, the appetitive belly – wherein lie “hunger and thirst, and the agitations of sex,” and a third, less clearly defined element, roughly translated as spirit, indignation, self-regard, and/or concern about reputation (215, 208). Called thumos, this element is likened to a desirousness that motivates the soul.12 Nevertheless, because Plato argues in favor of an ideal realm beyond our own, Levinas maintains that he is the originator of the perception of desire as lack. 13 Early modern thinkers pose a challenge to metaphysics. As Levinas writes, “The thought of the Renaissance will recognise an infinite desire in the soul, which is not a simple lack” (Alterity and Transcendence 65). Descartes, for instance, likens the deific to the human will – particularly the free human will; both are seen as infinite and powerful, although mortal will is lesser because insatiable. After Descartes, Kant offers a significant reversal of the philosophical tendency – one that developed in the wake of religion – to understand the finite in light of the infinite. For Kant, we relate to the world around us via intuition and receptivity: by sensibility. The infinite world is thus realized by our finite selves. Kant’s theory relies upon a transcendent, timeless self who unifies experience and grounds knowledge, but his emphasis on subjective understanding

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of temporality and endlessness shapes the philosophical thinking that follows. Nietzsche brings to the fore Kant’s suggestion that the finite being determines his or her sense of the infinite, although in “Infinity,” Levinas decries Nietzsche as a philosopher who insisted on keeping the infinite out of mortal reach (55). Levinas sidesteps Nietzsche’s arguments in favor of subjective transcendence, perhaps because he cannot countenance any suggestion that the self can exceed its own confines. But Nietzsche could and did: in Thus Spake Zarathustra, the Übermensch, or overman, is not only he who willfully transcends himself, but is also given the opportunity to experience eternal recurrence, the possibility that all we have already lived could happen again in cycles ad infinitum in an eternal return of the same.14 Nietzsche’s eternal return sets in motion the possibility that a fully desirous mortal can independently redefine temporal experience. Levinas clearly inverts this idea, directing it toward otherness and not the self. And Nietzsche’s influence is discernible throughout Levinas’s work, as when Levinas grudgingly admires his determination to disrupt “the primacy of the same . . . defin[ing] the whole of Western philosophy” (Totality and Infinity 45). With the Übermensch, Nietzsche takes the Western philosophical interest in the autonomous individual – Levinas’s prime example of sameness – to a productive extreme. Henri Bergson offers perhaps the best-known rendering of a subjective infinite: in Time and Free Will, Bergson derides clock and calendar time in favor of the self’s continually changing “process of organization or interpenetration of conscious states,” which he labels true duration, or durée (108). Durée signals freedom of the individual will, the unfolding of novelty, and the virtual actualizing itself in a creative flux; it is built upon the temporal and the endlessly interrelated elements of experience such as sensation and soul-defining passion. In “Infinity,” Levinas describes durée as follows: Bergson . . . reaches a time that is irreducible to an infinite series of instants treated as an eternity by the intelligence. The time composed of homogenous instants, a superficial, degraded time, turns us toward durée, the instants of which in a sense transcend themselves, laden with all their past and already charged with a future; in the very limit of the past, surging forth new; old with the age of being, and as if at the first day of creation, creative, freeing themselves of their limitations, infinite. (73–4)

Bergon’s is an infinity of possibility, one which Levinas suggests may supersede the significance of “actual infinity” – here a secularized infinite holds sway (74). After Bergson, subjective temporality is increasingly central to philosophy, coming to the fore with the development of phenomenology, of which Heidegger is a celebrated offshoot.

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Heidegger articulates the “ontological difference,” a theory predicated on the understanding that, since Plato, philosophers have erroneously conflated the concept of being with living entities. Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) sets out to retrieve the question of Being (as distinct from beings) for philosophy. Beings are best defined by time: conscious existence realizes its fullest potential when it recognizes the possibilities represented by its future, and more specifically, its end. This process Heidegger characterizes as “passionate anxious freedom toward death” (245). Working against Nietzsche, Heidegger resolves to de-emphasize human will in his philosophy, but his authentic existence is catalyzed by a deeply driven desirousness; passion fuels the individual’s most profound understanding of Being.15 While Heidegger fails to separate mortal time from infinite longing, his demarcation of Being brings us closest to a view of infinitude that does not spill over into metaphysics. After Heidegger, Levinas argues, “It is the being of beings that would be referred to by the terms finite and infinite, thus . . . new light is shed on many of the great texts on infinity” (74). Levinas’s “Infinity” underscores the sheer inseparability of the human passions from eternality. From the pre-Socratics forward, thinkers have conflated human striving with endlessness, and this conflation is readily transposed to an increasingly secular, fast-paced, urban, alienating twentieth-century society in search of the consolations and interest a recovery of eternal desire might provide. As Levinas writes, “themes of solitude and the breakdown in human communication are viewed by human literature and thought as the fundamental obstacle to universal brotherhood” (The Levinas Reader 164). For Levinas, the self is the very locus of finitude; trapped in the sameness of self we discover that “solitude is an absence of time” (Time and the Other 57). For centuries, religious faith offered access to the eternal; in like vein, Levinas argues that our non-presumptive relationship with the other provides a lived experience of the infinite. Levinas describes confrontation with the other as a relation in which the I frees itself from being limited to itself . . . from its reclusion within itself, from an existence in which the adventures are but an odyssey, i.e., a return to the island. The exodus from that limitation of the I to itself, which is revealed in a whole series of reflections of contemporary philosophy on the meeting with the Other . . . is also worthy of the adjective infinite. (“Infinity” 56–7)

When Levinas describes this relationship as infinite, he refers to the endlessly unrequited desire by which it is defined. For Levinas, infinity is an “apparently wholly empty notion” unless conflated with desire; as he writes in Totality and Infinity,

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The infinite in the finite, the more in the less, which is accomplished by the idea of Infinity, is produced as Desire – not a Desire that the possession of the Desirable slakes, but the Desire for the Infinite which the desirable arouses rather than satisfies. (TI 50)

Our desire is endless, and what we desire is an always-unknowable being about whom we can come to no conclusion, no satiated point of understanding. Levinas believes we can never fully grasp the desirable that is the other, not only because such a grasping implies presumption and reduction, but because conclusivity is itself undesirable, as it merely takes us back to ourselves. By contrast, otherness is the site of what Levinas labels radical alterity, or the absolutely unknowable that fascinates and eludes us: “It is not possible to grasp the alterity of the other, which is to shatter the definitiveness of the ego” (EE 86). Shattering the self via constant, unrequited desire is not lack, but the very height of productivity; our existence is most fruitfully defined by longing. Throughout his writings, Levinas will not offer a precise depiction of the desire the self has for the other, although he continually charts instances in which it can be felt or recognized. He argues that we begin to experience desire when we perceive and welcome the face of the other; the face-to-face encounter is Levinas’s metaphorical depiction of desire in its immediacy, in its urgent, everyday present. But the face-toface encounter spans many levels of temporality: it recalls our originary desire for otherness, a desire that Levinas believes precedes existence, and couches as responsibility. As in most forms of longing, the face-toface encounter is also directed toward the future; in Levinas’s ethical philosophy this futurity is determined by obligation. Additionally, the face-to-face encounter provides access to the infinite: in focusing on the other, we transcend ourselves. In a philosophy shaking itself free of metaphysics, Levinas locates transcendence in the everyday social exchange. Desire, then, encompasses all facets of temporality: past, present, future, and infinite. We can say, with some certainty, what Levinas’s desire is not. It is not borne of lack, and is best left unmet. Need and satiety Levinas couches as abjection: need is disgust, a sinking one’s teeth into the real, an assimilation of otherness, while satisfaction is merely a return to the finite self. Desire, by contrast, is an oxymoron, “a luxurious need” that only surfaces when we are in the presence of the other (TI 62). Desire is also a paradox: “nourish[ed] on its own hungers and . . . augmented by its own satisfaction . . . Desire is like a thought which thinks more than it thinks” (Ethics and Infinity 92). Because it is inevitably directed beyond the self, desire is not solipsism. Nor is it love, a word to which Levinas has an aversion as it promotes an overly romanticized view of the self as

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a fusion or confusion with the other. Levinas insists on the separateness of self and other crucial to the maintenance of desire and its attendant responsibility. With this separateness in view, he often equates alterity with the feminine, which he describes as the modest, hidden, domestic opposite of the masculine. While his use of this sex-stereotyped dichotomy has raised understandable concern, Levinas’s gender distinctions are not intended as essentialist absolutes but are meant to illustrate our individual distinctiveness and the longing that separateness generates. By extension, Levinas likens the philosophical attempt to demarcate an autonomous sense of self to male heroics, or a kind of absurd virility; Levinas believes it is precisely this masculine approach to the self that should be deferred in a privileging of otherness, or the mystery that is the feminine. Levinas calls attention to the assumption that the subject as traditionally formulated is male, and it is precisely that dominant subjectivity that his philosophy seeks to reconfigure.16 For Levinas, “The difference between the sexes is a formal structure, but one that carves up reality in another sense and conditions the very possibility of reality as multiple” (TO 85). Levinas’s emphasis on masculinity and femininity complicates and serves his likening of desire to Eros, another term he uses for longing. Eros maintains the irrecoverable distinction between self and other; it is not akin to the fusions of love or sex. As Levinas writes, “Freud himself says little more about the libido than that it searches for pleasure . . . Freud does not search for the significance of this pleasure in the general economy of being” (TO 90). By contrast, Levinas demarcates a phenomenology of the voluptuous that involves myriad desires and appetites. His “Eros” is very much in keeping with primary definitions of the term, which include feelings of deep regard, affection, sympathy, or pleasure in another’s presence. Levinasian Eros incorporates holding the door open for someone, or shaking hands; Levinas also uses words such as “caress” and “proximity” to demarcate our longing to be close to another, even as he realizes that we can never be close enough.17 Eros is not wilful power: Levinas suggests that it fails when reduced to grasping or ownership. What Levinas seeks is a fecundity devoid of power that can reproduce itself, a kind of filiation. In yet another vexatious, essentialist metaphor, Levinas argues that human reproduction encapsulates the productivity and elusiveness of desire: parents produce beings who are of themselves but whom they can never fully know or possess. While the child inevitably eludes the parent, the bond is irrevocable. This bond remains integral to Levinas’s depiction of desire: in Otherwise than Being, he repeatedly likens proximity to a willingness to give the other the food from our own mouths; this willingness defines the subject.

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In reconfiguring desires rooted in sexuality and power, two major possibilities emerge: firstly, Levinas’s quotidian desire is not rooted in lack, but is an endlessly productive state. For Levinas, desire is the most fundamental, overarching reason for being. Implicit in his work is an argument that desire is as infinite in kind as it is in availability. For instance, Levinas notes that hunger and thirst far surpass basic needs, but include longings for taste and tactility. Levinas regularly discusses mundane states of desire or desirelessness such as indolence and patience, even as his work is imbued with references to daily continuities like sleep, breathing, conversation, and touch. Levinas describes “our existence in the world, with its desires and everyday agitation” as central to our relationship with Heidegger’s Being, and with otherness (EE 44). The second possibility arising from Levinas is his challenge to fundamental tenets of philosophy. Desire counters the very foundations of philosophy, which are rooted in reason and rationality. Desire also divides the self: as philosophers continually acknowledge, we cannot remain unified subjects when longing for something or someone beyond ourselves.18 This divisiveness Levinas considers ideal: his human subject is a being defined by yearning for incomprehensible otherness. Levinas’s argument is entirely extreme, and an entirely predictable outcome of a period increasingly disenchanted with absolute versions of selfhood. Levinas’s untraditional philosophy thus emerges from and similarly explores the creative and intellectual possibilities percolating through innovative modernist literature and philosophy – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and also canonical, avant-garde writers like Proust, precede and influence him. Critics of Levinas contend that subject and other cannot be as radically disparate as his theories suggest. Derrida argues, The other as alter ego signifies the other as other, irreducible to my ego, precisely because it is an ego, because it has the form of an ego. The egoity of the other permits him to say “ego” as I do; and this is why he is Other, and not a stone, or a being without speech in my real economy. (“Violence”125)

For Derrida, Levinas’s alterity must rely upon something known; desire cannot exist without a shared element. Paul Ricoeur also finds alterity far too radical, and he takes issue with the extraordinary passivity of the Levinasian subject, who is completely dependent on the other’s initiative; Ricoeur cannot locate ethical mutuality within this extremity (qtd. in Cohen, Ethics 288–98). The asymmetry of Levinas’s ethical relation also confounds Slavoj Žižek, who suspects that the responsibility-asdesire the subject feels for the other is couched in a quiet superiority that undermines its ethical premise. Žižek writes in “Smashing the

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Neighbor’s Face,” “Self-questioning is always by definition the obverse of self-privileging; there is always something false about respect for others which is based on questioning of one’s own right to exist.” To these sorts of charges Levinas counters that his work is less a practical ethics than a set of conditions for an ethics, one built on endless obligation and refusal of presumption. Another issue at stake in any consideration of Levinas and literature is his difficult relationship with art. Levinas’s interpretation of aesthetics is vexatious: his work alternately deplores and explores artistic production. Two aspects of literature particularly distress him: firstly, as Jill Robbins writes, he believes “any language that is figured or troped . . . violent and unjust” because it impedes ethicality, which he considers best accessed through conversation (“Aesthetic Totality” 66). Levinas reveres spoken language because in speech we presume an interlocutor – the all-important other – and remain open to interruption. His argument is readily contested: certainly not all speech can be free of irony, manner, cultural inflection, or any number of presumptions considerably more problematic than acknowledging the other. Levinas’s preoccupation with the spontaneity of language is most lengthily discussed in Otherwise than Being, but also emerges in a much-critiqued early essay in which he deplores the concrete, unchanging qualities of the image and the written word, claiming, “By its reflection in a narrative, being has a non-dialectical fixity, stops dialectics and time” (The Levinas Reader 139). For Levinas, art always borders dangerously on an impossible, self-aggrandizing certainty. Fear of fixity yields Levinas’s second concern about literature, namely, his perception of its relentless return to subjectivity. Of Homer’s Odyssey, Levinas states, “the transcendence of thought remains closed in itself despite all its adventures – which in the last analysis are purely imaginary, or are adventures traversed as by Ulysses: on the way home” (TI 27). Derrida points out that Levinas is opposed to the “excessively Hegelian hero” created by Homer and redefined by Joyce, “this man of nostos and the closed circle, whose adventure is always summarized in its totality” (“Violence” 320). Derrida contends that Levinas venerates not Ulysses but Abraham, the Old Testament figure who leaves his country for an unknown land, never to return. As we have already seen in “Infinity,” Levinas equates the return journey, the fulfilled quest, to closure and the return to the self; instead, he seeks an “exodus from that limitation of the I to itself,” an exodus that occurs via otherness. But Levinas’s philosophical limiting of otherness to other people may well be too confining. Derrida’s use of narrative to explain Levinas’s rejection of narrative echoes Levinas’s process. For Levinas regularly disparages the written

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word but continually relies upon metaphorical language and literature to explain his philosophy. Some of the greatest influences on modernist literature are regularly cited in his work, a list that includes Poe, Baudelaire, and Greek mythology. And critics often quote Levinas’s speculation that “the whole of philosophy is only a meditation on Shakespeare” (TO 72). In Existence and Existents, Levinas concedes that modern painting presents a vision of the world devoid of direct representation, and that it may well best express the vigilant presence of being. As his contemporary Georges Bataille suggests, so too is all artistic production a form of unproductive expenditure, an evasion of rational thought and productive economics, “tend[ing] toward the dissolution of the subject” – a possibility Bataille rightly considers in league with Levinas’s thinking (“From Existentialism” 176). In other words, artistry disrupts the coherency of its subject, and more than this, when received, indicates the presence of an other who can never be entirely understood, a possibility Levinas grudgingly acknowledges in statements such as “works signify their author, but indirectly, in the third person” (TI 67). More recently, Gerald Bruns extends Bataille’s argument, suggesting that both Levinas’s ethics and modernist art elude the closure of full comprehension. More than this, Bruns points out in On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy, Levinas’s later work explores the possibility that our longing for proximity with the other may well be akin to the open-ended, yearning-imbued process of reading poetry. A version of this argument surfaces also in Levinas’s early writing; in a 1947 essay, Levinas suggests that “Proust’s most profound lesson, if poetry contains lessons, consists in situating reality in a relation with something which for ever remains other, with the Other as absence as mystery” (Reader 165). Here, Levinas’s expansion of otherness to art may well constitute a response to the philosopher Maurice Blanchot, who criticized Levinas’s insistence that the other is only ever a human being; for Blanchot, otherness can be figured as outside, the unknown, and poetry itself (qtd in Bruns, “The Concepts of Art and Poetry” 227). For Levinas’s peers and critics, art is a sought-after, elusive other. Within these critiques of Levinas lies a principle that informs Prosaic Desires: Levinas’s extraordinarily absolute otherness, both as locus of desire and as self-definition, compels a fantastic, productive rethinking of the subject–other dyad. In what follows, there is no intention to argue the pragmatic viability of Levinas’s terms – as Steven Connor, employing Derrida, has already discussed in Theory and Cultural Value, Levinas’s unknowable other is a problematic absolute unto itself, while his sustained refusal to map out a coherent ethics underscores the difficulty of applying his principles to literature. Levinasian thought clearly

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depends upon a rather unwieldy set of non-assumptions. But this very pursuit of non-assumption importantly denies the centrality of an autonomous self, even as it opens wide categories of otherness towards which mortal subjects might be drawn. Levinas’s infinite is an endless desire for unknowable, and yet always human, otherness. In my suggestion that Levinas’s philosophy further unearths modernist thinking about and portrayals of the desiring self, fiction will be presented as one among many revelatory form of otherness. But, in keeping with Levinas’s reflections and arguments, the desires considered here are not shaped by need or lack, and neither are they sexual or powerful; instead, they are productively, infinitely everyday.

Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation Many modernist writers knew that longing is central to existence and need not be overpowering to be significant – this is no doubt at least partly why the work of Proust, with its focus on life’s evanescence and minutiae, so appealed to Levinas. But within the work of Woolf, Joyce, and Stein arises the additional possibility that subjective desire, when opened out toward otherness, assuages the strictures of mortal time. Their literatures conflate time and desire in a way that enables them to move away from finite subjectivity toward a privileging of the ordinary individual operating within an infinitely desirous relationship with others; with this shift fully in view, it is unsurprising that Levinas’s theories should emerge at the tail-end of high modernism. The dual protagonist structure of Joyce’s Ulyssses is a ready example. Although Stephen and Bloom “didn’t see eye to eye in everything, a certain analogy there somehow was, as if both their minds were travelling, so to speak, in the one train of thought” (764). Joyce’s narrator is careful to articulate both the separateness of these figures, and their mutual striving for comprehension. Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway also offers two protagonists, and her Orlando focuses on an individual who exceeds mortality through exploring multiple desires, including creativity. Stein suggests still other ways of thinking about longing and otherness. Tender Buttons insists upon the impossibility of singularity: “a single plate is not butter, a single weight is not excitement, a solitary crumbling is not only martial” (44). Instead, Stein turns repeatedly to collectives, mixtures, spreadings, and unions, so that amidst a lengthy definition by negation of a single umbrella, her narrator suddenly pronounces: “so much more is there plenty of reason for making an exchange” (20). Exchanges with otherness favorably extend the individual.

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Just as Levinas’s ideas do not emerge from a vacuum, these writers do not begin their careers by disregarding power, sex, and autonomous subjectivity. In what follows, I illustrate their literary transitions in presentations of desire by drawing on a post-Kantian lineage of philosophers central to modernism. In addition to Levinas, the major thinkers who structure this work are Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, all of whom are associable by subject matter and by a line of direct influence. Schopenhauer mentored Nietzsche, and Heidegger, who remains one of the most productive readers of Nietzschean thought, was Levinas’s instructor. Nietzsche draws on Schopenhauer’s articulation of the allencompassing will while suggesting that an infinite will to power lies at the heart of subjectivity.19 Heidegger contends that we must perpetually direct our human passions toward death in order to live authentically, and Levinas replaces Heidegger’s emphatically subjective desire with objective desirousness, suggesting we transcend ourselves only when we long for the endlessly unknowable other. This ideological history involves a sea change from self-affirming desires to multiple longings defined by otherness; as Prosaic Desires argues, a similar trajectory can be discerned in the oeuvres of Woolf, Joyce, and Stein. The decision taken here to use philosophy as a ground for a discussion of endless desire, selfhood, and otherness is not a question of direct influence. As Hugh Kenner asserts, “That innovators in diverse fields are assuredly one another’s contemporaries without necessity of interaction, is one of the exhilarating truths of history” ( Ulysses 153). While this exuberant statement may provide sufficient rationale, it seems worth noting that relationship between literature and philosophy is notably strengthened in the period in question, and not only because, as is often argued, modernist art so readily engages in the self-reflexive processes of philosophy. Douglas Mao suggests that what sets modernism apart is the way “that the possibility of the utter contingency of everything (and every thing) became a major preoccupation of imaginative writing” (Solid Objects 17) A widespread, burgeoning interest in the banal thus informs this study, which is also implicitly guided by what Mao describes as the need “to reconsider the striking similarity between the questions asked by Anglo-American writers in the early twentieth century and those posed, roughly contemporaneously, by Continental philosophers of existence” (ibid.). Furthermore, my work aims to fill a persistent gap in literary study: although theorists of the everyday readily acknowledge the links to be made between philosophy, narrative, and the quotidian, very little has yet been written on these relationships throughout modernism.20 An exception in this regard is Michael Sheringham’s Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present, which draws

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upon epistemology, phenomenology, literature, and art to unearth the indeterminacies of the quotidian – Heidegger’s opposition to so-called unthinking or inauthentic existence is a target shared with this book. But while Sheringham nods towards Woolf and Joyce, his work more specifically addresses French culture from 1960 forward. Despite this focus, frequent mention of the proximity of the everyday to the ethical, and his emphatic claim that “quotidienneté implies community” (360), Sheringham does not mention Levinas. In some ways, the elevation of mundane experience in modernist literature and philosophy may seem counterintuitive, as two of the most readily available assumptions about this period are that it is crisis-laden – warfare and economic recession of global proportions come readily to mind – and the starting point of so much willful obscurity in art and philosophy. Where might quotidian longing arise amid all the chaos and obliqueness? Near-paradoxically, extremism appears to have invigorated the modernist interest in the everyday. Cataclysmic historical event and artistic experiment motivate curiosity about, and new portrayals of, the very banalities that propel daily life, lending greater value to the commonplace. Woolf, Joyce, and Stein are far from alone in extensively detailing prosaic desires: in The Complete Wild Body (1927), Wyndham Lewis narrates the exploits of a soldier who has transformed himself from a fighting to a laughing machine, having forcibly converted his ferocity into a very bitter and incessant amusement. Lewis uses risibility to make sense of the relationship between historical event and everyday desires. Indeed, in an essay (“Inferior Religions”) introducing his book, Lewis suggests that modern society has supplanted religious observation with constant, daily attention to physical or material minutiae as a means of meeting the human need for continuity. Other modernists affirm Lewis’s assertion: for instance, we might readily consider how the desire to escape boredom inflects the work of Aldous Huxley or Ernest Hemingway. By the time later modernists such as Henry Green begin their careers, literary experiment and prosaic desires are a well-entrenched combination: a quick survey of the chapter titles of Green’s first novel, Blindness (1926), exacerbates this point: “Laugh,” “Waiting,” and “Beginning Again” all speak to his narrative pursuit of infinite desires. So too does Party Going (1938), his novel about a group filled with nervous anticipation for a trip that we never see commence: unresolved waiting forms the story’s very crux.21 That desire is prolific – driving laughter, idleness, and anticipation – is a fundamental observation of this period. Modernists were keenly aware that desire is endless in kind and duration, and as such, can sustain narratives as completely as tales of requited love and material success. In newly centralizing quotidian

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longing, Woolf, Joyce, and Stein pursue innovative narrative styles and structures; their writing can be pervasively difficult, almost ironically begging its readers to overcome frustration and tedium in order to better comprehend life’s frustration and tedium. But this is not the sum of the exercise. Quotidian desire is infinite, but the individual is finite. As the work of these authors develops, it becomes clear that the struggle inherent to this temporal–emotional relation is eased when desirousness is directed out from the self, toward others. By gradually refusing the primacy of the desiring subject, these authors incorporate not only new styles but also new ideas: their portrayals of daily longing acknowledge that it is not the yearning individual but that individual in relation to others that is fundamental and that facilitates a lived experience of eternality. This ideological shift is cataclysmic, and is indubitably influenced by contemporaneous philosophy. Writers and philosophers alike thus reassess the very ingredients of myths of origin that haunt humanity, and so arise again and again throughout creative and intellectual history. In the twentieth century, the longing subject is again emended: while the body never loses its role, in Plato’s terms, as a passion-laden “instrument of time,” its endless dependence on, and desire for, a living presence beyond itself becomes the primary focus (Timaeus 57). To conclude, I offer here an overview of forthcoming chapters. Chapter 1, “Dying to Know,” addresses Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Stephen Hero, the title given to his earlier draft. In these works, Stephen Dedalus longs to overcome his willful self by fully knowing the world around him. This desire culminates in a dead-ended epiphanic theory remarkably similar to that of Arthur Schopenhauer. In a similar fashion, Woolf has her own version of the epiphany, or “moments of being,” although her approach is less absolute than Joyce’s. However, like Joyce’s Stephen, Woolf’s first major protagonist, Rachel Vinrace of The Voyage Out, is a very Schopenhauerian figure. Both Stephen and Rachel seek aesthetic transcendence through art; Rachel dies, but Stephen’s absolutism is ruptured by the death of his mother, an irreversible event he seeks to “unknow.” Extreme desire – even when not sexually or powerfully constructed – is thus as untenable in Joyce as it is in Hardy. But by tentatively embracing not knowing in Ulysses, Stephen becomes a figure far more Nietzschean, even as epiphanies continue to punctuate his epistemological development throughout. The novel’s second protagonist, Leopold Bloom, further disrupts Stephen’s certainty. Levinas’s philosophy is exemplified by Bloom, who fully acknowledges unknowns and values relationships before knowledge. For Bloom, as for Levinas, epiphanies occur only in face-to-face exchanges between individuals.

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While Woolf remains interested in “moments of being,” her work is as consumed with what she names “non-being,” or boredom, the subject forming the basis of my second chapter, “Haunted by Boredom.” Like many of the characters in her fiction – Rachel and Orlando, for instance – Woolf’s personal desire to create frequently emerges from ennui, a process she explicitly articulates in her diaries. Woolf’s interest in tedium is similar to that of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Levinas, all of whom contend that bored individuals are haunted by time. An allegorical, spectral time can be discerned Orlando, and is also rather remarkably encapsulated by Woolf’s rarely-critiqued “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: a Reflection.” My close reading of this short story examines its oscillations between Heideggerean and Levinasian approaches to ennui. Heidegger argues that boredom makes Being visible, while Levinas believes it emerges only from the constant return to the self – in “The Lady and the Looking-Glass” the narrator foretells Levinas’s position. Stein’s repetitious narration has often been condemned as an exercise in stifling boredom. By contrast, my third chapter, “Inclining towards Laughter,” suggests that Stein’s authorial attention to individual moments is propelled by her infectious narrative desire to laugh; this too is what sustains the reader through her prose. In her first work, the novella Q.E.D., Stein’s protagonist laughs, like Nietzsche’s philosopherpoet Zarathustra, primarily with and at herself, but between 1912 and 1922 Stein transits from depictions of solipsistic laughter to couples in perpetual, blissful dialogue for whom, as in A Long Gay Book, “all the use is humorous.” Stein’s explorations, in other words, move from self to other through a series of philosophically-informed narratives set primarily in the private sphere. This change in Steinian narrative laughter is concurrent with modernist theory on risibility; like Stein, thinkers from Bergson to Bataille gradually come to validate a shared desire to laugh resonant with Levinas’s longing for otherness. With the approach of the Second World War, both Woolf and Stein write last books consumed with the anticipation of crisis; their delineation of the various ways of managing that anxiety forms the crux of my final chapter, “In the Meantime.” Throughout Between the Acts, Woolf demonstrates how death defines the very fabric of life, a fact emphasized by the palpability of the encroaching war, which is a threat that underscores human tendencies to take mortality for granted and engage in mindless gossip and indolent behavior. Instead, Woolf’s characters are primarily defined by a daily existence in which expectations do not come to fruition. These figures come to understand the unknowability not only of the future, but also of the figures closest to them – the novel

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closes with full recognition of this paradoxically sustaining unresolvability. Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds conflates civilians in wartime France with their enemies; while all are emphatically, in Heidegger’s terms, beingtoward-death, the death they anticipate most is that of Angel Harper, the novel’s Hitler figure. Mrs. Reynolds is initially consumed by her own survival, but her interest in prophecy prompts her to think about the fate of others who so poignantly determine her existence. The fictions of Woolf and Stein end on distinctly Levinasian terms, even as they engage in elements of the self-same philosophical struggle that define so much of Levinas’s relationship to Heidegger. Fiction and not poetry has become the focus here, a decision ultimately determined less by conscious choice than by available content, as banal longings proved most readily evident in prose; indeed, my title, Prosaic Desires, deliberately plays upon this conflation of more commonplace writing with everyday emotive states. Throughout, I have tried to examine literature not already extensively considered; a clear impossibility where Joyce is concerned, but perhaps shedding light on some of the more unusual choices from the work of other writers. My conclusion extends key ideas and trajectories to Beckett’s fictions, arguing that while his high modernist forbears endlessly affirm endless desires, Beckett engages in an explicit negation of human longing. Beckett’s shunning of yearning proves as productive as the embrace of quotidian desire that precedes him, meaning that his work also centralizes everyday longing, a focus thus discernible in literature from the late nineteenth to the latter half of the twentieth century. In other words, prosaic desires prove as infinite in articulation as they are in kind and manifestation.

Notes 1. All references to the first edition will be based on “The 1892 Version of the Novel” in Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved (1975: 216–49). Other changes between the two versions include the excision of one marriage ceremony in the protagonist’s life, the significant delay of another, and the removal of numerous polemic statements on marriage. 2. Hardy wrote his novels between 1867 and 1897, and abruptly stopped writing fiction after the publication – and negative reviews – of The WellBeloved. Critics generally divide Hardy’s novels into good and bad; the good include Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. While the status of his other novels varies, almost all overviews of Hardy consider his “lesser” fictions. For examples of these arguments, see

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4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

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Rosemary Sumner, A Route to Modernism (2000: 60); Peter Widdowson, “Hardy and Critical Theory” (1979: 88); Richard H. Taylor, The Neglected Hardy (1982: 3); Joe Fisher, The Hidden Hardy (1992: 8); and Norman Page’s Thomas Hardy (1977: 91–2). For instance, in The Passions of the Soul Descartes catalogues various human emotions, writing, “It would be more correct to distinguish Desire into as many different species as there are different objects sought after” (66). Though Descartes’ taxonomy of emotion is rigid in design it affirms multiple, minute human longings. See Peter Brooks, “Narrative Desire” (1996) for an overview of this thematic trend in nineteenth-century literature. Hugh J. Silverman writes that in the wake of Hegel and Freud, twentiethcentury Continental philosophy continues to categorize desire as either sexual – “erotic, poetic, transgressive, and insidious” – or expressive of power – “an encounter with the other – productive, creative, discursive.” Contemporary thought thus reduces desire to a “dichotomy between desire for power and libidinal desire” (Introduction, Philosophy and Desire, 2000: 1–13). It is hard to find fault with this reading: following Freud, sexual desire is central to any discussion of longing; so central, in fact, that Stephen Heath describes Western society as dominated by a “nauseating terrorism of sexuality that organizes our life and experience” (The Sexual Fix, 1982: 151). And no one wants to be at the receiving end of this futuristic scenario envisioned by Foucault: “People will be amused at the reproach of pansexualism that was once aimed at Freud and psychoanalysis” (The Will to Knowledge, 1978: 158). Psychoanalysis is understood as having opened the door to more explicit and complex presentations of human sexuality; we need only consider Joyce’s Nighttown episode or D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover for ready examples. Psychoanalytic studies have dominated critical considerations of desire in modernist literature since the 1970s. Recent examples of this approach include Gabrielle McIntyre’s Modernism, Memory, and Desire (2008) which examines the long-overlooked erotic aspects of Woolf’s and Eliot’s writings, suggesting, via Freud, that these writers turn to the sexual in order to articulate very personal pasts, thereby countering the belief that modernism relentlessly rejected the historical in order to “make it new.” Joseph Boone’s Libidinal Currents (1998) details how psychoanalytic considerations of sexuality and subjectivity inform innovations in modernist narrative. A similar investigative line is taken in Colleen Lamos’s Deviant Modernism (1998), but she also considers what she labels “male hysteria,” or the combined fear of and desire for the feminine in Joyce, Eliot, and Proust. Lamos’s work bears kinship to Christine Froula’s Modernism’s Body (1996), which utilizes Lacanian theory to unearth Joyce’s portrayal of gender identity as a social construction. I am indebted to Maud Ellmann for pointing out the distinction between the multivalent aspects of Freud’s work, and the more singular focus of his critics. Examples include Marjorie Garson’s Hardy’s Fables of Integrity (1991) and Bruce Johnson’s True Correspondence (1983). Séan Hand in his preface to The Levinas Reader (v).

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9. In Altered Reading, 1999, Levinas scholar Jill Robbins provides a nice qualification here, writing, in the case of the related question of the way in which Levinas’s ethical thought is linked to Judaism, the explanatory power of calling Levinas a post-Holocaust or a Jewish philosopher may be at once too great and, at the same time, lacking. (xv) 10. Joyce’s reliance upon Homer’s Odyssey as a means of structuring Ulysses is a famous example. 11. Augustine’s fourth-century Confessions is a cogent example, delineating a personal struggle with passion culminating in a meditation on time. “[W]hy is it,” Augustine asks, “that what [God] has created is not also eternal?” (1961: 260–1). 12. For a good reading of thumos, consult Silverman Philosophy and Desire, 2000 (1–13). A concept akin to thumos arises in The Nichomachean Ethics, where Aristotle describes a tripartite soul composed of faculties, states of character, and passions involving pleasure, pain, and longing (1998: 35). 13. Levinas’s Existence and Existents offers a fuller view of this argument (30). Elsewhere, Levinas credits Plato with formulating forms of desire not predicated on lack, particularly in his discussion of goodness (Totality and Infinity 2002: 103). See also Plato’s Symposium (1951: 77), where it is suggested that even those who are completely satiated – the healthy, the wealthy – may project a fear of lack into the future. 14. There are many available readings of eternal recurrence: Alexander Nehamas (Life as Literature, 1985) suggests that Nietzsche’s theory is an ethical challenge forcing constant self-examination: are we prepared to relive our lives as currently lived? Karl Löwith (Nietzsche’s Philosophy, 1997) relates it to Nietzsche’s view that history does not necessarily illuminate more or less in any given age – each era thus identically returns. Heidegger, on the other hand, argues that eternal return is Nietzsche’s redefinition of religion on his own terms (Nietzsche 82, 232). 15. Although he concurs with Nietzsche’s supposition that the metaphysical tradition is a deceit, Heidegger does not believe that Nietzsche escapes metaphysics. In The End of Philosophy (1975: 92), Heidegger argues, “The reversal of Platonism, according to which for Nietzsche the sensuous becomes the true world and the suprasensuous becomes the untrue world, is thoroughly caught in metaphysics . . . is only the final entanglement in metaphysics, although in a higher form.” For Heidegger, Nietzsche’s Übermensch proclaims himself passionately, powerfully free of the values of the past, but remains defined by these very values. Unlike Nietzsche, Heidegger believes that the true nature of existence is obscured by emphasis on the will, which climaxes in the twentieth century as the will to will, a force promoting alienation, uniformity, war, and technology. 16. In Ethics and Infinity, Levinas clarifies this view still further: Perhaps . . . all these allusions to the ontological differences between the masculine and the feminine would appear less archaic if, instead of dividing humanity into two species (or into two genders), they would signify that the participation in the masculine and in the feminine were the attribute of every human being. Could this be the meaning of the

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enigmatic verse of Genesis 1.27: “male and female created He them?” (68–9) Derrida usefully complicates Levinas’s portrayal of gender in Adieu; see pages 44–5 in particular. 17. For instance, Levinas writes, To shake hands with a friend is to express one’s friendship for him, but it is to convey that friendship as something inexpressable, and indeed as something unfulfilled, a permanent desire. The very positivity of love lies in its negativity” (EE 35). 18. See the introduction to Butler’s Subjects of Desire, where she argues that desire challenges reason and subjectivity. In Feeling and Theory: Emotion after the Death of the Subject, Rei Terada also demonstrates how reason has always depended upon emotive, everyday states, even as these states contribute to the eventual undermining of autonomous subjectivity, as passion emanates from within, but also, indubitably, arises from something beyond the self. 19. Nietzsche was first translated into English in 1896; until about 1914, countless reviews of his work permeated the British press and literary periodicals (Bridgewater, Nietzsche in Anglosaxony 13). 20. See “On the Oppositional Practices of Everyday Life,” where Michel de Certeau argues that narrative is one of the most effective theoretical recordings of the prosaic (Social Text: Theory/Culture/Ideology). De Certeau’s claim is very much in keeping with Henri Lefebvre’s extended discussion of Ulysses as a novel in which “the quotidian steals the show” (Everyday Life in the Modern World 3). Quotidian desire as it emerges in social relations may have a particularly compelling part to play here. As Michael Gardiner points out, everydayness is rooted in intersubjectivity, and “a number of interlocking phenomena that have generally been sidelined within mainstream twentieth-century social theory, such as human affect and emotions” (Critiques of Everyday Life 3). I am not the first to observe that there is a paucity of work on everydayness, modernism, and philosophy. Rita Felski suggests that twentiethcentury artists and thinkers evince particular interest in the transformation of everyday practice to critical knowledge, pointing to movements like surrealism and the UK’s Mass Observation Project as proof. As such, Felski expresses surprise at the limitations of extant criticism (“Introduction”). In a recent bid to bridge this gap, Bryony Randall uses psychoanalytic theory to explore the rendering of daily activities such as working and reading in Anglo-American, high modernist writing (Randall, Modernism, 2007). 21. Green, Loving, Living, Party Going. Green’s affirmation of endless longing is widely regarded; as John Russell argues, he is deeply sensitive to human yearning, but also astute about the danger of having desires met: “This ambivalence is the touchstone of his attitude as a novelist” (Henry Green 5).

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Dying to Know

The protagonists of Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta and The WellBeloved are driven, respectively, by ferocious ambition and desperate sexual desire. Both are also artistic. Ethelberta writes a volume of verse that earns her the scorn of her mother-in-law and public acclaim: one of her poems is popularized by being repeatedly set to music. In The WellBeloved, Jocelyn Pierston is a sculptor for whom success comes far too easily, and who finds himself “hitting a public taste he had never deliberately aimed at, and mostly despised” (42). Although obsessively willful in other aspects of their lives, neither Ethelberta nor Jocelyn are particularly interested in their artistry; having achieved her goal of marriage to a rich man, Ethelberta stops writing; following a variety of personal losses – most significantly the failure to find love – Jocelyn repeatedly pronounces himself unmoved by art. More than anything, Ethelberta possesses a “longing for escape from galling trammels” (294). And, though deeply aware of his status as a successful Royal Academician, Jocelyn would happily exchange fame and fortune to become “an illiterate and unknown man” capable of securing the love of an ordinary woman (69). As discussed in the introduction, their singular pursuits ultimately unravel their sense of themselves as autonomous, willing beings; Ethelberta and Jocelyn are not sustained by self-serving desires for material success and eternal love. In their first novels, Woolf and Joyce generate protagonists similarly overtaken by longing. However, their writings do not privilege ambition or sexuality, but rather, the desire for knowledge. In this process, creativity occupies a central place: art is presented as the realm by which knowledge is best pursued; art is the very ground of understanding. Rachel Vinrace of The Voyage Out (1915) and Stephen Dedalus of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) long to know all; their thirst for understanding drives every facet of their daily lives, from their social interactions to their reading choices. But most significantly, this

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thirst informs their self-conscious, intellectual comprehension of their own artistry. Widely perceived as “an unlicked girl,” Rachel is vague, hesitant, and quirky; piano-playing is her most successful means of engaging with the world around her (The Voyage Out 109). Despite her overwhelming social awkwardness, Rachel proves adept at articulating her views on music, initiating an ongoing aesthetic debate with her fiancée Terence Hewet, a burgeoning writer. When Terence reveals his authorial desires, Rachel counters that music is the highest creative form, because it “goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once” (239). In response, Terence insists on aligning music and literature as arts that facilitate understanding: “What I want to do in writing novels is very much what you want to do when you play the piano . . . We want to find out what’s behind things, don’t we?” (253). Terence wants his writing to illuminate; while Rachel agrees with this goal, she maintains that music illuminates best. Rachel and Terence labor to invent theories that concur, and in one installment of the argument, Rachel describes her musical self as a “patch of light,” while Terence claims he feels only “immensely solid . . . rooted to the bowels of the earth” (341). Rachel transcends the terrestrial here, leaving Terence far beneath her. And this is quite literally how the novel develops: in her quest for knowledge, Rachel repeatedly transcends herself, first through music, then illness, then death. When she plays the piano, Rachel discovers that music clarifies lived vagaries: It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for. Reality dwelling in what one saw and felt . . . one could accept a system in which things went round and round quite satisfactorily to other people, without often troubling to think about it . . . Inextricably mixed in dreamy confusion, her mind seemed to enter into communion, to be delightfully expanded and combined with the spirit of the whitish boards on deck, with the spirit of the sea, with the spirit of Beethoven Op. 112. (35)

Here Rachel experiences synesthesia, or a communion with reality that allows her to perceive and understand the essence of boards, the sea, Beethoven. At the novel’s close, Rachel transcends herself again: mortally ill, she is “conscious of her body floating on top of the bed and her mind driven to some remote part of her body, or escaped and gone flitting about the room” (404). The instant Rachel dies, Terence feels “So much the better – this was death . . . It was happiness, it was perfect happiness” (412). In Woolf’s first novel, absolute knowledge is ecstasy, a satiation repeatedly associated with death. Inextricable, certainty and mortality propel the events of The Voyage Out, where Rachel, so assured in her judgment of music, so capable of grasping the essence of

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reality, and so given to transcending the world around her, experiences the most absolute of narrative endings: death. Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus shares many commonalities with Woolf’s Rachel, from an interest in Ibsen to a cocksure perception of art. As a child, Stephen desires knowledge. Vagaries are not his domain; he prefers to comprehend things absolutely and believes he can: “By thinking of things, you could understand them” (P 43). A high valuation of all things intellectual emerges early in Stephen’s fictional lifespan and continues through his successive portrayals in Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses. Stephen’s many incarnations preclude his being treated as a completely fluid entity; as he thinks to himself at the outset of Ulysses, “I am another now and yet the same” (12). But Joyce is consistent in illustrating Stephen’s complete immersion in art and aesthetics; from Stephen Hero onward, we are aware that “Stephen did not attach himself to art in any spirit of youthful dilettantism but strove to pierce to the significant heart of everything” (SH 33). A dilettante lacks serious aim or study, but Stephen forges a well-defined aesthetic theory culminating in the epiphany, which is defined by Richard Ellmann in James Joyce as a bald, uncompromising rendering of moments of fullness or passion wherein the essence of an object or event is captured. Like piano-playing Rachel, the artist experiencing an epiphany gains access to the soul of common things and incidents. Epiphanies make art out of the everyday but are only perceived and recorded by exceptionally intelligent and creative individuals. As such, epiphanies briefly satiate Stephen’s self-consciously superior desire for knowledge, but in the process, his epiphanic theory suggests that he also transcends fundamental human characteristics such as emotion and desire, becoming, as it were, dead to the world. As for Rachel in The Voyage Out, Stephen’s aesthetic satiation is imbued with deathly qualities. Rachel and Stephen are characters whose desire for knowledge supersedes ambition and love; although their longing is more quotidian than grand, their relentless pursuit of satiation proves as damningly dead-ended as that of Hardy’s protagonists. Both characters engage with aesthetics in ways absolute and untenable, as they involve desiring themselves into a will-less state, an impossible living death. In his theory of the epiphany, Stephen in particular expresses belief in subjective, knowledge-driven transcendence of which art is means and pinnacle. While Woolf is demonstrably more cautious about intellectually inspired transcendence, many of her characters, like Rachel, experience occasional “moments of being,” in which they access something within and beyond the present moment. These epiphanic theories parallel those of nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose work

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is broadly aligned with Woolf’s and Joyce’s earliest writings in establishing art, not science, as the foundation of knowledge; like them, he insists that the will defines lived experience. Schopenhauer also exhibits an epiphanic bent, arguing that artists and geniuses have the capacity to transcend the “thralldom” of the will and become “pure, will-less subject[s] of knowledge” (WWR I 195). If the will defines mortality, by extension, the achievement of will-lessness in artistically-inspired moments of transcendence stops lived time. In their fictions, Woolf and Joyce tacitly acknowledge the deathliness the process invokes: absolute Rachel dies, while the vitality of Stephen’s intellect is endlessly parodied, as when Joyce’s narrator labels him a “heaven-ascending essayist” in Stephen Hero (80). Taken to an extreme, even the most quotidian longings can kill off the subject. In aligning transcendence with death, modernists convey a foundational doubt about the perfectibility of the subject through knowledge. Woolf rather heavy-handedly ends her first protagonist’s life, while Joyce’s response to surety is more protracted: he resurrects Stephen time and time again, and in so doing extends his character’s overwhelming desire for knowledge to the breaking point. Come Ulysses, the dreadful certainty of his mother’s death challenges Stephen’s yearning for absolutism. What emerges instead is grief, or “the futile desire to return to a previous knowledge-state in which what one now knows, one would unknow” (Mleynek, Knowledge and Mortality 12). Stephen’s burgeoning will-to-unknow is highly significant in relation to the intellectual history of modernism. A similar rejection of certainty defines fundamental changes in contemporaneous philosophy, where a pronounced renunciation of certainty leads to a denial of traditional philosophical pursuits such as truth and wholeness. These forms of denial, in turn, are readily extended to other totalities such as satiation and coherent subjectivity. Nietzsche’s extended critique of certainty forms the benchmark of this change, and aspects of his thinking explicitly inform Joyce’s presentation of Stephen in Ulysses. But while Stephen begins to acknowledge the unknown, he does not entirely abandon epistemological absoluteness; as Joyce wrote in a letter, “Stephen no longer interests me . . . He has a shape that can’t be changed” – a certain stasis is part of Stephen’s constitution (Budgen, James Joyce 107). In spite of this assertion, Joyce increasingly portrays Stephen as a novice in social niceties and intellectual awareness: “a youthful tyro” prepared to acknowledge that he has a lot to learn (U 773). In Ulysses, Joyce discusses epiphanies largely to mock the desire for, and the very possibility of, certainty. He also introduces a character who directly challenges Stephen’s longing to “pierce to the significant

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heart of everything.” Unlike Stephen, Leopold Bloom recognizes that pierced hearts are inseparable from death; standing warily by at the burial of a friend, he tells himself: “No, no: he is dead, of course. Of course he is dead . . . They ought to have some law to pierce the heart and make sure” (U 141). Bloom encapsulates Joyce’s epistemological transition, his authorial movement from self-serving, finite, transcendent knowledge to a more communal, endless refusal of surety. For, as in the philosophical shifts that see Schopenhauer’s self-defining will become Levinas’s desirous other-defined subject, so too does the emphatic, death-inflected desire to know that emerges in Joyce’s and Woolf’s earliest fictions influence their later explorations of human yearning. From this early, all-consuming pursuit of knowledge, Woolf and Joyce turn to desires similarly prosaic, but more varied and directed toward otherness: quotidian longings such as boredom, risibility, and waiting, all of which will form the basis of further consideration in the chapters to come.

Knowledge and Aesthetics In “Subjugation,” an undergraduate essay written in 1898, Joyce describes knowledge and creativity as means of mastering the unclear and unknown, all leading to Enlightenment-style progress and Hellenic values like “the good” (Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing 7–8). These same ideals are upheld by Joyce’s first protagonist. In Stephen Hero, Stephen Dedalus and McCann engage in a vaguely Socratic dialogue in which interlocutor Stephen demands to know what his friend considers fundamental needs. After air and food, McCann lists as a subsidiary want “the acquisition of knowledge,” and garners no argument from imperious Stephen (51). Throughout this novel, Stephen’s peers fully grasp the extent to which he values knowledge, particularly his own. This aspect of his constitution is both admired and derided: “Cranly grew used to having sensations and impressions recorded and analysed before him at the very instant of their apparition. Such concentration upon oneself was unknown to . . . him and he wondered . . . at Stephen’s ingenuous arrogance” (125). Stephen is described as a “whole-hearted young egoist” who venerates his intelligence above all, including God (ibid.). And he believes that he – like God – is all-knowing and endlessly creative. At the end of Stephen Hero, he brashly informs his godfather and a companion that his intellect “is more interesting to [him] than the entire country,” and tells Lynch that his “entire aptitude is for the composition of prose and verse” (248, 232). Stephen speaks with abandon about entireties and absolutes, even as he insists on the

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inseparability of intellectual prowess and artistry. As he informs a skeptical Cranly, “it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty which has ever been adored on earth by an examination into the mechanism of esthetic apprehension” (212). A watertight theory of beauty is the totality Stephen most desires to know. Portrait establishes Stephen’s earliest associations between learning and aesthetics. Child Stephen struggles to grasp the world around him, a process made palpable by the fluttering of the white York rose pinned to his breast at Clongowes. Pitted against one another, the York and Lancaster teams do their utmost to win every school competition. For Stephen, the appeal of the intellectual race is steeped in the beauty of the prizes: He could not get out the answer for the sum but it did not matter. White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. And the cards for first place and second place and third place were beautiful colours too: pink and cream and lavender . . . Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could. (12)

The beauty of colour eclipses the correct formulation of the sum, but this brief aesthetic reverie returns to the factual: might green roses exist? Stephen is pained by the possibility that he cannot know where the universe ends, and strives to understand all within reach. He deciphers what he can, as when he concludes that although he emits a silvery noise, family friend Mr. Casey does not actually have a purse of silver in his throat. These intellectual ruminations often slip into the aesthetic: wine is called wine, but it is also a beautiful word that “made you think of dark purple” (46). Ultimately, more than music or images, words – both literary and fundamental to knowledge – give Stephen a feeling of intellectual control: Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learned them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about him. The hour when he too would take part in the life of that world seemed drawing near and in secret he began to make ready for the great part which he felt awaited him the nature of which he only dimly apprehended. (62)

Stephen exerts mastery over words by saying them again and again; in this way, he hopes to perceive reality. “Epiphany” is another term Stephen reiterates, secularizing its religious connotations, even as he hopes, via this form of perception, to access the metaphysical, an infinite akin to God’s eternal realm. For Stephen, art emerges from comprehension, and is “an image

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of the beauty we have come to understand” – a process and product encapsulated by the epiphany (P 207). Stephen deciphers three stages of epiphanic perception: firstly, an object or event is understood to have integrity, after which dawns the realization that it is a thing in itself, its own entity. Finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany. (SH 213)

In Portrait, Stephen abandons the word “epiphany,” but re-articulates the phases of epiphanic apprehension, naming them instead: integratis, consonantia, and claritas. Between Stephen Hero and Portrait a differing degree of autonomy is ascribed to the object or event in question: come Portrait, the emergent “whatness” of the thing has become more dependent on the artist’s perception. Stephen of Stephen Hero argues for “the being of the visible world” (80) as well as for the soul of objects, while in Portrait these essences exist primarily because “felt by the artist” (213). In other words, as Stephen’s character develops, the artist’s stature increases, as does his control over the external world. But in both of Joyce’s early works, Stephen’s presentation of the final moment of the epiphany remains as pronounced and absolute as a completed life: just before the mind’s coal of inspiration fades fully away, an instantaneous knowledge of a particular truth or beauty is revealed in its entirety. “Apprehended luminously by the mind” the epiphanized object or incident proffers “the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure” and carries the potential for artistic inspiration (P 213). This stasis is fundamental: fleeting though epiphanic perception may be, it relies upon enduring stillnesses: unalterable social laws and the stable frame of the artist’s mind, even as it generates an “imperishable perfection” – the work of art itself (SH 204). Stasis is also fundamental to the appreciation of proper art: in Stephen’s version of “esthetic emotion . . . the mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing” (P 205). By the terms of his artistic theory, creation and appreciation culminate in a transcendence of fundamental human qualities like thinking and desiring. And Stephen acknowledges that art denies continuity, or the ongoing machinations of life, describing it as “the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end” (P 207).1 The epiphany is, in short, a kind of living death. The connection between the epiphany and death is both literal and figurative. Etymologically speaking, epiphanies refer to sudden revelations of deities, moments that provide brief access to eternality, even as they

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underscore the perceiver’s sense of his or her own mortality. This definition applies to manifestations of gods and goddesses in Greek literature and to the Christian feast of the Epiphany.2 The celebrated arrival of God’s son assures believers of an afterlife, but the same event is inseparable from the brutal and bloody death Christ will endure. Joyce hints at this duality in Ulysses, when the narrator of “Oxen of the Sun” describes “the vigilant watch of shepherds and of angels about a crib in Bethlehem . . . long ago,” a reference preceded by the maxim: “Mark this farther and remember. The end comes suddenly” (553). Critics also tacitly acknowledge that epiphanic theory amplifies, and strives to exceed, lived time. Thomas Wolfe suggests that the most readily identifiable feature of modernist literature is the expression of an “intolerable desire to fix eternally in the patterns of an indestructible form a single moment of a man’s living” (qtd. in Beja, Epiphany 231) While Wolfe argues that modernists strive for epiphanic immortalization, Ashton Nichols asserts that epiphanies signify a mastery of endings: “The desire for finality and completeness is transferred from the future into an intensely realized sense of the present” (93).3 Stephen’s epiphanies incorporate both of these arguments: through them, he accesses immortality – the soul of the everyday, permanently rendered – and experiences an ending: the brief suspension of his own mortality. If the epiphany is a moment of recognition with an emphatically mortal life span, its extension to the petit mort – the little death of orgasm as rendered in French – is perhaps inevitable. Many critics have sought and found relation between Stephen’s aesthetics and his burgeoning sexuality.4 And Joyce’s narrators often associate Stephen’s sexual discoveries with his aesthetic revelations. While Stephen watches Emma Clery from afar, he “long[s] for a mad night of love,” experiencing “a desperate willingness to cast his soul away, his life and his art, and to bury them all with her under fathoms of ‘lust-laden’ slumber” (SH 158). Here sexual abandon appears to supersede artistic longings, but Joyce deliberately distinguishes physical from creative desire and maintains Stephen’s allegiance to artistry throughout, even as the quotation marks around “lustladen” further subvert the physical implications of Stephen’s thoughts. The passage verges on hyperbole and is representative of a stylistic exaggeration applied to all of Stephen’s relationships with desirable females in Portrait. His reduction of girls and women to their aesthetic qualities begins with childhood brooding over the image of Mercedes, prompting the observation “He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld” (64–5). This sentence recalls Stephen’s repetition of words he doesn’t understand, his attempts to garner “glimpses of the real world about him” (P 62). The feminine, and

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his own sexuality, are realms Stephen strives to comprehend; he consigns them to the same ideal world of meaning as he does most knowledge. But Mercedes – and indeed, the much-discussed bird-girl on the strand in Chapter 4 – are conduits meant to lead Stephen into that ineffable “new world” available through aesthetic perception (P 172). These figures are indubitably sexually attractive also, but as Stephen tells Lynch, it is dreary to believe all beauty associated with sexuality and reproduction; aesthetics must not be confused with eugenics. In a further clarification of the relationship between art and knowledge in Joyce, Joseph Gerard Bredin (“Applied Aquinas” 61–78) contends that Stephen’s epiphanies are not about beauty, but the experience of knowing beauty. Kate Harrison echoes this assertion, writing that claritas is “the culminating act of intellection” of Stephen’s aesthetics, and describing it as “the volitional acquisition of knowledge or . . . the volitional perception of beauty” (“The Portrait Epiphany”146). Stephen emphasizes the satisfaction that aesthetic appreciation brings; like Aristotle and Aquinas before him, he believes the best products of human intelligence are those borne by willfulness for an end, for completion.5 For Aristotle, this dead-endedness applies also to fiction, which, like philosophy, is a means by which knowledge is mastered; in his Poetics Aristotle describes how each discourse is driven by a movement from ignorance to a disclosure or recognition. In Aristotle, as in Stephen’s epiphanies, this trajectory applies even to inanimate objects (see Aristotle on the Art of Fiction 31). The most classic rendering of ends-directed knowledge acquisition occurs in the Old Testament: the story of Adam and Eve combines, as does the epiphany, a desire to know all, transformative knowledge, and the inextricability of knowledge from death. Stephen’s aesthetics thus unwittingly affirm Cranly’s assertion: “You say you’re emancipated but, in my opinion, you haven’t got beyond the first book of Genesis yet” (SH 185).6 And, as in Genesis, Stephen’s pursuit of knowledge is destructive. In Portrait, we are told that Stephen’s “thinking was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fireconsumed” (177). Many kinds of death – even apocalypse – are integral to the totalizing knowledge achieved in claritas.

Epiphanic Dead-Ends: Joyce and Woolf Joyce’s narratives offer few self-evident examples of epiphanic experience. As it is difficult to discern what constitutes such a highly subjective

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transcendent moment, critics attempting to do so tend to rely heavily on Joyce’s own epiphanies, which he kept in a notebook. A number of these epiphanies surface amid the narratives of Stephen Hero and Portrait, but even in their status as a separate collection, Joyce’s earliest jottings have merited their own deluge of critical commentary. Catherine Millot contends that “dead meanings that allow no sense, those scenes, fragments of dialogue seem to be the blind and useless witnesses of the inexpressible” (“On Epiphanies” 208). For Millot, epiphanic substance is dead because incomprehensible. While Ellmann argues that the epiphanies present essence, Millot contends that that essence is available only to their author. Millot’s concern lies with the reader, but her claim extends to epiphanic content as well: the majority of the entries in Joyce’s collection are quite literally “dead meanings” in that they are preoccupied with certain knowledge, threats to mortality, and death – additionally, many question who or what is known. Are Father Russell’s writings poetry or verse? (Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings 170). Who is “The Little Male Child”’s sweetheart? (198). Occasionally, answers are posited, as when a Miss O’Callaghan opens an epiphanic dialogue with the lisped statement, “I told you the name, The Escaped Nun” (178). The inextricability of identification and knowledge is particularly explicit in the following epiphany, which is thought to be from one of Joyce’s dreams about Ibsen:7 Yes, they are the two sisters. She who is churning with stout arms (their butter is famous) looks dark and unhappy: the other is happy because she has had her way. Her name is R. . . . Rina. I know the verb to be in their language. Are you Rina? – I knew she was. (James Joyce: Poems and Shorter Writings 196)8

Here the recognition of the two sisters is tied not only to what Joyce knows about them – their famous butter, their degree of happiness – but also to his knowledge of their language. Certainty permeates Joyce’s collected epiphanies. Aunt Lillie tells an amazed Joyce, “When I was a girl I was sure I’d marry a lord” (164). With similar confidence, Joyce records himself attempting to impress a girl named Maggie Sheehy with his precise knowledge of Ibsen’s age (171). While Joyce has few qualms about articulating his own surety, he is quick to mock that of others. One Tobin is parodied for being a newly wedded journalist with all the answers, full of self-assurance he is bursting to impart: “My advice to every young fellow that can afford it is: marry young” (169). But amid the bluster lies the most certain thing of all: mortality. A Mr. Vance threatens unrepentant child Joyce with eagles guaranteed to pull out his eyes, and matter comes away from the stomach of

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Joyce’s fatally ill brother. Georgie’s death inspires an epiphany in which Joyce surveys his corpse and comments, “Poor little fellow! Everything else is so uncertain!” (180) – the statement is a direct affirmation of the inseparability of certainty from mortality. Death permeates the narrative epiphanies as well, where creatures half-man, half-goat haunt and enclose a terrified Joyce, the sea is prey to “its own pitiless hunger,” and even animals are capable of lamentation (188). The brief, disparate collection is haunted by dead-ended knowledge and mourning. Joyce chooses his epiphanies, renders them, as Ellmann suggests, baldly, and offers no explanation as to their significance: for the most part, the key to the absolute knowledge they impart belongs solely to Joyce. Woolf shares Joyce’s tendency to make much of minor daily events; in Woolf’s first journal, we find an entry that bears a striking resemblance to what follows, one of Joyce’s earliest epiphanies: Two mourners push on through the crowd. The girl, one hand catching the woman’s skirt, runs in advance. The girl’s face is the face of a fish, discoloured and oblique-eyed; the woman’s face is small and square, the face of a bargainer. The girl, her mouth distorted, looks up at the woman to see if it is time to cry; the woman, settling a flat bonnet, hurries on towards the mortuary chapel. (181)

This epiphany, written and rewritten into Joyce’s fictions, desultorily assesses a pair beneath Joyce in social station. The tone decries the legitimacy of their grief; the woman is defined by bleak features, and a presumption of her unrelenting capacity to get the better of others in business transactions. The girl’s face dissembles: it is fishy, distorted, and false. She “looks up at the woman to see if it is time to cry,” and is clearly confounded by emotions – genuine or otherwise – and the formalities of funerals. From this instant, Joyce infers a great deal about these two lives, and does so without recourse to any other possibilities. Compare this with Woolf’s witness of a funeral procession in the fens in 1899: We met a Fen funeral coming back from Warboys, where the dead had been buried. They came from the east along the absolutely straight white road. We saw them crawling towards us with the sky heaping clouds & the wind blowing blue spaces around them. As we passed them, a boy looked down at us very sullenly & with the peculiar sodden depressed look that Fen men & women have; they were absolutely silent; & the procession went on to the heart of the Fen. I dreamt most vividly of this last night; how I looked into the womens [sic] faces; & the carts passed on & on into the [night?] they were going back to some strange dark land, & they said the only time they saw the light of day was when they came to Warboys to bury their dead. (A Passionate Apprentice 156)

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Woolf shares Joyce’s death-infused subject matter and his disparagement: the boy may look sullen, but it is quite unlikely that this is the expression perpetually worn by all people living in the fens. Woolf’s passage follows the stages of epiphanic perception delineated in Joyce’s earliest writings: a scene is perceived, then reassessed as a distinct scene unto itself. But in spite of Woolf’s repetition of the adjective “absolutely,” claritas evades her: “the procession went on to the heart of the Fen,” but Woolf does not pierce to the heart of any certain knowledge here; brief illumination belongs only to the women, who claim to “s[ee] the light of day” when “bury[ing] their dead.” Woolf is perplexed by this event; ponders it in her sleep. Markedly unlike Joyce, confusion permeates her rendering. As for Joyce, Woolf’s willingness to elevate the trivial emerges early; she observes in A Passionate Apprentice that “the most ordinary object is possessed with a strange fascination for me” (158). In her biography of Woolf, Hermione Lee argues that out of all of Hardy’s literary gifts, the one that moved Woolf the most was that which resembled her own, his “unconscious capacity for ‘moments of vision’” (539). This is a Hardy phrase Woolf borrows and centralizes in her “Sketch of the Past.” For Woolf, these were moments of great intensity that, as Lee puts it, “counted and told all” (ibid.). The funeral procession on the fen no doubt constitutes one such moment; it is an instance meant to inform, tell all. But Woolf is not interested in Stephen Dedalus-type aesthetic theories, in which clear stages of apprehension lead to a complete and triumphantly comprehensible end. She takes issue with painting, for instance, because she feels it is too focused on keeping “the end of beauty in view.” By comparison, she describes her aesthetic process in deliberately indistinct terms: I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the minds [sic] passage through world; & achieve in the end, some kind of whole made of shivering fragments; to me this seems the natural process; the flight of the mind. (PA 393)

Woolf’s end is no end at all: lacking coherence or resounding claritas, it marks only one stage of mental flight. This same vagary permeates The Voyage Out, where Rachel’s aesthetic contemplation results in synesthesia; even as music engenders blissful certainty within her, a part of Rachel yields to what she perceives. By contrast, Stephen describes epiphanized objects as leaping toward his resolutely still self. Transcendent, Rachel enjoys a “dreamy confusion,” while Stephen feels only omniscience. Rachel wants to know “the truth of it all” and incites in her audiences visions of “the whole of human life advancing nobly under the direction of [her] music” (136, 187). But Woolf’s narration counters these

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totalities with uncertainties; at one point, Rachel draws out her aesthetic theory in the dust at her fiancée’s feet, but we are not told precisely what it includes. Not for Woolf, as in Joyce’s Hero and Portrait, an extended, conclusive aesthetic theory in the midst of a novel. Although she rejects certainty, the young Woolf writes: “I am never comfortable with these acute analytical minds. They seem to me to miss the point, & yet light on something which one can’t deny” (PA 400). For Woolf, something must be yielded to absolutes, no matter how begrudgingly. Woolf believes that an excessive bent toward the definite is a primary fault of her own writing, but understands that “what one really records is” not so much certainty as it is “the state of one’s own mind” (PA 395–6). In his earliest manifestations, Stephen Dedalus mistakenly conflates the state of his own mind with a near-deific certainty; he proves resolutely unabashed about his will to know everything. Joyce depicts a protagonist both innovative and archaic: Stephen is propelled by a quotidian longing steeped in neither sex nor power. But by taking this longing to an extreme, Joyce finds it as dead-ended and self-serving as any nineteenth-century exploration of love or ambition. All is not lost, however, because Joyce rethinks Stephen’s epistemophilia, generating an awareness of still more banal longings, including, near-paradoxically, a desire to unknow. In the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses, the machinations of Stephen’s mind are exposed; come “Ithaca” Stephen exits Joyce’s writing forever. In between unfolds a yearning for knowledge heavily influenced by philosophical trends preceding and contemporary to the modernist period, trends from which neither Joyce nor Woolf were in any way immune.

Stephen Dedalus and Schopenhauer Two of Stephen Dedalus’s most famous epiphanies return to the themes of knowledge, satiation, and death, even as they encourage philosophical readings of their content. At end of the fourth chapter of Portrait, Stephen approaches a group of his schoolmates bathing near the Liffey, and [hears] a confused music within him as of memories and names which he was almost conscious of but could not capture even for an instant . . . from each receding trail of nebulous music there fell always one longdrawn calling note, piercing like a star the dusk of silence. Again! Again! Again! A voice from beyond the world was calling. – Hello, Stephanos! – Here comes the Dedalus! . . . – Come along, Dedalus! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!

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Stephen’s “strange name” now appears prophetic. He suddenly finds himself “in an ecstasy of fear,” yet newly capable of abandoning the lure of the priesthood; as his soul soars, he likens the words of the altar to “cerements shaken from the body of death” (167–9). The painfully overwrought presentation of this quotidian-inspired moment of transcendence suggests that Joyce’s mockery of Stephen’s epiphanic approach is well underway. For Stephen, however, the event is couched in deathly terms and is deadly serious – through it, he affirms his artistry. The vision of the girl on the strand almost immediately thereafter further legitimizes his new vocational certainty, even as it underscores Stephen’s dogged “wilful[ness]” and his propensity for being “touched with the wonder of mortal beauty” (171). Like the epiphanic theory that informs her portrayal, the girl’s beautiful face evokes finitude and endpoints.9 In “Epiphanoumenon” David Weir makes a case for a Kantian influence on Stephen Dedalus, one discernible in the three names he is given in the bathing boys epiphany, all of which recur in Ulysses. According to Weir, the names roughly conform to Stephen’s three phases of epiphanic perception (59–60). The phanos of “Stephanos” refers to the Greek verb to show or manifest, the root of “epiphany”; this manifestation corresponds with Stephen’s integratis, whereby the perceiver acknowledges the integrity of an object. The suffix of “Stephanoumenous” contains the Kantian noumenon, and so relates to consonantia, or the understanding that the object is a thing in itself. Finally, phosphor is Greek for the morning star, and also alludes to Lucifer – one “who seeks to dethrone God” (56). Phosphor resonates etymologically with the luminosity and transcendent purpose of epiphanic claritas. But it is Weir’s reference to noumena that is particularly compelling. In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant describes noumena as objects apprehended by the understanding alone. Widely translated as “things-in-themselves,” noumena include all things extraneous to ourselves whose use and sensibility we neither experience nor comprehend. Weir contends that “what Joyce meant by ‘epiphany’ approximates what Kant meant by ‘noumenon’” (ibid.). But the difference between the two terms is fundamental: in the Joycean epiphany, the thing-in-itself can be completely known. In a consideration worth quoting at length, Weir writes, The argument for an equivalency of Joycean epiphany and Kantian noumenon has not been made with a great deal of insistence. Few critics have followed up on Hugh Kenner’s argument in 1955 that Joyce believed that the “mind literally knows things . . . ; it does not content itself with a Kantian metaphysic of things-as-they-appear, in contradistinction to supposedly unknowable things-as-they-are.” What Kenner terms “supposedly unknowable” was for Kant absolutely unknowable, and he coined the term

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noumenon to describe this unknowable something that nevertheless exists . . . [P]urely intellectual – as opposed to sensible – intuition is for Kant quite outside the realm of human possibility . . . In Stephen Hero Joyce seems fairly clear in suggesting that there is some way of knowing phenomena apart from phenomenal appearances . . . epiphany presents us with a problematic epistemological issue; certainly Kant and most philosophers after Kant would hardly regard “epiphany” as a useful solution to the problem of the way the mind knows things. (57)

Kant might applaud Stephen’s determination to avoid subjecting the principles of beauty to reason; he asserts that this sort of critique lay at the root of A. G. Baumgarten’s failed pioneering attempt to create a science-based aesthetic. Instead, like Kant, Stephen uses the term “aesthetic” to refer to a “science of the laws of sensibility,” and a means of getting closer to “objects of cognition” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 49). As such, apprehension is central to both Kant’s and Stephen’s aesthetic theories. But, as Kant writes in the Critique of Pure Reason, human reason “finds itself compelled to have recourse to principles which transcend the region of experience, while they are regarded by common sense without distrust . . . transcending the limit of experience, [they] cannot be tested by that criterion” (3). For Kant, we can only presume – not know – that some things are true; time and space, his a priori categories, are readily identifiable, daily forms of incertitude. The unknown is the transcendental, and not particularly problematic, as Kant is less concerned “with things known, [than] with knowledge itself” (Critique 43). Under this rubric falls the noumenon, a concept challenging the notion that nothing exists beyond thinking beings: I by all means avow that there are bodies outside us, i.e., things which, though completely unknown to us as to what they may be in themselves, we know through the representations which their influence on our sensibility provides for us, and to which we give the name of a body – which word therefore means the appearance of this object that is unknown to us but is nonetheless real. (Prolegomena 40–1)

While Stephen is prepared to acknowledge that there is a world beyond words that he has yet to access, the eternally unknowable noumenon could only be anathema to him. Kant, on the other hand, cheerfully extends this unknowability to subjectivity itself: “we know our own subject only as appearance, and not as it is in itself” (Critique 112). Self-defined Stephen could never be content with these vagaries; Stephen believes the essence of anything – and certainly of himself – can be accessed by his intellect. Weir is right to suggest that Kant and his followers would take issue with Stephen’s theories. And yet, Stephen’s aesthetic is described as “German to the core, deriving from the tradition

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that includes . . . Kant, Schelling, and Hegel” (Scholes and Corcoran, “The Aesthetic Theory” 692–3). In spite of this assertion, Joyce’s understanding of, and debt to, German philosophy has yet to be fully considered by his critics and readers (ibid.). In my introduction, I suggested that the modernist writers considered here are indebted to the post-Kantian German philosophical tradition, a tradition that includes Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. These philosophers are renowned for challenging the presumption of autonomous subjectivity; as a part of that challenge, they engage thoroughly with human longing, an experience that dismantles the assertion that the self can be a cohesive whole. Arrogant, willful Stephen Dedalus implicitly attacks the Kantian noumenon in his certain, all-knowing epiphanic theory, even as Joyce’s use of the name “Stephanoumenos” encourages us to compare Stephen’s aesthetic theories with key tenets of Kant’s philosophy. The comparison yields likeness, contradiction, and a different allegiance: while Stephen refuses the unknown in a way that does not correspond to Kant, his theory is entirely consistent with Kant’s most aggrieved successor, Arthur Schopenhauer. Like Stephen, Schopenhauer firmly counters Kant’s supposition that the essence of the objective, perceptible world cannot be grasped, arguing instead that our knowledge of ourselves can be transposed to the objective world. For Schopenhauer, the all-consuming human will facilitates our comprehension of the world and every facet of our existence. The same thing can be said of Joyce’s Stephen, and indeed, has been: Harrison claims Stephen possesses an overwhelming “desire for self-determination” that drives his desire for knowledge: “it [is] intellectually and emotionally vital for Stephen – it is possibly his single ethic – that his activities admit and fit him for the conscious exercise of his will” (146). Schopenhauer combines perception, understanding, and willing in ways as flawed as they are fascinating; his work is both insupportable, and fundamental to the philosophy and literature of the century that follows. He argues that the will is not the direct cause of our apprehension of what lies around us but rather that the will and perceived representations are like two sides of the same coin. The body is central to Schopenhauer’s thinking: we experience our body as representation – it is external – and as will – it has a component that is subjective, or internal. The movement of our hand is not caused by the will alone; instead, it is a single act simultaneously comprised of both will and representation – the body’s action is nothing but objectified or perceptible will. Schopenhauer extends this set of observations to noumena, or objects of which, in Kant’s formulation, he can have no subjective experience. For Schopenhauer, the duality of the body is assured, and this

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knowledge can be applied to every single object or phenomenon, all of which have an inner element, just as human beings have consciousness. This supposition leads to some odd arguments in which Schopenhauer attempts to prove that will exists in inanimate things, as when he asks us to “consider attentively and observe the powerful, irresistible impulse with which masses of water rush downwards” or “the keen desire with which iron flies to the magnet” (WWR I 117–18). Though unlikely, these speculations underscore his fundamental argument that the world is an accessible, integrated whole driven by the will. Nearly two centuries before Schopenhauer, Descartes writes in The Passions of the Soul that there may be as many forms of desire as there are objects to desire; Schopenhauer’s two-volume magnum opus The World as Will and Representation (1818) is a significant contribution to that potentially endless taxonomy. Schopenhauer’s will is as infinite in kind as it is in scope, including material need, ambition, lust, love, reflection, and the thirst for knowledge; he regularly exchanges the term “will” for “desire,” suggesting that any human longing falls under the will’s parameters.10 For Schopenhauer, subjective will drives and explains all, even the significance and essence of human being and activity. While he argues that the will can never be fully known, Schopenhauer is certain that it is universal, enduring, and immortal – even metaphysical. As such, Schopenhauer posits our experience of the will as a form of access to the infinite realm. He believes life is a grim and perpetual oscillation between boredom and desire: we are either briefly satiated – and so bored – or striving toward something, and therefore willing again. Schopenhauer’s articulation of the will is unquestionably extreme, but, pivotally, embraces the mundane: he credits and explores quotidian forms of desire in a way that lays the ground for the philosophy and literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Emergent in Schopenhauer’s work is the sense the desire ought to be at the center of intellectual investigation; his articulation of an ongoing relationship between the will and the intellect is considered an influence on psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious, an influence Freud himself denied. Schopenhauer was widely read by writers such as Hardy and Beckett, authors who clearly imbibed the liveliness of his prose and his belief that life is ceaseless striving. Fundamentally and importantly, Schopenhauer’s insistence that the will is both daily and metaphysical secularizes our experience of the eternal. Willing represents continuity, and the will as we understand it is profoundly human; by Schopenhauer’s reasoning, desiring human beings can experience the infinite. But for Schopenhauer, endless desire is a constant source of dissatisfaction. Perhaps because of this negative demarcation of the will,

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his philosophy revolves around what Christopher Janaway describes as the hope that “the mind could be conscious of a timeless sphere beyond the empirical”; a determination to “reveal how the individual [can be] transformed into a will-less intellect in which the body’s desires are stilled” (“Knowledge and Tranquility” 41). Like Stephen Dedalus, Schopenhauer believes we can transcend ourselves through perception. Schopenhauer’s aesthetic is remarkably proximate to Stephen’s epiphanic theory in its result, and in each phase of its construction. The artist, Schopenhauer writes, plucks the object of its contemplation from the stream of the world’s course, and holds it isolated before it. This particular thing, which in the stream was an infinitesimal part, becomes for art a representative of the whole, an equivalent of the infinitely many in space and time. It therefore pauses at this particular thing; it stops the wheel of time, for it the relations vanish; its object is only the essential, the Idea. (WWR I 185)

Stephen briefly accesses the essence of objects and events, and so too does Schopenhauer: “Raised up by the power of the mind we relinquish the ordinary way of considering things, and . . . [t]hus we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what” (WWR I 178). And just as Stephen achieves claritas, Schopenhauer’s willing subject immerses him- or herself in radiance as a result of the illuminating effects of knowledge. This achievement both Stephen and Schopenhauer restrict to the artist or genius capable of objective contemplation; such individuals have the capacity to become, as Schopenhauer puts it, a “pure, will-less subject of knowledge” (WWR I 195).11 A powerful intellect can become fully aware of beauty and elevate the self above the will: like Stephen, Schopenhauer labors to efface feeling from this state beyond being as emotion and passion have a tendency to distort or falsify knowledge; both argue that only art of a scurrilous character engages our will.12 Given that both also define lived experience by the persistence of the will – for Schopenhauer it is explicitly central, while for Stephen it is a kinetic, base emotion from which he recoils to assert his genius – any renunciation of willing, however evanescent, implies a cessation of mortality. So it is that Stephen emphasizes epiphanic arrest and stasis while Schopenhauer asserts that the aesthete can “[stop] the wheel of time” and become an “eternal, serene subject of knowledge” (WWR I 185, 205). For Stephen and Schopenhauer, the yearning to know and understand all is a constant frustration. Indeed, for the most part, all longings are far too controlling: as Stephen suggests, the world is but a sordid spectacle presented by the intelligence, while the vast majority of humankind is controlled by menial passions such as “lust, ambition, [and] gluttony” (SH 40, 180). As such, both

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develop theories as extreme as their primary desire for knowledge of truth and beauty, theories that promote satiation, but deny time and longing, the very bases of mortality. Presumably by necessity, this living death is very brief. Schopenhauer is not fond of the fleeting instant; he recognizes that the present moment sustains existence, even as he excoriates its evanescence.13 Nevertheless, the instant, pitiful as it is, is as much as can be grasped at; hence artistic contemplation and creation are necessarily short-lived, as are all moments in which “pure, true, and profound knowledge of the inner nature of the world . . . becomes . . . an end in itself” (WWR I 266–7). Artistic reverie is merely an occasional consolation, a quick understanding coupled with a stilling of the will’s relentless nagging. The artist both experiences this reverie and illustrates its possibility to the masses: If the whole world as representation is only the visibility of the will, then art is the elucidation of this visibility, the camera obscura which shows the objects more purely, and enables us to survey and comprehend them better . . . This purely knowable side of the world and its repetition in any art is the element of the artist. (ibid.)

Artists illuminate objects so we can perceive and comprehend that the will that exists in all things – is the very essence of existence – even as we strive to remain devoid of willfulness, or desire. But only briefly: “As soon as any relation to our will, to our person, even of those objects of pure contemplation, again enters consciousness, the magic is at an end . . . we no longer know the Idea, but the individual thing” (WWR I 198). Desirous sensation signals the return of aware subjectivity, and with it, the loss of the artistically illuminated whole. Ellmann, among others, tells us that Joyce read Schopenhauer, and that the nineteenth-century philosopher indubitably influenced his work.14 Schopenhauer and Joyce’s earliest protagonist share not only a remarkably similar approach to aesthetics but also a futile embrace of asceticism (yet another short-lived attempt to overcome the will), a perception of art as hierarchical and ends-directed (more in the way of satiation), and, perhaps most significantly, an anxiety about death.15 Schopenhauer writes, just as everywhere in nature a remedy, or at any rate a compensation, is given for evil, so the same reflection that introduced in us knowledge of death also assists us in obtaining metaphysical points of view. Such views console us concerning death . . . All religions and philosophical systems are directed principally to this end. (WWR II 463)

For Schopenhauer, the transcendent moment appeals, in large part, because of its ability to obliterate the fear of death. He claims that only

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the pure subject of knowing can fully comprehend life’s worthlessness; once we fully understand that life is not worth living, we are no longer afraid to die. Schopenhauer’s work is infused with a horror of mortality, in spite of the fact that he describes death as waking from a nightmare, a phrase more than vaguely akin to Stephen’s approach to the historical.16 Schopenhauer argues that death inspires philosophy; so too does it motivate Stephen’s artistry: when gravely ill as a boy, Stephen fears he will die but is comforted by his recollection of the beauty of the funeral service and its accompanying music – even funereal aesthetics proffer catharsis and inspiration (P 23–4). As he grows a bit older, Stephen shuns death. He prefers Easter Saturday to Good Friday, because on the Sunday, Christ is not as dead as previously believed; he caustically claims that the only difference between himself and Jesus is that while Jesus died good-humouredly, he “will die hard” (SH 140). Nevertheless, death informs his aesthetic and is, as discussed, figuratively and directly central to many of his epiphanies. Stephen is certain he can fully apprehend what Kant denied the very possibility of knowing: he believes he can perceive the essence of objects and events independent of his own subjectivity. Like Stephen, Schopenhauer thinks artists and geniuses can completely comprehend things separate from themselves. Their arguments suggest not so much wills overcome as individual desires for knowledge wholly satiated by certainty. But Stephen and Schopenhauer resolutely insist that the transcendent moment briefly blocks lived time and desire, and in so doing, opens the way to the eternal. Few lay claim to an ability to obstruct mortal time while alive, which is presumably why Stephen’s artist must occupy a deific position, paring his fingernails like a God of creation, and why James Kirwan describes Schopenhauer’s transcendence as an ecstatic half-truth that accounts for the sense of transport but not the sense of yearning that beauty inspires. What Schopenhauer describes – a consciousness of the world so intense as to exclude our awareness that we are a part of it – is . . . a state in which, in contrast to the perception of beauty, all sense of the relationship between subject and object is abolished, and with it the very possibility of beauty. (Beauty 59)

Stephen demands the same critique; he considers himself in possession of “a temperament ever trembling towards its ecstasy,” one unable to acquiesce to the mundane, because over his soul “the image of beauty had fallen like a mantle” (SH 193–4). Note that it is not beauty but its external appearance that enfolds Stephen here; his reference to a mantle suggests he is muffled in the protection of a guise, one precluding access

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to the emotion and desire that beauty generally elicits. But, as it is used by mystics, Stephen, and Schopenhauer, ecstasy remains a good term for transcendence; ecstasy delineates an absence of feeling and contemplation of the divine, yet it also refers to being “beside oneself,” as in tumultuous utterances, intense delight leading to frenzy or stupor, and, in its earliest uses, “all morbid states characterized by unconsciousness.” And so we return, via ecstatic aesthetics, to the deathly specter of certainty, of absolute truth and beauty. In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry takes issue with Stephen Dedalus and his aesthetics, arguing that beauty ties us to eternality not by virtue of the single, arrested instant, but because any apprehension of the beautiful “prompts searching for precedent, then precedent of precedent, and so on, ad infinitum” (30) Scarry describes this as a search for an original, immortal form of beauty akin to our search for absolute truth. Sooner or later, all pursuers of “clear discernibility” make mistakes, reminding us that absolute knowledge of beauty or truth remains elusive (30–1). Quite unlike Stephen or Schopenhauer, Scarry argues that beauty does not validate the apprehender: when perceiving something beautiful, we are no longer concerned with ourselves, but instead, submit to what lies before us. In a phrasing very akin to Levinas’s supposition that the self is defined by otherness, Scarry argues that any experience of beauty is “a radical decentering,” a pleasure taken in our own adjacentness (114). Bloom is just such an adjacent figure: second to Stephen, deferent to others. But in Stephen Hero and Portrait, Stephen remains an absolutist, sure of his own will and its epistemological leanings. Schopenhauer’s dogmatic certainty also inspires critique. Terry Eagleton points out that if the will is all that exists, writing itself would be impossible. Instead, “reason must be . . . capable of curving back on itself, scrutinizing the drives of which it proclaims itself the obedient servant” (“The Death of Desire” 167). For Max Horkheimer, Schopenhauer’s work marks a philosophical turning point because he refuses to equate morality with metaphysics, abandons the naïve progressivism of his forebears, and asserts that “the true essence which is at the bottom of all external things, the thing-in-itself . . . is something that everyone can discover within himself” (“Schopenhauer Today” 27–8).17 Schopenhauer clarifies the monumental importance he attaches to subjective certainty at the outset of The World as Will and Representation: “That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. It is accordingly the supporter of the world, the universal condition of all that appears, of all objects, and it is always presupposed; for whatever exists, exists only for the subject” (I 5). Like Schopenhauer’s emphatically willed, knowing subject, Stephen prides himself on having “cultivated

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an independence of soul which could brook very few subjections” (SH 111). But ironically, subjectivity is so important to both Schopenhauer and Stephen that they effectively define it by negation. Eagleton writes, Schopenhauer ends up with a kind of transcendentalism without a subject: the place of absolute knowledge is preserved, but it lacks all determinate identity . . . An idealist philosophy which once dreamt of finding salvation through the subject is now forced to contemplate the unspeakable prospect that no salvation is possible without the wholesale immolation of the subject itself, the most privileged category of the entire system. (168)

Stephen falls under similar scrutiny: Harrison points out that by giving up the will in claritas, Stephen denies “what is essentially creative in art – ‘the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end’” (146). The desire for certain knowledge thus results in a kind of theoretical suicide. Neither overwhelming desire, nor its brief stifling, sustains the subject. But the errors of this extremism prove productive: Schopenhauer’s negative philosophy inspires Nietzsche’s articulation of the will as central and affirming, while Joyce’s resurrection of Stephen Dedalus – and his epiphanic theory – initiates his explicit articulation of a desire for a truly infinite state: incertitude.

Parodic Resurrection: Epiphanies in Ulysses Robert Scholes’s “Joyce and the Epiphany: The Key to the Labyrinth?” tries to kill off epiphanic significance: “Epiphany-hunting is a harmless pastime and ought probably to be condoned, like symbol-hunting, archetype-hunting, Scrabble, and other intellectual recreations” (66). Scholes contends that Stephen progresses from an idealist to a realist, and points out that he only uses the word “epiphany” itself once more, in a notably self-deprecating comment in “Proteus.” Here Stephen famously asks himself, “Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?” (U 50). For Scholes, Joycean epiphanies lose their theoretical grounding and evolve into incidents.18 But the narrative of Ulysses suggests otherwise. The prefix “epi” of epiphany and epistemology refers to resting, or being placed upon, and in an echo of this foundational role, epiphanies re-emerge throughout Ulysses as the basis of Stephen’s desire for knowledge, albeit continually denounced and parodied. In Ulysses, Stephen is forced into a classic rendering of anagnorisis, an Aristotelian term usually translated as recognition, and referring to a transition from ignorance to knowledge. Anagnorisis

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implies a “knowing again” by which the past, present, and/or future must be rewritten or reconsidered because of a change in awareness. As in Genesis, anagnorisis transforms the knower, who can never return to his or her former naïveté. This is the state to which Stephen, beset by grief for his mother, longs to return. As Sherryll Mleynek writes, Death is the ultimate irreversible event, and our knowledge of it is as irreversible as the event itself. Part of the difficulty of grief is the futile desire to return to a previous knowledge-state in which what one now knows, one would unknow. In other words, it is a wish to reverse the arrow of time, the actions of cause and effect, the inevitable movement of events, or the consequences of actions. (12)

While fiction is often written and read as an exploration of the longing for knowledge, in Ulysses, Stephen finds himself dominated by a will to unknow. Watching his mother die has brought Stephen far too close to death, to the “sluggish green bile . . . torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting” (4). Endpoints thus become horrific and questionable; Stephen can scarcely withstand the knowledge that his mother’s life is absolutely finished. In response, he is overwhelmed by a longing that directly counters his emphatic desire to understand all, even as it stems from the same extremism. Engulfed by a will to know, Stephen is forced to come to terms with a desire that cannot be overwhelmed by rational theory or self-proclamation. But within this longing lie an inevitable insatiability and veneration of ignorance that clarify the value of uncertainty. “What is that word known to all men?” Stephen asks in “Proteus” (U 61). Kenner argues in Dublin’s Joyce that the word is death, while Ellmann maintains in Ulysses on the Liffey that it is love. But the point may simply be that Stephen doesn’t know the answer. Nor do we: in spite of its endless proliferation of fact and system, many parts of Ulysses – like this unanswered question – are deliberately designed to elude us.19 For Kenner, Joyce glimpsed the reductive knowingness of the Victorian novel, and, “though he loved closed systems he was attracted even more . . . to a mental cosmos founded, as Stephen tells us the church is founded, on mystery” (Joyce’s Voices 153). Joyce’s narrative demonstrates that not-knowing generates infinite speculation; arguably, a similar drive for open-endedness motivates his portrayal of endless desires. Ulysses begins with Stephen’s internal vexation over whether he should have yielded to his mother’s deathbed request to pray with her, a refusal friend Buck claims killed her. Curiously, questions about his mother define much of Stephen’s learning. Thus, in the midst of

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so much boyhood surety, he cannot ascertain the right answer to his peers’ teasing question about kissing his mother before bed, alternately denying and affirming his behavior, and finally wondering: “What was the right answer to the question? He had given two and still [they] laughed” (P 14). Stephen is not riddled with uncertainty throughout Ulysses; he remains, as ever, an intellectually assertive figure overly concerned with epistemology, ontology, aesthetics. But Bloom’s entry into the novel emphasizes the deadening aspects of Stephen’s personality: Bloom is visceral, emotional, and disinterested in absolutes, preferring “impermanent sojourn” to Stephen’s epiphanic “permanence of arrest” (856).20 Nor is Bloom anti-intellectual or aesthetically unaware; he can justify his behavior via knowledge of “the pre-supposed intangibility of the thing in itself” (866). But he is prepared to ask the kind of questions Stephen abandoned in childhood, such as: “Do fish ever get seasick?” (494). As the narrator of “Ithaca” tells us, Bloom is a lover of “unplumbed profundity” while Stephen “distrust[s] aquacities of thought and language” (783–5). And yet, throughout Ulysses, Stephen’s confusion about his behavior at his mother’s deathbed proves the starting point for articulations of uncertainty. In Portrait, Stephen’s epiphanic theory is a rather plainly reported Socratic dialogue quite divergent from the more literary narrative styles elsewhere in the novel. By contrast, his demarcations of unknowing in Ulysses yield poetic, interpretable images, such as his recognition that within his “mind’s darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shift[s] her dragon scaly folds” (30). His mental portrayal of essence similarly celebrates obscurity: it is “a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend” (34). In turn, his latest aesthetic theory about Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not cocksure but driven by the uncertain nature of a ghost, and the unknown manner of the ghost’s death. Stephen articulates a theory that impresses an audience of educated and interested peers, then claims not to believe it – he will no longer stand so rigidly by his own proclamations. In “Proteus” – our most extended foray into the machinations of Stephen’s intellect – Stephen does not readily grasp everything, but rather, “almost[s] it” (U 59) – he can neither discern a word known to all, nor gather his thoughts to a palpable end. Instead, his mind approximates a quality “of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting the fullness of their times . . . vainly then released, forth flowing, wending back” (62). The chapter also wends, oscillating between unknowing and knowing. Declan Kiberd claims that on the one hand, Stephen is shown rejecting formal knowledge, while on the other, “Joyce is dramatizing a consciousness suffering the overeffects of a recent university education, and immobilized accordingly”

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(“Notes” 958). This same duplicity is evident in “Aeolus” when Stephen thinks, “I have much, much to learn,” then turns to Professor Hugh MacHugh and assuredly states, “I have a vision too” (U 183). And at the National Library, Stephen “ponders . . . possibilities of the possible as possible: things not known” even as he describes the accumulated information around him as “coffined thoughts . . . in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words,” still but for the “itch of death . . . in them, to . . . urge me to wreak their will” (248). What others know, their dead-ended certainty, threatens both Stephen’s recent valuation of unknowability and his intellectual authority; a part of him longs, as ever, to master knowledge. But the narrators of Ulysses are unwilling to let Stephen’s absoluteness stand unchecked. Stephen’s longing for intellectual mastery and aesthetic theories are more openly parodied here than in Stephen Hero or Portrait. Old epiphanies resurface – the mourning fish-faced girl makes another appearance, as does the question addressed to a young boy: “who is your sweetheart?” (451). And when Deasy suggests “All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God,” Stephen reasserts his deflation of the Christian epiphany, claiming God is as readily manifested in “a shout in the street” (42). But there are many less transparent references to epiphanic construction. For instance, Bloom’s interaction with the Ballast Office Clock reads as a parody of the incident in Stephen Hero when Stephen tells Cranly “I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it . . . Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany” (SH 211). Bloom studies and considers this item of “Dublin’s street furniture” as thoroughly as Stephen but can scarcely concentrate on the item before him; he briefly considers the clock’s time ball and recalls, by association, the astronomer Robert Ball, a figure who in turn prompts thoughts of parallax (194). Later, Bloom returns to this thought process, concluding, “Never know anything about it . . . Same old dingdong always.” In his contemplation of the clock, Stephen satiates a desire for knowledge; by contrast, Bloom finds the exercise a baffling “waste of time” (212). While this comparison might privilege Stephen’s perception, Bloom’s everyday approach merits as much narrative consideration as Stephen’s aesthetic one. In a further deflation of Stephen’s brilliance, Joyce has Bloom appropriate Stephen’s epiphanic theory, directing it not at art, but advertising, which Bloom contends must culminate in a “magnetizing efficacy to arrest involuntary attention” much as the epiphany achieves stasis, albeit willed (799).21 Epiphanies are mocked again in “Oxen of the Sun.” Shortly after identifying himself as “Bous Stephanoumenous, bullockbefriending bard,” friends remind Stephen of his artistic inexperience and his mother’s

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death (U 543). He sinks into a stupor, broken by Mulligan’s whispered taunt “Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods. Do you not think it, Stephen?” (546–7). But Stephen is staring intensely at a brightly colored bottle of beer; here the young artist wants a drink more than epiphanic illumination. As the discussion around him continues, the narrator derides Stephen again, describing him as a “morbid-minded esthete and embryo philosopher” addicted to a “perverted transcendentalism” (550, 547). Implicit critiques of illumination are discernible throughout Ulysses. At the end of “Cyclops” Bloom is literally manifested as “ben Bloom Elijah,” replete with an attendant brightness so great the good people of Dublin can scarcely bear to pay witness (U 449).22 Bloom is epiphanized, and subsequently witnesses an epiphany at the end of “Circe,” when his son Rudy returns from the dead in an Eton suit, “holding a book in his hand” – all underscoring the connection between venerable, certain knowledge, and death (703). Unlike Stephen, Bloom does not want light to illuminate; he values the Bailey light at Howth, lighthouses, glowworms, and the glint of jewels primarily because they appease fears of darkness, provide “a kind of reassuring” (490). But throughout Ulysses, Stephen and Bloom’s differing perceptions of light converge upon the striking of matches. In the Freeman office, Stephen witnesses someone thoughtfully lighting a match, and the narration ascribes to him the following thoughts: “I have often thought since looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of the match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives” (177). The tone of these thoughts jars because it is so strangely formal, so self-consciously narrative in a manner very much out of keeping with Stephen’s usual stream of consciousness. Without using the term, Kiberd considers this an epiphanic instance in that it could “be the precise moment when Stephen chooses the artistic vocation” (997). In its inflation of the trivial, as well as the implicit claritas of the lit match, this brief moment is certainly comprised of epiphanic ingredients; because the language is overwrought it remains consistent with Joyce’s ridicule of epiphanies throughout Ulysses. The two lives referred to here may well be Stephen’s and Bloom’s: in “Circe,” Bloom picks up Stephen’s fallen matches in an initial gesture of coming to his aid. To this shared recognition of a fall, Stephen replies, “Lucifer,” recalling that phosphor of “Stephanoforos” alludes not only to claritas, but also to the Latin cognate of phosphor: Lucifer. “Lucifer” also names a match, as in “Ithaca,” when Bloom turns on the coal gas and lights a candle at “Eccles Street” and the narrator tells us that he “ignited a lucifer match by friction” (U 780). This “candescence” is “quiescent”

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but kindles Stephen’s memories of his conversation with Father Butt at University College Dublin – one of the first instances in which he voices his burgeoning aesthetic theory (782). The course of Stephen’s aesthetic development is woven through these half-parodic, half-serious instances – not least when Molly Bloom describes herself coming “into the front room for matches to show [Bloom] Dignams death in the paper” (873). Molly sees Bloom covering up a letter to a mistress, and so claritas sparks death and knowing yet again. All these references form precursors to the dramatic shattering of Stephen’s desire to know things to completion. At the climax of “Circe,” Stephen vulnerably quotes “Nothung” – a German term signifying a state of neediness23 – and “lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry” (683). Here Stephen destroys illumination; the narrator tells us his action ends time and space. At this moment, Stephen is experiencing his most literal epiphany of all: the return of May Dedalus from the beyond. His mother does not tell him “The word known to all men,” but rather to repent – the epiphany clarifies no noumena, no special knowledge. In response, Stephen cries, “The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. Non serviam!” On one level, the incident parodies the disinterested contemplation Stephen touted as a young aesthete: this moment is the inverse of ecstasy, but in its emotionality, is distinctly related to it. On another, it signals Stephen’s rejection of dead-ended certainties; May confirms that Stephen cannot know things absolutely; shortly thereafter, he proclaims, “Damn death. Long live life” (689). This is more of an anti-epiphany; hence Stephen affirms not death, but life, at its close. Later, an assault leaves Stephen prostrate, and Bloom attempts to waken him, but finds Stephen can only quote Yeats’s “Who Goes with Fergus?” – the song he sang to his mother at her deathbed. “Well educated,” says Bloom, looking down on Stephen, “Pity” (702). Here Stephen’s epistemological journey returns to origins: he remains an artist defined by death. It is therefore unsurprising that come the episode of his departure, Stephen proves he has not lost his propensity for absoluteness, his continued dislike of aquacities of thought. Kenner writes that at the end of “Ithaca,” Stephen “walks out . . . as if out of the universe” (Ulysses 13); perhaps he does so simply to alleviate his childhood pain of “not know[ing] . . . where the universe ended” – he may well go off in search of all the answers (P 17). We simply don’t know; appropriately enough, Joyce refuses us narrative clarity on dead-ended Stephen’s own end. Instead, Joyce resurrects Stephen’s aesthetic throughout Ulysses, parodying it to death; Nietzsche’s ideas are a ready means by which Joyce effects this critique.

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Stephen and Nietzsche If there is a philosopher who might agree that young Stephen is a “morbid-minded esthete” addicted to a “perverted transcendentalism,” it is Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche extols arbitrariness, reducing truth to the status of a practical, useful convention; as an off-shoot of his denial of system and surety he asks us to consider life itself more important than the acquisition of formal knowledge. Quite unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche dislikes absolutism; in its stead, his On the Genealogy of Morality presents “perspectivism,” which takes into account impressions various and emotive: There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; the more affects we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our “concept” of the thing. (92)

For Joseph Valente, Nietzsche and Joyce are united in abandoning models of truth and universality for an affirmation of creative flux, one well represented by Molly’s “yeses” in “Penelope”: “‘Everything that lives,’ Nietzsche proclaims, ‘says yes’” (“Beyond Truth and Freedom” 89). While it has long been supposed that Joyce’s interest in Nietzsche waned as he got older, Valente argues that it in fact matured, pointing out that in Ulysses, Stephen’s aesthetic theory ascribes a series of volitional errors to Shakespeare; these errors in turn precipitate artistic discovery – become productive, creative – in a way that Nietzsche might applaud. Mistakenness is central to Nietzsche’s philosophy; he describes certainties as fabrications borne of a totalizing desire to know. Perpetrated, maintained, and upheld, “knowledge” is a powerful but inevitably flawed tool. For real philosophers, writes Nietzsche, “knowing is creating, their creating is law-giving, their will to truth is – Will to Power” (Beyond Good and Evil 83). Like his mentor Schopenhauer, Nietzsche considers the body and the will fundamental.24 But where Schopenhauer describes art as the ground and aim of knowledge, Nietzsche directly equates the two; in so doing, he abandons “the dangerous old conceptual fairy-tale which has set up a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless, subject of knowledge’” (On the Genealogy of Morality 92). Nietzsche’s will does not involve a passionless, preservationist version of the self. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus is directly likened to Nietzsche’s poetphilosopher Zarathustra, and the comparison resonates, particularly with regards to Stephen’s earliest manifestations. Stephen of Stephen Hero scorns the masses, raising himself above “the tyranny of the

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mediocre” (179). He repeatedly considers himself a Messiah, an outlaw who shapes society, one among those who “inhabit a church apart . . . lift their thuribles wearily to their deserted altars . . . [and] live beyond the region of mortality, having chosen to fulfil the law of their being” (SH 178). Stephen also shares with Zarathustra a sense of self unabashedly absorbed and devoutly egoistic: he “rejoiced that his life had been so self-centred,” and determines to live each moment to the fullest by acting on all of his personal desires (SH 49). Stephen’s insistence that Buck’s derisiveness about his mother’s death represents an affront to him, not his mother, extends this egotistical strain into his third novelistic appearance. He is and remains, as the narrator of “Oxen of the Sun” mockingly points out, both “eternal son” and prophet Zarathustra, he who orders others to “Go thou and do” as he does (513). Stephen and Zarathustra are representative figures who appear and reappear in their creators’ writings, and are consistently portrayed as striving to master their subjectivity in order to glimpse the highest values and measures of their time. Nietzsche abhors Schopenhauer’s belief that “the only way to the ‘true,’ to knowledge, lies precisely in getting free from affects, from will; the intellect liberated from will cannot but see the true, real essence of things.” For Nietzsche, emotion and feeling are central to knowledge and aesthetics; he insists that Schopenhauer’s error about affectless knowledge is extended to art, “as if everything were beautiful as soon as it is viewed without will” (WP 329). Nietzsche’s knowledge is inseparable from the body and its various longings and emotions. Using a structure similar to Schopenhauer’s delineation of aesthetic and intellectual awareness, Nietzsche radically counters his teacher’s every assertion: first, in order for willing to come about, a representation of pleasure or displeasure is needed. Secondly, that a violent stimulus is experienced as pleasure or pain is a matter of interpreting intellect, which, to be sure, generally works without our being conscious of it . . . and one and the same stimulus can be interpreted as pleasure or pain. Thirdly, only in intellectual beings do pleasure, pain, and will exist; the vast majority of organisms has nothing like it. (GS 122)

Nietzsche does not believe in renouncing the will; he describes the asceticism Stephen and Schopenhauer admire as a form of decadence. Their theoretical will-lessness is Nietzschean anathema, as he asserts that art is borne of, and in turn produces, pain, pleasure, and longing. In the multiple re-examinations and outright parodies of Stephen’s aesthetics throughout Ulysses, emotional distress and enjoyment begin to infuse his desire for knowledge; in the process, Stephen’s belief in complete desirelessness as the highest state of intellection and aesthetic

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reception is called rather severely into question. Stephen’s desire to unknow precipitates a turn to the infinities of uncertainty, an awareness that seeking knowledge involves longing for a satiation that never comes. As Ulysses unfolds, this awareness feeds an exploration of and yielding to other forms of banal longing. The pain of grieving undermines Stephen’s pursuit of surety, even as Stephen’s frustrated desire to know the word known to all men sparks his climactic rejection of certainty during the anti-epiphany of May Dedalus. But pleasure also imbues his recognition of the unknown: following his iteration of his Shakespearean theory, and again after he tells a group of newspapermen a tale of two virgins ascending Nelson’s Column, Stephen is described as consumed with laughter. In other words, aesthetics – in reception and creation – newly engender Stephen’s risibility. While formerly, Stephen argued that knowledge of art leads to a certain end, in Ulysses he comes to no definitive conclusion, largely because overcome by a different longing – the desire to laugh – which disrupts the cohesion of aesthetic and story; quotidian desire quite directly interferes with, and extends, his pursuit of intellectual and creative satiation. Stephen’s inconclusiveness is very much in keeping with Zarathustra’s ecstatic, disruptive laughter – explored further in Chapter 3 of this book – and with Nietzsche’s abhorrence of all things teleological. As Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science: “every metaphysics and physics that knows some finale, a final state of some sort . . . permits the question whether it was not illness that inspired the philosopher” (5). Nietzsche’s goal-oriented illness is not purely symbolic; he believes thinkers overtaken by a desire for certainty yield to craving and weakness, mistaking physiological for objective needs. That they have been, in other words, misled by the body and “its premonitions of the end” (GS 6, 30). As does the narration of Ulysses, Nietzsche associates open-endedness with uncertainty, and with a longing so infinite it precludes a sense of mortality. Nietzsche believes thinking goes awry when we demand that truth be picturesque and produce a powerful effect on the imagination. Stephen wants his own knowledge of beauty to be universally true, absolutely certain. But for Nietzsche it is a madness of human pride to believe in universal interpretation because we cannot know but schematize, “try to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require” (WP 305, 278). This denial of certainty is not meant to be disconcerting, but inspirational. Unknowing integrates endlessness into mortality because it forces us to acknowledge ‘the possibility that [the world] includes infinite interpretations’ (GS 239–40). This infinity Nietzsche extends to the aesthetic: the great attraction of art is its imperfection, which in turn, drives the poet

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who never really expresses . . . what he would like to have seen: it seems as if he has had the foretaste of a vision, but never the vision itself – yet a tremendous lust for this vision remains in his soul, and it is from this that he derives his equally tremendous eloquence of desire and craving . . . The fact that he never reached his goal benefits his fame. (WP 79)

Failure is a kind of success, while error is as significant as truth – for Nietzsche, endlessness can be located in any possibility. Stephen strives towards such infinity, musing in “Proteus”: “Endless, would it be mine, form of my form?” (60). He struggles to maintain Nietzsche’s epistemological multiplicitousness throughout Ulysses, his aversion to a single, totalizing view of the world and love of the mysterious. Stephen genuinely wants to damn death and live life. Thus his stream of consciousness grapples with the value of not-knowing; often, perplexingly, pronouncing and negating certain statements. “If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, not a door,” Stephen determines, adding: “Shut your eyes and see” (U 45). Perception and illumination can now take place with the eyes closed, in a dark both figurative and literal. Joyce too dabbles with totalities and narrative systematics, insisting on narrative parallax – most of the time – and following Homer’s Odyssey to a highly subjective letter. Nor did he believe in absolute aesthetic comprehension, asking an acquaintance who claimed not to comprehend Eliot’s “The Waste Land” if she really needed to understand it (Ellmann 495). Similarly, Nietzsche makes, then immediately counters, grand claims: “I should like to form an image of the inner world too, by means of some schema, and thus triumph over intellectual confusion . . . I know that I know nothing of myself” (324). But for all of their professed leanings toward the enigmatic, Nietzsche’s will-to-power and Stephen’s desire for certainty remain couched in the belief that “interpretation and subjectivity are . . . essential” (WP 303).25 In intellectual and creative writings so attuned to the desire to know, affirmations of certainty and other totalities inevitably creep in. There can be no question that Nietzsche associates knowledge with power; he claims that a full grasp of the will allows individuals to transcend themselves. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche argues that individuals must surmount themselves by yielding to their bodies and practicing active self-forgetfulness (4–6). When this overcoming of the intellectual, rational “I” is complete, the subject “will shudder with divine desires” and become Nietzsche’s ideal, dramatically sovereign being, the Übermensch – a term roughly translated as “overman” (Z 141). Embraced, the will to power fundamentally changes the self and its perception of all the values modern Western society holds dear, among them God, truth, morality, and reason. The Übermensch undergoes a

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transvaluation, what Gilles Deleuze describes as “a change and reversal in the element from which the value of values derives” (Nietzsche and Philosophy 163). Artists, saints, philosophers, and geniuses are overmen – those who stand out from the herd, those who embrace noble, mad passion. While Nietzsche’s transcendence is not metaphysical as in Schopenhauer – it is inspired by, and ultimately relegated to, quotidian experience – it nevertheless affirms an autonomous view of the self. As Nietzsche’s chapter headings in Ecce Homo suggest, his philosophy regularly venerates the individual; though arguably parodic, “Why I am so Wise,” “Why I am so Clever,” and “Why I am a Destiny” speak to the importance of the ego in Nietzsche’s work. And as much as he considers daily bodily experience integral to knowledge, Nietzsche still demands that longing be grand and extreme; his will to power is an exuberant, overwhelming passion. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche proclaims, “Nothing offends against a philosopher’s taste more than man, in so far as he desires” (58). Nietzsche knew the value of interrogating desire, and his willobsessed work undermines both philosophical reason and the pursuit of an autonomous subject. For, while the Übermensch suggests a unified self, Nietzsche is the first to point out that the subject is merely a “fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum: but it is we who first created the ‘similarity’ of these states . . . ” (WP 269). He asks us to consider the possibility that within the single subject might exist “a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and consciousness in general” (WP 270). Nietzsche thus denounces the homogeneity of the traditional philosophical subject, even as he is slow to acknowledge its dependence on others, upon whom he regularly heaps scorn. For Nietzsche, a “personal infinity” lies between the self and others; the self estranged from itself is his preferred relationship – the Übermensch is described as travelling through his own hell to his own heaven (GS 165, 191). But as Judith Butler points out in The Psychic Life of Power, subjects cannot self-reflect without an originary, external influence: “The desire to persist in one’s own being requires submitting to a world of others that is fundamentally not one’s own (a submission . . . which frames and makes possible the desire to be)” (28).26 As such, Nietzsche’s philosophical achievement remains less a newly unified self than a relentless skepticism about traditional formulations of subjectivity. This skepticism is, of course, an intellectual revolution; Nietzsche’s philosophy foregrounds the modernist interest in re-examining the subject through the lenses of time and desire. But ultimately, like Stephen Dedalus, Nietzsche is not fully prepared to embrace the daily, banal unencompassable in the same way as Leopold Bloom

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and the philosophy that Bloom’s thinking resembles, that of Emmanuel Levinas. Bloom fulfils what is nascent in Stephen: the full recognition of the endlessness of the desire to know, via its extension beyond the subject.

Bloom and Levinas Modernist writer Ezra Pound famously encouraged his intellectual and creative contemporaries to break from tradition and “make it new.” By contrast, late modernist philosopher Levinas argues that the desire for novelty is not at all revolutionary, but forms the basis of traditional approaches to knowledge. Levinas believes that human beings constantly crave the new; in his essay “The Old and the New” he equates this longing with “a Desire for the other” (TO 121). Bound to itself, subjectivity cannot yield anything in the way of novelty; as such, the pursuit of the unknown must inevitably take us out of ourselves. For Levinas, the Western emphasis on linear time perpetuates the error that the self is the centre of knowledge, as linearity leads us to understand the modern as a “definitively acquired freedom,” and the past as an existence that knowledge readily assimilates: “According to the European tradition . . . everything that comes about in the human psychism finishes through knowledge and through self-knowledge” (124). As a consequence, we assume that everything extraneous to ourselves can be absorbed into our own realm of understanding, that it has no existence unto itself. Unlike Stephen Dedalus, Levinas does not believe we can control what we perceive. Nor does Levinas agree with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who argue that art and knowledge are inextricable. In a direct counter to Nietzsche’s assertion that “knowing is creating,” Levinas insists that art and learning are separate realms because the subject can never exert any kind of deific control over otherness, which lies always beyond grasp. Levinas believes transcendence does not come through the mastery of knowledge but with complete disengagement from the self. After all, he asks, “what can come to the knowing mind that is not already contained in it?” (134). Levinas extends this problem beyond the subjective: “What can modern humanity expect from a future which it believes is held in the present of its absolute knowledge, where nothing is any longer exterior to consciousness?” (126). Levinas presents the other as the site of the new and infinite, the self as dead-ended sameness. Levinas’s epistemological considerations may well read as a critique of Bloom, a man described in “Cyclops” as “Mr. Knowall” and in

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“Ithaca” as “a conscious reactor against the void incertitude” (U 408, 866). “Eumaeus” reinforces this perception, as Bloom waxes on authoritatively about everything from geographical determinism to rumpled stockings. Bloom is described as having a scientific temperament, but his thoughts emerge from a “fluctuating incertitude” – his knowing guise is a nervous habit. And it is difficult to say whether his assertions or his prolixity annoy the “Cyclops” narrator more: “I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a straw from the bloody floor . . . he’d talk about it for an hour so he would and talk steady” (410). Bloom likes to elucidate the relationship between tennis and blood circulation; he also intones about Spinoza to Molly. Traditional systems of knowledge interest him. But for Bloom, as in Joyce’s allusive reworking of Genesis in “Oxen of the Sun,” “eating of the tree forbid” must never “pretermit humanity upon any condition whatsoever” – consideration for others precedes his desire for knowledge (533). In this Bloom accords with Levinas, for whom epistemological change occurs only with the realization that the self alone is meaningless, as the self is merely a vessel defined by otherness. Systematic knowledge accumulates, organizes, and engulfs the other; Levinas counsels us to work “against the tendency to equalise the new, as if it were only an unknown to know and not the other to desire in its inassimilable alterity – that is to say, to love rather than to equalize by knowledge” (TO 129). For Levinas, ethics precede epistemology; his term “alterity” refers to the infinite unknowability of the other, about whom no assumptions can be made. When Bloom attempts to assert various forms of knowledge in “Cyclops” he invariably finds himself returning to Levinas’s ethical starting-point, repudiating anti-Semitic injustice, force, history, insult, and hatred. All these, for Bloom, are “the very opposite of that that is really life” which he defines, when asked, as love (U 432). While Bloom is not driven by an explicit ethical urge, he does believe that the conscience of the knower lies too easily with the self, and should be disrupted by what Levinas labels the “for the other” – the consideration of otherness before all else (“Beyond Intentionality” 100).27 Speculating on the circumstances surrounding the Gold Cup race on 16 June 1904, Bloom is confounded by “the difficulties of interpretation.” All day various figures in Ulysses have sought information about the potential winner; many bet on a horse named Throwaway based on a mistaken interpretation of a statement Bloom makes about a newspaper he is about to abandon. Still trying to ascertain what really took place, Bloom realizes that the many variables involved preclude “a successful interpretation.” But Bloom, so regularly given to concrete argumentation elsewhere, is nevertheless satisfied, “to have brought a positive gain to

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others. Light to the gentiles” (790). This rumination about horse-betting sparks Bloom’s version of claritas – a quotidian illumination differing from Stephen’s in its selflessness. In Ulysses, it is Bloom’s structural function to draw the reader out of subjectivity – namely, Stephen’s. Kenner writes that the novel opens with the reader “so embroiled in [Stephen’s] subjectivity that nothing much is happening save internal events, alterations of cadence and image, gestures of a mobile ego. The book is commencing to be claustral, our pace of ingestion slow” – then Bloom arrives on the scene, with a force powerful enough, as Kenner argues, to change time: the clock goes back and the day begins anew (Kenner, Ulysses 41). That the other posits welcome novelty is one of Levinas’s primary premises; another is that otherness can change lived time. “Thought of the unencompassable, thought of the transcendent, thought of an otherness that refuses to admit of presence and simultaneity” interweaves the finite subject with an infinite unknown, generating an experience of the infinite within mortal beings (“Beyond Intentionality”113). Stephen does not recognize otherness, believing instead that “every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men . . . But always meeting ourselves” (U 273). Stephen sees himself in everyone, while Bloom seeks out difference: “He preferred himself to see another’s face and listen to another’s words by which potential narration was realised and kinetic temperament relieved” (802). Assertions of individuality do not interest Bloom. Instead, he suggests we are defined by relation: each one . . . is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only, and alone, whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating and repeating to infinity. (863)

Bloom learns by watching others, looking for differences that the “Ithaca” narrator exploits, continually commenting on the ineradicable breach between Bloom and Stephen: “the pair, poles apart as they were, both in schooling and in everything else . . . clashed” (733). Although united by a palpable desire to know one another, a desire that motivates their lengthy conversation in the wee hours of the morning, Stephen’s and Bloom’s perceptions will not – cannot – converge. In his tremendously commonplace way, Bloom understands that ignorance can be bliss. Envisioning a tour of a brewery, he thinks of the marvels therein, including rats in the vats, bloated and vomiting up drink. He then mentally exclaims, “Imagine drinking that! . . . Well of course if we knew all the things” (U 191). Bloom’s unfinished stream of consciousness is pregnant with things best left unthought and

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inconclusive; though comically horrific, his words remind us that the machinations of daily life – smooth or otherwise – are often predicated on a state of unknowing. For Levinas, desire for the unknown is fundamental as it breaks up totalizing systems of thought; claiming that this sort of totalization is best evinced in wartime, Levinas seeks a pursuit of knowledge that does not lead to such dire endpoints. In like fashion, Bloom expresses a longing to see another’s face and hear another’s voice; he is aware that otherness breaks up the totality of his self. These preferences run explicitly counter to Stephen’s bird-girl epiphany in Portrait; while Stephen longs to watch the girl on the strand, he does not care to hear her speak – the manifestation of her face, as discussed, is touched with only mortal, and not infinite, wonder. The face of the other provides the very basis of the Levinasian epiphany. Levinas uses the term “epiphany” in a manner antithetical to Stephen; for Levinas, epiphanies are not moments of absolute knowledge, but “unknowledge” experienced when we witness the foreverincomprehensible other, a moment encapsulated by the face-to-face exchange (TI 180, 290). The Levinasian epiphany of the face is a very literal, quotidian transcendence of the self, as it involves a recognition of, and complete acquiescence to, something beyond subjectivity; this transcendence does not affirm the self, but “requires a response,” even as it reveals the infinite (TI 290). Levinas writes, “Thought alert to the face of the other is the thought of an irreducible difference, a difference which is not a thematization and which disturbs the equilibrium of the impassable soul of knowing” (“Beyond Intentionality” 108). For Levinas, the epiphany of the face exceeds both perception and the known. On 16 June 1904, Bloom’s “magnetic face is favourably received by a wife, a nurse, and a maid” (U 851). Gertie MacDowell sends Bloom “a look, tense with suppressed meaning” – one imparting yearning (453). There is meaning in Bloom’s look too, so much that Gertie feels “very instinctively that he was like no-one else” (465). Indeed, Gertie might be said to achieve Stephen’s claritas and Levinas’s face-to-face simultaneously: “She looked at him a moment, meeting his glance, and a light broke in upon her” (475). But this exchange, while redolent of the fecundity Levinas posits in the relationship between subject and other, is a mock form of transcendence, in which anagnorisis is achieved by the revealing of Gertie’s knickers, a less than lofty form of knowledge. In “Eumaeus,” Stephen and Bloom “instinctively exchange meaning glances” – glances not meaningful but determining meaning itself (726). Equally poignant is this, after Bloom informs Stephen of Molly’s somnolent presence as they stand outside 7 Eccles Street: “Silent, each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces”

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(824). In this exchange, subject and object are blurred, and defined by relation. Each strives to understand the other, and self-knowledge is overtaken by a longing synonymous with Levinas’s articulation of the shared epiphany. “One can ask,” Levinas writes in “The Old and the New,” “if the human coincides with knowledge” (128). Bloom loves to be proximate to knowledgeability, but his proximity to humanity interests him more. He recognizes that life is not “infinitely perfectible” because filled with pain and loneliness, a list Bloom articulates that includes the grand – “the agonies of birth and death” – and the quotidian: the monotony of menstruation. Like Nietzsche, Bloom realizes that life takes precedence over formal knowledge, even as each depends on the other, and on the daily experiences and endless longings of the body. But, for all of his insistence on absorbing and disseminating facts, Bloom is most akin to Levinas in his perpetual readiness to “desist from speculation,” to navigate “the incertitude of the void,” and to defer to the “superior intelligence” of the other (817–18). It is this very deference that enables Bloom to ask why saltwater fish are not salty, to publicly and confusedly try to define a nation, and to proclaim love as the highest human ideal. Bloom’s knowledge reaches no end point, but starts with the epiphanic face of the other, encompassing only the unknowable, which is to say, the infinite, and infinitely sustaining, unencompassable.

Conclusions In depicting knowledge and art as inextricable, Joyce may well have drawn to some degree upon Aristotle, whom he read avidly as a young man. Aristotle describes all poetic arts as mimetic and believes imitation and learning are inseparable, writing: The impulse to imitate is inherent in man from his childhood; he is distinguished among the animals by being the most imitative of them, and he takes the first steps of his education by imitating. Every one’s enjoyment of imitation is also inborn. What happens with a work of art demonstrates this: though a thing itself is disagreeable to look at, we enjoy contemplating the most accurate representations of it – for instance, figures of the most despicable animals, or of human corpses. The reason for this lies in another fact: learning is a great pleasure, not only to philosophers but likewise to everyone else, however limited his gift for it may be. He enjoys looking at these representations, because in the act of studying them he is learning. (Poetics 20–1)

This association between perception and apprehension, with its attendant pleasures and reliance upon daily life, lies at the heart of epiphanic

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theory. Schopenhauer, Rachel Vinrace, and Stephen Dedalus articulate desires to perceive, understand, and render something completely; in their aesthetic theories, the yearning for total knowledge precedes consideration of the viability of absolutism. One critic describes Joyce’s early epiphanies as sympathetic to the artist’s mind, but hostile to the surrounding world, an attitude Joyce outgrew as he came to understand how the world is essential to artistic creation (Moliterno, Dialectics 86). Nietzsche puts it better: “The real world is unattainable, unprovable, uncompromisable, but the mere thought of it a consolation, an obligation, an imperative” (ToI 20). The desire to know what exceeds us runs deep, but affirmations of certainty inevitably prove mistaken. Joyce’s fictions increasingly affirm the inviolability of the unknowable world while simultaneously and deliberately unraveling a coherent sense of the self. Stephen moves from a Schopenhauerian perspective to one more Nietzschean; he is in turn juxtaposed to Bloom for whom emotion and compassion precede all. As in Hardy’s fictions of obsessive love and ambition, in Joyce, extreme passion proves a productive catalyst: after the death of his mother, Stephen is faced with an absolute as rigid and uncompromising as his own aesthetic. His grief precipitates an overwhelming, impossible desire to unknow the finality of this event. Though Stephen’s desire to unknow his mother’s death cannot be realized it does facilitate his recognition of the infinite practices and pleasures of uncertainty, and in turn, of other irresolvable, daily longings such as risibility. Joyce’s trajectory parallels the philosophical approaches to knowledge taking place just prior and contemporaneous to his own writing: he moves from a subjective, epiphanic, intellectual absolutism to an other-based, desirous precedence of the unknown over the known. As in twentieth-century philosophical discourse, Joyce’s work increasingly rejects watertight theories of truth, certainty, reason, beauty, and subjectivity. Throughout, epiphanies continue to surface; though parodied, they remain the basis of Stephen’s drive to know the world through art. Joyce’s process underscores Terence Cave’s work on recognition, where he argues that anagnorisis might be read as a vehicle for themes of knowledge in literature; in Recognition: A Study in Poetics Cave suggests that in the modernist period, literary parody of total knowledge becomes a common means of managing the burgeoning sense that certainty is implausible, even undesirable. But he is quick to point out that parody is partially imbued with false pretence, as it is laden with nostalgia and a longing for the reassurances of past securities and sureties – what Nietzsche describes as the consolation provided by a belief in reality. It is partly because of this very nostalgia that Woolf never loses sight

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of the illuminated moment of being throughout her career. Hence, in To the Lighthouse Mrs Ramsay tries to “mak[e] of the moment something permanent,” even as the process is not a “great revelation” but is based on the “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” – a phrasing that recalls Joyce’s illuminating matches throughout Ulysses (218). Little revelations of this kind regularly brighten Woolf’s fiction, but are not usually triumphant or transcendent: beauty, the narrator of To the Lighthouse suggests, “stilled life – froze it,” even as “the urgency of the moment always missed its mark” (239–40). This same spirit of uncertainty permeates Lily Briscoe’s epiphany at the end of the novel: in spite of repeatedly asserting that she has completed her picture, Lily understands that her work is necessarily an imperfect “attempt at something” (TTL 281). And Lily’s famous artistic vision is rooted in otherness: she paints only after meeting Mr. Ramsay’s “demand on her,” his “imperious need” for acknowledgment and sympathy (199). Starting out on her painting, Lily recalls figures from the past, Mrs. Ramsay among them; by the time she finishes, she and Mr. Carmichael – he whom Lily acknowledges knowing only in “outline” (262) – have finished scouring the horizon to track the outward journey of the Ramsay boat. Whether painting a picture or relaying shared information, the family and friends who return to St Ives in Mrs. Ramsay’s absence are markedly questioning: uncertainty permeates their creativity, their knowledge, and their relations with others. As in her narratives, Woolf walks a fine line between venerating and disparaging intellectual and creative illumination; her well-known argument from “Modern Fiction” claims that “life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us” (106) from birth to death. But following this assertion, Woolf asks, “Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration and complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?” (ibid.). Unlike Stephen’s claritas, Woolf’s theory is couched in a series of qualifiers: the author is meant to convey not an absolute, but variations difficult to pin down or pierce; Woolf keeps a desire for the unknown fully in view. And Woolf’s narrative recognition of uncertainty becomes steadily more pronounced; she moves from implicit critiques of Rachel’s aesthetic surety to Lily’s overtly other-inflected pursuit of the unknown. Come her final novel, Between the Acts, Woolf is fully prepared, as was Joyce in Ulysses, to mock certainty and aesthetic ecstasy. Writer–director Miss La Trobe is the vehicle for this parody; she who longs to escape from her endless striving, and believes that “a vision imparted was relief from agony” (BA 72). As the audience murmurs the faintest approval of her

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play, La Trobe magnificently contends that she “makes rise up from its amorphous mass a recreated world. Her moment was upon her – her glory” (108). But the audience is ultimately baffled by her meaning, and as such, La Trobe’s overwrought response is scorned by the narrative tone and fellow characters alike. In other words, La Trobe’s will to a transcendent end is as thoroughly denounced as that of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. La Trobe even participates in her own denunciation; at the pageant’s close she realizes “illusion had failed. ‘This is death,’ she murmured, ‘death’” (99). More problematic than La Trobe’s failed illusion is her aesthetic absolutism, which is notably – even predictably – short-lived. In their writings, Woolf and Joyce gradually abandon an emphatic longing to know all that enables their protagonists to affirm their autonomy; desires of this nature repeatedly evoke either literal or figurative mortality and lead to narrative dead-ends. Satiation and certainty fail, but mistakenness proves enticing: in Joyce’s Stephen, it sparks a will-tounknow followed by a longing for uncertainty quietly and increasingly present in most of Woolf’s novels. “Invincible ignorance,” proclaims a smug priest in Joyce’s Ulysses, out walking and surveying his diocese (283). While the priest’s statement is meant to damn the lay people of Dublin, it resonates much further: unknowing proliferates endlessly through Woolf’s and Joyce’s literatures. This paradoxically triumphant embrace of uncertainty precipitates an interest in other quotidian forms of longing that similarly go unfulfilled, yet sustain when directed away from the self, longings such as risibility, waiting, and, as in the focus of my next chapter, the desire to escape boredom.

Notes 1. This finality laden pronouncement first appears in Joyce’s Paris notebooks in 1903, where he writes, “Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end” (Joyce, “Aesthetics” in Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing 104). 2. Ashton Nichols writes that Greek literature regularly includes deific manifestations, or stories “testif[ying] to the interpenetration of the divine and the mundane.” Nichols reports that “healing epiphanies” are also recorded in Egyptian papyruses, where the sight of gods is reputed to restore the fatally ill (The Poetics of Epiphany 6). These epiphanies invoke powerful change, while Joyce’s epiphanies record stasis, thereby compounding his inversion of the term’s traditional etymology. 3. This thinking is not new: as Rachel Falconer argues, revelatory knowledge has long been considered briefly conveyed, complete unto itself, and generative of stasis (“Telescoping Timescapes” 451). The deathly implications are

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4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

aptly summarized by Beja, who argues that transcending time “is, in effect, the same as living outside of time” (58). Critics who tie Stephen’s aesthetics to his sexual maturation often focus on the potentially sexualized detail of his exchanges with Cranly and Lynch (see MacArthur, “Stephen’s Sexual Aesthetics”). David Weir has also written on the sexuality of the bird-girl epiphany and Stephen’s artistry as compensation for womb-envy (“A Womb of One’s Own” James Joyce Quarterly 31 (1994): 207–31). More typical is Joshua Jacobs’s thesis about the highly wrought epiphanies in Chapter 4 of Portrait: “What is chiefly at stake in these climactic passages is Stephen’s alternating mastery and helplessness before his nascent sexuality and the extent to which he can define his intellectual and physical self as discrete from his context” (“Joyce’s Epiphanic Mode” 21). In Posterior Analytics, Aristotle considers thoughts originating in chance lesser than those resulting from the pursuit of an end, or aim (The Complete Works 1: 95a, 156–7, 1–10). Similarly, Aquinas writes in Summa Theologiae: “Now the complete actuality at which the intellect arrives is complete knowledge, in which things are known definitely and distinctly, whereas in its incomplete actuality is imperfect knowledge, in which things are known indistinctly and confusedly” (Vol. 12. [Question 85, article 3, 65]). The New Directions edition reads, “You «say you’re emancipated» but, in my opinion, you haven’t got beyond the first book of Genesis yet.” I have excised the editorial punctuation, in which guillemots indicate words that were crossed out or altered but still readable, to enhance readability. See Ellmann’s James Joyce (85). I have elided the editorial punctuation here; the unredacted version reads: “I know the verb «to be» in their language.” Kenner sounds another note of finality regarding this epiphany. Noting that chiasmus “celebrate[s] . . . finality” and informs the structure of Portrait, he points out that it makes a last appearance with the final description of the bird-girl: “But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face” (Joyce’s Voices 68, P 171). At one juncture, Schopenhauer rather dramatically suggests that “in the fierceness and intensity of its desire [the will] buries its teeth in its own flesh” (WWR I 354). For other examples of Schopenhauer’s tendency to alternate “will” with “desire,” see WWR I 127, 164, and WWR II 206. Wayne Sheeks points out that despite Schopenhauer’s stated preference for knowledge, his philosophy rests on an unacknowledged interdependence of knowledge and will: without the will, the world would not exist, but without the intellect, knowledge of the will, and by extension the world, would not exist (“Schopenhauer’s Solution” 74). For Stephen’s suggestion that only scurrilous art engages the emotions, see Portrait 205; for Schopenhauer’s, see The Pessimist’s Handbook. See Schopenhauer’s “Additional Remarks on the Doctrine of the Vanity of Existence” in Parerga and Paralipomena (284). Joyce discussed Schopenhauer with his students (Ellmann, James Joyce 342), and Mary and Padraic Column write that he once referred to himself and a companion as “two frightful examples of the will to live” – an

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16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

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unmistakable reference to Schopenhauerian thought (qtd. in Evans, David. “Stephen and the Theory of Literary Kinds”). Schopenhauer also figures in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as part of the fable of Ondt and the Gracehoper. Schopenhauer and Stephen perceive asceticism as a futile but important counter to the passions. With comic incompetence, Stephen attempts a fully ascetic existence in the fourth chapter of Portrait, while Schopenhauer advocates an ascetic life as the only conceivable response to the incessant will, even if long-term renunciation of sordid desires remains impossible. With regards to ends-based art: Beja points out that both Schopenhauer and Stephen articulate hierarchies of literary genres based on degrees of impersonality, in which drama occupies the ruling position because “most objective” (31). It should also perhaps be noted that Woolf’s Rachel espouses the same view about music as Schopenhauer, suggesting that it is the highest, most transcendent artform. Stephen and Schopenhauer also agree that art is not obliged to morally elevate or instruct. In this regard, some critics consider Schopenhauer the forefather of the “art for art’s sake” credo of the decadents. Famous proponents of the theory that art should work only towards its own ends include Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, both widely noted as having exerted enormous influence on the young Joyce; in Stephen Hero, Stephen’s college president assumes he has fallen under the spell of decadence (95). On Schopenhauer and decadence, see T. J. Diffey, “Schopenhauer’s Account of Aesthetic Experience”. “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (U 42). Many critics also recognize the importance of Schopenhauer’s influence on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century psychoanalysis because he is among the first to centralize human will (see Eagleton “The Death of Desire” 159, and Christopher Janaway, Schopenhauer 33–4). Scholes’s article sparked a critical storm. But as in John Paul Riquelme’s article, “Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Transforming the Nightmare of History” the argument that the epiphanies eventually peter out continues. In Joyce’s Voices, Kenner asks how Molly moved all of the heavy furniture in the living room and points out that we never find out who McIntosh is or the date of Bloom’s birthday. In the Gilbert schema, the first three episodes do not correspond with bodily organs, an addition occurring only with the entry of Bloom. As Jean Kimball argues, in this regard, Bloom represents life, “is the flesh that completes the spirit in Stephen” (“Love and Death in Ulysses” 156). In Time and Western Man, Wyndham Lewis also explicitly relates the modernist subjective “time-mind” – well evinced by Stephen’s transcendent aesthetics – to advertisement, as both glorify “the life-of-the-moment, with no reference beyond itself and no absolute or universal value” (11). For an essay equating the commodity to the epiphany, and Stephen’s epiphanic theory to a marketing theory of consumerism, see Leonard, “The History of Now.” The losing of Bloom’s virginity is a story that also parodies Stephen’s birdgirl epiphany and claritas. The girl’s very birdlike name is “Bridie,” she and

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23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

Bloom are described as “entwined in nethermost darkness, the willer with the willed and in an instant (fiat!) light shall flood the world” (541). Stephen’s “nothung” comes from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. Wagner invents this term and uses it as a name for his protagonist’s magic sword (Kiberd, “Notes” 1146). The closest English equivalents of “nothung” are terms such as “needhood” or “needful.” See in particular Nietzsche’s “Schopenhauer as Educator.” The full quotation cited here includes Nietzsche’s oft-repeated condemnation of the Kantian noumenon: “That things possess a constitution in themselves quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity, is a quite idle hypothesis: it presupposes that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential, that a thing freed from all relationships would still be a thing” (WP 303). Nietzsche tacitly acknowledges Butler’s position: his philosophical rebellion, for instance, is self-consciously situated as working against the originary influence of his Hellenic predecessors. Bloom’s ethics may well be vague because, as Steven Connor argues, Ulysses asks, then deliberately evades, conclusive answers to ethical questions. In Theory and Cultural Value, Connor takes up the Derridean critique of Levinas discussed in the introduction to this book; he believes that Levinas’s otherness cannot be as completely unknown as Levinas suggests. But he also suggests that Ulysses, like Levinas’s philosophy, posits the question of how to foreground ethics without delineating a specific set of criteria, or a systematic, totalizing approach to the ethical. This refusal of system is consistent with Levinas’s – and Bloom’s – openness to the unknown.

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Chapter 2

Haunted by Boredom

In the midst of his knowledge-driven pursuit of dead ends, Stephen Dedalus argues, “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (P 215). Stephen’s spirit-artist creates in a rather clinical fashion, being both emotionally indifferent and tidy: “paring” connotes the removal of matter considered superficial and the act of trimming or making neat. Shortly after Stephen’s very early morning departure from 7 Eccles Street, Bloom also removes a nail. While Bloom does not so much pare as tear, his more brutal process similarly engenders a creative act in which he plays a near-deific role. Noticing that his feet ache, Bloom takes off his shoes and socks; shortly after doing so, the narrator tells us that he “picked at and gently lacerated the protruding part of [his] great toenail” (837). This procedure is the culmination of a whole series of similarly restless activities: left alone, Bloom debates whether to watch the sunrise, wanders into his front room, lights incense, surveys the objects on his mantelpiece, his reflection in the mirror above it, and that of each of the twenty-two volumes on his bookshelves. Realizing he feels “inhibitory pressure” from his collar and waistcoat, he removes these items, as well as his trousers, shirt, and vest (835). He then involuntarily examines the abdominal scar left from a recent bee-sting, scratches himself, takes a shilling out of his waistcoat, and mentally compiles the day’s budget. It is at this juncture that Bloom begins his impromptu pedicure. Alone, Leopold Bloom is bored. This is not Bloom’s first experience of ennui on 16 June 1904: “Bore this funeral affair,” he remarks on his way to Paddy Dignam’s burial (103). Again, at lunchtime, wandering about Dublin and contemplating disparities between landlords and tenants, he thinks, “This is the very worst hour of the day . . . Dull, gloomy, hate this hour” (208). But in “Ithaca” Bloom’s boredom is exacerbated by the fact that Stephen has abandoned him; solitary at home, he is left to his

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own devices. His activities underscore his isolation: he stares at his own reflection, is briefly bemused by his statue of Narcissus, a fellow figure of self-absorption, and strives to improve his own comfort. Bloom’s listlessness is resolved by the removal of his toenail, and still more specifically, when he “raised the part lacerated to his nostrils and inhaled the odour of the quick, then with satisfaction threw away the lacerated unguical fragment.” The odor reminds him of other such bored instances in his life, particularly his boyhood nights spent at Mrs Ellis’s school, where picking at his toes prompted instances of “ambitious meditation” (837). Bloom’s toenails, in short, are a utopiate: “a drug [inducing] fantasies of a utopian existence; a euphoriant.” On this occasion, the toenail is the catalyst for Bloom’s contemplation of his “ultimate ambition”: the purchase of “Flowerville,” a fictional, minutely imagined, luxury-filled farming estate. Full-scale realization of “Flowerville” appears impossible, a suspicion compounded by its perfect systems and conditions, including a beehive arranged on “humane principles” and a resident – Bloom himself – who labors all day, but is, at sunset, “without excessive fatigue” presumably because he so enjoys “ameliorating the soil, multiplying wisdom, achieving longevity” (841). Here Bloom anticipates rising in stature from gardener to groundsman to magistrate or justice of the peace. Via Flowerville, Bloom authors a self-serving utopia. Like Stephen’s nail-paring artist, he is a willful God of creation; his creative process preserves his own interests and authority. In his narration of Bloom’s movement from boredom to fashioner of his most desirable existence, Joyce plays on a long-standing tradition. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton begins by articulating “a new Atlantis . . . in which [his narrator] will freely domineere, build Citties, make Lawes, Statutes” (85). Matthew Green’s long poem The Spleen (1737) similarly explores melancholy and concludes with a utopia akin to Bloom’s Flowerville, one involving a well-maintained farmhouse adjacent to a city, replete with nymphs and dryads, who will, “In measur’d motions frisk about” to Pan’s own “melodious pipes” (26). Come the nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard’s “The Rotation of Crops” (1843) parodies the bored individual’s creation of personally pleasing worlds. Certain that his native Denmark founders on a boredom crisis through state neglect of amusement, Kierkegaard’s essay outlines a utopia in which the Danes abandon their debts and borrow more money for fun, games, prostitutes, and theaters. In this new Denmark, everyone will give up private property and a steady income, but Kierkegaard carefully articulates his own exclusion from this enforced privation, a decision he explains – tongue firmly in cheek – as being based upon his foundational role as interest generator.

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Kierkegaard’s essay foreshadows many twentieth-century theoretical approaches towards boredom. He presents boredom as fundamental to existence, a contemporary concern, and a state that takes us continually back to ourselves. As a cure for the affliction Kierkegaard recommends that we cultivate arbitrariness, or pursue a spectacularly interesting, intensive idleness directed at self-amusement, like a child at school endlessly entertained by a stray insect. In Either/Or he writes, “The more consistently a person knows how to sustain his arbitrariness, the more amusing the combinations become . . . the eye with which one sees actuality must be changed continually” (299). In arguing that the bored individual must determine to see the world anew, Kierkegaard exposes the heart of a long-held interrelation between ennui and creativity, one implicit in Bloom’s movement from toenail to utopia. The idea that boredom is a conduit not only to utopias but to the visionary more generally emerges as early as Aristotle, who claims that melancholy is often inextricable from genius. In Melancholy & Society, Wolf Lepenies argues that the relationship between artistic production and stultifying ennui was strengthened in the eighteenth century, during which time creative genius came to overtake original genius in association with melancholy. But the extremes of melancholy are not a pre-eminent modernist focus; as discussed in Chapter 1, writers in this period are increasingly aware that passionate bids to transcend the self through intellectual or artistic genius tend to be dead-ended. Instead, modernist depictions of ennui foreground boredom, a state more banal and common, even endemic. In his writing, Joyce regularly uses self-reflection to signal boredom: in “Ithaca,” Bloom’s interest flags at the sight of himself in the mirror; in “Sirens,” the narrator playfully intones: “Bored Bloom tambourined gently with I am just reflecting fingers on flat pad Pat brought” (U 360). Reflected in a mirror or reflecting on his own thoughts, Joyce presents a protagonist bored by his own self. By contrast, narrative represents an attempt to get beyond the tedious confines of the self, both because the written word is implicitly and explicitly engaged with an audience, and because no matter how subjective, writing must consider the relationship between selves and an external world.1 Kierkegaard’s parody, for instance, relies upon an other both implicated in and excised from his essay: wry humor emerges from his refusal to consider any one else’s desires in his plan to develop national interest. While Flowerville is by turns similarly subjective, Bloom is unable to remain focused on the accumulation of luxurious goods in his ideal abode. Instead, we are told that, when a justice of the peace, Bloom will use his legal authority against trespassers, “instigators of international persecution, all perpetuators of international animosities [and] all menial molesters of domestic

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conviviality” (843). This will to eliminate crimes global and domestic is consistent with Bloom’s schemes for social improvement throughout Ulysses, his concern, as noted above, about inequities like those between landlord and tenant.2 Bloom’s mundanely-inspired Flowerville makes explicit what is tacit in Kierkegaard’s boredom cure: the need to recognize otherness. For Bloom, this recognition of a realm beyond the self can be associated with a refusal of satiation; as he presciently observes, “too much happy bores” (358).3 Yearnings often prove most productive when unmet, and Bloom, who desires the infinities of incertitude, also recognizes the latent plenitude of other endless, shared daily longings. Like Joyce, Woolf explores the creative possibilities of boredom in her work, both as a personally loathed experience worth observing and by her portrayals of boredom as a self-reflective state resolved only by a movement toward interesting, unpredictable otherness. As such, Woolf’s work both belongs to and expands philosophical and historical considerations of boredom, even as it reflects the way she, Joyce, and Stein increasingly treat many forms of quotidian desire. Woolf did not suffer bores gladly: in her journals she repeatedly denounces dull figures like her sister-in-law, or her most ardent readers: “unhappily, people who come all the way from London & walk ten miles for the chance of seeing one are almost always bores” (Diary 1: 296). Kierkegaard’s cultivation of arbitrariness as a response to boredom and the boring is everywhere in Woolf’s writing: most of her novels begin with bids to alleviate character ennui, and she often labors to demonstrate how things presumed banal – marked walls, snails – might in fact be interesting. In addition, it is an explicit part of her creative process to consider states of tedium or languorous “non-being.” For Woolf, boredom is best resolved by desire, and specifically, the desire to create. Desire and boredom have long been considered opposite and inextricable; thinkers as diverse as Schopenhauer, Rousseau, and Barthes are in agreement here.4 In “On Being Bored” Adam Phillips clarifies how boredom includes yearning as part of its very substance, because it is always accompanied by “that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire” (71). In Woolf, this yearning is consistently creative in nature; her own authorial longings were compounded by the tedium of enforced bed rest following her illnesses. Perhaps as a consequence, unsuccessful but happy artists form a consistent theme in her work, as best represented by the melancholic Orlando, who writes “The Oak Tree” for centuries. For Woolf, as ultimately for Orlando, the artistic end-product is less consequential than the endless fascinations of the creative process. In Orlando Woolf revisits the longstanding connection between melancholy and creativity, but her focus eventually becomes boredom itself.

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Of specific interest here is her participation in a pattern overlooked in discussions of boredom: namely, the treatment of time as a spectral presence haunting the bored individual. Orlando’s lengthy lifespan speaks to the fact that time is the primary companion of the bored, a time defined by a particularly stagnant present, one divorced from past and future, monstrously inverted, infinite. In historical, lay, and philosophical descriptions of Langeweile – “The German Langeweile, literally the lengthening and lingering of the while (Weile), captures effortlessly the character of this process in a way which the English rendering of this term as ‘boredom’ cannot” (Parvis 67) – time is repeatedly described as an anonymous being – one that haunts us, one we feel compelled to kill – a spectre that reduces our sense of self through objectification, and occasionally, makes available an opportunity to recognize existence in its entirety. Known as the demon of noontide in ascetic writings, a time spirit binds discussions of melancholia and boredom from the fourth to the twentieth centuries, a trajectory including figures such as Nietzsche and Heidegger. This spirit directs the bored subject’s interest away from him- or herself, a role still more pivotal in Emmanuel Levinas’s early writings on ennui, which describe a spectral time as part of his general refusal of the philosophical drive towards subjective autonomy, the very drive Elizabeth Goodstein, in Experience Without Qualities: Modernity and Boredom – a work to which I shall return – identifies as lying at the heart of twentieth-century boredom. In this century, the demon of noontide is less overwhelming, authoritative specter from beyond than self-generated, spirit monster in a domestic closet. But just as Joyce’s iterations of a desire to know become increasingly banal, and paradoxically, increasingly significant, so too does the normalization of a ghostly time become central to the philosophy of the period and Woolf’s literature, largely in response to widespread social dissatisfaction with the superabundance of the mundane. In this chapter, I detail Woolf’s preoccupation with the philosophical issues inherent to boredom, particularly her focus on the temporality of ennui, and the relationship between the bored self and otherness. These issues are foregrounded in Orlando, but her little-studied short story “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection” most cogently brings them to fruition. Employing the same motif of bored self-reflection as Joyce, this story pits the perception of ennui as a conduit toward a self-affirming vision against a rejection of the inherent dullness of continually acknowledging the self, a process elucidated here by considerations of Heidegger’s visionary ennui and Levinas’s reworking of bored subjectivity. “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” is an exceptional example of Woolf’s interest in boredom because it articulates a distinctly

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apparitional time and because of its oscillations between two distinct ideological approaches towards boredom. What emerges is a sense that the boredom behind Woolf’s creative desires – both authorial and fictional – is informed by a longing to abandon the stultifying sameness of selfhood for the endless unknowns of otherness. In other words, Woolf’s presentation of boredom follows the same ideological transitions as do her considerations of the yearning to know discussed in Chapter 1; as we will see in Chapter 4, these same transitions inform her later portrayals of anticipation.

Gauging Boredom Boredom is a noun difficult to define; Adam Phillips underscores the slipperiness of the term with his observation that it is necessary to “speak not of boredom, but of the boredoms” (82). The multiplicitousness of boredom is echoed by an extensive terminology: related words include tedium, languor, acedia, melancholy, and ennui. Some, like Reinhard Kuhn in The Demon of Noontide, make a hierarchy of these terms, in which ennui is the most central. For Kuhn, ennui is a state of inner emptiness effecting an immediate disinterest in reality and excludes forms of boredom more and less extreme, like standing in line, housewifery, and anomie – complete loss of the will to live. Plato’s monotonous harmony and Aristotle’s genius-related melancholy aside, Kuhn argues ennui gains real momentum in the Christian era, during which it is known as acedia – a combination of boredom and sloth betokening spiritual impotence – and is elevated to one of the seven deadly sins. In her literary history of boredom, Patricia Meyer Spacks claims ennui refers to a feeling of superiority over one’s environment coupled with an enduring, pessimistic judgment of the universe. Boredom, by contrast, she describes as a brief, more immediate response to one’s surroundings (Spacks Boredom). What Lepenies, Spacks, and Kuhn agree upon is the etymological and experiential interrelation of boredom, melancholy, and ennui. In Experience Without Qualities, Goodstein takes issue with many traditional approaches to melancholy and boredom, and particularly with what she considers an erroneous conflation of disparate boredom terminology and an oversimplification of its causes. Although used interchangeably with “boredom,” Goodstein maintains that “melancholy” signals a “genuine reflection upon the meaning of human existence [that] is the province of the leisured few” (55). While Kierkegaard parodies this elitism, hints of it surface quite genuinely in Woolf, who is fond of statements such as “We pay the penalty for our rung in society by

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infernal boredom” (Diary 5: 357). Additionally, Goodstein attacks the longstanding philosophical presumption that melancholy is the common ground of the human condition, one evident in Plato’s Phaedrus, where he writes “absolute ennui is nothing but life laid bare when it contemplates itself with lucidity” (qtd. in Kuhn 339). Instead, Goodstein insists that ennui is a concept both privileged and historically constituted. “Boredom” is a post-Enlightenment term, a consequence of increases in secularism, industrialization, urbanization, and political reform – all leading to what Goodstein labels a “democratization of skepticism”: As the conditions of mass leisure emerged, an initially elitist discourse of subjective disaffection gradually took hold in popular culture, so that by the early twentieth century the experience of ennui had become truly universal. While a century earlier, melancholy had been cultivated as a sign of spiritual distinction, this modern boredom signified, if anything, the lack of an inner life . . . The contemporary terror of boredom, which testifies to its apparent inevitability, is saturated with the post-romantic resignation to a world in which neither work nor leisure can bring happiness to subjects who no longer hope for divine restitution in the next. (99)

Goodstein’s history charts a modernist-era sea change in the grandiosity of melancholy: no longer a form of spiritual inspiration, the status of melancholy is both reduced and elevated by being so widely experienced as everyday, banal boredom. Spacks makes a similar argument, suggesting that boredom becomes ever more entrenched in the nineteenth century, when personal fortitude, rather than God, was meant to overcome it – this secularization recalls yet again that the infinite is increasingly internalized in the modernist period, a process so central to its philosophy and literature, and in turn, to its explorations of prosaic desire. By the early twentieth century, Spacks claims causes internal and external were increasingly ascribed to boredom, which became a convenient point of reference for the disenfranchised – the unemployed, the under-educated – often in response to the widespread abandonment of tradition and community. Critics generally agree that boredom signifies an ideological crisis that reaches its zenith in the twentieth century, and that this crisis is often best represented in literature.5 But Goodstein stands apart in convincingly attributing the crisis to a pervasive Western cultural doubt, arguing that it stems from the difficulty of “generat[ing] an objective form of reflection on subjectivity” (418) – a problem that increasingly vexed thinkers from the early modern period forward, and one that is central to this book-length exploration of prosaic desires in literature. In short, for Goodstein, boredom is rooted in the impossibility of proving or sustaining a sense of autonomous subjectivity, and is thus primarily

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philosophical in nature. These fundamental relationships between ennui, twentieth-century literature, and philosophical discourse underpin the examination of Woolfian tedium that follows.

The Time Being Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, boredom becomes an increasingly central philosophical concern; philosophers hearken back to past formulations of melancholy even as they develop newlyattenuated understandings of contemporary boredom. Kierkegaard’s work was influenced by Schopenhauer, who considers “want and boredom . . . the twin poles of human life” (Essays and Aphorisms 45). Mentored by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche evinces a similar dissatisfaction with the proliferation of boredom within modern society, claiming that the education system teaches humanity to be a dutiful machine; Christianity Nietzsche considers a means of alleviating taught boredom. Nietzsche also deplores the masses – whom he famously labels the “herd” – for dull habit, “deep mediocrity,” and their smothering of life (GS 210). What then, is the alternative? Only this: the fullest conceivable embrace of the dull, desired and sought after. For this is surely what underpins Nietzsche’s formulation of the eternal return of the same: What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once more and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence . . . The eternal hourglass of existence is over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” (GS 194)

Nietzsche anticipates that this proposition will elicit either an unequalled despair, or a full embrace of demon and prospect as divine. Once eternal return is welcomed, life is irrevocably altered, as “the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight” (GS 194). This weight may in turn become the catalyst for an ongoing craving for eternal return, one that continually affirms the subject and the subject’s fate. Nietzsche does not condone the latter of these two options; he neither desires eternal sameness nor that such a concept should appear desirable. As he writes pejoratively in Ecce Homo, love of fate is proof positive that one wants nothing changed in all eternity. Stasis belongs to the herd, and is not the goal of the super-historical individual, the artist or the philosopher. For it is the Übermensch who is given the opportunity

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to recognize eternal recurrence, which affirms moment-to-moment existence and the larger cycle of the lifespan, setting in motion the possibility that a fully desirous individual can redefine temporal experience, including its tedium. As Debra B. Bergoffen argues in “Seducing Historicism,” Nietzsche sees boredom as one of the dangers of the present, as significant as the pervasive and destructive will to truth against which so much of his work rails: In the eternal return, action is predicated on the wisdom which understands that the future though the same as the present is yet unique in the way in which it repeats the eternal. The future is presented as a variation on a theme whose variegated re-presentation surprises us in its multiplicity of the same. (94)

People aware of historical repetition can transcend boredom, those who recognize that the value of history lies in inventing ingenious variations on a theme indubitably commonplace; here we witness another reworking of Aristotle’s association of melancholy and genius. This transcendence is accomplished by the will and not by knowledge; as we saw in Chapter 1, Nietzsche describes knowledge as part of the boring domain. It is the will to see the same differently that makes possible the transcendence of the same; just as Kierkegaard speaks of a perceptual cultivation of arbitrariness, so must Nietzsche’s super-historical being “[attend] to the play of appearances” (Bergoffen 94). As noted earlier, this willingness to perceive the mundane differently lies at the heart of creative endeavor, be it fictive or philosophical; here Nietzsche, like Kierkegaard, foresees the modernist artistic resolve to reconsider everyday banalities. While hearkening back to Aristotle, Nietzsche’s reconsideration is indubitably, prophetically modernist in tenor: his denunciation of state education, Christianity, and the masses as boring all speak to peculiarly contemporary anxieties about the role of the self in an increasingly secular and urban world. As does Nietzsche, Heidegger posits boredom as central to existence, an index of being, and a conceivable conduit to transcendence. Heidegger is enormously preoccupied with what boredom reveals about twentieth-century life; why does boredom exist, wonders Heidegger in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, “when world trade, technology, and the economy seize hold of man and keep him moving? And nevertheless we seek a role for ourselves . . . Is man himself now supposed to have become bored with himself?” (77). In this work, published two years after his landmark Being and Time, Heidegger postulates two fundamental forms of boredom: becoming bored – in which we are held by the thing that bores us – and being bored, in which “we

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are bored – almost as though the boredom came from us and as though the boredom continued to propagate itself” without external cause (92). We might become bored when waiting for a train that does not arrive on time, feeling restless and unable to read the book we carry with us. Being bored, by contrast, can entail an illusion of interest; Heidegger provides an example of a dinner party that we interrupt our work to attend. Coming home later in the evening, we realize we were bored throughout, although we have no recollection of having been so at the dinner itself. In short, we recognize that the entire evening was spent just passing the time. Both examples of boredom evince Heidegger’s modernist preoccupation with the quotidian. Profound boredom is a second, more severe subsection of being bored; in this state, the individual recognizes the full extent of their own boredom. This mood occurs out of the blue, and when we experience it we recognize that it is hopeless to try and pass the time. At this juncture, we refuse to recognize the existence of anything or anyone else, a refusal that facilitates a heightened awareness of conscious existence as a whole, what Heidegger famously labels “Da-sein,” or the site of aware being. As Emad Parvis puts it, “Only in deep boredom do we come across the very limit beyond which beings slide into nothing, where no-thing prevails, i.e. where being holds sway” (77). This manifestation Heidegger terms “the moment of vision”; here individual existence becomes clear against the greater backdrop of existence itself, and the temporal horizon upon which existence rests (FCM 169). Heidegger’s work returns to two entrenched boredom themes: the notion that boredom is a conduit to the visionary or creative – as articulated in Western philosophy and literature from Aristotle to Joyce and beyond – and the treatment of time as a ghostly presence. Access to Heidegger’s moment of vision occurs only with the assistance of bored time, a traditional allegorical figure in boredom literature, and one more tacit than explicit in Heidegger’s work. While not deliberately foregrounded as such, close reading indicates that bored time takes on a distinct character in Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, where it is described in figurative terms that liken it to a ghostly presence both haunting and enabling. We try to reassure ourselves we have safely escaped spectral time when experiencing Heidegger’s lesser forms of boredom, where we cautiously “pass it by” and “propel it, drive it on so that it passes” (93). Even so, it lies in wait, “is peculiarly casual and assured,” and when we cross its path we do so only to assuage “that fluttering unease of searching for something with which to occupy ourselves” (116). But time becomes increasingly threatening: Heidegger describes it vacillating, paralyzing, torturing,

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and dragging itself hideously along like a wounded animal, holding us in limbo all the while. Time reveals its ghastly power when confronting us in profound boredom, a state in which it “swallows up, as it were, the flowing sequence of nows and becomes a single stretched ‘now’ which itself does not flow, but stands.” In response, “We bring time to a stand, but – and we must take careful note of this – we do not make it vanish” – instead, time stands firmly within our own existence, metamorphosing into a present engaged in compressing still more present into itself, becoming a monstrosity stunted by its lack of past and future (124). Heidegger describes the time spirit as peculiar and obtrusive, both impressing itself into our consciousness and binding itself to our individual experience of time. When temporal possession is complete, profound boredom sets in. Boredom, we recall, springs from the temporality of existence, and triumphantly reveals to us our own temporality against the larger temporal horizon. But even Heidegger’s celebrated moment of vision carries haunting implications. For at the moment of our supreme indifference, when even our individuality recedes, we have “an expectation that the time-character of precisely this profound boredom will leap out and confront us in a major way” (142). Were this proposition not unnerving enough, Heidegger encourages us to overcome boredom by generating still more mystery “and its attendant terror that gives [existence] its greatness” (164). Heidegger believes time-bound, conscious existence is a burden that should be unloaded upon us and should overshadow daily life like a returning ancestral ghost. While this ghost frightens, it nevertheless provides a useful revelatory scare that we both actively court and inevitably shun. Time is a frightening and uncanny presence in Heidegger’s theory of boredom, but he nevertheless offers a degree of autonomy to the individual not found in the original formulations of the specter of bored time. For the characterization of time as a spirit-being with extended powers over the bored begins with Christian monasticism. Anchorites occupied the desert as early as the third century; their isolated lifestyle developed into a movement in the Near East. In his essay “Accidie,” Aldous Huxley observes that these monks were subjected to the assaults of many demons, usually during the night, although one, a fiend of “deadly subtlety,” was not afraid of daylight: The holy men of the desert called him the daemon meridianus; for his favourite hour of visitation was in the heat of the day. He would lie in wait for monks grown weary with working in the oppressive heat, seizing a moment of weakness to force an entrance into their hearts . . . Suddenly it would seem to the poor victim that the day was intolerably long and life desolatingly empty . . . He would go back to his meditations, to sink, sink through disgust

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and lassitude into the black depths of despair and hopeless unbelief. When that happened the demon smiled and took his departure. (47–8)

Throughout the Middle Ages, monks and laity alike report victimization by Acedia or Accidie between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. (Kuhn 52). References to Accidie recur throughout the early modern and Victorian periods, a motif carrying on into the twentieth – as noted above, Bloom’s dullest, gloomiest hour occurs over lunch.6 Nietzsche appears to allude to a similar specter in his articulation of eternal recurrence, which is narrated in The Gay Science by a demon. But perhaps the most emphatic presentation of a noontide both mundane and haunted occurs in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra – a work bringing together the visionary element of boredom and an avenging time spirit. Zarathustra comes to a knowledge of Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same – the possibility that every mundane experience in one’s life might limitlessly recur – during a vision at the top of a mountain, to which he has carried the Spirit of Gravity, whom he describes as devil and foe. The mocking dwarf-mole spirit has a temporal quality, as indicated by its permeation of Zarathustra’s every hour; its gravity might be ascribed to the weight of mortality. Zarathustra carries the spirit to a gateway inscribed “Moment,” in which two infinite roads controvert one another; one represents past, the other future. Here the spirit descends from Zarathustra and informs him that time is a circle; as Zarathustra has surmised, the gateway of the present contains all that has already occurred and will occur. As Zarathustra comes to a full, heightened awareness of the indefatigable return of time, he hears a dog howling as he once did in his childhood, thereby verifying time’s circularity. Zarathustra believes that the dog howls in recognition of a ghost, and the Spirit of Gravity is the only specter at hand. When the dog stops, Zarathustra realizes that the time being has disappeared. As with Heidegger’s visionary moment, the time that haunts – the stunted time of the demonic dwarf – leads Zarathustra to a vision of his existence against the whole of the temporal horizon; at this moment, he transcends himself, becoming Übermensch. In both Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s visionary moments, only the resolute bored individual can access existence; the instant of revelation is active, and the time being merely assists with directing the self out of passive boredom. What emerges is a paradox in which existence is fully perceived by the bored yet interested individual: a self who can manipulate passion – even lack thereof – in order to transcend his or her own subjectivity. Nietzsche and Heidegger thus turn prosaic boredom into greatness; their work is founded on uneasiness about subjective

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autonomy and experience, even as it spectacularly validates the self. It is this myopic, dizzying, eternal return to selfhood that Emmanuel Levinas deplores as the very crux of boredom. The subject, for Levinas, is but stultifying sameness: “the I riveted to itself” is “lived as ennui.” It is not to our advantage, but a source of despair, to be riveted to a finite life; this bond informs “the taedium vitae, one inevitably “steeped in the love of life it rejects” (TI 146). Any return to the self cannot proffer an identity, for the subject requires a “concrete relationship between an I and a world” (TI 37). Levinas cautions, “Reaching for the other is not something justified of itself; it is not a matter of shaking me out of my boredom.” Reaching for the other is “the event of the most radical breakup of the very categories of the ego,” the commitment “to be[ing] somewhere else than my self,” the refusal of “definite existence” (EE 85–6). This break up occurs through fecundity, Levinas’s term for the insatiable, infinite desire for the other; by putting the other before the self, we let go of the tedium of ipseity, or constant self-return. Thus we escape ennui not by ourselves, or by a magnificent, passion-driven form of transcendence that reveals our self to us against the entirety of the temporal horizon. Instead, we transcend ourselves in an entirely quotidian fashion, simply by seeking out the interest and novelty of the endlessly unknowable other. Levinas’s transcendence is not self-affirmation, but self-deferral. Levinas’s consideration of boredom unearths the subjectivity at the heart of previous philosophies; he exposes the paradox that the bored individual can single-handedly alleviate his or her own boredom. But in alignment with his contemporaries, his early Existence and Existents articulates something of a spectral presence watching self-absorbed individuals. Levinas rejects the existentialist assertion, as per Kierkegaard, that boredom arises from the infinite dizziness born of gazing down at the “the nothing that interlaces existence” (291). This same supposition informs Heidegger’s insistence that subjectivity is defined by mortality, the individual journey toward the nothingness that is death. While Levinas never ceases to praise Being and Time and Heidegger’s formulation of Da-sein, he simply cannot accept that we emerge from and return to nothing. Instead, he argues that existence relies upon our enduring experience of living presence, which he likens to wakefulness or anonymous vigilance and labels the il y a, or the “there is.” Levinas suggests that when we experience insomnia we sense that existence is presence, noting that the sleepless person becomes object, feels other, to a watching night. Insomnia thus reveals the foundation of existence even as it fully extinguishes our sense of self; like Heidegger’s spectral time, Levinas’s il y a leads the individual to a vision of being.

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Like Freud, Levinas links the condition of melancholy to the experience of insomnia.7 When insomniac, the il y a reminds us of our inescapable bond with existence, a bond with the potential to exhaust: “What wearies then is not a particular form of our life – our surroundings, because they are dull and ordinary, our circle of friends, because they are vulgar and cruel; the weariness concerns existence itself” (EE 11). Weariness lends itself to indolence, and while we may feel happy spending a morning in bed, or “being shut up in our own shell,” ultimately, “idleness weighs us down, afflicts us with boredom” (16). Levinas considers indolence and its attendant boredom a holding back from the future, a weary present that “perhaps indicates that the future . . . is impossible in a solitary subject” (17). Insomnia, with its haunting il y a, is the preliminary to the recognition that the self must welcome otherness, or else succumb to the ennui of subjectivity, “the melancholy over the eternal course of things” (77). Levinas uses ideas similar to those of his forebears to arrive at a completely different place: in Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s boredom-inspired moments of vision we are led to a view of ourselves juxtaposed against all existence but proceed alone towards infinite sameness or the nothingness of death. While recognizing the endemic nature of modern boredom, Nietzsche and Heidegger rework Aristotle’s association of melancholy and genius to promote and venerate the subject. Levinas’s haunting presence, by contrast, demands that we continually perceive ourselves in the light of otherness. In its very open-endedness, Levinas’s theory does not affirm a sense of self whole and entire, but nor does it eschew the infinite longing that fortifies our sense of everyday continuity.

Woolf’s Boredoms Like Levinas, Virginia Woolf makes a case for the fundamental unknowability of the other, an idea that arises in her first novel The Voyage Out, when Terence Hewet says to Rachel Vinrace, “one never knows what anyone feels . . . can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person’s opinion of another person?” (251). This thread is also woven through Jacob’s Room, where the narrator states repeatedly, “It is no use trying to sum people up” (37), a sentiment repeated by Lily Briscoe in reference to Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse: “She would never know him. He would never know her” (125). And in The Waves, as Tamlyn Monson argues, Bernard constantly oscillates between a desire to define others in his own terms and a recognition that otherness defines and eludes us (see “‘A Trick of the Mind’”).8 It is in this latter regard

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that Bernard claims: “I only come into existence when the plumber, or the horse-dealer, or whoever it may be, says something which sets me alight,” a realization taken to an extreme with his musing “To be contracted by another person into a single being – how strange” (W 109, 72). The other makes us ourselves. This fact is both strange – it flies in the face of Western philosophy and Descartes’s cogito ergo sum – and one that will become the center of Levinas’s thinking.9 Bernard can neither function within his own stultifying self nor successfully unify his social circle with his narratives. And yet, his endless interest in otherness sustains his creativity; at the end of The Waves, Bernard is still spinning a tale. As Levinas argues, the return to the self is boring; Woolf, who claimed to loathe egotism, recognized that greater interest lay beyond her own being. At a very early age, Woolf established a movement from boredom to creativity that would later motivate and form part of her narratives. Of prescribed childhood outings she writes in “A Sketch of the Past”: “to beguile the dullness [of] innumerable winter walks we made up stories, long stories that were taken up at the same place and added to each in turn” (Moments of Being 76). Woolf applies a Heideggerean term to these strolls, equating boredom with “non-being”: “Walks in Kensington Gardens were dull. Non-being made up a great proportion of our time in London” (77). But “non-being” is neither as final nor as deathly as the term suggests: dull walks prove the catalyst for storymaking; dull daily existence is the stuff of her early journals, which are inlaid with bits of fiction, and the creation of multiple personalities like Miss Jan, a stereotypically inept female unable to manage a new bicycle, a Leslie Stephen lecture, or heated words. Prone to uttering banalities such as “how is one to live in such a world,” Miss Jan is nevertheless, for Hermione Lee, “the beginning of Virginia Stephen’s sense of herself as a writer” (PA 77, 112). And Miss Jan reads as a precursor to later Woolf characters, Mrs. Dalloway and “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” among them. In her diaries, Woolf mentions “fit[s] of melancholy” in reference to the monotony and dreariness of her mental illnesses (Diary 1: 223, 119, 233). Through the act of writing, Woolf retrieved periods in which she perceived that her “life [was] allowed to waste like a tap left running” (1: 239). She writes: “I can only hope my illness, like dead leaves, will fertilize my brain” (2: 161). From boredom comes creativity; as Lee contends, Woolf’s “‘moments of vision’ [were] all the fuller because of the automatic customary unconscious days on either side” (Virginia Woolf 539). As we saw in Chapter 1, Woolf never totally embraced epiphanic moments that confirmed the evanescent intensity of her own work; as

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such, she endeavored to demote these transcendent ecstasies into openended longings and, eventually, to parody their very possibility. But before achieving full consciousness of the failure of the epiphany, Woolf often, unwittingly, wrote highly overwrought descriptions that move rapidly from the mundane to the passionate. Ironically, these endless descriptions of beauty emerging from ennui become stultifying in turn, as in an instance at her summer home, Rodmell, where “the quiet lapped me round! & then how dull I got, to be quite just: & how the beauty brimmed over me & steeped my nerves till they quivered, as I have seen a water plant quiver when the water overflowed it” (2: 301). Here Woolf is an all-too-exemplary melancholic: idly attentive, leisurely, and self-absorbedly reflecting her way to the visionary. Woolf subtly, persistently differentiates between bourgeois melancholia and the boredom of the urban, anonymous, over-stimulated, and distinctly average human being – a distinction Goodstein characterizes as the boredom of the poet versus that of the factory worker. This duality runs throughout Woolf’s journals: while annoying people are just boring, her father, her husband, Lytton Strachey, and she all share a tendency to sincere melancholy because they are self-conscious, intellectually superior beings (1: 23). These attitudes filter into her fiction: “Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night,” she writes tendentiously in Jacob’s Room; in the same volume, the adorable floozy Florinda reads Shelley and finds herself “horribly bored” (70, 106). A more laudable figure, Jacob encapsulates both emergent, democratized boredom and its older, more distinguished form: “Composed, commanding, contemptuous, a little melancholy, and bored with an august kind of boredom, there he sat smoking his pipe” (200). By contrast, Mr. Ramsay only says “the most melancholy things” – the boredom of the masses lies beyond his magnificent sphere (TTL 95). Woolf is very attuned to the ways in which language betrays class, as indicated by this diary passage about a Tube ride: “was shoved in at one door, pressed out behind a stout kind man who said ‘Barge after me’ – why ‘barge?’ to what social strata does that word belong?” (5: 85). As such, it seems not coincidental that her distinguished and upper-class characters are melancholic, while her lower-class characters are merely bored. “Boredom” Woolf uses pejoratively. No group bores Woolf more than those with charitable intentions: “Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic. They rule in the metropolis” (1: 192). Woolf frets about becoming boring, as when, just before leaving for Burgundy with Vita Sackville-West, she worries lest “Vita might be bored with her company, become disillusioned” (2: 280). She also uses boredom as a bathetic device, a means of deflating things terrifically important to her.

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Thus, her affair with Vita she describes offhandedly in a letter as “rather a bore for Leonard, but not enough to worry him” (qtd. in Lee, Virginia Woolf 594). War, too, is boring; she complains of having to talk to dull servants during air raids and describes boredom as her contribution to the war effort (1: 85, 116; 5: 288). While many discussions of the tedium of wartime civilian life support Woolf’s claims, her denunciation of literary success as “boring” brooks more argument. Statements like “What a bore it all is!” regularly fall among ruminations about book sales or the difficult exposure of having friends read her work, and appear to be less about boredom than thinly veiled anxiety (2: 108). Woolf expressly observes that she assuages ennui via the cultivation of “a thousand interests,” particularly in her creative endeavors: “The great thing is never to feel bored with one’s own writing. That is the signal for a change – never mind what, so long as it brings interest” (1: 107, 2: 292). And it is the desire to create that interests Woolf most. Mark Hussey writes that Woolf fixes on a central paradox of her art when she says that beauty is achieved in the failure to achieve it; in other words, in the effort . . . By “grinding all the flints together” (or “gathering fragments”), the whole that cannot be directly communicated is formed in the intersubjective relationship between literary art and the reader: “Are we not always hoping? And though we fail every time, surely we do not fail so completely as we should have failed if we were not in the beginning, prepared to attack the whole. One must renounce, when the book is finished; but not before it is begun.” (The Singing of the Real World 73)

The fragments Woolf gathers together are often very mundane indeed: snails and scuffed walls form narrative focal points in “Kew Gardens” and “A Mark on the Wall” (The Completer Short Fiction). Regeneration of the banal forms the crux of many of Woolf’s novels, almost all of which begin with depictions of boredom. After a series of disinterested introductions and re-introductions, the first chapter of The Voyage Out concludes with Helen Ambrose’s belief that “between them all she would be considerably bored” (19). Woolf’s voyagers prove desperate for diversion, organizing events to “abolis[h] . . . long evenings which were apt to become tedious and lead to absurdly early hours in spite of bridge” (167). As Night and Day begins, distracted hostess Katherine Hilbery is asked to show her famous grandfather’s relics to yet another guest, and is surprised but comprehending when Ralph Denham frankly states, “It must be a bore, though, showing your things to visitors” (12). So too Jacob’s Room opens with the emphatically bored masses at the local aquarium: “all wore the same blurred, drugged expression” (19). As the novel proceeds, the narrator informs us that Jacob himself

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frequently says things too dull to repeat, and is, on many occasions, “the very picture of boredom” (189). At the outset of To the Lighthouse we are introduced to James Ramsay, a young boy awaiting news of a boat trip meant to divert both the Ramsays and the lighthouse keepers. As Mrs. Ramsay frets, “those poor fellows . . . must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden.” It is one of Mrs. Ramsay’s many roles to bring “something to amuse,” to ease prospective boredom (9). After her death, her family is confounded by consideration of what to take to the lighthouse, but the torch of interest-generation is nevertheless half-heartedly taken up, thereby binding the novel’s slender plot. Woolf may have perfected her ability to make the dull subject interesting with Clarissa Dalloway, a woman who first appears in The Voyage Out hiding her “tiny yawn[s]” and suspiciously asserting that “everyone’s interesting really” (40, 49). When she resurfaces as the star of Mrs Dalloway, we discover Clarissa is friend to “the most appalling bores in Europe” (100, 102). In this novel, Woolf savors the awkward boredom of social convention when Clarissa is briefly reunited with an old friend: just as it happens on a terrace in the moonlight, when one person begins to feel ashamed that he is already bored, and yet as the other sits silent, very quiet, sadly looking at the moon, does not like to speak, moves his foot, clears his throat . . . but says nothing – so Peter Walsh did now. (54)

The couple is carefully described as akin to someone bored, but not bored themselves – boredom is thus as acknowledged and evaded by the narration as it is by Clarissa and Peter. Their boredom extends to the next generation; Elizabeth Dalloway “was really awfully bored,” and shares her mother’s belief that “there is . . . an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room” (176, 39). But while in Six Existential Heroes Lucio Ruotolo expertly reads Clarissa as an exemplary existentialist protagonist, Woolf’s narratives do not depict existence as interlaced by, or driven towards, nothingness. Instead, Woolf explores the paradoxically fertile site of “non-being”: the everyday, banal aspects of mundane lived experience. From this non-being emerges creativity. The Waves begins not with boredom but rather with each protagonist actively forging an identity through narrative. Woolf frequently uses her characters to explore dimensions of creative desire. As Katharine Hilbery pronounces, “It’s life that matters, nothing but life – the process of discovering – the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself at all” (Night and Day 132). The list of failed artists in Woolf’s novels is long; they are not treated with uniform veneration, but there is a palpable narrative kindness extended to those who at least attempt to express themselves

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creatively. As we saw in Chapter 1, frequently tedious Rachel is a most Schopenhauerian figure in that she is either bored or desiring to play the piano. Her death precludes further exploration of her creativity and the “curious[ly] dull” desire she shares with and for Terence Hewet, but throughout the novel, it is artistry that keeps her afloat on the monotonous sea of her heavily supervised young adulthood (318).10 Similarly, exuberant Mrs. Flushing of The Voyage Out staves off boredom with “perfectly untrained onslaughts of the brush” (272), and Charles Steele, a painter who appears at the outset of Jacob’s Room, is “an unknown man exhibiting obscurely . . . and much gratified if his landladies liked his pictures – which they often did” (5). In Mrs Dalloway, Sally Seton, Peter Walsh, and Septimus Smith have all dabbled in writing, or hope to. Lily Briscoe is, of course, Woolf’s best-known failed artist, a figure whose painting even the kindly Mrs. Ramsay does not take seriously (TTL 25). But Lily’s artistry sustains her in difficult moments, as when enduring the insufferable bore Charles Tansley. To the Lighthouse ends on Lily’s subdued yet triumphant note: her picture will not be seen by many, but “what did it matter” she asks herself, answering, “I have had my vision” (281). Having seen, having translated that vision into something, is more important than the vision itself.

Orlando’s Regenerative Oak A figure both boring and bored in The Voyage Out is St. John Hirst, a promising Cambridge fellow. During a dull sermon, Hirst writes what he considers three of the finest lines in literature. These lines are referred to repeatedly, but never appear in the text itself. Hirst’s private creation foreshadows Orlando’s poem “The Oak Tree,” another great work we do not read. This elision is part narrative convenience – what author, fictional egotists aside, wants to lay claim to the greatest lines in literature? – part Woolfian veneration of creative process over product. Orlando regularly engages in Woolf’s self-conscious narrative movement from the dull to the creative: he is introduced as a writer and time waster, inspired to write ten pages of effusive poetry after listlessly slicing away at the shrunken head of a Moor. Orlando finds the brilliant wit of the salons “tedious beyond description,” and the stultifying life of the courted noblewoman horrific, inventing the game of Fly Loo so as to fill onerous hours with the persistent Archduke (Orlando151). Even this game rapidly proves dull, and Orlando cheats in order to generate interest in the process at hand. Bored Orlando is a thoroughly modern character. But he is also thoroughly bourgeois, quite regularly

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fall[ing] into . . . moods of melancholy; the sight of the old woman hobbling over the ice might be the cause of it, or nothing; and [he] would fling himself face downwards on the ice and look into the frozen waters and think of death. (35)

Woolf’s narrator parodies the reverence attached to melancholy, writing, “the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy,” an assertion undermined by its extension to an absurd conclusion: “all extremes of feeling are allied to madness” and thus we must “take refuge in the true Church” (35). Orlando proves far less concerned with pursuing philosophical truth or passion than with sustaining everyday desire, and the desire that sustains its protagonist for centuries is the production of literature. Noble Orlando has leisure to cultivate arbitrariness, and the capacity to turn melancholy into creative vision. But just as Orlando’s melancholy diminishes into boredom, so too does her desire to write become less urgent ambition than quotidian longing. Though it always emerges triumphant, Orlando’s desire to write is severely challenged through the ages, and in the Victorian era particularly, where she finds herself suffused with the period’s stagnant boredom writing unintentionally insipid verse; in this period, Orlando proves unable sufficiently to escape her own ennui. Later in the century she sees for the first time a monstrous and monotonous conglomeration of objects in St. James Park – a monument to the banal Victorian spirit, notably witnessed at noon. This monument becomes Orlando’s own demon of noontide as it forces her to come to terms, as any such demon should, with her profound boredom. Immediately after viewing it, Orlando mentally wrestles with Victorian ennui and decides to let the zeitgeist “l[ie] dormant for a time” (181). Having just seen a spectrum of temporality, Orlando reaches into her dress for her copy of “The Oak Tree.” She progresses, in other words, from monotony to creative vision. Writing “The Oak Tree” sustains Orlando in a similar fashion for centuries: in the midst of sluggish parties she disappears to go and add to its lines; when idle with the gypsies she resorts to berry juice ink in order to work on it still further. From a recognition of the “dull as ditchwater” moral differences between herself and these gypsies – a tedium compounded by the “dry bone” of the midsummer environment on Mount Athos – Orlando again experiences a vision, this time of a great park in a grassy hollow, filled with oak trees (115). She “gazes entranced for some time” at this vision, then resolves to return to England – drawn by the inspiration of her oak tree, both poem and living thing on her estate (116). Orlando writes “The Oak Tree” for over 300 years, and clearly

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possesses a desire for fame alongside a desire to write – she spends time in well-known salons and with writers like Pope and Addison because she is curious about literary success and its machinations. When her poem is completed, toward the end of the nineteenth century, Orlando awakens as if from a dream, realizes the world goes on, and that if she died, it would continue the same. And yet she perceives her poem as a living thing in need of being read, and with a view to publication she sets out to London, where she bumps into Nicholas Greene, an entertaining writer who once confirmed Orlando’s sense that literature was “something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning” (213). On this occasion, Greene proves disappointingly sedate and dull, as does his presentation of the modern-day state of literature. Nevertheless, he is fascinated by Orlando’s poem, which he immediately publishes to wide acclaim. But, just as literature is more banal than Orlando understood, literary success does not satisfy, presumably because it was always the desire to create that mattered, rather than the creation itself. In making little of Orlando’s fame, Woolf denounces satiation and ambition as dead ends and self-serving passions; instead, her fictional biography promotes a more open-ended and everyday creativity, one that Orlando significantly comes to recognize at the outset of the modernist period, an era increasingly preoccupied with the quotidian. The movement from boredom to creativity thus manifests itself in recollections of Woolf’s childhood, peppers her journals, acts as salve to the tedium of illness, and surfaces as an introductory and framing device in many of her narratives. Woolf’s many uses of the term “boredom” – including her distinctions between melancholy and boredom – underscore the understanding that it is necessary to think of boredom as a term incorporating a number of similar but nevertheless distinct states of being. Ultimately, Woolf’s abiding interest in boredom as inspiration and narrative motif opens out still further, so that after the more traditionally melancholy, visionary, elite genius that is Orlando, she writes a short story in which the depiction of a bored, commonplace individual involves an even deeper exploration of distinctly twentieth-century philosophical concerns, namely, autonomous subjectivity, otherness, and their relationship to the crisis of ennui.

“The Lady in the Looking-Glass” Woolf’s “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection” (The Complete Shorter Fiction 221–5) was published in 1929, a year after Orlando. The story depicts the boredom of the return to the self, then explores

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and affirms the self as defined by otherness. The plot revolves round Isabella Tyson: an older woman, a spinster, quite well off. We observe her drawing room on a summer afternoon, see her garden reflected in the hall mirror, and watch the post being delivered. There is some speculation about the course of Isabella’s life and affairs, all of which amounts to nothing: at the tale’s end, Isabella appears friendless, past-less, adventure-less, simply a being alone, reflected in a mirror. Throughout, the narrator is anonymous, and feels him- or herself accompanied by a nocturnal specter, in whose presence the speaker becomes engaged in numerous bids to objectively demarcate an autonomous subject, namely Isabella. But in spite of the narrator’s extended attempts to inscribe his or her desires on the protagonist, Isabella continually eludes definition; the speaker simply cannot determine whether she is mysterious and interesting or the leader of a very predictable, appropriable existence. Until the story’s end, the extent of Isabella’s own boredom is concealed from us; the climax occurs when she gazes into the glass and experiences a visionary moment of boredom without its accompanying redemptive features. Isabella, it turns out, may or may not have a banal life, but is certainly profoundly bored. However, the brief denouement denounces both Isabella’s ennui and the narrator’s endeavor to incorporate her into known experience, finally avowing the irrefutable interest of illimitable otherness. Woolf begins by equating looking-glasses, reflections of the self, with the criminal: “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime” (221). This sentence is reminiscent of Levinas’s supposition that the return to the self is an “accursed solitude” – a just punishment for self-absorption. In an extension of this position, Woolf moves immediately from the dread, telling reflective surface to the presence of a solitary other: “One could not help looking, that summer afternoon, in the long glass that hung outside in the hall.” From “the depths of the sofa,” the anonymous narrator defines the reader’s viewpoint and appears familiar with Isabella, having sat at her desk and “trod . . . carefully” on her rugs (222). The narrator now takes the liberty of spinning tales of interest about Isabella’s home: One felt . . . like one of those naturalists who, covered with grass and leaves, lie watching the shyest animals – badgers, otters, kingfishers – moving about freely, themselves unseen. The room was full of such shy creatures, lights and shadows, curtains blowing, petals falling – things that never happen, so it seems, if someone is looking. The quiet old country room with its rugs and stone chimney pieces, its sunken book-cases and red and gold lacquer cabinets, was full of such nocturnal creatures. They came pirouetting across

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the floor, stepping delicately with high-lifted feet and spread tails and pecking allusive beaks as if they had been cranes or flocks of elegant flamingoes whose pink was faded, or peacocks whose trains were veined with silver. And there were obscure flushings and darkenings too, as if a cuttlefish had suddenly suffused the air with purple; and the room had its passions and rages and envies and sorrows coming over it and clouding it, like a human being. Nothing stayed the same for two seconds altogether. (221)

Isabella’s room, so representative of her subjectivity, is here filled with an anonymous presence that seems to objectify the anonymous narrator, even as it animates the room, which has become “like a human being.” In the midst of this presence, the narrator witnesses the things that never happen – “so it seems” – in front of human beings: petals falling, curtains blowing – things less unobservable than too mundane to observe. The room darkens, becomes filled with “nocturnal creatures,” and is subsequently haunted from outside by “a perpetual sighing and ceasing sound, the voice of the transient and the perishing . . . coming and going like a human breath” (222). What is described here is an embodied nocturnal akin to Levinas’s il y a, an ever-present vigilance upon which being is founded, palpable in insomnia. Indeed, this portion of the narrative exemplifies Levinas’s edict that “nocturnal space delivers us over to being” (EE 54): in the wakefulness of this presence, breeze becomes breath, an empty room is filled with creatures, and most importantly, Isabella’s otherness is carefully detailed. Awareness of the il y a forces the individual to feel his or her objectification; in Woolf’s story, the presence of this presence enables the narrator to come to terms with Isabella’s radical unknowability. Like the nocturnal creatures, the narrator spreads tales and pecks allusive beaks. Many postulations are spun, beginning with the supposition that all that lies in Isabella’s mirror is transfixed, a statement that may also be a pecking allusion: “in the looking-glass things had ceased to breathe and lay still in the trance of immortality” (222). This description resonates both conceptually and linguistically with Baudelaire’s “ennui, fruit of dismal incuriosity, / Assumes the fearful scope of immortality” (41).11 The glass does not reflect the narrative presence, nor, initially, Isabella herself, but rather, the mundane “marble-topped table opposite” and “a stretch of the garden beyond” – “a long grass path leading between banks of tall flowers until, slicing off at an angle, the gold rim cut it off” (The Complete Shorter Fiction 221). Just as the frame cuts off the garden path, so too does it slice off Isabella’s retreating self, vanishing as she descends the path “in her thin summer dress, carrying a basket” (222) – our narrator claims to have witnessed this event half an hour before. While what occurs beyond the mirror’s reflection engenders endless speculation, its

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surface seems to stand for the hard traditional wall of truth, the foundation of philosophy itself, the site of being, rather than becoming. For as the narrator asserts, “There must be truth; there must be a wall” (222). Truth, however, is dull: things can be hard and fixed, but the narrator would much rather use these spaces as sturdy foundations for creative contemplation. What might Isabella retrieve? The narrator suggests “something light and fantastic and leafy and trailing, traveller’s joy, or one of those elegant sprays of convolvulus that twine round ugly walls and burst here and there into white and violet blossoms.” Isabella is directly likened to the trembling convolvulus that “twines around ugly walls,” thereby occupying an intermediary space between narrative fictions and truth’s unyielding barrier. And this is because she is fundamentally unknowable, even by the all-seeing narrator: The [flower] comparison showed how very little, after all these years, one knew about her; for it is impossible that any woman of flesh and blood of fifty-five or sixty should be really a wreath or a tendril . . . Yet it was strange that after knowing her all these years one could not say what the truth about Isabella was. (222)

This sentiment recurs during a contemplation of Isabella’s thoughts while she is envisioned cutting flowers: She was thinking . . . she must order a new net for the strawberries; that she must send flowers to Johnson’s widow . . . These were the things she talked about at dinner certainly. But . . . it was her profounder state of being that one wanted to catch and turn to words. (224)

In Heidegger’s terms, the narrator wants to describe Isabella’s own ontological difference, to delineate the distinction between her everyday machinations and her conscious approach to existence in and of itself. But these attempts to compound Isabella’s subjectivity paradoxically and repeatedly affirm only her elusiveness. All giving rise to further speculation: Isabella might be a traveler, a woman who “collected [objects] with her own hands – often in the most obscure corners of the world and at great risk from poisonous stings and Oriental diseases” (222). Her cabinets “almost certainly held letters, tied with bows of ribbon, sprinkled with sticks of lavender or rose leaves . . . [in them] one would find the traces of many agitations . . . intimacy and affection, violent . . . jealousy and reproach” (222). But we neither should nor can believe anything we are told about Isabella. In truth, her letters had led to nothing – that is, she had never married, and yet, judging from the mask-like indifference of her face, she had gone through twenty times more

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of passion . . . than those whose loves are trumpeted forth for all the world to hear. (223)

Alone, Isabella’s existence amounts to nothing, even as her face betrays an indifference that the narrator hopes speaks to her passion. Yet at this very suggestion, the room, “under the stress of thinking about Isabella . . . became more shadowy and symbolic; the corners seemed darker” (223). The narrator tries to inscribe Isabella, and in the midst of this appropriation, the darkening room engenders uncertainty. Isabella cannot be possessed or known by any other being, including the reader; as the narrator suspects, “the rugs, the chairs, the cabinets” occasionally “seemed as if they knew more about her” than “we” (222). Enter monstrous time: “Suddenly these reflections were ended violently and yet without a sound. A large black form loomed into the looking-glass; blotted out everything, strewed the table with a packet of marble tablets veined with pink and grey” (223). This black form disappears quickly, and the tablets, after some consideration, are brought “into the fold of common experience. One realized at last that they were merely letters. The man had brought the post” (223). The man – servant or postman – functions as the presence of mortal, finite time: he is a regular, punctual recurrence of the same, carrying enduring marble tablets that hint at the eternal. Even after identifying the letters, the narrator continues calling them tablets, speaking of their absorption into “the stillness and the immortality which the looking-glass conferred,” and their appearance of having been “graven with eternal truth” (223). “If one could read them, one would know everything there was to be known about Isabella, yes, and about life, too” (223). The letters are allknowing, “defy human purpose,” and represent not only infinite time, but also absolute truth – their properties are distinctly metaphysical. In Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s formulations of boredom, spectral time brings the individual to a broader grasp of existence and all of its temporal planes. If the breathing, darkening room aligns itself with Levinas’s il y a, the man with the post takes on the role of Heidegger’s haunting time, a figure signaling access to a transcendent realm. But Isabella does not want to know the truth of her profound boredom. We begin to find a better sense of Isabella’s accursed solitude as she is envisioned hiding the letters away: “Isabella did not wish to be known – but she should no longer escape. It was absurd, it was monstrous” (223). The postman’s monstrosity is now conferred to Isabella, who wants neither to be comprehended by another nor to see herself – hence she hides the truth-bearing letters. But this is all a fiction too, one meant to justify the narrator’s position: “If she

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concealed so much and knew so much one must prize her open with the first tool that came to hand – the imagination. One must fix one’s mind upon her at every moment. One must fasten her down there” (223). Our narrator is carried away, resolving to make truth of fiction; Isabella will be as described. “One must refuse to be put off any longer with sayings and doings such as the moment brought forth – with dinners and visits and polite conversations. One must put oneself in her shoes” (224). The tedious dinner party is merely, as Heidegger suggests, a distraction; instead, the narrator will occupy Isabella entirely, via her “softest and most flexible leather” shoes (224). The absurdity of this certainty becomes immediately apparent, for though the narrator believes Isabella is presently cutting at a dead flower, “at the critical moment a veil of cloud covered the sun, making the expression of the eyes doubtful – was it mocking or tender, brilliant or dull?” (224). Dull, apparently, for she thinks only of errands. But this dullness is again undermined, because in cutting the dead flower Isabella thinks of her death, of “moulder[ing] sweetly into the roots of violets” (224). Here she contemplates her life in relation, and thus emerges from her monotonous subjectivity. For Isabella’s mind was like her room, in which lights advanced and retreated, came pirouetting and stepping delicately, spread their tales, pecked their way; and then her whole being was suffused, like the room again, with a cloud of some profound knowledge, some unspoken regret, and then she was full of locked drawers, stuffed with letters, like her cabinets. To talk of “prizing her open” as if she were an oyster, to use any but the finest and subtlest and most pliable tools upon her was impious and absurd. One must imagine. (225)

This is an illuminating moment for the narrator, as signaled by the moving lights: this perception of Isabella suffuses her and is a revelation. Isabella’s subjectivity is ultimately defined by an infinite otherness; she is a locked cabinet filled with information never to be gleaned. She cannot be known; she is not consigned to the ennui of the return to self, and to suggest as much is absurd. “One must imagine” is an imperative to perceive Isabella’s life as an unknown entity, beyond subjective and untenable truth. But this is not quite how the story ends. For this revelation is severely disrupted by the looking-glass: “One must imagine – here she was in the looking-glass. It made one start.” Reflected in the glass, Isabella is again appropriated: “One verified her by degrees – fitted the qualities one had discovered into this visible body” (225). Her movement is so gradual she scarcely disturbs the transfixed reflection. The stillness is exacerbated by her gaze at herself in the hall, her “moment of vision”:

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She stopped dead. She stood by the table. She stood perfectly still. At once the looking-glass began to pour over her a light that seemed to fix her; that seemed like some acid to bite off the unessential and superficial and to leave only the truth. It was an enthralling spectacle. Everything had dropped from her . . . all that one had called the creeper and the convolvulus. Here was the hard wall beneath. Here was the woman herself. She stood naked in that pitiless light. And there was nothing. Isabella was perfectly empty. She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for nobody. As for her letters, they were all bills . . . she did not even trouble to open them. (225)

As in Kierkegaard’s rendering of boredom as a “dying death,” Isabella stops dead in the glass, moving imperceptibly toward her reflection and the marble tablets. She is fixed in time, an immortal mortal, bound by the dullness of the return to self; all that can be perceived in this state is the hard, limited wall of philosophical truth, and the counter to Levinas’s il y a: a very existential nothing. Enmeshed in the ennui of the return to self, Isabella is caught in the full, pitiless gaze of her own solitary existence. The narrator is initially fascinated, then condemnatory. For the story ends as it began: “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms” (225).12 This is the triumphant conclusion, albeit a triumph paradoxically predicated upon a very banal event: a woman gazing at herself in her hall mirror. But the story gleans its tension from its oscillations between the dull return to the self – witnessed both in the narrator’s appropriation of Isabella, and Isabella’s moment of boredom – and the interest generated by the embrace of unknowable otherness. The narrator is clearly torn between these two positions throughout; is Isabella a series of knowable facts, a hard wall of truth, or is she mysterious, the convolvulus between that wall and the narrator’s own gaze? Just as one position is affirmed, it is immediately rejected: the constantly proliferating nocturnal presence which refuses absolutes is countered by the routine arrival of the man with the post, carrying tablets carved in stone, assurances that the self can be inscribed and known. A similar ideological debate informs Levinas’s reworking of Heideggerean thought, including his challenge to the profundity of boredom. Self-reflection Levinas considers “unnatural”; we cannot properly call ourselves into question on our own, as this critical attitude is only possible in the face-to-face with the other, an exchange between two individuals that is not, and cannot be, “a play of mirrors” (TI 81, 83).13 Woolf’s story depicts the limits of self-reflection as endless relations define each aspect of Isabella’s subjectivity: she is not nothing because there is an entire story found in the ribbon at her waist, the leather of her shoe, a single, shaded gaze toward the sun – no monotonous reading of this woman stands. No one knows Isabella. As

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Levinas suggests, to presume that knowledge of others can be readily assimilated is to preclude experience of the new, the unknown. Thus the mirror proffers the sameness of still more self, even as it is a conduit to larger questions of existence, on which Woolf speculates by reflecting the self objectively, via an anonymous narrator who is in turn objectified by a nocturnal presence. Her protagonist is neither melancholy nor consumed by any great passion; the profundity of this story emerges from minutiae and minor incident. In the process, Woolf embraces what Goodstein formulates as modern skepticism about the role and nature of subjectivity, of which commonplace boredom is a cogent symptom. But Woolf also directs her creative vision beyond the self, demonstrating how a bored individual remains determined by, and might move toward, the endlessly interesting unknowability of otherness. In “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection,” Woolf presents an ideological debate about boredom in which the reader is direct witness to the exposed processes of cultivating interest; in so doing, Woolf’s piece adds weight to the critical claim that literature is an exceptional aesthetic conduit by which boredom can be understood.

Conclusions The depiction of dullness is central to Woolf’s writing, just as consideration of monotony proves essential to her sense of her own mortality: “Yes, I am grown up . . . I am a little bored indeed” (Diary 2: 236). Like her philosophical forbears, Woolf considers melancholy fundamental: “If one is to deal with people on a large scale & say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy?” (1: 259). Woolf planned to “write a story about life turning all the faces in a tube carriage grey, sodden, brave, disillusioned” (2: 286). This cycle from boredom to creative desire and back to boredom again is occasionally implicit in her work, as when Orlando writes insipid verse in the Victorian period. Woolf’s concern about her competence at describing the monotony of non-being stems from her certainty that “every day includes much more non-being than being,” and, as such, that all great artists can and should describe boredom as well as flashes of insight – in “Sketch of the Past” she describes her novels Night and Day and The Years as explicit experiments in this regard (Moments of Being 70). In striving to portray the most evanescent and yet endemic aspects of the quotidian, Woolf constantly articulates how the mundane might become a source of narrative interest. How, in other words, banal existence inevitably yields states of longing both sustaining and fascinating.

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Woolf believes the British “could in some miraculous way slow down the hours, dull the incidents, lengthen the meals, and make even the servants and page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety” (VO 261). Her work depicts boredom as increasingly accessible to all – including her much-derided servants – and deflates estimations of melancholy as the lofty province of the leisured few; for Woolf, even giraffes in the zoo can wear a “melancholy eminence” (Night and Day 387). Woolf also has her narrators consider the parameters of the dull, so that the larger significance of tedious tasks and habits is often called into question: “Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which fall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments, while life dwindles, to come and dine?” (Jacob’s Room 126). The perpetual non-being of the middle and lower classes particularly angered her in its accepting averageness; as she writes to her sister: “I have just travelled Kensington High Street – which almost made me vomit with hatred of the human race. Innumerable women of incredible mediocrity, drab as ditchwater, wash up and down like dirty papers against Barkers and Derry and Toms” (qtd. in Lee, Virginia Woolf 536). For Lee, these disparaging comments about the everyday lives of the lower classes are unavoidable but cannot be reconciled with the beauty of Woolf’s artistry. To this we might be added the following: first, that while hints of these attitudes lie in Woolf’s implicit pitting of the term “melancholy” against “boredom,” it remains unfortunate that these distinctions never make their way into Woolf’s work as an overt debate. And secondly, it Woolf’s very fascination with the banal that forms the catalyst of so much of her creativity. Woolf shares with contemporaries like Joyce and Stein a newly emergent urge to articulate quotidian states of being and yearning; while these attempts are not always unhindered by prejudice or the sheer difficulties of construction, they are fundamental to the literature of the period. If there is an image that best denotes the fundamental role of boredom in Woolf’s writing it may be the sea. “If life has a base that it stands on, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills,” then Woolf’s bowl stands upon this memory: lying half asleep, “hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach” (64). This she describes in “A Sketch of the Past,” as a form of ecstasy. But the sea is also monotonous, as Woolf clarifies in The Voyage Out, where the waves “cleav[e] . . . perpetually” with a “monotonous order of plunging and rising” (36, 75), a description resurfacing in Jacob’s Room, which recounts the sea’s “dull sound, as if nocturnal women were beating great carpets,” (246) and again in To the Lighthouse, where “the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach” is sometimes consolatory, sometimes

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terrifying (23–4). The sea is fundamental, but not stagnant; as Goodstein argues, all monotony is historically rendered. Thus Woolf speculates in Jacob’s Room, “This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern invention. Perhaps . . . we do not believe enough . . . what use are fine speeches and Parliament, once you surrender an inch to the black waters?” (190–1). Water imagery also characterizes the tedium of writer Bernard’s school days in The Waves: “immense dullness would descend unbroken, monotonous. Nothing, nothing, nothing broke with its fin that leaden waste of waters. Nothing would happen to lift that weight of intolerable boredom” (205). The sea is the great, amorphous body of non-being from which Woolf, like Bernard, so often nets artistic inspiration. In despair, filled with “a sudden conviction of complete desertion,” and looking for the “fin [that] breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea,” Bernard is without a self, because without desire (237). “But how describe the world seen without a self?” (W 239). Woolf is only partially trying to answer this question with the eternal, nocturnal presence of “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection” – more importantly, it is a story which embraces, then rejects, the monotony of self-reflection, even as it acknowledges the centrality of monotony in individual twentieth-century lives. As Woolf writes at the end of the pageant in Between the Acts, “the mirror that reflected the soul sublime, reflected also the soul bored” (16). Dullness can be accursed solitude, provide determining, quotidian moments of vision and become – via the desire to create – a conduit to an exploration of interest. Both Joyce and Woolf depict this movement from the bored self to the interesting other. Indeed, in the midst of a period so retrospectively defined by its crisis of ennui, many modernist writers strove to, as Woolf puts it in “Modern Fiction,” “come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely what interests and moves them.” And part of what moves them is boredom itself; hence, in the same essay, Woolf lauds Ulysses for “suggest[ing] how much of life was excluded or ignored” – for embracing so much “non-being” (108). It is in this regard that Joyce insists – both pragmatically and parodically – on telling us that the very flowers of Bloom’s Flowerville will be purchased “from sir James W. Mackey (Limited) [wholesale and retail] seed and bulb merchant and nurseryman, agent for chemical manures, 23 Sackville street, upper” (840). And just as Bloom’s comically revelatory Flowerville betokens a whole history of melancholy individuals and self-serving utopias, so too do works like Woolf’s Orlando and “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” reinvigorate the classical philosophical tradition of visionary melancholy espoused by Nietzsche and Heidegger, a tradition to which Woolf

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is aesthetically, philosophically, and historically attuned. She writes in her diary, “I always remember the saying that at one’s lowest ebb one is nearest a true vision,” she perceives bored time as a haunting specter, and she distinguishes between melancholy and boredom (1: 298). But while thoroughly engaging with various states of boredom – both personally and fictively, and particularly as a catalyst for creation – in “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection,” Woolf avoids any neat, finite solutions to this particularly twentieth-century ideological crisis. For Kierkegaard, ennui can be resolved by an individually motivated and sustained arbitrariness; for Woolf, as for Joyce in Ulysses, release lies not so much in self-amusement as in a creative and communicative reach toward otherness. Within the few pages of her short story she generates a complexly objectified narrator who in turn struggles to objectify what proves to be a distinctly bored protagonist; as Woolf demarcates and re-demarcates the narrative process and Isabella Tyson’s increasingly elusive character and experiences, she makes palpable Levinas’s claim that endless interest lies in the refusal of subjective autonomy and the dull repetition of what can be fully known.

Notes 1. As Mark Currie writes in Postmodern Narrative, “There is always a kind of oscillation between objectivity and subjectivity in reading: the reading invents the narrative no more than it is invented by it” (133). 2. In direct contrast to my own argument, Wolfgang Wicht claims Flowerville undoes the political progressiveness of Bloom as hero because the “episode . . . suggests that utopian fancies are latently embedded in late capitalist consumer society” (Utopianism in James Joyce’s Ulysses 216). While Bloom the ad canvasser is quite predictably entrenched in the workings of capitalist society, “Flowerville” undermines the elitist classism attached to melancholy, an assumption central to Kierkegaard’s exemplary assertion that “Those who bore others are the plebians . . . the endless chain of humanity in general; those who bore themselves are the chosen ones, the nobility” (Either/Or 288). 3. Schopenhauer stands apart as a pre-twentieth-century figure who foresees the dystopia Bloom’s words invoke: Imagine this race transported to a Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one another without any delay and keep one another without any difficulty: in such a place some men would die of boredom or hang themselves, some would fight and kill one another (“On the Suffering of the World” 43). 4. According to Reinhard Kuhn, Rousseau considered “ineffable ecstasy” the opposite of boredom, a phrasing that details desire but carefully elides

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

satiation (The Demon of Noontide 154). Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text presents boredom and bliss as proximate (26). Goodstein, Spacks, and Kuhn all suggest literature provides the best gauge of the twentieth-century boredom crisis. While Woolf is the focus here, Spacks also cites Stein’s valuation of the trivial and repetitious and D. H. Lawrence’s bored heroes as valuable indicators of modernist ennui. The literary references in this period are in fact endless: in Stephen Hero, Stephen proclaims “Life indeed nowadays . . . often a sad bore,” while in the “Penelope” episode of Ulysses, Molly frequently complains that her life is profoundly uninteresting, an affliction she extends to her daughter Milly, who does nothing but the “loglady all day” (28; 910). Boredom is also the subject of any number of Beckett’s works – a refrain in Malone Dies is, “What tedium” (Trilogy 179–292). And boredom surfaces as a central concern in the work of Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley, both of whom were peripheral but regular participants in the Bloomsbury circle. Indeed, Russell’s overly optimistic “In Praise of Idleness” might function as a partial blueprint for Huxley’s dystopic Brave New World as the essay argues for an extensive use of technology to free up leisure time for all classes. In The Conquest of Happiness (1930), Russell describes boredom as a modern epidemic visibly stamped on the faces of the masses; he also suggests that it has been one of the greatest motivators in human history, and “is so at the present day more than ever” (44). Come Authority and the Individual (1949), Russell is less exuberant, observing that post-war disarray engenders nostalgia for wartime excitement and purpose; after the urgent passions of war, boredom is the new foe. These references are figurative and tacit, but available: Spacks delineates time’s avenging spirit in the work of Victorian writers like Mary Delany, who speaks of gambling women as those who “[kill] that which will kill them (time)” (96). Schopenhauer also describes time as a taskmaster who “ceases to persecute only him it has delivered over to boredom” (“On the Suffering of the World” 42). Freud writes, “The sleeplessness in melancholia testifies to the rigidity of the condition” (“Mourning and Melancholia” 253). For Monson, Bernard cannot resolve this distinctly Levinasian conundrum because he cannot determine how to include or exclude otherness – cannot, in Levinas’s terms, “participate wholly in either totality or infinity” (“‘A Trick of the Mind’” 193). It is a sentiment that perhaps also recalls Hegel’s argument that the subject’s desire for the other fills a lack or void, which Levinas posits as a more productive relationship that preserves, rather than usurps, otherness. For more on the relationship between Hegel and Levinas, see Brian Schroeder, “The (Non)Logic of Desire and War: Hegel and Levinas.” See Ruotolo The Interrupted Moment on how The Voyage Out was born of Woolf’s own boring 1905 boat voyage to Spain during which she felt keenly her inability to work, and yet “at the same time . . . was painfully aware that her artistic vision required such a descent into inactivity” (20). “Spleen” (Baudelaire Flowers of Evil) bears a number of likenesses to Woolf’s story, including a metaphoric association between a crammed chest of drawers and the many stories comprising its protagonist.

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12. This reflection of Isabella could be read in any number of ways, and raises the question of its relationship to Lacan’s mirror stage, which suggests that the infant’s initial recognition of his or her reflected self is in fact an identification with an external world; in other words, our always questionable sense of subjective coherency is dependent upon otherness. In Lacan, the other forces a disconnection between the self and its desires, thus interfering with the fundamental desire for autonomy; by contrast, Levinas’s other is the very source of desire, which is rooted in a longing to escape one’s solitude. Levinas’s other is thus more in keeping with Woolf’s own aesthetic interest in the fascination and regenerative quality of endlessly proliferating otherness. For a useful examination of mirrors in Woolf, see also Hermione Lee’s “A Burning Glass.” 13. Levinas writes that in mirrors we can only make ourselves decent for social, mundane relations, “wip[e] away the night,” become “clean and abstract” (EE 31).

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Chapter 3

Inclining Towards Laughter

The “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses is concerned with air and its passage. Gusts batter the office of the Freeman’s Journal from outside, and from within, where among the odd “sudden screech of [Ned Lambert’s] laughter,” a group of men make blustery, portentous claims about everything from individuals only tenuously known to Irish history (156). Stephen Dedalus takes away Mr. O’Madden Burke’s breath with his suggestion that they adjourn to Mooney’s, along the way contributing his own long-winded account to the proceedings. The story Stephen tells he describes as his “vision,” later titling it A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or the Parable of the Plums. His tale involves two elderly spinsters who decide they want to view Dublin from the top of local landmark, Nelson’s Column. The description of their trip is absurdly involved, including an extended period of financial saving, the prying of said savings from a money box, and, on the day of the journey, the purchase of bread, brawn, and two dozen plums to sustain the women through their climb. Eventually, in a further mention of air and its travels, the women pant up the column, “peeping at the airslits” (184). At the top, they teeter precariously near the edge, almost overcome with vertigo, then sit down and eat, “spitting the plumstones slowly out between the railings.” At this point in his narrative, Stephen “g[ives] a sudden loud young laugh as a close.” His audience is baffled. After a series of questions, none of which uncover the meaning of the story, Professor Hugh MacHugh rather unconvincingly claims to understand it all, “laugh[ing] richly” – his laugh is as solitary as Stephen’s (188–9). No one shares Stephen’s perception of humor, or his desire to laugh. James Joyce was well-acquainted with solitary laughter. In 1903, he wrote in a letter to his mother: Yeats . . . said he knew me only a little time and in that time I had roared laughing at the mention of Balzac, Swinburne &c. I have more than once upset a

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whole French café by laughing. An old woman shook her umbrella in my face one day in Dublin – I was laughing so loudly. (Joyce, Selected Letters 19)

Neither companions nor strangers join in Joyce’s laughter in any of these instances, but he remains unabashedly exuberant. Joyce valued risibility and strove to generate laughter with his writing: he intended to write a comedy after completing his first book of poems, and his riposte to the widespread derision and skepticism that greeted Finnegans Wake was: “It’s meant to make you laugh” (qtd. in White, The Grand Continuum 20). Given his ongoing celebration of risibility in any guise, it is not surprising that Joyce generated a protagonist “as much in love with laughter as with combat” (74). Joyce crayoned out this phrase in his draft of Stephen Hero, but it aptly describes Stephen’s joint proclivities for intellectual repartee – his primary form of conflict – and persistently solitary laughter. For Stephen’s conclusion to The Parable of the Plums is just one instance of a steady pattern throughout Ulysses: 16 June 1904 proves full of Stephen’s subjective laughter. As his morning of teaching comes to an end, Stephen confuses his students with a riddle, which he answers himself giving “a shout of nervous laughter to which their cries echoed dismay” – like Professor Hugh MacHugh, the students grasp neither Stephen’s perception nor his mirth (32). Similarly, in the midst of his Shakespearean aesthetic, Stephen makes a little joke, then laughs alone as his audience struggles to grasp his theory (249). In “Circe,” Stephen’s propensity to laugh at the machinations of his own mind is taken to an extreme. Asked at Bella Cohen’s to display his proficiency in French Stephen instead offers a garbled promotion of brothels in his native tongue, one interspersed with references to the poem he wrote on the strand earlier in the day. His audience sportingly follows along as best they can, and some of the women in the room compliment his French – clearly, they comprehend not a word. Stephen then “grimace[s] with head back, laughing loudly, clapping himself,” pronouncing his efforts a “great success of laughing” (U 672–3). As he is the only person expressing mirth, his triumph is either misguided or thoroughly solipsistic. As discussed in Chapter 1, Stephen’s risible denouement to his tales and theories in Ulysses functions in part as a mockery of the teleological drive so fiercely staked out in his aesthetic musings in Stephen Hero and Portrait. In Ulysses, Stephen laughs his conclusions, or lack thereof. Like Joyce, he enjoys his own perceptions, and does not look to others to affirm their risibility. His is a curiously self-driven laughter, one that replicates the risibility of Gertrude Stein’s earliest protagonist, Adele of Q.E.D. (1903). Both Stephen and Adele are driven by a fierce and isolating intellectuality; keen to understand the world, they often find

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themselves laughing alone. While it is not Joyce, but Stein, who is the focus of the following chapter, the similarity of their early fictions begs initial consideration here. Two observations arise: first, their characters are in league with a larger body of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury thought exploring the viability of purely subjective laughter. Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra is fundamental to this burgeoning interest: for prophet-philosopher Zarathustra, we laugh alone at our mortality, perched on a mountaintop, gleefully anticipating the resounding return of our own joyous peals. Consistent with other landmark works like Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals and Freud’s Jokes and the Unconscious, Nietzsche prompts a wave of publication of philosophical, psychological, sociological, and anthropological English books on laughter in the 1920s and 1930s, a trend waning with the onset of the 1940s. This intellectual preoccupation was widely recognized: in The Complete Wild Body (1927), Wyndham Lewis’s protagonist describes himself as “living in a mild and early millennium of mirth,” a supposition echoed in The Secret of Laughter (1932), where Anthony Ludovici contends that his is “an age in which laughter and all the means of provoking it stand very much higher than they have ever stood before in public esteem” (80, 6). Modernist books on risibility tend to grapple with the relationship between the self, others, and laughter, occasionally articulating improbable theories validating the possibility that individuals can rouse themselves to laughter – or may one day be able to – whenever they desire. But even if willed, solitary laughter were tenable, authors like Joyce repeatedly expose the inherent limitations of laughing alone. In “Aeolus,” Ned Lambert’s lone screeches annoy, while Hugh MacHugh’s name is as redundant as his laughter. And although they diligently consume brawn, the spinsters of the Parable of the Plums are barren and their seeds – tossed on the pavement – will not flourish; this infertility prefigures Stephen’s isolating laughter. Many of Joyce’s characters laugh at their own jokes or perceptions as those around them merely tolerate their outbursts. Buck Mulligan possesses an uncanny or “eldritch laugh” and shares his frequent merriment more readily with shadows than his companions (539, 279). School headmaster Mr. Deasy, full of self-righteousness and anti-Semitic vitriol, laughs horrifically and by himself, as does Bella Cohen, the brothel owner who, like Deasy, possesses a laugh triumphant, authoritative, and disgustingly phlegmatic (654, 673). Mockery is a tendency Joyce extends to his narrators, so that the speaker in “Cyclops” announces, in relation to Bloom, that he “had to laugh at the little jewy” (377). Much of this laughter reinforces an individual sense of superiority, as when one Lenehan laughs heartily

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while telling his friend J. J. O’Molloy about the night he fondled Molly in Bloom’s unwitting presence (165). O’Molloy’s somber unease signifies the reader’s discomfort with Joyce’s solo laughers: Buck, Deasy, and Bella often behave deplorably, and their laughter alienates. In an age where the autonomy of the subject is increasingly questioned, Joyce depicts solitary laughter as neither sustainable nor sustaining. The second observation emerging from Joyce’s and Stein’s early, associable interest in risibility involves their microscopic exposure of the temporality of laughter. Generally speaking, a person on the verge of laughing recognizes or anticipates something humorous, a perception followed in quick, near-imperceptible succession by a desire to laugh, then laughter itself. So rapid-fire is this chronology that it is ascertainable only because we never laugh before observing humor. But because Stephen is such an intensely intellectual figure, this temporality comes fully into view: his narrators actively point out that his laughter is predicated upon a moment of perception – in Stein’s Q.E.D. this same chronology is portrayed still more laboriously. While readers and other characters may not understand precisely what these protagonists perceive, it is nevertheless clear that their laughter proceeds from a moment of intellectual recognition. Articulating the chronology of events that take place within the moment of laughter is unusual; from a temporal vantage, humor is more commonly associated with the singularity of the present moment. Humor is considered a form of rupture, one with the capacity to instantaneously explode traditions, expectations, logic, or fundamental beliefs. In this regard, humor breaks lived continuity, calling attention to the immediacy of the now. This is not to suggest that the past is completely abandoned: humor often arises because of a momentary return to childhood playfulness. But the perception of humor amplifies the present, and is often specific to that present. While fully engaged in the presentist focus of laughter generation, Joyce and Stein break it into a still more minute chronology that foregrounds the separate stages of recognition and risibility. In an extension of these components of revolutionizing rupture and present-ness, humor has a longstanding modernizing role in literary history. As Mikhail Bakhtin points out, novelistic prose and other socalled “low genres” are dependent upon a willingness to “[laugh] at living reality,” to pay attention to the self, one’s contemporaries, and one’s own time while mocking the strictures of a traditional past once considered absolute (“Epic and Novel” 21). For Bakhtin, the pursuit of popular laughter is a catalyst for literary reinterpretation and innovation. In other words, just as I have argued throughout Prosaic Desires that exploration of quotidian desires to know, to unknow, and to escape

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from boredom broaden Woolf’s and Joyce’s experimentalism, so too does Bakhtin suggest that attending to the desire to laugh can expand thought and creativity. While high modernists like Joyce and Stein might not fall quite so readily into Bakhtin’s theory of popular risibility, their focus on everydayness certainly does; like many authors of their time, both are fascinated by daily experiences like laughing. As such, it is surprising that laughter is continually, and perplexingly, elided from considerations of the modernist canon. One critic claims that the focus on difficult modernist art has “smothered its laughter,” as we tend to overlook artists’ “new willingness to break the boundaries between sense and nonsense” and the laughter “learned . . . through overseriousness and disillusionment” (Laird, “Laughter and Nonsense” 80).1 Humor enables modernists to abandon tradition: we might consider the parody of the overblown headlines of Joyce’s gale-force “Aeolus,” or how Stephen’s perception of comedy often indicates a break from previously held allegiances. Humor has a contemporizing effect, calling attention to the present moment and generating new forms of awareness and creativity from the mundanities of daily life. And laughter itself emerges from a state of longing eminently everyday: risibility. For if humor underscores the present, our return to temporal continuity is signaled by risibility or the desire to laugh, a desire necessarily rooted in otherness, a desire infinite and infinitely available. Inclining toward laughter generates linkages, both temporal and with others, as fabulously allegorized by the laughing hours of Joyce’s “Circe” episode: “From a corner the morning hours run out, goldenhaired, slim, in girlish blue . . . The hours of noon follow in amber gold. Laughing linked, high haircombs flashing, they catch the sun in mocking mirrors, lifting their arms” (U 678). Plato suggests most human desire is founded upon recollections of pleasure, and our will to laughter is no exception (Philebus 66). When we laugh, we may do so uncontrollably, and our laughter can be highly subjective. But we only ever laugh at the impetus of some external stimulus: a memory, the words or action of another, or, as is so often the case with Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, a perception of the self as other, and as other, funny. Groups intensify laughter: with companions we laugh longer and more often; we usually like to see others laughing; merriment enhances other social pleasures like eating and conversing. But group laughter both unites and divides, affirming shared existence even as it has the power to alienate. This is the combined pleasure and pain of laughter Socrates identified, and with which so many writers have since grappled (Plato Philebus 97). The observation of another inexplicably seized by giggling, mockery, scoffing – these are ways laughter alienates, or can be a daily lived experience of Levinas’s argument that individuals

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remain perpetually unknown to each other. Shared or divisive, the desire to laugh exacerbates our sense of an overwhelming interpersonal longing; laughter also eases our longing for the infinite. We often laugh as a release from constraining social norms such as propriety and morality, and by extension, from the greatest constraint of all, our mortality. As Gerald Gould writes in Democritus, or the Future of Laughter (1929): That we have so little time to be merry is the best reason for merriment. Laughter, in short, is a recognition of the nature of man; a mortal creature, grotesque in his origin, indecorous in his habits, and in these physical aspects a prey to time. (6)

Risibility is regularly associated with divinity because in laughter we are thought to transcend our brief existences. But laughter occurs in the present and is tied to the continuity of an infinite, and infinitely human desire. This desire for laughter is always available; the sense of continuity it generates is why children’s laughter is so readily – and often deplorably – idealized. Children’s laughter evokes the regenerative power at the heart of risibility; it speaks to the pre-linguistic and widespread accessibility of laughter, and is also considered less constrained than the most spontaneous adult laughter. Stephen’s laugh at the conclusion of his parable is described as young because laughter emerges from an eternally available desire, known to us from our earliest recollection. In what follows, I give a brief overview of how modernist theorists are interested in many of these aspects of laughter, particularly its capacity to alienate and associate, and its temporality. In the same period emerge Gertrude Stein’s earliest writings, which present risibility as the preeminent prosaic desire, one which in turn, sustains the reader through her difficult stylistics. The risible qualities of Stein’s writing include her use of childlike language and her emphatic, often-oblique renderings of present moments, all compounded by a fascination with voice. With reference to her initial experimentation, she states in Lectures in America, “I found I was for a little while very much taken with the beauty of sounds as they came from me as I made them” – a description evoking not only the spoken word, but also laughter (196). As Stein’s work continues, this subjective focus shifts: she becomes less interested in her own utterances and instead turns to the sounds made by others. Critics Neil Schmitz and Ulla Dydo have both observed a move away from the self in Stein’s work and identify the change as occurring around 1910 when she begins to explore both her theory of the “continuous present” and include Alice B. Toklas as a dialogic other in her oeuvre.2 A close reading of Adele’s isolated laughter in Q.E.D. coupled with a detailed analysis of Stein’s movement from single to double laughter in A Long Gay

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Book (1909–12) clarifies this transition. Still more significantly, Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother (1910–12) is consumed with sounds emerging from a very combative “he” and “she”; so amorphously is sound delineated throughout that it forces us to contemplate the role of all human utterances, laughter included. In Stein’s early works, the singular laughter of Q.E.D. quite literally doubles over, becomes shared: in A Long Gay Book, Stein demonstrates how, as Bloom puts it in Ulysses, “birds of a feather laugh together” (U 535); come Two, Stein depicts how individuals radically at odds nevertheless exchange an infinite, and often risible, desire to communicate. Stein’s laughter, in other words, precedes and enacts Emmanuel Levinas’s supposition that even between disparate individuals lies a surfeit of irresolvable but productive longing. And, as we have already seen in the work of Hardy, Joyce, and Woolf, Stein’s persistent exploration of a particular quotidian desire facilitates an ideological and creative movement from self to otherness.

Modernist Laughter In Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, Robert Provine contends that the best lesson philosophy teaches about laughter is that it is elusive and vanishes under scrutiny; he also rightly points out that the vast majority of extant theories are about humor and comedy, and not laughter itself. Oft-cited philosophical references include Plato’s fear of laughter as a revolutionary force, Aristotle’s definition of man as the creature who laughs, Hobbes’s negative appraisal of laughter as sudden and derisive glory, Kant’s supposition that laughter occurs when expectations yield nothing, and Schopenhauer’s incongruity theory. But Provine’s science of laughter notably neglects the laughter-engendering play between words and events, and it is this very play that attracts writers, literary critics, and philosophers.3 For if philosophy strives to determine how and when humor is perceived, literature generates the opportunity for that perception – hence Bergson and Freud, among others, depend upon narrative to construct their laughter theories. In turn, humorous literature is understood to be indeterminate and open-ended, underscoring the sense that laughter is another quotidian experience as ephemeral as it is pervasive.4 But like the pursuit of information and the desire to escape boredom, risibility is fundamental to considerations of everydayness, which, as Michael Gardiner writes, must engage with how the body manifests longings banal and spontaneous that speak to pervasive human needs for community, proximity, and intimacy (Critiques of Everyday Life 16). Just such a longing is the desire to laugh.

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Throughout the modernist period, Darwin, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Freud were leading thinkers on risibility; all are frequently cited in the extensive literature on laughter that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. The attention paid to laughter and its causes in the early twentieth century is clearly rooted in burgeoning evolutionary science and psychoanalysis, but mention is also frequently made of the great salve that is laughter in a way related to the more somber historical events of the period. Two world wars and a lengthy economic recession in the first half of the twentieth century may well account for the shift from venerating the triumphant laughter of the self to a broader intellectual contemplation of the interrelationships between self, other, and laughter. Darwin’s pioneering The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (1872) is an early example of the emphasis placed on solitary laughter: in his study of how feelings might be inheritable, he details research methods primarily directed at isolated subjects. The principles by which Darwin accounts for emotional expression downplay sociality: he suggests that emotions either gratify the subject’s state of mind or are involuntary and reflex. These principles he extends to laughter, which he rather dispiritedly defines as a purposeless movement in response to happiness, one that sets the individual apart and reinforces his or her sense of superiority. While Darwin spares no detail of the laughing individual, his analysis of group laughter is weaker. The noise of laughter oddly perplexes him, even as he infers that emitted sounds can signal a joyful meeting between members of a community. Surely these joyous utterances might well explain “why the laughter of man and the tittering of monkeys should be a rapidly reiterated sound” so distinctly different from prolonged calls of distress? (The Expression of Emotions 207). In Le Rire (1884), Henri Bergson agrees with Darwin that laughter reinforces individual superiority. But unlike his predecessor, Bergson believes mirth and emotion are incompatible, and he attributes all laughter to the perception of mechanical inelasticity. For Bergson, rigidity is comic and laughter is its corrective. Bergson contends that when we laugh at others we laugh at their automatism, a characteristic he connects to improprieties such as absentmindedness and unsociability. After laughing, he argues, the individual retires within the self, “is more assertive and conceited than ever, and is disposed to look upon another person . . . as a marionette over whose strings he has control” (“Laughter”189). While his laughter theory argues one-sidedly for risible divisiveness, Bergson nevertheless pivotally recognizes that laughter is regenerative. He suggests that even before we laugh we reinforce our sense of continuity through humor, which is pleasurable because it returns us to the playfulness and uninhibited thinking of childhood. This latter idea

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is explicitly reworked in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), where Freud sets out to right philosophical resistance to the significance of joking. For Freud, jokes are opportunities to be free of social pretence or happily rediscover something familiar, including our childish natures – Freud distinguishes his theory from Bergson’s by suggesting that perceptions of humor are not reliant upon specific memories, but a more general recollection of unrestrained childishness.5 As in Bergson, this recollection is self-serving; for Freud: “When I make the other person laugh by telling him my joke, I am actually making use of him to arouse my own laughter” (156). Of late nineteenth-century laughter theorists, no one extols the merits of risible self-affirmation quite as exuberantly as Nietzsche. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) Nietzsche’s protagonist proves fully prepared to laugh at himself, his contemporaries, and his own time. Amid all of this mockery, Zarathustra extols the continuity risibility evokes, reverently and repeatedly alluding to its childish wisdom and shamelessness. But what most pleases Zarathustra is his ability to inspire his own laughter; he goes so far as to suggest he can tickle himself: “My soul, tickled by sharp breezes as with sparkling wine, sneezes – sneezes and cries to itself: Bless you!” (205).6 Throughout his writings, Nietzsche frequently argues for an autonomous subject who generates his own laughter, even as he points to the divide this process necessarily generates within the self. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes, At times we need to have a rest from ourselves by looking at and down at ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing at ourselves or crying at ourselves; we have to discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must now and then be pleased about our folly in order to be able to stay pleased about our wisdom . . . nothing does us as much good as the fool’s cap: we need it against ourselves . . . (104)

By treating the self as other, solitary laughter restores egotistical balance. Nietzsche argues this division is positive: his laughter enables ordinary men to transcend themselves and become laughing supermen.7 While solo laughter is conventionally associated with madness, laughing gas, or the prodding of the temporal lobe, for Nietzsche it affirms our subjectivity in its many guises.8 But Nietzsche’s so-called autonomous risibility invariably – if tacitly – relies upon otherness: even Zarathustra’s astonishing self-tickling is dependent upon the vagaries of gusts all very much beyond his control. Throughout the modernist period a variety of minor theorists elaborate upon the basic theses postulated by Darwin, Bergson, Freud, and Nietzsche. For instance, J. Y. T. Grieg’s The Psychology of Laughter and

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Comedy (1923) and Ralph Piddington’s The Psychology of Laughter: A Study in Social Adaptation (1933) discuss Bergson’s idea that laughter interrupts the present; Piddington argues that this rupture is short-lived, as laughter tends to affirm and maintain the status quo. In a similarly evolutionary vein, Ludovici’s The Secret of Laughter argues that laughter is a fundamentally threatening behavior, a barring of teeth accompanied by guttural sounds meant to convey our superior adaptation. Controlled laughter is superior, even warlike, while excessive laughter is generally ascribed to the disenfranchised, a group including children, women, African Americans, and the mentally ill – C. W. Kimmins’s The Springs of Laughter (1928) is a noteworthy, if regrettable, articulation of these stereotypes. More positively, Martin Armstrong’s Laughing (1928) affirms Nietzsche’s sense that through laughter we can become “completely and gloriously alive,” and he posits the hope that laughter may well remedy international strife; one of his chapters is dedicated to rewriting World War I as a farce.9 The heightened awareness of mortality in this period is often cited as a reason for re-evaluating everyday pleasures such as laughter; in a similar vein to Armstrong, in Democritus Gerald Gould presents laughter as potentially politically liberating – a pivotal, progressive “escape from the ego into the common lot” (20–1, 5–6). Here we perceive an emergent interest in risibility and otherness more wholeheartedly taken up by late-modernist philosopher Georges Bataille. In articulating his theory of risibility, Bataille also borrows extensively from his forebears; like Bergson and Freud, he considers laughter a form of rupture and suggests that it regeneratively returns us to a childish state. A lover of extremes, in “The Torment” Bataille takes risible selfaffirmation to new heights, suggesting that ecstatic laughter dissolves subjective sovereignty allowing individuals to access a metaphysical realm attainable only through complete self denial. Nietzsche’s transcendent laughter remains terrestrial, Bataille’s is celestial.10 But alongside this regressive, divine affirmation of the risible self – as discussed in Chapter 1, a similar will-renunciation and transcendence informs Joyce’s epiphanic theory – Bataille opens up new thinking on shared laughter. Bataille believes laughter is communication; between individuals he describes it as “compenetration,” a reverberation and amplification initiated by the rupture of the comic object (“Laughter” 60). This communicative aspect he expressly couches in Freud’s own renderings of desire; Bataille’s laughter is either sexual – hence “penetrative” – or death-driven: he argues the solitary transcendental laugher experiences a living death and believes that a tickler might drive a convulsive ticklee to murder. Longing for the other that is not steeped in either of these drives is unthinkable for Bataille. But Bataille’s emphasis on the

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communicative aspect of laughter is pivotal: to see laughter as an emission generated by a desirous interrelation, to underscore its communal element, is to compound the infinite desire it evokes. While laughter is not Levinas’s express concern, he recognizes something that eludes Nietzsche, Bataille, and their contemporaries: namely, that total self-affirmation – risible or otherwise – is impossible. In Levinas’s work we transcend ourselves only by putting the other before our selves. For Levinas, laughter could neither fully compenetrate nor satiate. Levinas’s philosophy brings to bear a longing for otherness foundational to all articulations of the self and experience, a longing that is expressed in the modernist literature published well before his philosophy emerges and which I have extended to the theory of risibility formulated at the outset of this chapter. Like most theories of laughter, my own cobbles together past ideas. All laughter emerges from the perception or anticipation of something humorous; this is evident in Joyce’s depiction of his highly intellectual protagonist and surfaces also in Freud, where he observes that joking “derive[s] pleasure from mental processes,” thereby affirming that recognition forms an initial stage of humor (96). After recognition comes risibility, a state of longing differently and usually only implicitly figured in theories of laughter. Darwin, for instance, acknowledges that willingness precedes laughter when he suggests that “the laugher . . . must be in a happy frame of mind” (200). Conflating perception and risibility, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra likens laughter to an emergence of “wise desire” (215) while Freud and Bataille compare it to a satiating climax, thereby suggesting that humor is desireladen, albeit primarily sexually. Instead, I argue that laughter emerges from an infinitely available but much more banal everyday longing. While agreeing with Bergson that the act of laughing interrupts and heightens the present moment, I am less interested in its ability to generate continuity through affirmation of our recalled childhood. Instead, I suggest that laughter confirms our continuity because it is inspired by and affirms our infinite longing for otherness. Risibility emerges from a perception of otherness, and laughter communicates that humor-tinged longing, even as it assuages that very longing when shared. Gertrude Stein’s writing brings these ideas still more creatively to light.

Stein Regales Recollections of Stein almost always include mention of her laughter. As James R. Mellow writes in his biography, people introduced to Stein were

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charmed . . . by the irresistible fullness of her laughter. It was a laugh, one of her friends remarked, “like a beefsteak” – juicy and solid. Another thought it was like the fire kept banked in [her] studio’s cast-iron stove. A sudden burst of inspiration could fan it into a roaring blaze, spreading a genial warmth. (Charmed Circle 14)

Toklas’s autobiography, What is Remembered, repeatedly describes Stein’s habitual “fine large laughs” (44). Recalling their introduction, Toklas includes particular and peculiar mention of Stein’s risibility: She wore a large round coral brooch and when she talked, very little, or laughed, a good deal, I thought her voice came from this brooch. It was unlike anyone else’s voice – deep, full, velvety like a great contralto’s, like two voices. (26)

Toklas’s recollection includes a self-reflexivity integral to Nietzsche’s own laughter theory: it is as if Toklas relies upon the brooch as a subjective other through which Stein’s otherwise solitary laughter can be shared, a supposition strengthened by Toklas’s claim that Stein appeared to have two voices simultaneously. Intriguingly, Toklas implicitly undermines the possibility that Stein’s laughter can function purely on its own. This perception of Stein as necessarily sharing her laughter through and with her brooch foregrounds the intimate, incessant laughter Stein will come to share with Toklas herself, a risibility understood to motivate Stein’s writing. Thirty years into their relationship, Stein writes to Thornton Wilder, “now I am xciting [sic] myself with a child’s book . . . it makes Alice laugh and I am so pleased” (The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder 265). Stein yearned to evoke Toklas’s laughter in writing and in life. A friend recalls their shared mirth: “The two of them together could make a great racket. Often . . . they were both shouting at once, or laughing – Gertrude rocking happily and noisily in her wicker chair, and Alice quieter but just as thoroughly amused” (Dear Sammy 9). Biographical details confirm what becomes patent in her writing: as her career progresses, Stein moves away from subjective laughter and toward shared risibility. Eric Sevareid describes how, early in her career, Stein laughed alone at her work: In written form her words seem bizarre and difficult to follow, but when she herself reads them aloud it is all perfectly lucid, natural, and exact. She had just then finished her first version of Faust. She walked heavily up and down her study in front of her dark Picassos and read the script aloud to me, carried away by her own words and breaking off into ringing laughter which so overcame her at times that she would stop to wipe her eyes. (qtd. in Mellow 81)

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Here Stein laughs at her perceptions, which, rendered and read aloud, have become other, and as other, risible. Sevareid appreciates the process, even as he implicitly acknowledges that Stein – with her “remarkably lucid and germinal mind” – sees something he doesn’t: he does not describe himself as laughing. But eventually, readers learn to partake in Stein’s humor, even when they do not fully understand her meaning. Wilder told Stein in a letter that he found her writing almost entirely incomprehensible but considered his confusion irrelevant given that “there’s so much [to] understand and love and laugh and feed on” (The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder 419). Stein’s readers are rarely propelled through her work by a straightforward, readily assimilable understanding of meaning, but they can be motivated by recognition of her humor, sustained by the always-possible exercise of the desire to laugh. Stein’s ability to provoke laughter was often far too successful, as indicated by Sherwood Anderson’s recollection of one of her readings: My brother had been at some sort of gathering of literary people on the evening before and someone had read aloud from Miss Stein’s new book . . . After a few lines the reader stopped and was greeted by loud shouts of laughter. It was generally agreed that the author had done a thing we Americans call “putting something across” – the meaning being that she had, by a strange freakish performance, managed to attract attention to herself, get herself discussed in the newspapers, become for a time a figure in our hurried, harried lives. (Critical Essays 40)

In his introduction to Geography and Plays, Anderson describes Stein as an artist “who has been able to accept ridicule,” but Stein openly resented the mockery unleashed on her and her high modernist peers (qtd. in Mellow 260, 371). Critics regularly contend that Stein’s decision to write popular narrative was a questionable means to certain celebrity, but it might be argued that humorous works like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas simply extend Stein’s defining authorial preoccupation: a longing to generate not mockery, but laughter. The persistence with which Stein continues her more difficult writing even after achieving fame speaks to this preoccupation: it is as if she hoped her readers would eventually come to appreciate and laugh along with the comedy of her repetition. For risibility provides the basis and sustenance of Stein’s work. In her monumental study with William Rice, Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises, Ulla Dydo asserts: Stein’s texts are written in the language of true comedy, where nothing is absolute, hierarchies are not respected, roles and identities can change, and

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the only authority is the wide democratic freedom of the word that can move, make and remake itself. (18–19)

Her narrators behave like knowing children, engaging in excessiveness, games, and a resolutely simplified diction; as Stein asserted, “Children always understand my books better than grownups” (qtd. in Stewart 83).11 Stein often repeats words and phrases for pages on end as if toying with language, and these portions of her prose are as open-ended as make believe: they are not meant to progress to any verifiable conclusion, but glean meaning primarily from their generation of amusement. She writes in The Making of Americans: “Loving repeating is always in children . . . Slowly this comes out in them in all their children being, in their eating, playing, crying, and laughing” (295). But The Making of Americans offers yet another clue as to why Stein is so reliant on youthfulness. At its outset, a father asks his children what they will make of themselves as they grow older and they laugh, telling him they can’t possibly know yet, but promise to “be good for something.” The father looks severely at his children, but also with amusement, and the narrator describes the event as “a cheerful challenge” enjoyed by all, particularly as the children liked “to fight strongly against him in the everlasting struggle of conscious unproved power in the young against dogmatic pride in the having done it, of the old ones” (9). Children’s laughter, then, challenges authority in a way akin to Stein’s own cheerful confrontation with traditional literary style.12 While regenerative childhood laughter is crucial to Stein’s prose, she also venerates the well-defined present moment. Stein is renowned for the development of a “continuous present,” a theory she articulates both in Lectures in America and “Composition as Explanation.” The continuous present involves an emphasis on the immediate moment, “beginning again and again” or repeating language, and relying on subjects ready to hand – what she describes in “Composition as Explanation” as a “using everything” (Writings and Lectures 1911–1945 25–9). This temporal focus fuels the risibility of Stein’s childlike prose still further as she asks that we consider language afresh with every reading – for Stein, each so-called repetition should be interpreted as a new and independent present.13 Like laughing, Stein’s writing calls attention to the here and now, even as her perpetually ruptured narrative time relies upon a risible continuity between writer and reader. Writing and reading are fundamentally forms of communication between willing participants, and Stein’s oblique narration underscores the infinite yearning, the perpetual struggle central to this process. Stein generates resoundingly present presents, then, via humor, restores the singularity of each

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inscribed moment to the work at hand. She asks that her readers make an implicit choice: find humor here, maintain a willingness to laugh at the near-inconceivable, or stop reading altogether. Stein’s risibility is confrontational, engaging, and as everyday as the basic diction and domestic content of her work. Laughter is integral to Stein’s depictions of the quotidian: throughout The Making of Americans she maintains that in trying to understand her characters, she must consider their “ways . . . of living,” a claim regularly followed by a list of fundamental everyday activities that includes laughter.14 Dydo’s archival work strengthens my argument that risibility informs Stein’s process. Based on extensive examination of original drafts, Dydo observes how Stein clearly struggled to finish off individual pieces, often using the confines of a notebook as an externallyimposed end point. Dydo considers this literal inability to conclude mirrored by Stein’s narrative content, “which does not unroll toward a climax or conclusion but goes on, steadily and simultaneously, in many forms” (41). Like many critics before her, Dydo emphasizes how Stein’s prose is often driven by the sound of words rather than the meaning they generate; she breaks words into pieces or particles, and re-joins them into new and unusual combinations that glean more interest from their aural qualities than from their established meanings or functions. For the reader, these linguistic realignments become the catalyst for sudden, unexpected connections, which Dydo describes in terms borrowed from Stein’s A Long Gay Book as moments in which words rise up “for us, in moments of felicitous reading” (338). Put differently, in Stein’s writing, we as readers often find ourselves experiencing joyous moments in which we feel we comprehend the ideas, stories, and rhythms informing Stein’s work. Taken together, Stein’s combined emphases on continuity, as well as her frequent reduction of words into units of sound, and generation of abrupt meaning all emulate the process of laughing itself, an emission difficult to stop, formed by senseless noises, and responsive to surprising recognitions. Compounded by her use of childlike diction and rupture-laden temporality, Stein’s writing is inevitably imbued with levity; or, as she puts it at the end of her poem “Lifting Belly”: “In the midst of writing there is merriment” (Writings 1903–1932 458).15 Even Stein’s detractors acknowledge how central risibility is to her work; as Wyndham Lewis writes, “She is just pretending, with a face of a solemn humbug, not to be able to get out the word; what this verbal inhibition results in is something funny, that will make you laugh” (Time & Western Man 47). In case we, like Lewis, miss the point, Stein also describes the delights of shared risibility within her narratives.

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Q.E.D. and Solitary Risibility Like Joyce’s Stephen, Gertrude Stein’s first protagonist – Adele of Q.E.D. (1903) – displays a tendency to laugh by herself. At the outset of the novella, Adele is perplexed by the enormity of her passion for a woman named Helen. Sitting alone on the ship they are taking to Europe, Adele enjoys a perception culminating in laughter: “Why” she said in a tone of intense interest, “its like a bit of mathematics. Suddenly it does itself and you begin to see,” and then she laughed. “I am afraid Helen wouldn’t think much of its only seeing. However I never even thought I saw before and I really do think I begin to see. Yes it’s very strange but surely I do begin to see.” (Writings 1903–1932 13)

Instead of telling us what Adele sees, the narrator show us only that she gains a partial sense of certainty from her vision. Adele meditates on it repeatedly in the following summer, “always end[ing] with a childlike pride in the refrain ‘I did see a little I certainly did catch a glimpse’” (13). Her meditative process compounds our understanding that Adele is embroiled in an intellectuality others consider isolating. After kissing Adele, Helen looked steadily down at her. “Well!” she brought out at last. “Oh” began Adele slowly. “I was just thinking.” “Haven’t you ever stopped thinking long enough to feel” Helen questioned gravely. Adele shook her head in slow negation. “Why I suppose if one can’t think at the same time I will never accomplish the feat of feeling. I always think. I don’t see how one can stop it. Thinking is a pretty continuous process.” (12)

Adele thinks, observes, catches glimpses and, on occasion, these instants of recognition drive her desire to laugh. As for Stephen, her response is both affirming and inconclusive; it is also replicated throughout Q.E.D., which explores the limitations of laughing alone. An unrequited love story, Q.E.D. concludes with what Adele describes as a “dead-lock” that is tacitly prefigured by her increasingly rueful and very solitary laughter (62–3). Glimmers of Stein’s mature style – particularly her oddly flat, near-deadpan tone – emerge in this novella, but it remains one of her most traditional narratives, following a linear progression and imbued with descriptions of character and setting absent from her later, more experimental writing. The book opens with Adele on a steamer to Europe, hoping Mabel Neathe and Helen Thomas – two girls with whom she is vaguely acquainted from college – will prove amusing companions. Here Adele describes her personal experiences, as well as her relations to other people and her surroundings as “an awful grind” because there is so much “to know and understand”

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(3). In spite of this internal struggle, Adele’s perceptions of the world around her readily give way to laughter; so constant is her risibility that Helen describes Adele’s face as “almost foolishly happy and content” (8). “Large, abundant, full-busted and joyous . . . [Adele] moved happily along, her white Panama hat well back on her head and an answering smile on her face as she caught the amused glances that fell upon her” (51). Adele is quick to express humor: to stave off the unease caused by the infatuation she and Mabel’s simultaneously have with Helen, she vigorously takes up “the burden of . . . entertainment” on behalf of their awkward group (11). Adele’s well-known “ability to regale” confirms her place in Mabel’s social set (16). But Adele finally buckles under this constant obligation; by the novella’s end she is exhausted, impatient, and bored. She can no longer bear the frustration of her unrequited sexual passion and Mabel’s prostitution of the object of that passion, the perennially cash-strapped Helen. Adele distances herself from Helen and Mabel, travelling extensively and alone through Europe and the American eastern seaboard. In the process, Adele comes to see herself as other; like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, she often laughs while reflecting on the foolishness of her own behavior. Many facets of Adele’s characterization echo modernist laughter theories; for instance, Stein alludes to the regenerative qualities of risibility via Adele’s “childlike pride” in her own perceptions. And Adele is often likened to the infinite: she cultivates a “habit of infinite leisure,” claims she longs “to . . . meditate endlessly,” and “take[s] an everlasting time to arrive anywhere” (16, 22). She is perpetually bemused by her inability to know any woman’s motivations, and takes pleasure in her first passionate embrace with Helen because it offers her a sense of time without origin. Similarly, she is drawn to Helen because in her she recognizes two endlessly incompatible beings, “one whole . . . consisting of a laugh so hard it rattles . . . alternat[ing] with another . . . that possesses a purity and intensity of feeling . . . and an infinitely tender patience” (23). This attraction is furthered by Adele’s awareness that they share an infinitely mistimed desire: “Adele realized that Helen demanded of her a response and always before that response was ready. Their pulses were differently timed” (40). Finally, like Nietzsche, Adele recognizes that the external world makes available infinite interpretations; this awareness fuels her solitary laughter. And Adele always laughs alone. Although we are told she inspires laughter, instances of shared mirth are never described in Q.E.D. Instead, Adele laughs by and to her self, even in the presence of others. The solitary nature of this laughter is clarified during the initial voyage, where Adele begins to laugh in Helen’s company and explains that her

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desire to do so rests on her perception of “the general foolishness” of their love triangle. But this, we are told in no uncertain terms, is not laughter at anyone’s expense: “There was nothing mocking in her face nothing but simple amusement” (10). As if to counter the widespread supposition – presented alike by Darwin, Bergson, and Freud – that laughter reinforces an individual sense of self, Stein deliberately describes Adele’s laughter as emerging solely from her own levity, triggered by her own isolated perceptions. But while this narrative claim frees Adele from charges of scorning or mocking, it nevertheless compounds our sense that although Adele chides Helen for her “fatal illusion . . . that [she] could stand completely alone,” she is similarly embroiled in her own “inveterate egotism” – her “cursed habit of being concerned only with [her] own thoughts” (24). This is not a curse she successfully renounces: for Adele, the pleasure of her own constant company proves paramount. And so Adele laughs to herself at the sudden inconsequentiality of meeting at Helen’s house – initially considered a risky endeavor – and again at the realization that there is no morality in passion (21, 35). Once, with Helen, Adele briefly approximates a “state of perfect happiness” – here she laughs with fondness, but alone (39). This solitary laugh resurfaces when Helen admits to a degree of wrongdoing in their relationship for the first time. Helen’s silence becomes increasingly apparent as Q.E.D. progresses, and Adele laughs more often, but less happily as she recognizes that Helen poses a threat to “her certain hold on her own frank joyousness and happy serenity” (21). Her laughter becomes sardonic as she watches Mabel bribe Helen with trips and jewelry. She “smiles drearily” at the ridiculousness of the situation, at her inability to maintain Helen’s loyalty because she quite literally can’t keep Helen in the manner to which she has become accustomed (58). A solitary trip to Tuscany briefly regains Adele her good humor: “While winding joyously up and down the beautiful Tuscan hills and swinging along the hot dusty roads all the foulness and bitterness were burned away. She became once more the embodiment of joyous content” (59). Adele is happiest as laughing Zarathustrian hermit, alone in nature, self-communing. But she is haunted by the divide between herself and Helen to the extent that her constant laughter becomes “a usual indulging in . . . dismal self-mockery” (56). And Helen’s hard and rattling laugh never blends with Adele’s content chortles. When Toklas published Q.E.D. for the first time in 1950 she called it Things As They Are, a title taken from one of the concluding phrases of the story, and recalling Piddington’s suggestion in The Psychology of Laughter that laughter expresses satisfaction with the status quo (Stimpson and Chessman, “Note on the Texts”).16 The solitary laughter of Q.E.D. exposes modernist fears that

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a triumphantly autonomous subject may simply be alienated and lonely: Adele and Helen’s relational deadlock is echoed by their inability to take part in each other’s laughter. To some degree, laughter is always reliant upon subjectivity – however circumstantially shared, “no one can laugh for you” – but the steady souring of Adele’s laughter throughout Q.E.D. suggests that an individual desire for laughter – like any solitary quotidian desire – does not affirm the self for long (Sanders, Sudden Glory xv).

A Long Gay Book and Shared Laughter In 1908, six years after completing Q.E.D., Stein began A Long Gay Book. From the outset, we are aware that her authorial agenda is entirely different from that of her early novella. Stein states, “In this book there will be discussion of pairs of people and their relation, short sketches of innumerable ones” (LGB 17). As in The Making of Americans, Stein is striving to detail a series of lives in this book, but her terminology indicates the distinctly philosophical bent of this piece, namely, the questioning of the authority of the subject – “the one” – and an attendant transition to a valuation of the subject–other dyad. Inherent to this process is Stein’s concern with what she calls “being-existing,” a phrase referring to the infinite call of finite existence, which is encapsulated thus: “Living can be continuing if every one believing that every one is not believing that living is continuing, is believing that any one can come to be a dead one” (LGB 62). For Stein, we are endlessly bound together by the belief that we will cease to exist; life persists on the basis that everyone comprehends mortality. But as in many of Stein’s works, A Long Gay Book begins not with death, but birth, opening with an examination of baby and childhood in which the narrator states that individuals who ignore memories of their earliest years do so because acknowledgment of the beginning of life – of origins – necessitates “a losing of the everlasting feeling” (13). For these “ones,” making too much of a concrete starting point is to negate any part in an infinite. Stein’s narration works against this rejection of babyhood, arguing that men and women who “have it in them then to lose inside them their everlasting feeling” find themselves in possession of a broken interior world; for the narrator, a lost sense of the infinite is more devastating than any knowledge of mortality (15). As such, A Long Gay Book labors to establish our awareness of origin within a larger stream of time: “In beginning going on living any one is going on living” (35). If beginning is inextricable from some kind of continuity, the two terms need not be separated by punctuation or pause but may be read as the single phrase: “beginning

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going on living.” In A Long Gay Book, this continuity is enhanced by Stein’s narrative movement from self to other, an ideological movement inspired by her conscious exploration of the quotidian desire for gaiety or laughter, one central to the book’s title, narration, and style. Among the first of Stein’s extensive, experimental works, A Long Gay Book contains paragraphs and pages made up of endless slight repetitions which read like a train of thought honing in on a particular perception. The meaning of these passages lies almost entirely in their playful humorousness – almost entirely, because they are often discernibly related to the subject at hand. Thus, within the confines of a work exploring individuals, their relations, and continuity, Stein devotes two pages to finishing, a term that pertains to death, as in “having finished needing being,” or the end of a relationship or interaction: “Finishing with some one” (26–7). She writes: Some one is finished with some one and that one is one who was one not any one needed to be finished with as that one was one being one not coming to any finishing. Finishing with such a one is what some one is doing and that one then is knowing that thing and not any one then is finishing any such thing. Being finished with some one is what has happened to some one and that one is that not any one can be beginning to be finishing. Finishing with some one is something and that finishing then is done. Finishing with some one is something some one is beginning and that thing then is begun. (27)

Some one can finish while another one begins; finishing can occur between two people; finishing can betoken beginning – these are all potential readings that emerge from this paragraph. The logic is paradoxically opaque and open to interpretation. Were anyone to reconstruct the thoughts arising in the contemplation of an abstract idea, a similar kind of connected, but convoluted logic might emerge. Stein clearly revels in such renderings and wants to amuse us with the swirling repetition of her disjointed but thematically connected thought patterns; she fills pages with these constructions. Consider, as another example, her thoughts on dayness and oneness: In each day being a day and in every day being a day and any day being a day, in every day being a day any one being one going on being living in each day being a day any one being one is being one doing that thing being one having been one going on being living. In each day being a day and any day is a day, any day being a day, in each day any one coming to be one continuing being living is one having been one being living, having been one going on being living. (36)

This passage is overtly tied to her textual concerns: not only is Stein exploring the individual within a discrete amount of time but she juxtaposes these units against an articulated infinite: within each day, each person

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is continuing to live. Having taken on the comparison of lived to infinite time – a longstanding philosophical concern – Stein writes the theme out to exhaustion. She plays with it until its mystery is gone; its hold over us has ceased. Then she stops, changes course, and writes on again. The rhythm and punctuation of these passages is fundamental to their humor. Just as the words in the above quotation on dayness and oneness can be read for their meaning, they can also be heard as phonemes, or theoretical representations of sound lacking grammatical reference. This is particularly true when Stein exhaustively iterates and reiterates monosyllables; these words cease to signify, becoming utterances contextually significant but individually meaningless, akin to the sounds made in laughter. And yet, in the midst of these largely nonsensical passages, Stein boldly inserts a period, asserting a necessary full stop before she can begin again. These sentences are in turn shaped into paragraphs, even as they are located within two or three pages filled with similarly isolated paragraphs dedicated to very similar topics. The structure imposed is not arbitrary. The periods and ends of paragraphs frame the incessant stream of thought and ideas, speaking to an awareness of audience and to a conventional grammatical structure. While in “Poetry and Grammar” Stein expresses a great aversion to the comma, she does not stop short at the full stop, which emphasizes the rupture of the humorous moment, even as it provides an opportunity for swelling laughter.17 The continuity of these most insistent, discrete Steinian tracts is reconvened into the endlessness of the written word by the writer’s own desire to laugh, one she shares with her audience. For humor, like the self, cannot be fully contained: “In arranging being one any one is having a piece of them spreading . . . In arranging being one is almost” – but not completely – “completing that thing” (LGB 43). In the midst of A Long Gay Book Stein begins to pry the lid off oneness. “In being one being inside that one” – the self within the self makes two (55). Stein also calls oneness into question by protesting its reality too much. Consider, for instance, this about a character named Larr: “He was that one. He was satisfying any one enough that he was that one. He was satisfying himself of something of being that one” (69). Which one is Larr, and why does that one require so much substantiation? A longing for the other slowly emerges amid the oneness: “Some one is wanting to have some one come again” (28). Joy exists in the communication between two: Knowing something and telling it again and again is a happy thing if the two of them are then completely knowing that thing that knowing that thing and telling that knowing a thing and telling it again and again is a very happy thing. (35)

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Amusement arises from shared perception, and the other affirms one’s own continuity: thus to feel anything about someone else – be it like or dislike – is to be continuing. And this, after fifty-odd pages of dogged oneness, confirms the transition: “Anything is two things” (53). On the next page, the narrator begins to address a “you,” and dialogue enters the text: “Why do you mind if you destroy nothing, if you arrange everything, if you continue anything, why do you mind if you admit something.” The speaker wonders what someone else thinks, and a speculative tone enters the narration from this point forward, culminating in a “they” whose names mingle, and who spend the day by giving away the time to each other. “Let the best way of saying how do you do occupy the morning and the evening. This will not fill all the time. Happy day” (95). By the end of A Long Gay Book, time and pleasure are determined by the other; a movement from singularity to doubleness has been effected, and the longing shared between two is signaled and compounded by an increase in risibility and the enjoyment risibility brings. “Two are not one when there is a dress” (111). As A Long Gay Book concludes, the subject–object relation is defined in terms of a single garment, which cannot be worn simultaneously by two people, just as the philosophical other cannot be defined by any subject. This statement is a mockery of philosophical authority and a truth cogently explained; it also refers to the accomplice Stein’s narrator has gained along the way. The amusement between the delighted domestic figures permeates the conclusion of A Long Gay Book. Indeed, this cosy self-contained world presupposes an inclination to laugh, “Very likely they can laugh when they laugh and very likely they like what they like when they like what they like” (84). Freedom abounds, and with it, a corresponding, unconstrained laughter: “Evading and then relaxing and then stipulating and then hearing that there is a protection is not the whole way to have it said that there has been laughing” (94). The narration moves away from the repetition of purely abstract phrases; in their stead, there are discussions of pepper, banking, constancy, and where, in and among this space, to put the laughter: “Place the laughing where the smile is lending what there is of expecting that attention” (97). Laughter is suddenly an object to be taken hold of and arranged within the continuity of domestic space: “Biting a piece of a sample and refusing a piece of a laugh . . . is not the way to follow” (104) – here laughter can be divided and served like cake. Indeed, laughter finds itself thrust among a catalog of domestic objects and chores: “The sign, the left and the laugh, all the tangle, the length of light, piece the pressing” (107). And again: “To sustain a breath is not so dignified as to laugh longer and to do that

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with that wail is the principal task of more plucking” (101). Laughter nevertheless occupies a highly visible portion of the domestic portrait: “A wave of the white and the black and all the precious substance that which is the whole resemblance is so keen that it is not in between, it is the whole and there is laughing” (99; emphasis added). Laughter is integral to this place, this longing between two who cannot simultaneously wear a single dress, but can cobble together a life in which “all the use is humorous” (114). In Q.E.D. and A Long Gay Book, as in The Making of Americans, to be one is to be “doing, thinking, feeling, remembering and forgetting, loving, disliking, being angry, laughing, eating, drinking, talking, sleeping” – oneness is thus only partially, but integrally, defined by the risible (LGB 23). The individual can laugh alone, like Adele in Q.E.D. or Mrs. Peter: “Every day [Mrs. Peter] was laughing and . . . being that one” (LGB 39). But the desire to laugh necessarily arises from otherness, importantly undermining individual surety. Adele is confused by her relationships, preferring isolation and solitary laughter. In A Long Gay Book, Stein suggests that laughter is best when infectious, a state only possible when risibility acknowledges how it is always sourced in a longing for unknowable otherness: “Any one laughing might be meaning that they were feeling that some one was a funny one. This is not certain” (79). In the process, risible desire proffers a return to temporal continuity. Consider the case of Helen: Helen was hoping to be laughing. She was saying she was going to keep on laughing. In going to be laughing she was beginning and in beginning she was continuing. She was continuing, she was believing anything, she was believing that she had been laughing, she was believing that she had been continuing. She went on believing. (66)

Pursuing laughter reinforces Helen’s belief in her own mortality. At the end of A Long Gay Book, dialogue and the inclination to laugh underscore the implicit longing between the self and the other; laughter is now part of a whole so complete it can be fearlessly divided: “The whole is so much that there is a half” (104). One splits into two and is strengthened by this division; divisiveness is not reduction but aggregation ad infinitum. Laughter, a piece of this whole that cannot be refused, is freely given by one to another, infinitely born of the infinite desire between them. While Adele’s laughter confirms the infinite longing between herself and Helen Thomas it does not bridge that divide. By contrast, the laughter of the “they” at the end of A Long Gay Book is lively, dynamic, liberating. The philosophical infinite is incorporated into the domestic: “Present the time and section the sailing of a coat. Show no theory. Show

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the satisfaction and see the window. All the gentleness is mixing” (105). From a narration investigating the uses of humor emerges a humor of usefulness – one can almost hear Stein’s laughter spread. “The difference is spreading” Stein writes in Tender Buttons (3). Written down, Stein’s uncontained, uniquely subjective humorous perceptions extend to a shared desire for the risible.

Two and Infinite Levity In The Language that Rises, Dydo argues that in the midst of A Long Gay Book Stein begins to rely upon short phrases, multiple puns, and the breaking up and recombining of words; these processes, she suggests, feed into Tender Buttons, which emerged in 1914, and is often considered a benchmark in Stein’s oeuvre. Dydo’s claim for the experimental importance of A Long Gay Book augments Schmitz’s contention that doublespeak filters through this work in a way not previously observable in Stein’s writing. But Stein’s attention to sound and difference – a focus adding new dimensions, voice, and philosophically-oriented play to her writing – are also primary preoccupations in Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother, a work begun a year after A Long Gay Book was underway; both pieces were completed in 1912. Two is an involved documentation of the sounds “coming out of” a “he” and “she” who, apart from the title, go unnamed. Nor is the sound in question ever completely specified; there are no direct quotations of speech, and very few readily identifiable functions or outcomes are ascribed to their utterances. Unlike A Long Gay Book, Two is not a cosy domestic narrative; instead, it charts a very palpable conflict, one evidently based on the disagreements preceding a lifelong rift between Gertrude and Leo Stein. Stein struggled under and benefited from the influence of her brother, an art critic and investor with whom she shared a Parisian flat and an impressive collection of paintings by modernists such as Picasso and Matisse. Leo’s decision to leave their home is believed to have been predicated upon Stein’s burgeoning romance with Toklas; by 1912, Leo had left the apartment at rue de Fleurus, and Toklas was firmly ensconced as Stein’s new living companion. While these biographical details are straightforward enough, Two uncovers the longings for resolution and affirmation that accompany conflict, and indeed, intimate relations of any kind. Unlike Q.E.D., which is defined by Adele’s laughter and Helen’s silence, the “he” and “she” of Two strive again and again to communicate; their ties are never completely severed. Levinas contends that insatiable desire for an other who consistently eludes our understanding forms the basis

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of any face-to-face encounter between individuals; this sort of incomprehension – writ large – forms the very basis of Stein’s text. Throughout Two, attempts to know and understand the other occur through desirous utterances very akin to risibility, and as endlessly available. “The sound there is in them comes out from them.” So begins Two. By the end of the first paragraph, we are aware that the “they” in question are two individuals, each of whom is living, knowing, and “having sound coming out of them” (1). To greater and lesser, but fairly consistent degrees, the movement of sound from the inside of their bodies to the outside forms the primary narrative interest of the 142 pages that follow. Near the end, Stein sums up her content, and the machinations of her characters, as follows: “Sound sounding is expressing everything” (137). This sound has many guises but cannot be reduced to yelling, stomping feet, or any other noise – polite or otherwise – the body might make. At times, Stein’s narrator observes particular kinds of sound: we are occasionally told that her characters say something, make replies, or whistle (64–5, 116). But most bids to specify are quickly undermined, as in, “They are not ones singing. They are ones talking. Sound is coming out of them and some of the sound that is coming out of them is coming as talking” (3). The claim that they are talking initially appears definitive, but the next sentence undoes this surety, suggesting that only a portion of the sound they make can be attributed to spoken words. Indeed, in any number of instances, sound is complicatedly characterized in a manner that strikes a balance between specificity and ambiguity: that was a sound that was expressing that pleasantness was increasing, that was a sound that was telling that understanding had been trembling, that was a sound that was meaning that gentleness had been existing, that was a sound that was telling that expecting something was not existing . . . that was a sound that was something. (14)

Are these discrete, individual sounds, or does this passage – much longer in the book – refer to one very widely interpretable sound? Either way, while meanings and functions are indicated, described sounds go unspecified. Lacking distinct demarcation or attribute, Stein’s sound takes on the amorphousness of laughter, a noise variable and difficult to describe, if discernibly human. Sound, however, is not all encompassing. Besides making noises, the “he” and “she” of this narrative are also described as moving, struggling, eating, hoping, walking, and running. Sound emission is clearly reserved for communication: “Sound being sounding and something being existing and some one needing feeling she was one exhausting expression” (22). Sound is almost always directed towards others – “sound coming

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out of her she was . . . doing what would please some” – it is also often “meaning something” (23, 133). Sound is associable with the knowledge and perceptions of those sounding off, and often follows observed moments of recognition, as in “She was thinking this thing. She was thinking in this thing. She had sound coming out of her” or “He had been understanding anything and sound had been coming out of him” (5, 12). On occasion, these ruminative declarations are imbued with the philosophical: “In accepting thinking as being something continuing he is one having sound continuing being coming out of him” (31). At stake in this last quotation is a reflection on the nature of thinking and being itself, epistemological and ontological concerns assuaged by the ubiquity of communicated sound. But the relevance of sound is not limited to the realm of abstract philosophical pursuit, because sound also betokens the emotional: “In sound sounding and coming out of her she was expressing all of feeling all she was feeling” (87). Or more succinctly: “She being one, sound coming, she was realizing that she was feeling’ (25). Indeed, sound seems motivated in many instances by a near-desperate need, one that defines the self: she was needing to be one having sound coming out of her, needing sound sounding needing to be one, she was needing sound coming, she was needing, she was one, she was needing sound sounding . . . she being was one was needing to have sound sounding, she was needing sound to be coming out of her, sound. (27)

This need importantly characterizes both figures, so that “he” too is described as needing sound’s soundings (38). Like any quotidian desire, the need for sound, like the yearning for continuity itself, is ongoing: “She was needing to be one continuing, that is she was needing, if she were to be one having sound coming out of her and sounding, she was needing being one continuing” (39). In one instance, the narrator acknowledges that sound cannot, of course, be seamlessly continuous, describing “she” as sounding, but also quitting (24). Emitted sounds may start and stop, but in Two, their significance is drawn from the ever-present possibility they represent; as Stein lists at one juncture, sounds facilitate the commencing, believing, meaning, expecting, and enlarging of a sense of continuity (59). Sounds are endlessly available and produced; their endlessness is affirmed when the narrator asserts “Sound sounding is expressing that which is continuing” (136). Continuity is paramount: rare references to something or someone stopping are carefully construed as “not continuing” as if to imply that eternality determines even attempts at cessation.

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Sound, then, is an expression of knowledge, meaning, or emotion and, fundamentally, meets a basic and continuous human longing for communication; it is also distinctly associated with risibility. In keeping with the undefined conflict at hand, explicit references to laughter in Two are limited to mockery.18 But on occasion, the narrator imbues the sounds coming from the “she” with a very literal sort of levity: Sound having been coming out of her had been coming and had been a sound that had been coming and sounding and going on and rising and had been a sound that was sounding and going on being that thing being a sound coming and rising and going on and continuing and waiting and going on and rising and waiting and rising and going on and waiting and rising and going on and rising and rising and waiting and going on and rising and going on and going on. Sound coming out of her had been a sound coming out of her and going on and coming out of her and coming out of her and going on and coming out of her and coming out of her and rising. (15)

Emulating both laughter and conflict, this is a peculiarly one-sided upward movement; her sound rises, almost carrying her along with it. By contrast, “he was not sublime when he aspersed what was the beginning of elevation” (104). “He” casts aspersions on her rising, but she rises above even this, becoming, in an unusually overwrought Steinian moment, transcendent: “She is the anticipation. She is the actualization. She is the rising having been arisen . . . She is the lamb and the lion” (107–8). This passage resonates with Zarathustrian triumph but is consistent with other modernist explorations of extreme or intensely self-validating subjective desires as “she” does not remain superior for long. Her brief likeness to a Christ-like figure is bathetically exposed as the product of a very earthbound sounding between two, so that “she” quickly attributes her sense of herself as “an estimable person” to nothing other than “a marvellous articulation” (108). Nevertheless, through uttered sound, “she” appears to overcome his determination “to set all that was rising” (127). This victory should not be construed as either final or all-determining: irresolvable disparity is fundamental to the two in question. Sound is communicative but also affirms what Levinas figures as the absolute isolation of subjectivity: “the sound coming out of her was the sound that was that she was one” (15). Presumably it is precisely because sounds can both communicate and fail to do so that there is so much incentive for the endless iterations of Stein’s Two. From the very start, individual sounds both unite and divide this “he” and “she”: “They are alike in having been having sound coming out of them . . . They are not alike, the sound each one of them is having come out of them is sounding different from the sound coming out of the other one”

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(2). They share in common the making of sound, but their sounds are entirely dissimilar; while this divergence precludes their ever knowing one another completely, it is itself fully understood: “Each one of them is completely knowing that that one is completely different from the other one . . . They are completely different and sound is coming out of each of them” (29). Their differences are compounded by an increasingly fraught conflict, throughout which “he” is often accused of trying to bring things to an end. His refusal of open-endedness is aligned with activities, like listening or describing, but also to undefined events: “having been completing something he was beginning the deciding of everything” (42). Deciding is unacceptably precise, as are justifying, judging, arranging, and perfecting – at issue in these activities is their presumption of authority and finality; their move toward teleology clearly offends the narrator’s belief in continuity: “in perfecting he was not continuing” (44, 47). “She,” by contrast, always carries on: she knows and knows again, is accepting, asks questions, and expresses mingling and loving.19 But so much does “he” disregard continuous exchange that “he” even tries, albeit unsuccessfully, to end sound: “he was ending, and ending sound was sounding and coming out of him. He was not ending, that was what he was doing, waiting not being existing, and he was waiting and waiting he was not listening” (67). Again cessation is fragmented into continuity: ending sound is what “he” does as still more sound comes out of him; thus the conflict carries on, alongside and part of the everyday, infinite longing to understand otherness. As Two proceeds, there is a reference to “one who came” – Toklas seems the obvious biographical reference here, although predictably enough, the individual in question is identified only by pronouns. Entry of this third party brings the conflict between “he” and “she” to a palpable climax, accompanied by a mutual denunciation of their dyad: “Each of them was not one of the two of them” (99). After this, an outright battle ensues: there is a veritable flurry of storming, winning, withdrawing, attacking, losing, and pardoning, all exacerbated by mention of his departure. Ultimately, each figure experiences a kind of victory: “she,” as already mentioned, depicted as transcendent lion and lamb, “he” being “the one who did not win and this he said as he said he won and he won. He did win” (110). Stein’s use of the homophones “one” and “won” emphasize the loneliness of any victory, however triumphantly asserted. Additionally, his statements are conflictedly portrayed: “this he said” pertains to both losing and winning, as if to suggest that winning is a state both subjective and arguable. The narrative supports this ambiguity, as neither her win nor his is ever ratified by the other. In Two,

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the victor remains undetermined, although the narrator implies that her spoils of war exceed his: “he” retains his “faculty of expression” but it is tainted by his constant investment in “the completion of completing”; “she,” however, can express and carry on: “She had the likelihood of saturating all the partial examples of solutions with the continuation of expression” (123, 118). Continuity indubitably triumphs, as “he” and “she” remain perpetually defined by their very irresolution. Two closes as follows: “She was ready and not coming. He could not go. They did not stay away” (142). The first two sentences invoke stasis while the third assures that endless proximity – mental, emotional, or physical – remains fundamental to their experience: their relationship continues to define their respective senses of self. “He said and she said. They did not say that he said and she said. They did not say what they said. He said. She said” (140–1). To suggest that this is a “he said, she said” tale is cliché and inevitable, given the constant use of the two pronouns in relation to so much communicable sound. But even at this juncture, Stein’s narrator describes the “he” and “she” as speaking, then retracts this assertion so as not to limit their communication to speech. Indeed, the pair is far more accurately engaged in a debate of “he sounded, she sounded.” While the narration confirms and reconfirms that “he” and “she” do not and cannot agree, “the burden is not that sound which has been sounding” (137). However strife-ridden, sound forms a bridge over the ocean of longing that lies between them; if “he” and “she” fail, it is not a failure of discontinuity – their longing goes on – but a failure to recognize the inherent productivity, even inevitability, of their inability to understand each other. The narrator is careful to indicate how sound becomes meaningful or significant only in the other’s presence: Each one of them was one, each one of them was needing sound coming and sounding and coming out of that one and sounding. Each one of them was needing that, having been listening, sound that was sounding was coming out them. (37)

Sound is a necessary form of continuous exchange; it is not enough to make sound, or hear one’s self sounding: listening to another’s sound is imperative. Unlike the stifling silence of Q.E.D., in Two sound is made and is meaningful; part of what it portends is “giving being existing” (133, 57). Sound is a gift given to one’s self and others; as if to emphasize this point, “she” is described as a person who busily engages herself in finding new, noisy forms of expression and interaction in order to “ha[ve] the exchange” (136). And part of what is noisily passed back and forth is the continuity of love:

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She being that one she was expressing and expressing she was expressing this thing and expressing this thing she was feeling everything and feeling everything she was loving and loving she was being living and being living she was continuing and being continuing sound was coming out of her and the sound coming out of her was sounding. (47–8)

”She” is one, and “he” is a separate being; each speaks their own perplexing noise-language. But the need to express unites them, and this desire is so overwhelming that the sound of their interaction takes precedence over its content. In writing a narrative that explores the differences between two loving but deeply divided subjects, Stein exposes the temporal continuity at work in the infinite desire to know and understand an other that remains incomprehensible. And, in depicting the desire for undefined but endless exchange of utterance, Stein makes palpable the shared longing by which risibility is generated.

Conclusions Laughter is powerful, and modernists knew it; its alienating force emerges in Ulysses, where much of the vitriolic mockery goes unchecked, and in Stein’s Q.E.D., where Adele’s laughter effects no change in her relationship with Helen. Joyce’s and Stein’s literatures indicate how humor ruptures lived continuity, and how that rupture can divide, exacerbating the irreconcilable differences between individuals. But laughter emerges from an infinite, ever-present longing, one that affirms continuities temporal and desirous. As Stein repeatedly returns to the risible in her writing she depicts both its continuity and its reliance upon otherness. Thus the eternal return to the solitary in A Long Gay Book schisms into the infinite variety experienced by the two who find all use humorous; thus the “he” and “she” of Two can be radically different yet long for the amorphous levity of each other’s utterances. Stein’s reworkings of mirth extend contemporaneous philosophies: Bergson, Nietzsche, Freud, and Bataille suggest that laughter’s main role is selfvalidation, and from a theoretical perspective, personal transcendence remains a pinnacle believed attainable through laughter. But with his emphasis on communicative risibility, Bataille opens the door to discussions of shared laughter. The desire to laugh is not transcendent because it provides access to some metaphysical or divine sphere. Instead, the perception or anticipation of something humorous prompts risibility, and the laughter that follows confirms the very endlessness of our daily yearning for otherness, as posited by Levinas. While otherness becomes increasingly paramount, solitary laughter

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remains fundamental to Stein’s and Joyce’s narratives, emerging in the triumphant sounding of the “she” in Two and discernible in the figure of Stephen Dedalus, who so frequently laughs on his own throughout Ulysses. In “Proteus,” Stephen thinks of an acquaintance as victim to “the imp hypostasis” who “tickle[s] his brain,” a description which quite aptly fits Stephen himself (49). Hypostasis refers to the embodiment of the human and divine in Christ, but it also speaks more generally to the possibility of two natures existing in one being; imprisoned by his own intellect, Stephen’s laughter often seems to respond to recognition of his self as other. Joyce’s portrayal of Stephen suggests that this sort of laughter is alienating and deeply unsatisfactory. Exiting a brothel very early on the morning of 17 June 1904, Stephen babbles in a way both clever and communicatively empty, recounting historical events and literary terms in a manner perceived threatening, obnoxious, and opaque. Impervious to the ire he provokes in the crowd that gathers, Stephen is disoriented but insistent as Bloom tries to lead him away from an impending fight, laughing hollowly, stumbling, and declaring his center of gravity displaced. Stephen is enervated by an awareness of his own isolation that cannot be overcome – not even by his triumphant, mocking enunciations of academic prowess. If his intellect is the literal center of his grave and serious self, here it lacks the ballast of an easy, satiating, or shared levity: hence his laughter is both subjective and empty. But by this juncture in Ulysses, Bloom has already acknowledged that individual laughter is akin to solitary confinement. In response to jeers outside Barney Kiernan’s pub he sentences the crowd to a course of laughing alone, telling himself, “Ought to go home and laugh at themselves” (496). For Bloom, self-laughter is punitive. Fundamentally, laughter is dependent upon something or someone beyond the subject. That otherness is a necessary facet of risibility surfaces in Toklas’s odd description of Stein’s laughing brooch, a laughing object echoed in Molly’s monologue in “Penelope,” where she describes Simon Dedalus “with his tall hat on him at the cricket match and a great big hole in his sock one thing laughing at the other” – here a ridiculously ragged sock takes on the shape of a mouth agape with giggles at its absurd counterpart, a too-high hat (913). But while the pleasure of laughter is often inspired by recognition of the inanimate, the experience of laughter is heightened and compounded by being shared by individuals. The infinite unknowability between two echoes the infinite inclination to laugh: laughter is indeed best when doubled over and over again. Laughter responds to the endlessness of this inclination, and childish laughter underscores its regenerative foundations; hence Stein concerns herself with “hanging onto the everlasting feeling” of baby

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and childhood in laughter-filled A Long Gay Book (15). In a comically inflated passage in “Cyclops,” Joyce parodies venerations of youthful continuity, depicting a heroine attempting to cheer up her lover as he stands upon the scaffold. The young woman regales the doomed man with “recollection [of] the happy days of blissful childhood together on the banks of Anna Liffey when they had indulged in the innocent pastimes of the young” – these memories prompt hearty laughs from both of them, ghoulishly echoed by the spectators gathered round to watch him die (401). Joyce’s characters – both amicable and at odds – share a disposition to laugh, as do his narrators and readers. But Stein remains still more profoundly dependent upon the risible: without amusement it is doubtful either disparaging critic or fond lay reader could work their way through her obfuscating repetitions and linguistic reformations. Though consumed with the narrative present, Stein knew a laughing life is not a stagnant one, and she sought to underscore the continuity in her writing by eliciting laughter. Risibility, and the awareness of otherness necessary to its generation, enables her “to confront the sad pull of gravity, the doomsward movement of rushing time, and transform the feeling of it” (Schmitz 7).

Notes 1. See also Yael Renan, who argues in “‘Angelfaces Clustered Like Bright Lice’” that artists like Duchamp elevated the banal to the status of high art, a tension only resolvable by laughter. 2. Neil Schmitz suggests that Stein’s work moves from singularity to doublespeak, from the laughter of one to the laughter of two, and identifies this change as taking place specifically within the narrative of Stein’s A Long Gay Book, written between 1909 and 1912. Schmitz notes this transition in Of Huck and Alice, but does not closely interrogate it. Dydo’s claim is similar. She points out that Stein’s initial writings are imbued with the sound of a very definitive “I” in whom we can gauge much of Stein’s personality and track the events of her life; however, this “I” is slowly filtered out of Stein’s writing, becoming what Dydo describes as the “‘I not any longer’ of the meditations” – pieces written in the latter half of Stein’s career (Dydo with Rice, Gertrude Stein 34). Some rationale for this change emerges in the manuscripts, which indicate that Stein often used love notes or messages to Alice B. Toklas as a means of beginning a new piece; Dydo argues that very soon after Toklas moved in with Stein in 1910 Toklas’s “still small voice” begins to form an audible backdrop to most of Stein’s writing (8). 3. As Barry Sanders argues, “Laughter eventually takes over the heart and soul of anyone who writes for any length of time. Sooner or later, every writer turns to punning and joking. Language begs for it” (Sudden Glory 190).

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4. Bakhtin writes that literatures incorporating humor deliberately insert indeterminacy into their texts – we might think here of Stephen’s bewildering laughs – generating “a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with the unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present)” (“Epic and Novel” 7). 5. Freud describes humor formation as follows: “a preconscious thought is given over for a moment to unconscious revision and the outcome of this is at once grasped by conscious perception” (Jokes 166). Preconscious thought is revised by the unconscious, which in turn ruptures the present moment of conscious perception. Here Freud extends the continuity involved in the perception of humor still further: by his terms, humor not only restores our childish sense of play, but also involves the unconscious, which he likens to the infantile. 6. With a much lighter hand, Joyce depicts a particularly Zarathustrian laughter in Ulysses. In “Lestrygonians,” Bloom recalls a gusty night, years past, when he went to fetch Molly after a concert: “Remember her laughing at the wind, her blizzard collar up. Corner of Harcourt Road remember that gust? Brrfoo! Blew up all her skirts and her boa nearly smothered old Goodwin” (197). Professor Goodwin has just given one of his last musical performances; on the verge of death himself, he is almost obliterated by the wind and Molly’s clothing, even as she appears to triumph over all with her reckless laughter. Come “Nausikaa,” Bloom attributes the same exuberant risibility to their daughter Milly, recalling, Day we went out for the pleasure cruise . . . Filthy trip. Drunkards out to shake up their livers. Puking overboard to feed the herrings. Nausea. And the women, fear of God in their faces. Milly, no sign of funk. Her blue scarf loose, laughing. Don’t know what death is at that age. (495)

7. 8. 9. 10.

As for Molly, the garment round Milly’s neck is loose, freeing her throat for its extended laugh; while others exhibit fear of nature’s overbearing strength, Milly is unafraid, and merely tickled by the wind. In both instances, the horrors of mortality are assuaged by laughter, underscoring a connection between risibility and transcendence. But Bloom’s careful qualifying statements remind us that even the most triumphant laughter is only human: Molly’s flushed face is vulnerable, and Milly’s bravery is born of youthful ignorance. Like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Joyce’s victorious laughing figures only very briefly overcome human fear and fallibility. Peter A. Gunter argues that from this vantage, desire is briefly satiated (“Nietzschean Laughter”). On solitary laughter and madness, see Provine, Laughter 152–72. Armstrong’s work also foresees a time when “a simple plug or switch in the wall will furnish to every home and every public building a constant supply of laughter . . . more than sufficient, for every emergency” (79). Critics do suggest that Nietzsche’s laughter, like Bataille’s, pursues a particular kind of truth; I am skeptical of this position because Nietzsche considered truth a constantly shifting thing, and “the weakest form of knowledge” (GS 110). Lawrence J. Hatab similarly considers Nietzschean laughter a call to abandon the pursuit of truth and Western-imposed limits on life (“Laughter in Nietzsche’s Thought” 74). Hub Zwart, by contrast,

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argues Nietzschean laughter offers access to ‘essential’ and enduring truths (Ethical Consensus 70). So too does Peter Gunter maintain that Nietzsche connects laughter and metaphysicality (“Nietzschean Laughter” 499). The equation of laughter and divinity has a long history. Sanders points out that the Greek gods bestowed the gift of laughter upon mortals, while the Hebrew God could kill with his laughter. This association lends laughter power, partially explaining both Plato’s and the Latin Church’s resistance to unchecked laughter (63, 74, 143–6). Modernists make the same association; Martin Armstrong, for instance, describes the joker as the conduit of a divine accident (Laughing 27). And post-modernists like D. Diane Davis argue that the laughing individual gives way to the cosmic play of the universe, in spite of the fact that Davis also derides modernists for believing in laughter “that celebrates rational organisation, beauty, truth, and sensibility of the earth” (Breaking Up [at] Totality 33). Modernist laughter indubitably evinces nostalgia for truth; this lies at the heart of Bataille’s most extreme suppositions. But the certainty the modernists seek is implied by the “cosmic” beyond upon which Davis herself relies. 11. As early as 1934, a reviewer pointed out that while Joyce’s writing packed endless meaning into each word Stein stripped meaning away; as Dydo asserts, “Stein did not seem learned. Her primitive and childlike vocabulary provoked condescending smiles” (The Language that Rises 13). Friends like Sam Steward attribute a childlike naiveté to Stein herself, and in her letters to Carl Van Vechten, she called herself “Baby Woojums,” whilst figuring Toklas and Van Vechten as her parents (The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten). 12. Women’s language and laughter are also frequently described as defying patriarchal authority (see Sanders, Sudden Glory 19). Dydo associates Stein’s experimentation with just such a feminist challenge, arguing that she rejected “all inflexible forms, including hierarchical thinking, authoritarian organisation, prescriptive grammar, and chronological narrative – aspects of the patriarchy” (The Language that Rises 17). Stein’s refusal of punctuation and near-incomprehensible sentences are akin to Joyce’s presentation of Molly Bloom’s disorganised, lengthy sentences in Ulysses, or Dorothy Richardson’s assertion that stream-of-consciousness writing is an innately feminine form in her preface to the first volume of Pilgrimage. Before Joyce and Richards, Stein’s MA narrator stakes a similar claim: “Sometimes then I have to tell myself it when I am all filled up with it, sometimes then I tell it to rid myself a little of it, sometimes because I am so full of it it keeps pouring out of me all the time” (326). Almost unbidden, writing flows out of Stein like uncontrollable laughter. To a certain extent, this same argument informs écriture féminine, a term that first emerges in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” where Hélène Cixous extols the creative force of women’s laughter. Cixous cites Joyce’s “Penelope” as a leading example of the potential inherent to the nonpatriarchal themes and styles she espouses (The Exile of James Joyce). See also Christine van Boheemen, “‘The Language of Flow’”. 13. In “Portraits and Repetition” Stein argues, there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use

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emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis’ (Lectures in America 167). 14. For some examples of these lists, see pp. 290, 324, 333, and 493. 15. A long poem, “Lifting Belly” was written between 1915 and 1917 but went unpublished in Stein’s lifetime. 16. See also Mellow on Stein’s desire to delay the publication of Q.E.D., a decision believed to be predicated on the novella’s biographical and lesbian content (Charmed Circle 58). 17. According to Stein, in “Poetry and Grammar,” when she first began writing, she believed “that writing should go on and on and if writing should go on, what had commas to do with it, what had periods to do with it what had small letters and capitals to do with writing going on” (Lectures in America 217). In spite of this authorial drive for continuity, Stein explains that periods are necessary “interruptions” of written continuity, adding, “Periods have a life of their own a necessity of their own a feeling of their own a time of their own. And that feeling that life that necessity that time can express itself in infinite variety that is the reason that I have always remained true to periods” (218). 18. Mocking instances include a description of “he” as having “the clamour that was not refusing using laughing and abusing” – laughter here is likened to a manipulated and cacophonous tool, manipulated with distaste (114). At another juncture, laughter is described as a form of precision whereby sides are taken; additionally, a reference is made to a denial of laughter even as “the whole lounge” is taken over – it seems that this territorialism involves mirthless mockery (Two 122, 142). 19. For her acts of continuity, see pp. 42, 48, and 79.

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Chapter 4

In the Meantime

Laughter begins with a recognition or anticipation of something humorous, and this moment of perception is highly unpredictable. As Martin Armstrong observes in Laughing (1928): Thinking, and to some extent, even dreaming can be performed when desired. We can say: Let us eat, Let us drink, Let us smoke, Let us idle, and so saying we can proceed to do these things, but we cannot deliberately set ourselves to laugh . . . Certain statements, a certain event or set of events may, circumstances being favourable, produce the laugh, and we may make the statements or do our best to procure the events and await results: but we can do no more than wait. (14)

Armstrong’s discussion suggests that a longing for an ungraspable otherness lies at the heart of laughter, and the desirability of sharing this experience, which is as pleasurable and commonplace as eating and drinking. So consumed is he with his subject he almost describes a world attending on the next guffaw, keenly anticipating its next risible release. But ultimately, Armstrong believes laughter is an intimate experience that regrettably, cannot be transposed to the global sphere: he contends that if the nations involved in the First World War had been able to laugh at themselves, conflict might have been prevented – instead, the absurdity of war had to be waited out. Armstrong’s constant mention of anticipation when discussing laughter brings a salient point to light: waiting is a quotidian longing that depends upon otherness and can be experienced personally and globally. This extension of everyday desire to the world stage is the focus of Woolf’s and Stein’s last novels, where the individual, domestic experience of waiting foregrounds international expectations about the Second World War. In these late modernist literatures, prosaic longings are taken beyond the self and an intimate other to the broadest possible scope of human relations. Like Mrs Dalloway, Woolf’s Between the Acts depicts a June day in England imbued with anticipation. Waiting is markedly different in each

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book: while Clarissa eagerly looks forward to her party, the residents of Pointz Hall are neither in control of, nor invested in, the church’s annual fund-raising pageant, which has been organized by local Hogben’s Folly resident Miss La Trobe. Historical events compound the passivity of the major figures in Between the Acts: Mrs Dalloway takes place in June 1923, but Woolf’s final work is set in June 1939 – her characters await both a play and a crisis of global proportions. The narration repeatedly exposes these multiple layers of anticipation, as in this scene when the audience sits viewing an empty stage after a depiction of early Britain: “Ambitious, ain’t it?” [Mrs Manresa] said to Bartholomew, while they waited . . . Could they talk? Could they move? No, for the play was going on. Yet the stage was empty; only the cows moved in the meadows; only the tick of the gramophone needle was heard. The tick, tick, tick seemed to hold them together, tranced. Nothing whatsoever appeared on the stage. “I’d no notion we looked so nice,” Mrs Swithin whispered to William. Hadn’t she? . . . the beauty of the visible world took his breath away. Tick, tick, tick the machine continued. “Marking time,” said old Oliver beneath his breath. “Which don’t exist for us,” Lucy murmured. “We’ve only the present.” “Isn’t that enough?” William asked himself. Beauty – isn’t that enough? But here Isa fidgeted. Her bare brown arms went nervously to her head. She half turned in her seat. “No, not for us, who’ve the future,” she seemed to say. The future disturbing our present. (BA 62)

“Could they talk? Could they move?” These questions point to the paralysis of any expectant audience. Audiences eagerly await performances; performers hope that the gathered assembly will pay attention. Neither expectation goes to plan here: in this unforeseen lag between scenes, the audience whispers and moves about restlessly. Alongside triumphant artist William Dodge, elderly siblings Lucy Swithin and Bart Oliver labor to affirm this idle present, even as Isa scans the crowd, seeking out a neighboring farmer with whom she is infatuated. While Isa only “seem[s]” to express interest in what might happen next, the narrator unequivocally insists upon the importance of the future. Were it not 1939, this might be overstatement; instead, the quotidian urgency of an audience awaiting the end of a local pageant feeds into the larger urgency of the onset of the Second World War. In an earlier version of this scene, when the novel was still provisionally titled Pointz Hall, Dodge looks on enviously at Lucy and Bart, who, “stretched their wings in the present; luxuriating; immortal, because they had no future” (PH 98). Dodge is an artist who shares Stephen Dedalus’s epiphanic tendencies: he calls it “staking” a sight when he views some everyday scene that sparks within him a sense of beauty and immortality. These are the only moments, Dodge acknowledges, when

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he can access Lucy’s and Bart’s certainty about the future. They are also brief instances: “his immortality was momentary, he had a future – unfortunately.”1 Here young Dodge envies Lucy and Bart’s “safety; their immortality,” and their proximity to death (PH 98–9). Woolf’s subtle changes between drafts are important, and speak to larger philosophical concerns: in Pointz Hall, the future is defined by the eventuality of individual death, while in Between the Acts, the future belongs to an “us” that includes both the distracted Isa and the reader. In the final draft, then, the very significance of the idle present – the waiting between the acts – lies in its near-palpable relationship with a future that is shared, “The future disturbing our present.” Within this minor editorial change we witness not only Woolf’s refusal of certain knowledge – a false idol knocked down over and over again in her work, as discussed in Chapter 1 – but also, yet again, how the persistent exploration of prosaic longings like waiting can effect a move from the subject to the other in modernist literature. Woolf’s Between the Acts takes place during neither peace nor war, and uncertainty and hesitancy define most of its interactions. Anticipation is a central textual preoccupation: of the numerous expectations presented, some fail, some come to pass, a great many go unresolved; the narrative voice articulates all, suspending judgment. Countless critics have remarked on the strange passivity of Woolf’s final novel, and Between the Acts can appear carried along on the ebb and flow of its own situational tide. But as the above examples suggest, Woolf is quite consciously exploring relationships between present and future and between individuals; her preoccupations are very much in league with the philosophical inquiry of this period and also resemble her ideological transitions in exploring boredom, discussed in Chapter 2. In the Pointz Hall passage, Woolf suggests that subjectivity and nothingness define futurity; these self-same views are central to Heidegger’s landmark work Being and Time (1927). But in the excerpt from Between the Acts, Woolf portrays a temporality defined by otherness and hope, and in making this shift, she foregrounds the arguments made in Levinas’s first discussion of his philosophy, namely Existence & Existents (1947). Like Heidegger and Levinas, Woolf proves concerned with the inadequacy of the immediate moment; all three of these modernists suggest that the primary significance of the present lies in its anticipatory relationship with the future. Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds evinces a similar temporal preoccupation: Stein’s novel returns repeatedly, even obsessively, to the relationships between present and future, and in turn, to those between self and other. Here I include consideration of Woolf’s Pointz Hall and Stein’s Wars I

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Have Seen to further the supposition central to this chapter, that in their respective articulations of anticipation, Woolf and Stein set out with an approach which is very Heideggerean in content and direction but then change course; ultimately, both authors affirm that an infinitely unknowable other defines the individual sense of the future. As such, their novels culminate in ideologies that emerge less than ten years later as the basis of Levinas’s philosophy, and it is not a coincidence that this collective yielding to the otherness of the future arises so forcefully in the decade that includes the Second World War. The final books of Woolf and Stein are historical and experimental; both evince a political urgency stemming from the looming presence of a second global war, an event that shaped the development of Heidegger’s theories, and inspired the very formulation of Levinas’s.

War, Angst, and Patience Levinas generated the original tenets of his philosophy when interned in a German prison for French soldiers in the Second World War. His extraordinary familiarity with Heidegger’s thinking originated in events that preceded the war: Heidegger became Levinas’s teacher when he replaced Husserl in the chair of philosophy at the University of Freiburg in 1928. In 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazis and became Rector of Freiburg, occasionally approving the silencing or removal of Jewish academics and speaking out in support of the Nazis. It was in 1933 that Jewish Levinas abandoned a longstanding plan to write an introduction to Heidegger’s ontology (Bernasconi, Forward ix). Heidegger’s Nazi affiliations have been well-documented and critiqued; while some have denounced his entire philosophical enterprise on this basis, others, like Hans Sluga, look for larger sociopolitical reasons to account for why a brilliant philosopher became caught up in a criminal regime (Sluga, Philosophy and Politics). Sluga’s main argument is rooted in Heidegger’s sense of impending crisis, a sense Sluga believes was inherent to the German psyche and was nurtured by misreadings of Nietzsche’s late-nineteenth century philosophy as well as the stunning defeat of the First World War. Germany, Sluga explains, was not excluded from the modernist valuation of the subjective present moment – a phenomenon so cogently represented in literature by the Joycean epiphany or the interest in the contemporizing effects of laughter (see Chapters 1 and 3 respectively). For Sluga, the Germans were determined to make the present moment heroic, an unsustainable goal that eventually gave way to widespread anxiety. Sluga suggests that the real crisis

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to which German thinkers like Heidegger fell prey was the fading of an insular European vision, coupled with a shifting academic terrain which saw new disciplines usurping philosophy – physics, for instance, came to dominate studies of time. Unable to reconcile himself to these changes, Heidegger created an individualist temporal philosophy in support of his mistaken belief that a decisive moment of crisis could be predicted and should be acted upon; this, coupled with what another historian calls his “cultural chauvinism,” fuelled his Nazi collaboration (Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism 44). Like Heidegger, Stein idealized the present moment. As discussed in the previous chapter, the outset of her authorial career is defined by her development of the “continuous present,” a process whereby she tried to elide past and future from her prose by emphasizing the immediate. And, like Heidegger, Stein has been denounced as a Second World War collaborator. Janet Malcolm’s investigative journalism sheds light on Stein’s association with Bernard Faÿ, a Frenchman affiliated with the Gestapo and an advisor to France’s Vichy government. Faÿ was in charge of executing Vichy’s ban on secret societies, a restriction that resulted in countless deportations and concentration camp deaths. He was also the greatest promoter of Stein’s writing in France, and protected Jewish, lesbian Stein throughout the war, taking the issue of her safety directly to Philippe Pétain, the Vichy leader executed following the war for his complicity with the Nazi’s anti-Semitic agenda (Malcolm, “Gertrude Stein’s War”). In Wars I Have Seen, Stein describes Pétain as France’s savior; throughout, Stein takes pains to justify as reasonable the actions of those who collaborated with the Nazis. While this makes for uncomfortable reading, Malcolm’s article traces a transition in Stein’s political thinking from ribald reactionary to humbled democrat, a movement motivated by her growing awareness of wartime atrocities. Mrs. Reynolds speaks to that transition: it is a novel that, quite unconventionally for Stein, situates itself neither in an adamant present, nor an amusing biographical past. Instead, in Stein’s final work, the futuristic phrase “not yet” is a refrain; for instance, Mrs. Reynolds’s age is not twenty, but “not yet twenty-one” (MR 8). So prolific is the phrase “not yet” in Stein’s novel that it even becomes the punch line to an oblique joke: “is your father living yet not yet, Mrs. Reynolds laughed a lot when she heard that one” (141). But “not yet” is generally far more serious, as when “Mrs. Reynolds began to regret that it was not yet, and yet it was too soon for it to be yet” (159). As in Between the Acts, the future very much disturbs the present of Mrs. Reynolds. “It seems as if there were no progress in the human race, but only repetition.” This is Woolf’s summation of war in Three Guineas (249).

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It has been argued that anticipation of the Second World War tolled the death knell for Woolf’s belief in human progress; her suicide is considered to have been motivated by an inability to see the war through (Zwerdling “Between the Acts”). Alongside her husband, Leonard, Woolf was actively involved in numerous anti-war efforts, even as she displays a bathetic tendency about the subject in her diaries, critiquing, for instance, her enforced move to the countryside with its bad plays and small-minded, simpering politics – these self-same annoyances of course, form the plot of Between the Acts (Lee, Virginia Woolf 729). In fact, the war was a very personal threat for the Woolfs, as both Leonard and Virginia were believed to have been included on a list of dangerous British insurgents by the Nazi regime.2 The threat influenced their writing; in “Monstrous Conjugations” Natania Rosenfeld contends that the hybrid narrative of Between the Acts is Woolf’s attempt to mediate between the commanding voice of dictatorship and the frenzied affirmations of the masses. While Woolf exhibits wariness about using words for political ends, Rosenfeld maintains she equated action with writing. As a result, Between the Acts begins as Germany occupies Austria and Czechoslovakia; in less than three months, Poland will be invaded and England will enter the Second World War. Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds is set in France, beginning in about 1932, the year before Hitler became chancellor, and extends to the French liberation in 1945.3 Impending global crises contributed to a literary transition in the 1930s whereupon many writers shifted their temporal focus from a subjective present to a collective future (see, for instance, Widdowson “Between the Acts?”). This history frames Woolf and Stein’s final, anticipatory narratives, as well as Heidegger’s and Levinas’s thinking. The main facets of Heidegger’s philosophical revolution were developed between the two world wars. As discussed in the introduction to this book, Heidegger retrieved the question of being for philosophy. Being and Time (1927) articulates his theory of “the ontological difference,” or the distinction that should be made between existence and beings that exist; his term “Da-sein” encapsulates the site of aware or conscious being. For Heidegger, Da-sein is grounded both in Being itself (Sein) and finite temporality. Heidegger suggests existence realizes its potential in a full recognition of mortality; while most believe that thoughts of death are a form of cowardice, Heidegger asserts in Being and Time that death “must be understood as possibility, cultivated as possibility, and endured as possibility in our relation to it” – this process he terms “being-toward-death” (241). Awareness and anticipation of death characterize fully authentic existence, a self-perception striving toward completion. “With death,” writes Heidegger, “Da-sein stands

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before itself in its ownmost potentiality of being. In this possibility, Da-sein is concerned about its being in the world absolutely” (BT 232). Heidegger thus orders existence into the future: “Da-sein, as existing, always already comes towards itself, that is, is futural in its being in general” (BT 299). While aware existence is always future-looking, the closer Da-sein comes to embracing death the higher the strata it occupies in Heidegger’s hierarchy of futurity, which begins with awaiting, then accelerates to waiting, expectation, and anticipation, and culminates in anticipatory resoluteness, or being-toward-death. For Heidegger, awaiting constitutes a pursuit of the present and a giving over to that present; he considers this type of existence both passive and inauthentic – although awaiting looks into the future it does not look all the way to the end that is death (Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism 66–8). Expecting, by contrast, Heidegger describes as “a waiting for . . . actualisation.” (BT 242). Da-sein can progress from awaiting to expecting: “Expecting is a mode of the future founded in awaiting that temporalizes itself authentically as anticipation” (BT 310). Being-toward-death necessarily involves a degree of waiting because death must be expected, but cannot be controlled. Expecting lies in the interval between awaiting and anticipatory resoluteness. It is the point where what is “possible is drawn into the real, arising from and returning to it” (BT 242). Heidegger alternately terms expectation “anticipation,” or a freeing awareness of the potentiality of death. But to live completely authentically is to embrace Angst, a state neither fearful nor passive in which present Da-sein comes face to face with its future. Anticipatory resoluteness – the highest point on Heidegger’s futurity hierarchy – is the subject’s recognition and demand of Angst from the self. To be fully authentic, the anticipation of death must be individual; Heidegger claims that being with others, or Mitda-sein, is fundamental, but he also argues it belongs to Da-sein: control remains with the individual. In the book written during his internment, Existence and Existents, Levinas counters Heidegger’s argument that finitude defines human temporality, describing angst as “a time composed of separate instants given to an ego that traverses them so as to gather in the following instant” (93). Instead, Levinas argues that we exist in anticipation of the newness of each instant, and are defined by a hopefulness rooted in salvation. Each moment contains the past, but can paradoxically be born anew: within this newness lies the possibility of redemption (EE 93). Alphonso Lingis observes that Levinas’s futurity relies upon Nietzsche, who was among the first to recognize that forgetting is a necessary part of our relationship with the past and makes innocence possible:

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But for Levinas the happiness that time could bring – and which constitutes the very promise of the future – is not simply the happiness that fills the space created by the obliteration of the guilty past, but that which restores the past pardoned. The future is to come to the whole of one’s time; the hope for the future is a hope for what one is and was . . . Thus the promise of the future is a promise of resurrecting the past, with all its forces, but in such a way that it would begin anew . . . it is just this that is the positive feeling of time. (Lingis, Translator’s Introduction xxv)

Levinas uses the term “infinition” to describe this joyous resurgence of the new possible in every moment. Infinition is not Levinas’s only depiction of our relationship with futurity. As discussed in Chapter 2, Levinas also theorizes weary passivity, and in so doing, accords to some degree with Heidegger’s articulation of “awaiting,” or giving oneself up to the present. For Levinas, weariness implies a present prior to an action, a deliberate holding back from the future. But this holding back is not a refusal of individual death; instead, it is rooted in the belief that the future can be ours alone. Levinas writes, “It is not enough to conceive of hope to unleash a future” (EE 91). Levinas contends that the subject’s future is defined by otherness, an argument furthered in Existence and Existents by his brief discussion of consolation. While a consolatory caress does not promise the end of present suffering it carries with it the power to transport the sufferer elsewhere, away from the self and toward a future. This, Levinas argues, is the temporalizing effect of compassion. Existence and Existents precedes the certainty with which Levinas later argues that subjective existence transcends itself in the desirous relationship with the other. His later formulations of infinition – the continual rebirth of the new that defines the future – are accomplished through, and determined by, desire for an always unknowable other that looks forward, and can never be satiated (TO 77–9). Levinas eventually argues that time itself should be understood as a deference to the other, a “deference whose effect one could never obtain”; a kind of “awaiting or anticipation, without any anticipation aiming . . . in an awaiting that is pure patience or passivity” (God, Death, and Time 38, 29). With explicit reference to Heidegger, Levinas posits patience as a counter to anxiety and angst, a hopefulness in which passivity becomes mastery (TI 238–9). In patience, “the will breaks through the crust of its egoism” and is no longer influenced by death (TI 239–40). Patience exemplifies an “inexhaustible future”; it is Levinas’s ideal and infinite “not yet” (TI 210). And, just as Levinas is concerned with an infinite “not yet” and Heidegger’s Da-sein “is always already its not-yet as long as it is” (BT 227), so too are Stein’s and Woolf’s last novels consumed by the future; throughout, these narratives

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struggle with individual mortality but gradually embrace and depict Levinas’s other-based futurity.

Between the Acts: Not Now In a direct reflection of Woolf’s intellectual and creative oscillations in Between the Acts critics duly emphasize the “between” of her hovering narrative. Marilyn L. Brownstein suggests that Woolf depicts “interstitial bliss” or states of consciousness that lie between language and feeling (“Postmodern Language” 73). J. Hillis Miller observes that Between the Acts privileges interpolation over extrapolation (Fiction and Repetition 203, 217). More emphatically, Andrew John Miller argues that Woolf’s last book explores neither modernist essentialism nor a post-Enlightenment break with the past in a move toward revolution and progress, adding, “Woolf places herself in a position that . . . might appear to exhibit an intolerable degree of ambivalence” (“‘Our Representative, Our Spokesman’” 35). This ambivalence is compounded by a style exhibiting what Alan Wilde calls a “pandemic use of semi-colons” and clauses to the degree that narrative continuity is fragmented, disrupted, and full of unresolved gaps – a technique echoed by numerous descriptions of silent rooms and awkward social groupings (“Touching Earth” 159). Sallie Sears extends Woolf’s narrative ambivalence to individual characters, who, she claims, “are incapable of purposeful action and resist the knowledge that might lead to it” (“Theater of War” 213). So prevalent is this ambivalence that in the opening scenes of Pointz Hall Rupert Haines can scarcely bring himself to say “perhaps” – a word, as Woolf’s narrator notes, that is “very useful” because it “allows the mind to indulge in many reflections” (PH 37). “Perhaps – under its shelter as many ideas grow as there are blades beneath a stone; but all white; denied the green that the fresh air of certainty gives – that certainty which is to tell the truth, the lot . . . so seldom achieved” (PH 38). This persistent uncertainty – it exists though crushed by rock-hard solidity, and without light – marks most descriptions throughout Between the Acts. Pointz Hall is “too homely” to “rank among the houses that are mentioned in guide books,” although its view merits mention in “Figgis’s Guide Book (1833)” and passers-by consider it “a desirable place to live” (9, 41). Similarly hazy is the description of the cook, who “never dashed off masterpieces, it was true; but then never dropped hairpins in the soup” (28). Domestic content might be an appealing in-betweeness, but it too eludes Woolf’s cast. Bart Oliver’s dog Sohrab

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“never admitted the ties of domesticity. Either he cringed or he bit” (17). Isa swings between love and hatred for her husband, and Giles in turn despises William Dodge’s “dillying and dallying,” his sense that Dodge is “not a man to have straightforward love for a woman” (46). Giles’s surprisingly consistent rage is offset by the reader’s knowledge that his love for Isa is constantly interrupted by infidelities and is therefore hardly straightforward either. An air of expectancy compounds the general ambivalence: in Between the Acts, characters are figures in waiting and are rarely dedicated to the present moment. In the first scene, an evening visit to Pointz Hall, Mrs. Haines is affronted by her husband’s and Isa’s palpable infatuation but responds by waiting to depart “as one waits for the strain of an organ to die out before leaving church” (8). When the couple finally stand to leave, Mrs. Haines offers Isa her hand: “But Isa, though she should have risen at the same moment that Mrs Haines rose, sat on” – both women attempt to out-wait each other (9). A small battle is being waged, one introducing the narrative interest in the associations between interpersonal and wartime expectations. In the past, Isa has also been kept waiting by those who believe themselves superior: she recounts an incident when her dentist, who “had a patient a princess” made her wait over an hour. “And you know,” Isa concludes, “when one’s a child, how long that seems” (25–6). Isa’s nostalgia about waiting is furthered by the description of the fish deliverer, who no longer lingers while the kitchen staff check his wares and feed sugar to his horse – he is in a perpetual hurry because his route, now by motorbike, has been considerably lengthened (26). Waiting is also perpetual, endless necessity, as when the family expects Giles home from London on a regularly irregular train (29). Similarly, Miss La Trobe, “Waiting for Mr Streatfield . . . paced between the birch trees” (49). The local clergyman, Streatfield, is meant to bring part of the pageant set with him; the framing device of the trees underscores La Trobe’s anticipatory existence between moments of time. Most obviously, between the acts of the pageant lie intervals to be endured, as when gardener Cobbet repeatedly examines his watch, noting how many hours until seven, when he must water the plants (72, 80). At the same juncture, Isa senses Mrs. Manresa’s attraction to her husband and awaits his “usual explanation” (80). Isa then latches on to Dodge, dragging him reluctantly to the greenhouse: “Dodge lagged behind. She waited” (81). “Alone I linger,” Isa murmurs to herself at this juncture, but she is not the only figure engaged in solitary waiting: Mrs. Manresa, jolly trollop and unexpected visitor, attends regularly upon herself with lipstick and mirror (95, 114). The word “attend” is continually associated with Manresa. As the play begins, she announces,

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“We must be good and attend”; she frequently retreats and reappears with “Giles attendant” (140–1, 100). “Attend” – meaning follow, await, expect – aptly applies to these descriptions of waiting on and for Manresa’s exuberant self. “How long was she going to keep them waiting?” is in fact one of the novel’s central questions, and is directed primarily at La Trobe, whose play lurches through an afternoon of anticipatory interactions (125). In Heidegger’s terms, these instances constitute “awaiting,” or inauthentic Da-sein. Heidegger asserts that in order to come to terms with the certainty of our own death the nothingness of death must be continually acknowledged, and, importantly, that it be recognized as an individual event, torn away from “the everydayness of the they-self” – the “they” being Heidegger’s primary term for otherness. He continues, death does not just “belong” in an undifferentiated way to one’s own Dasein, but it lays claim on it as something individual. The nonrelational character of death understood in anticipation individualises Da-sein down to itself . . . Da-sein is authentically itself only if it projects itself . . . upon its ownmost potentiality of being, rather than upon the possibility of the they-self. (BT 243)

Authentic anticipation of death inflects existence, preceding relations with others. By contrast, the minor instances of waiting throughout Between the Acts are determined not by the anticipatory individual but by the machinations of the “they.” But neither is Isa being-toward-death when she desires that the waters of a wishing well should cover her, or when she suggests, in a brief, musically-inspired recognition of “human pain unending” that she wants “the little twist of sound [to] have the whole of her” (75, 126). These are Isa’s responses to the threat of war and to the recognition of violence: she is, we are told, book-shy and gun-shy like most of her generation and distressed by the day’s news story of a young girl gang-raped in a London barracks (18). Isa’s longings are future-oriented, individual, and death-driven, but she is not, as Heidegger advocates, fully freeing herself for death; in authentic angst, we “always [brood] over [death] as something coming . . . [but] weaken it by calculating how to have it at our disposal” (BT 241–3). Isa’s suicidal leanings may not constitute being-toward-death but the menace of war is an angst-generating catalyst for Giles and Dodge, who are portrayed, in Heideggerean terms, as attuned to “the constant and absolute threat” death involves (BT 245). Giles arrives at Pointz Hall consumed with thoughts of the threat of war across the Channel; the clarity of this knowledge informs his every action, setting him apart from other characters: “Giles remained like a stake in the tide of the flowing

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company” (71). As Giles interacts with his family and guests, death is his primary concern: to the tune of the pageant’s music, he mutters, “I fear I am not in my perfect mind,” and then recalls, “a stricken deer in whose flank the world’s harsh scorn has struck its thorn” (63–4). Giles does not want to be influenced by the waiting “they” that is the audience; its passivity annoys him so that he jerks chairs and kicks stones. Nor does he want to feel “manacled to a rock . . . forced passively to behold indescribable horror” (46). To escape the weary present, Giles seeks relief in decisive action – he stomps upon a snake helplessly choking on a frog to mitigate both animals’ suffering. Giles’s certainty implicitly confirms Dodge’s thinking about death, which he intimates to Isa shortly after they are introduced. Isa wonders aloud, why they could speak so plainly to each other. And added: “Perhaps because we’ve never met before, and never shall again.” “The doom of sudden death hanging over us,” [Dodge] said. “There’s no retreating and advancing” – he was thinking of the old lady showing him the house – “for us as for them.” The future shadowed their present, like the sun coming through the manyveined transparent vine leaf; a criss-cross of lines making no pattern. (83)

While Isa’s speculative statements may pertain to the war, Dodge’s terminology – “retreating and advancing” – insists on the connection. The old, house-showing lady is Lucy; unlike the passage quoted in the introduction to this chapter, here Dodge does not admire Lucy’s proximity to death or her lifetime of ignoring or attending to death at will. What Dodge affirms instead is the urgent, authentic discourse he shares with Isa on the basis of their shared recognition of death. Dodge accepts, in other words, the freeing power of perpetually anticipating one’s own death in the midst of an absent pattern of the future. What little we see of Dodge and Giles exposes their “passionate anxious freedom toward death” (BT 245). The upcoming war may well have forced Giles’s and William Dodge’s angst, but in Between the Acts Woolf demonstrates that anticipating and embracing death informs existence more generally, and at Pointz Hall, intergenerationally. In the first scene, as the strains of Isa and Rupert’s infatuation “die out,” Mrs. Haines anticipates killing their shared emotion and is certain that “in the car going home to the red villa in the cornfields, she would destroy it, as a thrush pecks the wings off a butterfly” (8–9). By anticipating the death of their illicit passion, Mrs. Haines elevates it to a living, finite thing. Mortality similarly permeates the explorations and play of Isa’s and Giles’s son George: The little boy had lagged and was grouting in the grass . . . [He] grubbed. The flower blazed between the angles of the roots. Membrane after membrane

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was torn. It blazed a soft yellow, a lambent light under a film of velvet; it filled the caverns behind the eyes with light. All that inner darkness became a hall, leaf smelling, earth smelling of yellow light. And the tree was beyond the flower; the grass, the flower, and the tree were entire. Down on his knees grubbing he held the flower complete. (12)

Experiencing the flower in life and death generates a hall of light behind George’s eyes, giving him a totalizing impression of both the plant and the world around it – here Woolf associates knowledge and death in a fashion reminiscent of the Joycean epiphanies discussed in Chapter 1. George is described as one of a long line of Olivers who capture butterflies in the little hollow next to Pointz Hall. The membranes of George’s “cabbage white” presumably tear as easily as those of his flower, perhaps exacerbating his sense of life’s movement into death (44). When children, Bart and Lucy caught butterflies, and fish: one of Lucy’s more poignant memories is an instance in which Bart forced her to come to terms with the certainty of death by “ma[king] her take the fish off the hook herself. The blood shocked her – ‘Oh!’ she had cried . . . And he had growled: ‘Cindy!’” Lucy carries this recollection into old age; it is part of what defines her life (19). Isa’s attraction to Giles, whom she met while fishing in Scotland, is predicated on this self-same awareness of death. From the viewpoint of a nearby rock, “she . . . had watched him with the stream rushing between his legs, casting, casting – until, like a thick ingot of silver bent in the middle, the salmon had leapt, had been caught, and she had loved him” (38). In Woolf’s last novel, recognition of death is a male domain passed down from Bart to Giles to George and situated in masculine institutions like the military. “What’s history without the Army, eh?” demands Colonel Mayhew, watching the minor conflicts of Miss La Trobe’s play about Britain through the ages (110). But to assert this too keenly is to omit Mrs. Haines’s emotional murder, Lucy’s memory, Isa’s tacit agreement with Dodge’s being-toward-death, and the boys and girls who catch butterflies at Pointz Hall. The internalization of death is fundamental to the fabric of life and to the individual lives Woolf presents. These moments heighten the reader’s sense that anticipation of death is irrevocably tied to all considerations of the future. But Woolf realizes each moment is not an angst-filled anticipation of one’s own demise. Instead, Between the Acts includes great swathes of what Heidegger considers “being-in-the-world” – or falling prey to everyday existence, rather than actively embracing being-toward-death.4 One of the primary ways that Woolf incorporates everydayness into her narrative is via Heidegger’s “idle talk.” Although Heidegger suggests that this is not a disparaging term his description belies this caveat: idle talk is an

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average, everyday form of communication that “only approximately and superficially” addresses “beings talked about” and “communicates by gossiping and passing the word along” (BT 157–8). Fundamentally, even as it exists in the world and with others, idle talk closes us off to an awareness of being, precluding being-toward-death. Heidegger’s suggestion that everyday, unattuned behavior like idle talk prevents full engagement with being explicates the endless chatter in Woolf’s – and, as we shall soon see, Stein’s – anticipatory wartime narrative. In her essay “The War from the Street” Woolf describes the First World War as a time in which “you are nothing but a vast receptacle for the rumours of other people’s opinions and deeds” (The Collected Essays 3: 4) – these forms of idle talk run through Between the Acts. The nurses at Pointz Hall push the perambulator, and “[roll] words, like sweets on their tongues” (BA 12); Mrs. Manresa proffers “a few gobbets of gossip; mere trash” (33); a Mrs. Parker is prompted to apologize for gossiping when the clergyman looms into view (81). The pageant audience discusses the activities of the king and queen, the excessive and unhygienic petticoat wearing of previous generations, and physics: “The very latest notion, so I’m told, is, nothing’s solid” (67, 112, 138). Death is literally concealed: the war is alluded to only occasionally, as when an unidentified person asks and answers, “And what about the Jews? The refugees . . . the Jews . . . People like ourselves, beginning life again . . . But it’s always been the same” (87).5 This yielding to sameness is foreshadowed in the opening discussion of Between the Acts, which centers on the anticipation of a local cesspool. Bart describes the cesspool as a modern convenience built at the expense of Roman ruins, of the very British history La Trobe commemorates in her pageant.6 But talk of the cesspool remains inconclusive; the most that can be said about it is: “What a subject to talk about on a night like this!” – an empty statement Mrs. Haines turns into a refrain (7–8). “The repetition was senseless, hideous, stupefying,” writes the narrator of Between the Acts, ostensibly about the local scenery (51). Idle talk effects no change: Every summer, for seven summers now, Isa had heard the same words; about the hammer and the nails; the pageant and the weather. Every year they said, would it be wet or fine; and every year it was – one or the other. The same chime followed the same chime . . . (20)

In Hogben’s Folly, “1833 was true in 1939 . . . Most days it was the same” (41). The chilling dialogue about the fate of European Jews suggests how unacceptable stasis can be. As indicated by his discussion of idle talk, Heidegger is concerned about the influence and infiltration of the “they” and its perpetuation

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of banal, everyday existence, which he considers a “slumbering of the fundamental relationships of Dasein toward beings” (FCM 274). Everydayness is a kind of captivity for Heidegger, a denial of “comportment,” or holding oneself up, a passivity toward Being. Heidegger’s anxiety about non-conscious existence – the refusal to take a position – interests Levinas also, but for Levinas, unconsciousness is relegated to sleep. In Time and the Other, Levinas maintains that sleep is a private state in which we give ourselves over to Being (51). Both sleep and fatigue hearken a suspension of existence, a “lag . . . between a subject and itself,” a necessary forgetting and interruption of consciousness, which gives itself over to rest: “Unconsciousness as sleep . . . is a participation in life by non-participation, by the elementary act of resting” (EE 19, 72, 66). Levinas writes, “Sleep is a modality of being, in which a being withdraws from itself and is delivered of its own self-control . . . we must notice that into this event its failure is already written. Fragile sleep, soft-winged sleep, is a second state” (EE 84). Sleep is nevertheless important because it brings about awakening, that instant “where the adherence of existence to an existent appears like a cleaving” (EE 9). For Levinas, awakening demarcates what Heidegger labels the “ontological difference,” the distinction between the concept of Being and the beings in which it is manifested. Awakening commences subjective identity and initiates our taking up of a position in relation to Being. This daily positing of selfhood is difficult – hence the appeal of spending the morning in bed, indulging in the weariness that, as described in Chapter 2, leads so often to boredom with the self. Levinas argues that we both renounce and return to the self in sleep, which he represents as existence suspended in its own subjectivity. His theory has interesting ramifications for the last novels of Woolf and Stein as both writers have a peculiarly pervasive interest in beds: weary with waiting, characters continually concede to sleep. As the group gathered at Pointz Hall discusses the cesspool, “a daylight bird” is heard “chuckling over the substance and succulence of the day, even in sleep” (7). This self-satisfied, somnolent laughter is followed by Lucy Swithin awaking to the singing of more daylight birds; Lucy does not get up but lies in bed reading “an Outline of History” (10). Even when she eventually rises, Lucy remains preoccupied with her morning indolence, “tempted . . . to continue her imaginative reconstruction of the past.” These activities are listed in and among descriptions of Lucy’s waffling about where to live each year and her habit of “increasing the bounds of the moment by flights into the past or future” (11). Lucy, in other words, enjoys being lost in her self and exhibits a weary passivity widely shared in Between the Acts; in the interval between lunch and pageant,

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Lucy, Bart, Mrs. Manresa, Dodge, Isa, and Giles find themselves indolent, awaiting, and very, very sleepy. Suppressing yawns, Mrs. Manresa “sighed, pretending to express not her own drowsiness, but something connected with what she felt about views” (51). Only Bart, for the second time that day, yields to the desire to drowse and dream: “He gave up the game; he couldn’t be bothered . . . he snored” (52, 17). “We aren’t free, each one of them felt separately to feel or think separately, nor yet to fall asleep” (50). Each character resents waiting, resents being part of a group that defines their actions, and longs for the unconscious return to self that sleep promises. Heidegger attributes weariness toward existence to a falling prey to otherness, but Levinas locates its source in the Same, or the philosophical primacy of the self, into which he believes otherness is always, inevitably, and problematically incorporated. Levinas, in other words, rejects the suggestion that a being can or should exist alone authentically. And in Between the Acts Woolf counters her examination of being-towarddeath and subject-centered weariness with depictions of selves longing for ever-evasive others. This longing is directly enunciated in Pointz Hall, where “Society” is defined as “that eternal sensation or desire . . . to meet; even if it be but to collide; to meet, even though the collision is painful” (PH 62). In this large-scale sense, Between the Acts exemplifies Levinas’s diachrony, “the always of non-coincidence” between subject and other; for Levinas, existence is defined by a continuum of disjunction rooted in the complete unknowability of any other to any subject (TO 32). This unknowability generates Woolf’s “eternal sensation or desire to meet,” which is rarely experienced by two characters simultaneously throughout Between the Acts. On two occasions, Isa watches her children led across the lawn by the nurses and taps on the window. “Isolated on a green island” they do not hear her; though “she blew them a kiss . . . in the drone of the garden it went unheeded” (14, 25). Lucy’s “salute [of] the children” through the window of Bart’s study results in the same non-response (21). Via Lucy and Bart, Woolf clarifies the endemic sibling rivalry of Stein’s early book Two: their relationship is defined by crosscurrents and longings for connections that do not come to pass: “Nothing changed their affection; no argument; no fact; no truth. What she saw he didn’t; what he saw she didn’t – and so on, ad infinitum” (22). Lucy and Bart experience an endless surfeit of irresolvable longing: Bart is annoyed by Lucy’s religion, her vagueness – “Skimming the surface, she ignored the battle in the mud” – and by her refusal to assume: as she enters his study, he observes, “she seemed to see [him] for the first time” (22, 141, 84). Lucy’s surprise speaks to the fact that though she has lived the vast majority of her life with Bart she

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continually perceives him afresh. Bart is the stranger that defines her; as the narrator tells us, “It was always ‘my brother . . . my brother’ who rose from the depths of her lily pool” (143). Beneath his growling impatience, Bart understands her significance also; he knows that “she belonged to the unifiers; he to the separatists,” but nevertheless, moves in unison alongside her towards the pageant, and within their home (85). And most of the relationships in Between the Acts are marked by a disjunctive, or in Levinas’s terms, diachronic quality. Isa and Dodge are “conspirators,” but she does not grasp his desire to get away from the barn during the interval until it has passed, “‘Like to see the greenhouse?’ Isa asked suddenly . . . O not now, he could have cried” (76, 81). Though he longs to know, Bart cannot for the world ascertain what ails Giles; viewing the carefully collected volumes in his library, he thinks to himself, “A great harvest the mind had reaped; but for all this, compared with his son, he did not care one damn” (84). Giles does not speak to his father or his wife about his burning anticipation throughout the day. Dodge considers Isa’s and Giles’s relationship “as people say in novels ‘strained’”; each is quick to blame this strain on the other. Giles excuses his own silence with “She had not spoken to him, not one word. Nor looked at him either” (77, 80). But beneath his bitterness, Giles longs for Isa’s gaze upon him; the requisite affirmation of the other’s expression sounds a note of hope in Between the Acts. La Trobe’s gramophone laments its “dispersed are we” refrain throughout, but the narrative encourages us to understand that unrequited longing between individuals is what sustains, in spite of gaps in understanding and a threatening future. Sexual longing is a frivolity that remains on the surface; beneath lies a more urgent desire for definition by unknowable otherness. Lucy Swithin can scarcely remember Dodge’s name as she shows him round Pointz Hall. In the room where Lucy was born, she and Dodge share a distinctly Levinasian face-to-face exchange in the mirror, “Cut off from their bodies, their eyes smiled, their bodiless eyes, at their eyes in the glass” (54). Lucy’s gaze – “He saw her eyes only” – alleviates the wounds inflicted upon Dodge by Giles’s derision and the brutal violence of the bullies of his past (55). Similarly, and in a way akin to Lucy and Bart, Isa remains capable of feeling “shock” when she sees Giles: she sees him anew each time (38). “Do we know each other? Not here, not now. But somewhere, this cloud, this crust, this doubt, this dust –” so Isa thinks about her relationship with Giles (47). Expectations are doomed to failure; we cannot ever fully know each other or anticipate the shared future. As if to compound this uncertainty, an inordinate number of Woolf’s characters find their expectations do not come to fruition. Bart intends to entertain

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his grandson by sporting a cone of paper over his face; George recoils in fear, sobbing. Bart carries this failure with him until the day’s close, “It was here, early that morning, that he had destroyed the little boy’s world. He had popped out with a newspaper; the child had cried” (141). Candish is Pointz Hall’s gambling, alcoholic butler with a surprising love of arranging flowers; the portrait in the dining room shows an ancestor dismayed by the painter’s unexpected exclusion of a favored hound. Giles would have liked to have become a gentleman farmer; instead, he is a city-based businessman with a wife infatuated with a neighboring gentleman farmer. Manresa’s unannounced arrival challenges the certainty that country life should be filled with solitude. Mrs. Elmhurst expects the worst from the village idiot in the play; instead, he behaves as planned. Ultimately, neither La Trobe nor her audience is pleased with the pageant: her illusion fails La Trobe on numerous occasions, and her audience is left wondering, “What is her game? To disrupt? Jog and trot? Jerk and smirk?” (127). Failed expectations imbue the second sentence of the novel, and all residents of Hogben’s Folly: “The county council had promised to bring water to the village, but they hadn’t” (7). The weather is yet another factor in this extended motif of surprise: “Every year they said, would it be wet or fine; and every year it was – one or the other” (20). Except this year, 1939, when it is initially fine, and then suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, wet. We cannot ever fully know the otherness defining us and our future, Levinas suggests. Nothing brings this more clearly into focus than the last scene of the play, in which the actors hold up mirrors to show the audience themselves. Everything about this self-revelation is defined by an unknown other: the actors flash randomly, an unidentifiable voice emerges to narrate – “It came from the bushes – a megaphontic, anonymous, loud-speaking affirmation” – the same voice speaks of “the gun slayers, bomb droppers . . . [who] do openly what we do slyly” – extending the subject–other dyads of mirror-holding actors and audience members to the enemy across the Channel (130). Just prior to this scene, someone reads the program and foresees that the last act is entitled “Ourselves.” While other historic periods might be understood and rendered, this audience member is deeply skeptical that any individual can adequately define and portray his or herself, announcing, “‘Myself’ – it was impossible” (124). Woolf’s narration demonstrates that individuals do not stand alone; as such, the adamant subjectivity at the heart of being-toward-death is unsustainable. Thus, though this year’s pageant is a blatant repetition of every other, it is tinged for Isa with the recollection of the girl in the newspaper that morning. “The same chime followed the same chime, only this year beneath the chime she heard:

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‘The girl screamed and hit him about the face with a hammer’” (20). At the novel’s close, Woolf defines even the reader by otherness: we are told that “the curtain rose” and are thus exposed for what we are, an audience expectantly looking into a future defined by others. “Change had to come,” as one audience member, Mrs. Lynn Jones says to herself, “unless things were perfect; in which case . . . they resisted Time” (121). Woolf too rejects the stasis of sameness: in Between the Acts infinite, irresolvable longing for the other carries us into the future.

Mrs. Reynolds: Not Yet Like Woolf’s final novel, Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds is preoccupied with between-ness; as her narrator vaguely imparts: “In the meantime it was always in the meantime and if it was not it was exciting in the meantime” (38). Although fairly certain that the war will end, protagonist Mrs. Reynolds often wonders what will happen in between. Stein’s characters – civilians in an occupied country – long for a better future; their longing is circumscribed by the possibility that life may be curtailed at any moment. War heightens individual being-toward-death, but Stein’s fictive expectation is coupled with a time emphatically defined by the other. Stein’s other is personal and domestic: Mrs. Reynolds is never given a first name, and thus is implicitly and exclusively defined by the otherness of her husband throughout. As in Woolf, this intimate dyad forms the basis of a large-scale interpretation of otherness; for Stein, otherness comes to include fictional representations of Hitler and Stalin, respectively named Angel Harper and Joseph Lane. As Stein writes in her epilogue: This book is . . . [about] a perfectly ordinary couple living an ordinary life and having ordinary conversations and really not suffering personally from everything that is happening but over them, all over them, is the shadow of two men, and then the shadow of one of the two men gets bigger and then blows away and there is no other. (267)

Time’s crawl in Mrs. Reynolds is repeatedly – insistently, to use a favorite Stein phrase – tied to Angel Harper’s ageing process and his widely hoped-for demise: the characters of Mrs. Reynolds exist in anticipation of the death of Levinas’s other. Stein enhances the proximity and desirousness shared by Mrs. Reynolds and Harper by opposing and conflating their characters throughout her narrative. In depicting this comparison, Stein engages in Heidegger’s stages of futurity – waiting, expectation, and resolute anticipation among them – but does so in a way

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that privileges the other’s primacy. The novel ends when Angel Harper dies, when he is, mercifully, “not fifty-five alive” (266); being-towardthe-death of the other proves finite. But time does not stop here. Instead, the infinite is affirmed through the relations Mrs. Reynolds shares with people other than Harper; the “they” towards whom Heidegger exhibits suspicion and who comprise so much of Mrs. Reynolds’s daily existence throughout the text. In other words, Stein’s last novel is another modernist fiction rooted in the ideological subtext that the self is finite, while the self defined by otherness is infinite. Stein’s autobiographical Wars I Have Seen begins with a discussion of children’s burgeoning knowledge of death and its significance: It is a struggle not to die between babyhood and fourteen, not not to actually die, that is a matter for parents and guardians, but the not to know that death is there . . . that is what makes any one shy between babyhood and fourteen, later on there was are other things in between, there is eternity, and there is or there is not being a king or queen . . . there was no war then . . . of course I was struggling not to be dying that is not to know that dying was dying and frightening was not only frightening but connected with any thing. (13)

Physical well-being is not the concern of the child, as it falls within the purview of caregivers; instead, children struggle to remain “shy” or naïve about death, a struggle compounded by the fact that everyone is born with an understanding of mortality. As a child, Stein could avoid thinking of death in part because there was no war in her country; as she grows older she understands not only the continual threat of finitude – which is “connected with any thing” – but also eternal time. War, Stein writes soon after, heightens and detracts from this knowledge: “The idea of enemies is awful it makes one stop remembering eternity and the fear of death” (23). Like so much of Mrs. Reynolds, this statement resonates with Levinas’s and Heidegger’s approaches to futurity, as it involves recognizing both eternality and being-toward-death. To be without an awareness of either, for Stein, is awful. Heidegger’s angst is everywhere in Mrs. Reynolds, where death slips into all activity: “Everybody did, everybody died and everybody did” (48). Emphasis is placed on the ordinariness of finitude, so that descriptions of death are frequently and bathetically set beside trivial details like odd-looking Ford cars, singing birds, and Mrs. Reynolds’s preference for potatoes (58). Some frustration is expressed about the meaninglessness of death on a mass scale; hence the man who raises fish for the government “felt strongly about how bitter it was that so many should be dead dead dead because of Angel Harper” (130). And Mrs. Reynolds laments that death changes nothing: “There is no use in so many people being killed . . . if it will always be eight o’clock” (78).

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However, when a car accident occurs nearby, Mrs. Reynolds dashes off to have a look at her neighbor’s corpse; similarly understated is a narrative hint that Mr. Reynolds may have been present at an infanticide (201, 114–15). Death is both remarkable and everyday; Stein’s characters believe in, and are not fazed by, the Heideggerean premise that death ‘is possible in every moment’ (BT 238). But the death they feel most passionate about is Angel Harper’s. For Mrs. Reynolds, it makes no difference that everybody is afraid, because eventually they will all be dead (47). But Harper’s death matters: “Mrs. Reynolds . . . had never liked Angel Harper and now she knew it was more than that, she knew she would like not only that Angel Harper would be dead that he would always have been dead” (67). In Mrs. Reynolds’s ideal future – for futurity is the tense adamantly maintained in the odd grammar of this sentence – Harper would always be dead. Mrs. Reynolds anticipates Harper’s death by continually equating death with the mention of his name; his forty-ninth birthday makes her think of deathbeds, and the time between full moons may be the time he will die (130, 197). Fellow characters hint at a similar desire for Harper’s death; at a dinner party at the Reynolds’s, one Valerie Harland “said To be or not to be Angel Harper and everybody laughed” (94–5). A group affirms the possibility of Harper’s demise with laughter; so too does Hope Reynolds, sisterin-law to Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds, long for someone to hang him, while Mr. Reynolds “would be just as well pleased if they killed him” (52, 73). But apart from Joseph Lane, who wants to murder him, no one wants to be personally responsible for Harper’s death (64). Instead, in these instances, the possibility of death is passionately considered. Amid all this speculation is Harper’s keen certainty about his own death, which the narrator mentions on more than one occasion (32, 45). Harper is the only character who directly articulates self-consciousness about his mortality, and it pervades his earliest memories: “When Angel Harper was eighteen, there were hours and hours when he might have been dead” (80). For Heidegger, truly authentic Da-sein includes some recognition of the past; as such, it is significant that Harper is the sole character who strives to remember his childhood; his sinister memories are a persistent narrative touchstone.7 It is a fundamental innovation of Stein’s book that it is toward Harper’s fully anticipatory, highly conscious self that the other characters direct their desires and their sense of time. Harper’s presence defines the passing of days, months, and years: “Angel Harper was not tired of being forty-three . . . And nobody had it to say and nobody knew what day he would have it be another day” (88). Harper’s birthdays function as bleak reminders of the war’s length; it is widely anticipated his demise will coincide with the end of the war:

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Pretty soon it was tomorrow and every day Angel Harper would have another day and the day did come . . . when Angel Harper had had enough of being forty-nine, he was not yet fifty but he had had enough of being fortynine and on that day, Mrs. Reynolds said well I knew it was too good to be true . . . Just too good to be true. (131)

It is her expectation that Harper will be dead before he reaches fifty that Mrs. Reynolds suspects is too good to be true. While Stein’s characters are inclined to passively await existence, Harper forces them to consider a future determined by another, and to regularly and eagerly anticipate his demise, which they consider an eventuality both looming and certain, even as it lies beyond their control. Mrs. Reynolds and her community are, in effect, being-toward-the-death of the other. Stein’s narrative builds towards Harper’s death and the end of the war, and as it does so, she depicts a gradual transition akin to Heidegger’s movement from passive, subject-bound waiting to active expectation to anticipation of death. But her book reaches its climax when these forms of anticipation fail, and instead, her protagonist embraces a Levinasian future defined exclusively by the other. At the outset of Mrs. Reynolds we are told about Mrs. Reynolds’s cousin who waited to marry but never did. The story concludes: “to wait did not bother her and later on waiting was like being there” (5). As in Heidegger’s inauthentic awaiting, waiting in this anecdote is both passive and an approximation of conscious existence: it is sufficient, but not quite authentic. And waiting often signifies a temporal deferral in Stein’s novel. The war, we are told, is “a long way to wait,” and at one point, Mrs. Reynolds states, “pretty soon when anybody wants anything well I will tell them wait until they are older wait wait, and by that time well by that time it will be all over” (68, 75). Waiting displaces other forms of everyday desire, which can resume when the war is over.8 Until then, waiting defines existence: “Mrs. Reynolds said they had potatoes to eat they had wood to burn so there they were eat heat and wait” (83). We also witness Mrs. Reynolds’s ineffectual attempt to ground her self in the present by waiting: Mrs. Reynolds was not late, she never was because she was always waiting. She knew it was not necessary not only to know but she knew that it was true that to wait now might make her wait then and to wait then might make her come again to wait now. Wait for what she said to herself but really she knew that it was not only watchful to wait but careless to wait and pleasant to wait and ready to wait. She was ready to wait and indeed if Angel Harper was forty-eight there was nothing to do but wait . . . Wait said Mrs. Reynolds and she knew that it was not too late to wait. (118)

The repetition of this passage underscores the sheer redundancy of waiting. There is some sustaining inertia in Mrs. Reynolds’s passive

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process: if she begins to wait now, she will continue to do so, although the need to iterate this thought suggests that Mrs. Reynolds is concerned about the possibility of waiting over an extended period of time. What is she waiting for? Here she is deliberately evasive, changing the subject mid-sentence: what she is waiting for is irrelevant, as it is a watchful and ready process, and hence, somewhat active, even if careless and selfindulgent, pleasant. Waiting, after all, is not her fault; Harper is fortyeight and there is nothing else to do. Mrs. Reynolds’s time is defined by another, and she believes herself incapacitated by that externally-defined temporality. But this avowal of passive waiting changes perceptibly as the narrative moves on and Harper turns fifty-one: “she wanted to say that she had enough . . . and she was almost angry when Mr. Reynolds said she might just as well wait, it was not too late to wait” (177). References to the exhaustion of waiting begin to spring up from this point forward; although Mr. Reynolds counsels patience, Mrs. Reynolds feels too tired to be patient (183). She is tired of the spring offensive and tired of waiting for Harper to turn fifty-two (192, 197). In short, she has had enough (228–30). Even the day before the liberation, she finds it exceptionally hard to wait. As Stein writes in Wars I Have Seen: “we are . . . rather querulous with waiting” (149). This waiting lacks Levinas’s patience; it is grounded in the static yielding to the present of Heidegger’s awaiting, and for Mrs. Reynolds, proves unbearable. Not satiated by waiting, Mrs. Reynolds embarks on a more active anticipation. This transition is palpable in the narrative relaying of Mrs. Reynolds’s life history, which is imbued with a sense of expectation throughout. We are told that even as a toddler, Mrs. Reynolds was a person whose expectations were usually met: “So after Mrs. Reynolds had commenced talking and walking she went out with her nurse every day and she always had something to say, she said, well are they coming . . . Of course they very often did come” (4). When Mrs. Reynolds was sixteen, her neighbors owned a little calf that often got away; Mrs. Reynolds gleefully expected its return, which was guaranteed at her command: “She said it is coming, and when it came she said it is going” (6). But the certainty of these expectations does not last; as war approaches, Mrs. Reynolds notes that “the days did not change but she was expecting something . . . she did not know what it was that she did expect” (113). She begins preparations, and makes a point of being always ready; this is a habit that carries over into the war itself. The nature and goal of these preparations are never clarified, but they are as imbued with wartime urgency as all else in the text.9 As the war accelerates, the only thing Mrs. Reynolds truly feels she can anticipate is the weather. As a young married woman she always expected winter

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to follow summer; during the war, she takes comfort in the knowledge that there will be seasons, and that at least rain can occasionally be foretold.10 Harper, we are informed, does not control climatic time: “Angel Harper was hidden away from climate. There” (61). The final, exuberant “there” signals a change in Mrs. Reynolds’s approach: although weather is changeable, the climate proffers a certainty distinct from the unpredictable horror that is Harper’s regime. As she wrests time from Harper’s controlling influence, Mrs. Reynolds embarks on a form of anticipation that, as in Heidegger’s being-toward-death, is directed toward her own future. Evidence for the self-absorption of her wartime preparations is sprinkled throughout the text, but it is an assertion perhaps best supported by one of Mrs. Reynolds’s many ruminations on food and its shortage. “Let us help ourselves said Mrs. Reynolds” – her phrase is suffused with the pleasures of generous hospitality, but is offered only to herself and Mr. Reynolds (174). From the outset, Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds are described as a couple who “had gone along,” and taken care of themselves (1).11 But as with her interest in climate, Mrs. Reynolds’s sleeping habits indicate that her anticipation is no longer quite so self-centered. In Mrs. Reynolds, going to bed signifies the end of each daily wait, and in turn, most of Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds’s days are spent waiting to go to bed. After the first 100 pages we are told on nearly every subsequent page – over 100 times in total – that Mr. Reynolds said they should go to bed, that it was their habit and so they went to bed, or that it was time to go to bed. Initially, resignation permeates this activity, which tends to occur when the irresolvable subject of Angel Harper dominates the conversation. Unable to endure thoughts of their Harper-driven future the couple goes to sleep, thereby returning to the cosiness of their respective subjectivities. “Mr. Reynolds said it is better to go to bed than to be dead. Mrs. Reynolds shrugged her shoulders and said good night” (76). Going to bed is a way of “not think[ing] about anything,” and appeases anxiety: every one else may be nervous, but Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds are “going on sleeping” (109, 116, 193). But as Mrs. Reynolds’s wartime lassitude begins to wane, so too does her perception of bed as a retreat from existence. A series of “little fright[s]” disrupts “their habit every night” and influences Mrs. Reynolds’s slumber: “When Angel Harper was forty-eight, there began not exactly began but there almost began to be days when Mrs. Reynolds said that she wondered perhaps when she went to bed, she would not sleep well that night” (109, 115). Bed is less and less a symbol of comfort: on one occasion, Mrs. Reynolds thinks of deathbeds, and cries when Mr. Reynolds tells her that “it is not in death-beds that they will die” (130). Mrs. Reynolds’s dreams, initially of food, are

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increasingly disturbing, and include “a singular disaster” in which “she saw a half of a beef pass by and after that there were soldiers and after that they went away” (40, 142). Eventually, Mrs. Reynolds becomes reflective about her sleeping: when she gets up late “she did not tell any one”; she starts going “to bed very carefully,” and observes that Mr. Reynolds is “too ready to go to bed” (230, 233, 242). Somnolent, continual retreats into the self become a concern and signal Mrs. Reynolds’s burgeoning awareness of otherness.12 Mrs. Reynolds’s belief in prophecy further propels her expectation away from Harper and herself to a “they” comprised of friends, neighbors, and peers. Reference to this “they” is endemic; in an uncanny resemblance to the Heidegger translation, Stein continually uses the pronoun “they” to describe others. In Wars I Have Seen, Stein writes, “everyone was waiting, waiting for the Germans to go away – ‘they’”(188). In Mrs. Reynolds, this “they” applies also to the immediate community, as in “Nobody said Mrs. Reynolds ever gets tired of saying what they have to say” (207). A great deal of what people have to say corresponds with Heidegger’s idle talk, in that Stein, like Woolf, portrays the rumors that fly thick and fast in wartime. But Mrs. Reynolds’s prophecies, which are not directed at the war but at its cessation, are distinguishable from groundless gossip, largely because they are the foremost catalyst for her renewed sense of time. Mrs. Reynolds’s prophecies, in other words, facilitate her adherence to a future-oriented temporality generated by others who are not Harper. At the novel’s outset, all prophecies are directed solely toward Mrs. Reynolds’s future. In her youth, Mrs. Reynolds is told that “she would have more than a mile of strawberry plants” and this event comes to pass (8). So too does the promise of box hedges, as does the prediction that she will one day get married and become Mrs. Reynolds (9, 12). Mrs. Reynolds “liked to prophesy,” and so does most everyone around her, including Joseph Lane (22, 29). Mrs. Reynolds draws on two major historical prophecies, the first being that of seventh-century St. Odile. St. Odile is also mentioned in Wars I Have Seen, where Stein helpfully explains that she regularly read a book of prophecies throughout the war. In Mrs. Reynolds, St. Odile’s words are not sourced; her prophecy is just described as the foreseeing of a time when “the Germans shall be called the most war-like people on earth” and initiate a war so horrible that it paralyses all other nations (33). A second historical prophecy, that of nineteenth-century St. Geoffrey, is similar. In it, Geoffrey prophesies the dates of war, the countries involved, and the eventual defeat of the Germans by the French (40). Prophecies have always been fulfilled in Mrs. Reynolds’s life in the past; during the war, these two

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– particularly St. Odile’s – become the foundation of her anticipation. As she says herself, “even if she was waiting, she was choosing St. Odile, she had not weakened, she was still choosing St. Odile” (233). Prophecy, then, fosters Mrs. Reynolds’s palpable transition from waiting to active expectation, from passivity to conscious choosing. There is no doubt that St. Odile is a personal comfort; Mrs. Reynolds revels in the certainty provided by her own assured sense that although Harper continues to age he will never reach the age of sixty, seventy, or eighty (139). This same self-preoccupation surfaces when she hears the final outcome of St. Geoffrey’s prophecy, where he suggests that in 1980 an era of Antichrist will begin and persist for sixty years. To this Mrs. Reynolds responds, “I do not . . . care about what happens in 1980, why would I?” (40). A future where Mrs. Reynolds will most likely be dead is irrelevant. But after a period of meditation, she reconsiders this response: “She said, Mrs. Reynolds said that if Anti-Christ came in 1980 and her little niece in 1940 was nine years old how old would she be in 1980. Mr. Reynolds knew” (43). The future, Mrs. Reynolds acknowledges here, is neither finite, nor hers alone. Time is shared, just as this speculation is shared and affirmed between herself and her husband. Thus begins Mrs. Reynolds’s slow but steady recognition that the future – consolatory or otherwise – is not to be waited upon. Her action, though cautious and minimal, is nevertheless significant. For Mrs. Reynolds risks ridicule by foisting her prophecies upon friends and strangers alike in order to spark widespread expectations of a better future. At a dinner party she insists on the veracity of St. Odile’s words, and most uncomfortably, none of her guests affirms her suppositions. As time passes, Mrs. Reynolds begins to feel regularly shunned when she reiterates the prophecy: Mrs. Reynolds felt a little funny when she said Saint Odile out loud, she knew she believed in what St. Odile said but when she said it and every one kind of acted as if they did not quite want to hear her say it, not that they minded her saying it but all the same there was not any shame, but all the same. (161)

Although she struggles with the meaning of this unenthusiastic response, Mrs. Reynolds persists in spreading the word: “sometimes she felt that she was foolish to believe in St. Odile . . . and sometimes she only wanted to talk to total strangers” (172). And Mrs. Reynolds gains, if not converts, then certainly cohorts. Edmund, her cousin’s son, shares her predilection for prophecy, and reaffirms her faith in St. Odile. Quite significantly, as Mrs. Reynolds attempts to interest everyone she meets in St. Odile, she tells Mr. Reynolds, “now I am going anywhere” (217). Throughout Stein’s work, characters are constantly going away to an

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undisclosed location; in a particularly threatening moment, we are told that dictators Harper and Lane go away everywhere. Harper goes to every known place; Mrs. Reynolds, by contrast, goes anywhere – to places unknown, extending consolation to strangers. Throughout Mrs. Reynolds, Stein deliberately contrasts the novel’s dictatorial figure with its protagonist. In many ways, this relationship defines the narrative structure: after a brief relaying of Mrs. Reynolds’s childhood and marriage, the text exhibits on-going oscillations between the perspectives of anti-hero and heroine, resulting in an implicit equalization of these characters, one extended by numerous narrative references. Very few degrees of separation divide Mrs. Reynolds from Harper. “They had never met Angel Harper or Joseph Lane but might as well have. That is to say they knew so many who had who had, that is to say seen and heard and felt and told” (73). Many of the Reynolds’s friends-of-friends and neighbors know Harper and Lane. Among these associates the closest is Mrs. Reynolds’s brother-in-law William and his wife Hope, who were at one time so close to Harper that they fear for their safety in France after the occupation; Hope and William are thus among the many to go away. While we might assume from this information that the Reynoldses have at least been introduced to Harper, Stein’s narrator points to and denies the likelihood of this possibility: “Angel Harper never passed in front of her house, he always happened to come the other way when he went to see Mr. Reynolds’ younger brother” (21). Contradictory clues are continually dropped about the nature of these associations: the Reynoldses saw Harper from time to time (24). Or did they? “Perhaps well perhaps Angel Harper went away and they never saw him” (25). And “later on” they never, ever saw him: “Mrs. Reynolds said she had never met him and in a way she never had” (29). When the Reynoldses speak of Harper and Lane, their language is rife with denial and qualification. In a way she never had, but in many ways, she appears to have, as when the narration shifts so abruptly, yet almost imperceptibly from Mrs. Reynolds’s perspective to Harper’s that Mrs. Reynolds seems to be an unnamed “she” Harper recalls: Mrs. Reynolds went home, today Angel Harper had his birthday and he was fifty-two and so said Mrs. Reynolds what difference does it make to them . . . Angel Harper was fifty-two and it might be well it might be that he would remember that when he was fourteen some one walking along was eating candy and perhaps Angel Harper could not remember but perhaps she offered him some and if she did did he accept a piece or did he not, did he eat a piece or did he not. He did not know whether he did or whether he did not . . . Dear me said Mrs. Reynolds I wish I knew. (201–2)

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This shadowy memory might belong to Harper or Mrs. Reynolds; the concealed identity of the female figure deliberately confuses the relationship between recollection and recollector. The seamless narrative flow, however, suggests not only that Mrs. Reynolds knows intimate details of Harper’s life but that she is even connected to his stream of consciousness. For as he wrestles with his past, Mrs. Reynolds picks up the thread of his thought and struggles along with him. This seamlessness occurs on numerous occasions: Harper dislikes noise, but at the age of forty-five hears a “loud noise [that] was should be”; this “should-be” – a noise both imperative and futuristic – is simultaneously heard and disliked by Mrs. Reynolds, and by Mrs. Reynolds alone (98). When Harper recalls his mother, Mrs. Reynolds also “remembered about her mother but she did not remember about Angel Harper” – another instance in which denial of Harper exacerbates the tie they share (104–5).13 A more eerie, personal example: Harper does not dream, and Mrs. Reynolds knows it (141). Mental proximities extend to physical: Mrs. Reynolds and Harper share the same aversion to sitting, preferring to stand.14 Mrs. Reynolds and Harper’s social relationship appears akin to that of Harper and Lane, whom Stein’s narrator improbably describes as having “met and never met” (71). Coincidences continually bring Mrs. Reynolds and Harper together in the reader’s mind: their birthdays are ten days apart, both choose to stay in occupied France, both are possibly Jewish, and neither ever says thank you.15 This conflation of thoughts and lives is curious, and collapses the sharp divide between them. But their connection is not totalizing because Harper is not fully incorporated into Mrs. Reynolds’s subjectivity, or vice versa: rather, Harper both remains other to Mrs. Reynolds and shares her selfhood. At the outset, Harper is a dominating other with whom Mrs. Reynolds shares a desirous if finite relationship of anticipation: she expectantly looks forward to his demise and death. Although by this interpretation, Harper’s future defines Mrs. Reynolds’s own, she recognizes and resents this and tries to keep him distinct from herself: hence her repeated denials of seeing, knowing, or associating with him. But she catches herself up on this distinction, inserting qualifiers into her statements of denial, and struggling not to think of Harper, all the while discussing him on a near-daily basis: here her longing for the other repeatedly surfaces. And the narrative also betrays her: even as Mrs. Reynolds strives to separate herself from Harper, the narrator informs us that they share not only the same finite time but that this time is occupied by two selves so similar the differences between them are easily and readily obliterated: they are as one self and one being. In these moments, Harper ceases to represent or define but becomes Mrs. Reynolds’s individual future; he is inseparable

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from what she anticipates and brings into her own present. In this way, Stein’s narration oscillates between Heidegger’s and Levinas’s concepts of subjectivity and anticipatory temporality: Harper’s is a finite future indistinguishable from Mrs. Reynolds’s own, a subjective future with an ending she actively, resolutely anticipates. But from a more Levinasian perspective, Mrs. Reynolds’s selfhood and time are undeniably shaped by the other that is Harper. And in the process of recognizing the indivisibility of her future from his, Mrs. Reynolds comes to see how so many others define her and her life. Stein deliberately set out to make Mrs. Reynolds inextricable from her Harper/Hitler. In Wars I Have Seen, she writes that in her own book of prophecy it was clear that Tuesdays “were going to be very bad days for the Nazis” (178). So it is not coincidental that “Mrs. Reynolds was very well born. She was born on a Tuesday” (3). Furthermore, Stein is careful to point out how bad days for the Nazis define the novel as a whole: “Mrs. Reynolds is not all about roses, it is more about Tuesdays . . . the day they made peace from war and . . . war from peace” (2). Stein’s is a story about wartime, and about the few degrees of separation between enemy and comrade; in the process, the degrees of separation between comrades are also articulated. For Mrs. Reynolds is not only other to Harper but also to Mr. Reynolds. The anticipatory temporality of this relationship, and its likeness to their (non) relationship with Harper, is nicely encapsulated by the following exchange: “Mr. Reynolds turned in his sleep, what is it you wanted me to do, he said. Nothing but be my angel said Mrs. Reynolds. Mr. Reynolds was still asleep, That is easy he said” (27). Be my Angel Harper, my other, the other whom I anticipate desiring infinitely. Harper is usurped here, just as he is by this, from Mrs. Reynolds: “If whatever happens does happen then naturally enough Mr. Reynolds is always amiable, Mrs. Reynolds never told any one this but it was something which made her daily life be what it was” (37). More than Harper, Mr. Reynolds defines Mrs. Reynolds’s daily existence. But Mrs. Reynolds’s growing anticipation about a Harper-free future is grounded not only in her relationship with Mr. Reynolds, but also in her relations with her community at large. For she does not expect Harper’s death on her own, but actively demands that others do the same. There is a collective responsibility for the dictatorship and the war, and the novel’s significance hinges on Mrs. Reynolds’s slow recognition that Harper has not only taken power, but has also been given it Mrs. Reynolds said to Mr. Reynolds it is all the same but nobody says any more about him, about which one said Mr. Reynolds about John’s father, no said Mrs. Reynolds about Angel Harper and Mrs. Reynolds was right, she said that it was true and it was true they were beginning not to forget about

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him but they were beginning not to mention him and that made Angel Harper and in a way he could remember any day just then that maybe it was true it could make Angel Harper just then feel like anyone . . . well why anyway said Mrs. Reynolds it does not make any difference if they do forget him, no said Mr. Reynolds only it does, and Mrs. Reynolds knew that he was right because of course it did, it did make a difference if not any one was remembering to mention Angel Harper. (216)

Here we witness, again, Stein’s extraordinary ability to emulate the incomplete, half-events, gestures, and articulations of daily life, a skill she exhibits from the perplexing taxonomy of Tender Buttons to the abstracted narration of Mrs. Reynolds. This passage describes a deliberate cessation of idle talk, or that which, in Heidegger’s terms, detracts from being: the widespread refusal to perpetuate Harper’s power through verbal acknowledgment is notably successful. Mrs. Reynolds realizes that time is not defined by a finite being-toward-Harper’s-death, but by the other that is her community. There is more than a hint of Levinasian salvation in the shared determination to forget him: “It is said Mrs. Reynolds just as well not to remember as to forget” – in forging a new future, a conscious setting aside of past mistakes will be necessary (95). For Levinas, this very sort of temporal restoration lies at the heart of pardon, hope, infinition – an active forgetting that does not obliterate the past, but facilitates the welcoming of a genuinely unknown future shaped by productive longing.

Conclusions As does Mrs. Reynolds, Between the Acts concludes with the redemptive possibility of a future marked by a longing for otherness, rather than an anticipation of death. With reference to Giles and Isa, the narrator states, “Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born” (152). In Woolf’s last novel, exploration of sleep and beds culminates in this very Levinasian “fecundity.” Levinas uses this word primarily in its traditional sense to refer to abundance, fertility, or something prolific. Fecundity begins with tenderness, a “way of remaining in the no man’s land between being and not-yet-being” (TI 259). This interval is akin to what Heidegger labels the ontological difference, and is not a renunciation of selfhood: infinite or “ever recommencing” being relies upon both subjectivity and futurity (TI 268). The self is in “relation with . . . a future, irreducible to the power over possibles,” and that future cannot be anticipated or mastered (TI 267). Levinas suggests that

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the parent–child relationship explicates the concept most fully, noting, “Infinite time does not bring an eternal life to an ageing subject; it is better across the discontinuity of generations, punctuated by the inexhaustible youths of the child” (TI 268). Children are both stranger to and part of their parent; desire for the other that is one’s own child is not based on lack, or need, but sacrifice. Fecundity imbues Lucy Swithin’s tour of the house with Dodge, which begins with the bedrooms: she shows him the bed where she was born, and then sits on it, swinging her legs and singing “an old child’s nursery rhyme to help a child” (BA 53–54). From here they will travel to the “symbolical, universal nursery” (PH 89). “‘The nursery,’ said Mrs. Swithin . . . ‘The cradle of our race,’ she seemed to say” (BA 54). While surveying originary beds, Dodge is restored by Lucy’s tenderness, and by her expression. From the vantage of the bed in which she was born, Lucy shares a faceto-face exchange with Dodge in the mirror, proffering such tenderness Dodge feels renewed – “healed” of the past and its misdemeanors (BA 55). This Levinasian epiphanic moment restores the past pardoned, even as it alleviates the burden of existence, which Isa considers “laid on [her] in the cradle; murmured by waves; breathed by restless elm trees; crooned by singing women; what we must remember; what we would forget” (BA 109). Existence must be forgotten and remembered; this process makes infinition possible and lessens our solitariness. This struggle is also assuaged by Isa’s children, who continue her, and their grandfather Bart: “Many old men had only their India – old men in clubs, old men in rooms off Jermyn Street. She in her striped dress continued him.” “Indeed, he was grateful to her . . . for continuing” (BA 17). In both Pointz Hall and Between the Acts Isa is described as bolster-like; she is the somnolent site of others’ subjectivity (PH 36; BA 8). Circumscribed by the otherness of her children, her husband, and by a desire to write poetry, Isa’s fecundity is the struggle upon which the novel concludes: “after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born” (BA 152). Fecundity does not overcome the necessary, divisive, isolation of existence: instead, it facilitates a future of unbounded desire and time. Hints of fecundity are also everywhere in Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds. It is a future-directed continuum best signified by Hope Reynolds, who is expecting a baby as the novel opens. Expectant hope then filters through the book, as most of the characters “were either very hopeful or not hopeful at all,” although Mrs. Reynolds is a bit more ambivalent, being “full of hope at least she hoped that here was hope” (171, 175). While Hope Reynolds is among the many to mysteriously disappear she returns at the novel’s end, pregnant again. Hope’s second pregnancy signals a burgeoning optimism and is part of a trend:

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Mrs. William Ranger told [Mrs. Reynolds] that there were a great many of the women they knew who were going to have children, a great many of them. That said Mrs. Reynolds is necessary to make up for all those who have gone away. (257)

In Between the Acts, a plane passing overhead marks the end of the pageant, interfering with the clergyman’s enunciation of the word “opportunity” and reminding all about the onset of war (134). At the end of Mrs. Reynolds, the plane indicates a different form of expectancy: Yes said Mrs. Reynolds when she met Herbert Armor, yes I have just heard that Lydia has gone away to have her second baby in an airplane. Really said Herbert Armor, yes said Mrs. Reynolds yes she is going to have her second baby in an airplane and she is going to call him Philip, she is going to have him in an airplane. But said Herbert suppose it is a girl well said Mrs. Reynolds in that case she will call it Philippa, but anyway said Mrs. Reynolds, airplanes go up and they come down so really perhaps the little Philip will be born in a bed like his brother John. (227)

Fecundity is “irreducible to the power over possible” (TI 267). Perhaps the first indication that the fecund future cannot be certain is the inability to gauge exactly when a baby is coming: Lydia hopes to have her baby in a plane, but it is just as likely it will be born in a bed. Either way, this odd little story depicts a future in which the plane is a symbol of a future defined not by crisis, but by regeneration. Death, as Woolf once pointed out to her sister Vanessa, was the experience she would never be able to describe. In her consideration of death, Woolf does not abandon subjectivity; indeed, in a very Heideggerean sentence, Anne Banfield argues that “the deaths that shaped Woolf’s [own] biography were also the sign of her life’s authenticity” (The Phantom Table 216). Banfield’s evidence is drawn from Moments of Being, where Woolf describes enjoying a sense of self-importance when thinking about the extremity of life. But in Between the Acts, Woolf struggles to reconcile subjective mortality with a collective future. Thus Giles and Dodge are filled with Heidegger’s angst, even as others chat idly and ineffectually, often appearing more concerned about the weariness of waiting than with the war itself. Woolf shows the continuity behind all this disjunction; the anticipation of individual finitude, the infinite longing binding even antagonistic figures. These struggles find some resolution in fecundity – moments when shared glances ease past horrors, when spats yield embraces, or when we observe “green mounds in the churchyard . . . cast up by their molings, which for centuries had made the earth friable” (BA 57). Stein wrestles also: Mrs. Reynolds challenges self-centered anticipation, but Wars I Have Seen honors Pétain

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as a figure who spent the war “actively waiting” described – again, remarkably like Heidegger – as “a complete action” necessary because “to do it would do what he had to do” (60). In the process, Woolf and Stein succeed in taking everyday longing past the personal realm to the international stage. Neither Woolf nor Stein lived long enough to experience the longterm repercussions of Nazism. Heidegger, whose reputation is forever damaged by his own Nazi affiliations, considerably softened his approach to futurity. Indeed, his theories begin to resemble Levinas’s, particularly in “Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking,” where three interlocutors discuss and extol non-willing, or the willing renunciation of willing, in order to attain releasement. Releasement lies “beyond the distinction between activity and passivity” and sounds very much like Levinas’s anticipation without aiming (59). While never fully passive, and, for the most part, entirely subjective, what emerges from this dialogue is a veneration of patience as a means of accessing thought. “Going toward” – Da-sein’s authentic movement toward the future clung to so adamantly in Being and Time – is here watered down to a “moving-into-nearness” (89). Heidegger does not abandon nothingness, but the pursuit of proximity, and not finality, is now the goal. Dispersed are we, says Woolf’s gramophone. For Levinas and, to a growing degree, for Heidegger also, proximity recovers time, making possible the anticipation of still more futurity. Woolf and Stein portray the continuity that sustains these in-betweens and meantimes.

Notes 1. To improve readability I have elided some text, removing editorial indications of material that was crossed out or altered, but still readable. Here the unamended text reads “his immortality was momentary, ‹because› he had a future – unfortunately.” 2. Lee writes, “it was known that with the invasion plan for July 1940 the Gestapo had drawn up an ‘Arrest List’ or ‘Black List’ for Great Britain . . . which ran to 350 pages.” While no one could be entirely sure of being included, it is very likely that the list included the Woolfs; as Lee acknowledges, “Leonard and Virginia Woolf were not the only people to make careful, practical suicide plans” (Virginia Woolf 730). 3. It is not until well into the novel that Stein provides a specific date; 1942, the pivotal year of French occupation, is related – in a nice imperialistic parallel – to 1492, the year of Columbus’s legendary journey to the Americas. (232). The narrator also drops the hint that Angel Harper is forty-nine and is ten years older than the year itself (138). As the recounting of Harper’s

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

age begins with his being forty-two and not yet a dictator, it seems likely the novel begins in 1932 (17, 25). Woolf’s “non-being” and Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world” are proximate but not the same. As discussed in Chapter 2, “non-being” is a personal listlessness while “being-in-the-world” is a thoughtless giving over to the world. References to the war are more direct in Pointz Hall, where Giles’s frustration is specifically tied to his feeling that “whereas others fought, he totted up figures” and La Trobe’s pageant is surrounded by marching trees, enacted by “an army of flashing imps” and received by “a whole battery of applause” (124, 83, 162). So too is idle talk slightly more overt: “Things look worse than ever on the continent. And what’s the Channel, come to think of it, if they mean to invade us?” (168). The multiple meanings of the word heighten its thematic significance within the novel: “cess” refers to cessation, interruption, and assess – as in militaristic levies on populations. I have written extensively about this subject in “Woolf’s Cesspoolage,” a paper currently under review for publication. Although he “knew that he did not remember was he” – “was he” being his past self – Harper proves quite capable of memory (148). His memories are shadowy and ominous: he recalls a fondness for smearing potatoes over his arms and face, whispering into a drain to an undefined someone at thirteen, a predilection for cross-dressing, carrying a knife, being stoned by other boys when eight, and harnessing other children as horses at sixteen (21, 85, 76, 223, 93, 108, 189). This deferral is restated at the outset of 1941 when “Angel Harper was fifty-one and there was no longing no longing for anything” (166). References to widespread anxiety are recurrent. Examples include “Everybody around began to say oh dear” (143) and “a great many people who had never thought anything about hay or about anything growing now that Angel Harper was fifty-one began to find it all very interesting” because “after all you have to eat” (163). For examples see 20, 57, 120, 130, 218, 236. Getting along also defines their wartime existence: Mr. Reynolds assures his wife that come what may, “we will do what we always do” (149). Their wartime sufferings are predicated on the loss of luxury items such as high heels, gloves, sugar, automobiles, and stockings (255, 198, 180, 168). Markedly unlike the Reynoldses, Harper “never never went to bed” (221). Both Harper and Lane regularly experience insomnia, which offers, as per Levinas (see Chapter 2), a sensation of being objectified by the presence of being (165–6, 215, 221). In Levinas’s terms, being unable to sleep prevents Harper from awakening himself to the world, from taking a position in relation to being, or embracing a future demarcated by otherness. Stein’s Brewsie and Willie, a drama about American G.I.s in the Second World War, is also about expectation and waiting, albeit from the perspective of life on the front. The two central characters are generally depicted when on leave, and there is much discussion of their post-war expectations, as well as many references to waiting on girls and women. Stein explores the American tendency to hurry through progress; as such, Brewsie advocates at one juncture that Willie spend more time thinking and less time

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doing; at stake is an advocacy of patience as opposed to American “hustle,” one that annoys Willie, who claims he has “nothing to do but wait” (62). Very reminiscent of Mrs. Reynolds, the drama also makes references to beds, and to deathbeds in particular. One character points out during an extended, meandering conversation about beds and their pleasures, “When you wish you were dead you always wish for a bed,” prompting sighs from his fellow soldiers (8). 13. There are other significant transitions from Harper’s memory to Mrs. Reynolds’ stream of thought: “By the time he was fourteen he felt better about having been thirteen . . . It was all so far away, indeed it had never been, she had never not ever seen Angel Harper but she did oh yes she did and how she did oh yes she knew his name not when he was fourteen but when he was forty” (77). And again: “Once in a while Angel Harper ate. He never remembered that once upon a time he had been eight. Leave out what it is all about. That is what Mrs. Reynolds said in her sleep. But she was not asleep. She sighed but she was not asleep” (76). 14. Angel Harper never sat but plans to sit when the war is over; his standing connotes preparedness (83, 104, 215). So too does Mrs. Reynolds’s standing: she is always ready to stand, and meditates and prophesies while standing (28, 43). She has a real aversion to sitting and only does so when weary with resignation (for examples of aversion see 52, 114, 151, 184, 238; for weariness 202, 204). 15. Mrs. Reynolds discusses the proximate birth-dates (199); Harper and the Reynoldses both enunciate a decision to stay in France (216, 155). Harper contemplates the likelihood of his Jewish history; shortly thereafter Mrs. Reynolds is told that Jews make good prophets. The underlying assumption here – Mrs. Reynolds takes it personally – is that she is a good prophet because Jewish (221, 251). Regarding Harper and thanks, see 71; on the Reynoldses and thanklessness, see 80.

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Conclusion: Endlessnessnessness

Heidegger’s “Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking” advocates a willing renunciation of the human will, a theoretical stance remarkably akin to Levinasian patience, or anticipation without aiming. The essay was translated into English in 1966, the same year that saw the publication of an interview with Heidegger in the German journal Der Spiegel, a piece infamous among scholars for Heidegger’s occasionally evasive and consistently unapologetic responses about the extent of his Nazi affiliations (Sheehan, “Only a God Can Save Us”). But the interview indicates as much about the post-war intellectual climate as it does about the political as a great deal of the discussion at hand is given over to Heidegger’s reconceptualization of philosophy. While “Conversation on a Country Path” tacitly denounces the subjective angst crucial to Heidegger’s early formulations of Da-sein, in the Der Spiegel interview Heidegger extends that repudiation to philosophy itself, stating, with no small hint of despair: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavour. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god in [our] decline. (58)

Heidegger’s apocalyptic sentiments are rooted in his belief that technology has become an alienating, monstrous force signaling a need for collective patience. Just as Woolf’s and Stein’s last novels portray domestic settings where individuals are held in thrall to political forces beyond their control so too does Heidegger, nearly twenty years later, feel defined by the unknowable other that is technological development. Like Woolf and Stein, Heidegger recognizes that this “being held” entails an uncircumscribed period of anticipation, but quite unlike them, he suggests it involves a “mak[ing] ready for this readiness of holding oneself open for the arrival, or the absence, of a god” (58).

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Heidegger’s spiritual turn is perhaps not surprising given that philosophy has long recognized its tacit associations with religion: as Heidegger argues, even philosophers like Nietzsche who openly reject God and metaphysics invariably engage in what they reject. But Heidegger’s language in the Der Spiegel interview is particularly compelling because he both espouses and effaces the possibility of the ultimate first principle: a deity. He suggests that humanity must await the arrival or the absence of a god, situations equally portentous, and although diametrically opposed, equally viable. Heidegger’s language, in fact, is deeply reminiscent of a writer coming very much into prominence in the same period, namely Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s writing is filled with affirmations instantaneously countered by denials, a trope extended to the sacred, the metaphysical, and vagaries of plot. Almost too obviously, one of Beckett’s best-known plays makes good humor out of the scenario Heidegger envisions with dismay: the anticipation of a deific figure, an anticipation just as significant when the arrival never comes to pass. In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon are paralyzed by what their acquaintance Pozzo describes as “an appointment with a Godin . . . Godet . . . Godot.” Godot exhibits stereotypical deific characteristics, being white-bearded, forgiving, a receiver of “kind[s] of prayer,” and nowhere to be seen, even as he permeates each moment of a play named in honor of his absence (Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works 35–6, 19). Waiting without end or discernible means restrains Vladimir and Estragon, stifling all other activity, and all other desires, to the point that the exchange – “Let’s go. We can’t. Why not? We’re waiting for Godot” – forms a refrain throughout Beckett’s play. Waiting for Godot was written between 1948 and 1949 and bears similarities to Between the Acts and Mrs Reynolds. As in Woolf’s and Stein’s respective anticipations of war, Beckett associates waiting with violence, a violence that is both entrenched in power imbalances between characters and a response to frazzled nerves and frustrated desires, resulting in comic eruptions of angry words, as well as schoolyard-style fistfights. The combined urgency and futility of waiting permeates Beckett’s play in the same way as it does Woolf’s and Stein’s final novels: anxious, listless emotion is palpable, while striving for an ever-deferred endpoint is the drama’s very crux. And, as in the literature of so many high modernist writers, Waiting for Godot proves keenly attuned to philosophical thought, and particularly to the ways in which the infinite has been posited, rationalized, and embraced in the past. This intellectual awareness permeates all of Beckett’s work, so that we constantly observe his effortless mockery of the tenets of Western philosophy. Beckett’s toying is both diminution and valorization, akin to

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Heidegger’s suggestion that post-war society is defined by philosophical absence, a definition by negation that persists in centralizing philosophy. With emphasis on his fiction, and particularly his short piece “Lessness,” what follows will discuss how philosophy and everyday desire are integral to Beckett’s writing. Beckett draws on and inverts the steady affirmation of prosaic longings initiated by authors such as Woolf, Joyce, and Stein. While tacitly acknowledging the entrenched examination of minute, banal desirous states like boredom and risibility that have gone before, Beckett proves equally interested in negating their significance. Rather than treating desire as a forward-looking, abundant passion, Beckett distils it and focuses on its past manifestations. Nearparadoxically, Beckett’s reductiveness proves a bountiful, endless source of creative reflection as deeply dependent upon longing and otherness as that of the modernists that precede him; as such, his work extends the scope of prosaic desires artistically, theoretically, and historically into the latter half of the twentieth century. It is regularly argued that Beckett is like Schopenhauer in advocating a suppression of the will by the intellect as much as is humanly possible, even as he portrays intellect and emotion as inextricable.1 This theory goes some way toward explaining Beckett’s repeatedly negated desires, which thus appear merely longings under weak intellectual control. Continuity, and especially “the dogged human will to keep on” persist as guiding organizational principles in Beckett’s writing, constantly disrupting his otherwise rational, chronological, and systematic presentations of information (Kenner, Samuel Beckett 183). But Beckett’s desire is not solely a relentless willing. The everyday longings discussed throughout Prosaic Desires arise repeatedly in his work, which is filled with anticipation, as well as yearnings to know, escape boredom, and laugh. And, as in Woolf, Joyce, and Stein, these desires are often affirmed and extended via otherness. For instance, while Beckett regularly acknowledges the inevitability of uncertainty, in Texts for Nothing, a speaker wonders “what has become of the wish to know” and pronounces it gone, having entered a void, so that “no one feels anything, asks anything, seeks anything, says anything, hears anything, there is only silence . . . there is no one and there is someone” (No’s Knife 135). Here the negation of a desire for knowledge culminates in a profound absence; this absence is then mitigated by an inevitable presence that affirms the existence of all that can never be fully discerned. In Beckett, the will-to-unknow is less angst-ridden than it is for Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus; instead, the breadth of uncertainty is assumed, and is treated with veneration time and again. Boredom, too, is a primary Beckettian concern. While his early

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protagonists frequently long for a life of indolence, in Malone Dies (1951), ennui is resolved by the recounting of narrative (The Trilogy). Malone describes authorial play as tedious, but nevertheless plays on. In delineating characters and presuming an audience, Malone acknowledges that otherness eases prospective boredom, as do Woolf’s narrators. And Stein’s transition from solitary to shared risibility also surfaces in Beckett’s writing, so that his early protagonist in More Pricks than Kicks (1934) strives for self-affirmation by “laugh[ing] himself out of . . . weakness” (159). In Watt (1945), Beckett’s narrator reduces laughter to three types, “the bitter, the hollow, and the mirthless” (Grove Centenary Edition 206), but this pessimistic evaluation is later countered by the affirming, endless laughter of works like Company (1980), where we find the following recollection of father and son: When he chuckled you tried to chuckle too. When his chuckle died yours too. That you should try to imitate his chuckle pleased and tickled him greatly and sometimes he would chuckle for no other reason than to hear you try to chuckle too. (Nohow On 28)

Beckett’s risibility thus moves from a triumphant Nietzschean laughter to a mirth that emulates Levinas’s fecundity, becoming an infinitely productive longing exemplified by the parent–child relation. And his depiction of anticipation follows a similar pattern: Watt concludes with the protagonist’s death in a waiting room, a demise implying that waiting is a state best left unresolved, a supposition reasserted in How it Is (1961), where the speaker anticipates bodily pain with pleasure, as “with it [he] may last a little more” (36). This same speaker describes a paradise in which “no one ever abandons anyone and no one ever waits for anyone,” thereby indicating that all waiting is attendance on otherness, even as purely autonomous being is as impossible as any utopia (143). Beckett’s high modernist forebears grappled with ideas with which he proves very much at ease. I am suggesting here that Beckett, like Woolf, Joyce, and Stein before him, centralizes everyday longings that when gradually and increasingly extended to otherness become a source of the infinite in his work. But this is only part of what I want to assert; it is also a contention that runs counter to a great deal of Beckett criticism. Scholars often argue that as his work proceeds, Beckett eventually effaces the external world, focusing instead on the introspective machinations of an individual mind; they trace out a trajectory from otherness to subjectivity explicitly counter to my own. So prevalent is this argument that it is assumed that characters who exhibit similar qualities or behaviors in his writing – most obviously, Moran and Molloy in Molloy – are different facets of

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the same person, or new phases of self-discovery; this argument is often extended to the voices permeating the consciousness of speakers in later works like How It Is.2 In part, emphasis on Beckett’s subjects arises from his early interest in Descartes – the subject of his first published poem, Whoroscope – so that critics seek evidence of his engagement with cogito ergo sum.3 And Beckett does devote a great deal of energy to considerations of the individual, albeit largely with a view to mocking the possibility of gaining any authoritative purchase on selfhood. Just so does the speaker of The Expelled (1945–6) describe how his “soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself” – the continuous pain underscores the significance of self-delineation, while the qualifying “mere” neatly undermines the project (First Love and Other Novellas 34). In Beckett, even a multiplicitous view of the self does not sustain, as in Mercier and Camier (1946), when Mercier says, “There are days . . . one is born every minute. Then the world is full of shitty little Merciers. It’s hell” (404). While often similarly undermined by his narrators, otherness is nevertheless a crucial component of Beckett’s writing, as some critics have discerned. Steven Connor considers the repetition of character and event in Beckett a valorization of absolute difference, in that repetition always denies the possibility of essential unity, being by nature multiple and so concerned with relationality (Samuel Beckett). And Hugh Kenner argues that the external, unidentified voices permeating Beckett’s fiction demand to be read as the sound of those who lie beyond the subjective domain; intimations of the inevitable struggle to communicate. Kenner contends that every Beckett plot “is simply an encounter between persons: hence the journeyings, the waitings, the confrontations.” Although each plot concludes with impasse or infinite series, meaning resolution is denied, confrontation with the other is nevertheless inevitable and incessant (187–9). As early as Murphy (1938), Beckett imbues this confrontation with longing, so that Murphy is “actually being needed by five people outside himself,” including Neary, whose name is an anagram of yearn, and who longs for Murphy “as thought he had never yearned for anything or anyone before” (120). Similarly, Molloy watches a stranger in the distance whom he desires to know but can scarcely see: “in spite of my soul’s leap out to him, at the end of its elastic, I saw him only darkly” (11). The struggle to see the other recurs in Beckett’s work; like Levinas, Beckett relies heavily on the power of the face-to-face encounter, even as he denies the comprehension visual exchange might elicit. This denial surfaces perhaps nowhere more obviously than in Watt, wherein Sam and Watt develop a habit of walking face to face in the hopes of clarifying the oceans of misunderstanding

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between them; in spite of their sustained efforts, Sam continues to find Watt’s garbled language “devoid of significance” (302). Their arduous position is nevertheless sustained, as is Beckett’s portrayal of the shared gaze, which is distinctly Levinasian in signifying a longing to know and understand an ever-elusive other.4 Beckett’s appreciation of the longing generated by unknowability is tied to his keen awareness of the limitations of philosophical tradition. Critics repeatedly note that Beckett is very much in league with postmodern theory in addressing philosophical truths while assailing their possibility, thereby effecting a “pure affirmation without assertion” in which nothing can be redeemed or resolved but all continues regardless (Hill, Beckett’s Fiction 162).5 Beckett’s ability to affirm denial and deny affirmation relies upon the continuity of longing, a paradox best articulated by Mercier: “Were I not without desires . . . I would buy me one of those hats, to put on my head” (470). A proclamation of desirelessness is undone by the express wish for a particular sort of hat; Mercier reminds us that we cannot exist without longing. In an early monograph on Proust, Beckett champions Schopenhauer’s view of the will as an all-determining oscillation between boredom and suffering, as well as Proust’s ability to comically “interrupt (disfigure) the luminous projection of subject desire” (Proust 28). But like the thinkers he admires, Beckett reconfigures traditional conceptualizations of longing. Desire is generally considered a forward-looking, anticipatory emotion, but Beckett’s interest lies in the way it has manifested itself in the past; he argues that “wisdom consists not in the satisfaction but the ablation of desire” (18). Ablation involves the carrying away or gradual removal of something superficial – matter such as sand, salt, glacial water – or symptomatic, like the measurable aspects of disease. Ablation lacks an endpoint: the removal in question may clarify or purify an area such as a geographical locale or the human body but results in an inevitable accretion elsewhere, if only of waste material or dead matter. In Beckett’s narratives, desires surface as pared-down, economical versions of these past accumulations; while Proust is also concerned with the past, his renderings of memory and desire are by contrast abundant, lush excursions. In a manner consistent with the inextricability of time and desire central to modernist literature and philosophy, Beckett’s distillation of longing is entirely akin to his approach to mortality. For Beckett, if anything definitive can be stated about subjective temporality, it can only be apprehended as a retrospective hypothesis. The individual is the seat of a constant decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the phenomena of its hours. Generally

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speaking, the former is innocuous, amorphous, without character . . . Lazily considered in anticipation and in the haze of our smug will to live, of our pernicious and incurable optimism, it seems exempt from the bitterness of fatality: in store for us, not in store in us. (Proust 15)

Agitated and multicolored: interest lies in the accreted phenomena of the past. Just so does past desire structure Beckett’s narrative as much, if not more, than movement into the future. A discussion of futurity at the end of The Unnamable highlights Beckett’s emphasis on past desirousness. In the midst of an increasing frenzy of speculation the protagonist determines to ask questions rather than seek answers; when questions fail, there are always plans; when plans fail, there are always aspirations. While aspirations are usually affirming, here the unnamable experiences no anticipatory pleasure: there are always aspirations, it’s a knack, you must say it slowly, If only this, if only that, that gives you time, time for a cud of longing to rise up in the back of your gullet, nothing remains to look as if you enjoyed chewing it, there’s no knowing where that may lead you, on tracks as beaten as the day is long, often you pass yourself by, someone passes himself by, if only you knew, that’s right, aspirations, you turn and look behind you . . .

Ablated desire in this instance involves regurgitation, a cud of longing accreted in the mouth, defining the present. The eternal return of past desires only partially digested clearly nauseates, even as it forces aspiration to become retrogressive, a looking backward. Desire would offer no consolation whatsoever, were it not for the conclusion of this strand of thought: “you turn and look behind you, so does the other, you weep for him, he weeps for you.” This shared sadness is itself undermined – “what difference does it make, others present, others absent, they are not obliged to make themselves manifest” – and yet the speaker cannot prevent himself from returning to the “opinions, comparisons” of others, all of which, he concedes, “can’t help helping, to get you over the pretty pass” (405). This “pretty pass” has many referents in Beckett, who often uses terms like hyphen, hymen, interval, and tympanum to intimate the unbridgeable spaces between self and world.6 But here, others assist the unnamable over the pass, and this otherness is not encountered through forward-reaching yearning but through backward glances and ablated desires. In Chapter 4, I discussed how Levinas’s “infinition” involves anticipation of the novelty of every instant; while each moment inevitably contains the past, Levinas asserts that it can be born anew, and that within this newness lies the possibility of redemption, or the very promise of the future. Although sharing Levinas’s focus on the endless longing to

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comprehend the other – a longing that indubitably facilitates his portrayal of the continuities of mortal time – Beckett’s eternality eschews this sort of redemption. Beckett negates as much as he affirms, and in the same spirit, counters futurity with a very present, palpable past. This past is evident both in his reliance on the history of philosophical thought and in the way that previous experience shapes his fictions: like the unnamable, many of Beckett’s characters walk “tracks as beaten as the day is long,” passing themselves by as they travel. In other words, Beckett takes past diminishments and accretions and uses them as a source of renewal, a renewal that does not necessarily forget or forgive but innovatively and continuously affirms what has gone before. In so doing, Beckett extends the reader’s sense of the infinite endlessly into the future and through what has already occurred; in this sense, Beckett expands Levinasian infinition backwards as well as forwards. Beckett’s later work, “Lessness,” illustrates this process still further. “Lessness” is often read as a post-apocalyptic narrative. It begins with allusions to ruins, refuge, and a surviving male being; the prevalence of the past and its rubble seems likely to shape his future.7 First written in 1969, “Lessness” was originally entitled “Sans,” or “without”; while both titles suggest a proliferation of paucity, “without” is overtly opposed to within, indicating that “Lessness” is meant to address extensive lack and exteriority. This exteriority is crucial to the structure of the piece: while it has been argued that Beckett’s later works present embryonic existences or fragments of a single self, “Lessness” portrays a man whose relationship to the world around him is intensely documented by a watching narrator. Thus the protagonist, sketched out exclusively as a countenance and its body – “Grey face two pale blue little body heart beating only upright” – comes into contact with another, his “Little body ash grey locked rigid heart beating face to endlessness” (Beckett, Six Residua 47). Intimated here is Beckett’s motif of the face-to-face exchange, replete with infinite longing. This visual exchange recurs, and appears emotive rather than rational: whiteness is associated with the “light of reason” throughout, a whiteness “all gone from mind” in the event of the exchanged gaze, where indeterminate longing takes precedence over known certainties. White is also the colour of the four “blank planes” of the mind, or the box in which the brain or self is contained – these too are “all gone.” In “Lessness,” the distance between the figurative self and narrative other is further collapsed by frequent mention of touch, a touch calmly given and received, resembling, in its shared succor, a caress: “Face to white calm touch close eye calm long last” (48). In Levinas, the caress is an important facet of fecundity, a gesture of anticipation that refuses to grasp or take hold of others, but

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conveys the possibility of love and tenderness. The descriptions of touch in “Lessness” are imbued with just such a future-oriented longing, all directed towards an otherness so deliberately abstracted as to be inevitably, excruciatingly unknowable. “Lessness” reads as a fictionalized account of the Levinasian face-to-face epiphany and the consolations of contact it intimates. “Lessness” is composed of sixty sentences repeated once in a different order, making a total of 120; each set is divided into what Beckett described as “statement groups” of ten sentences apiece. Beckett considered each statement group “formally differentiated” into categories including: “collapse of refuge,” “outer world,” “body exposed,” “refuge forgotten,” “past and future denied,” and “past and future affirmed” (Esslin, “Samuel Beckett” 118). While the categories “outer world” and “body exposed” augment our understanding that self–other relations are a presiding theme, Beckett’s simultaneous denial and affirmation of temporality has led to radically opposed interpretations of the work, which has alternately been seen as a narrative of renewal or desolation. In “Samuel Beckett – Infinity, Eternity,” Martin Esslin propounds the latter view, arguing that “Lessness” interprets Nietzsche’s eternal return as a theory in which finite universal matter exists within an infinite amount of time, so that “the same combinations and permutations of the same elements must endlessly recur” (114). Hence “Lessness” portrays a beginning again out of ruins, a process echoed by Beckett’s recycling of the same linguistic material throughout the piece. But Esslin believes “Lessness” also depicts entropy, a concept lifted from thermodynamics, and involving a gradual running down of the universe, which, however, because absolute zero can never be reached, must also go on, diminuendo, forever . . . On the scale of subatomic particles . . . such a run-down universe would collapse into itself and produce a new big bang, thus starting the whole process of permutations anew. (114)

Entropy, then, pictures infinity like a mise-en-abyme whereby what is visible and available to us is continually reduced, if ever-present, much like the imagery of “Lessness.” But Esslin bypasses the renewal inherent to eternal return or entropy for a focus on their respective diminishments. And while he ascribes entropy specifically to the temporality of “Lessness,” it might also apply to Beckett’s invocations of desire more generally: as in Beckett’s ablation, we witness in entropy a gradual diminishment that insists upon continually asserting itself anew, like the cud of past longing arising in the aspirant unnamable’s gorge. Esslin’s emphasis on the plight of the figure in “Lessness” is credible

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enough: Beckett’s protagonist has a grey face and body, and his surroundings are also grey: the ruins, the sand beneath the ruins, the sky, even the air. Blandness surrounds this being, and an oppressive stasis: “No sound no stir . . . Never but this changelessness” (47). The history the ruins symbolize appears better, even blessed: in the past there was a god to curse and a blue sky, where now there is only blankness and flatness; no refuge, only rubble. But in the midst of scattered ash, longing asserts itself, both in repeated mentions of vanished “dreams of other nights better days” and via memories of others. For while the central figure of “Lessness” is “all alone in the sand,” he knows “he will make it” – belief in possibility is shored up by his recollection of others’ aspirations. Specific aspirations are less important than the desire they generate, the movement towards some goal; “towards which so many” is a recurrent phrase. The male figure also hears cries and wild laughter, conceptions echoed by “a wild imagining the blue celeste of poesy” (51). Communicative sounds and words betoken rebirth in the midst of so much ruin, all encouraging the protagonist out of his stasis: “no hold one step in the endlessness he will make it. It will be day and night again over him the endlessness the air heart will beat again” (49). He will make it even if the past is a diminishment, a return to “Old love new love . . . the blessed days” when “unhappiness . . . reign[ed]” (51). Lessened longing is better than no longing at all. Were “Lessness” just about the contemplations of a solitary postapocalyptic being, the piece would lose its vibrancy, or what one critic describes as its “regenerative conflict” (Cohn, A Beckett Canon 307). Part of the conflict of “Lessness” lies with the diminishment of the self: the upright figure whose “features crack” and who, at the end, is a “little block overrun arse a single block grey crack overrun” (51). But the features of the male figure’s face are also “overrun”: “upright grey face features overrun two pale blue.” Within the shared gaze, a gaze indicated by the “two pale blue,” exists a surfeit, an overflow, as well as an acquiescence or defeat – in this, Beckett’s infinite longing, however diminuendo, asserts itself again and again. In his original notes, Beckett suggests that the denial of past and future throughout “Lessness” is commensurate with its affirmation, with the exception of one statement which occurs midway, and is repeated at the end: “Figment dawn dispeller of figments and the other called dusk” (51). Because of this exceptional, precisely placed sentence, the negation of past and future in “Lessness” is overwhelmed by affirmation. The driving of fragments in this sentence is a partial beginning, a “figment dawn” involving a radically opposed other, one associated with a dusky liminality not nearly as final or absolute as night – another of Beckett’s hyphens. And like

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the figment dawn, the narrator is a dispeller, scattering orts through “Lessness” under the supposition that an audience will strive to understand and experience Beckett’s entropies: his decanted time, his ablated desire, his extension of the infinite into abundance, diminishment, futurity, and pastness, his conversion of lessness into endlessness. For Emmanuel Levinas, desire comes into being through the facial expression of the other and can provide a lived experience of the infinite, or as Bloom thinks to himself while listening to music in Ulysses, “the endlessnessnessness . . . ” (355). Throughout Prosaic Desires, I have suggested that within modernist literature, longing for the other surfaces in ways often far less monumental than Levinas’s ethical, epiphanic, transcendent face-to-face exchange. Two conclusions can be deduced from my argument: on one hand, consideration of less portentous longings within Levinas’s framework might drastically reduce the scope and meaning of his desire. On the other, the modernist rendering of a very wide variety of longings may well extend Levinasian desire, generating a broader and more varied approach. Both of these conclusions are viable. For while the strictly ethical nature of Levinas’s longing is not always present in modernist fiction, the emphasis he places on desire directed beyond the self indubitably emerges in this period: in the literature considered here, as in Levinas’s philosophy, the subject is fundamentally a desiring subject, ultimately defined by otherness. But the term that perhaps best defines this overarching desirousness was mentioned in my introduction: thumos, or Plato’s motivation of the soul, is an originary desire distinct from sexuality or power that defines and divides the self. From this foundational desirousness arise multiple everyday longings, such as the pursuit of knowledge and anticipation, all of which affirm the pervasiveness of desire and the fragile, dependent nature of subjectivity. In their examination of quotidian longings, Woolf, Joyce, and Stein suggest that while desire always makes the subject other to itself, desire that is confined to the individual merely underscores the loneliness of subjectivity, or what Levinas will later call the horror of separation. Experienced alone, certainty, ennui, laughter, and anticipation are inconsequential, unbearable, dead-ended. Experienced alone, desire is short-lived and reminiscent of mortality. By contrast, shared longings infinitely regenerate. In Time and Western Man, Wyndham Lewis disparages his modernist peers for their “gothic yearning for the infinite, the vague, that which has no outline and is innocent of either sense of locality or of any concrete value at all” (382). This yearning emerges in numerous ways in the literature of this period, particularly via a marked tendency

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to return to the same subjects, incidents, and phrases. We see this tendency in Hardy’s repetition of setting, Woolf’s redescriptions of character, Joyce’s insistently open-ended rendering of event, Stein’s endless slight variations of clause and phrase, and in Beckett’s recurrent motifs of journeying and ceaseless striving. The persistence of these authors underscores a longing to grasp the infinite unknowability of otherness, a longing that demands an eternal return to what Nietzsche called the same, but which inevitably proves different. But their persistence is also a veneration of incompletion that denies finality, and it is intertwined with attitudes towards mortality.8 The modernist interest in the infinite signals a deliberate shunning of death, a process imbued with fear. From a historical perspective, a heightened fear of death in the first half of the twentieth century is perfectly understandable, even prophetic, given that the privations of the Great Depression fed into approximately 70,000,000 fatalities in the Second World War. Coupled with this lived experience of death on a global scale is an intellectual death: the end of the philosophical pursuit of a fully autonomous subject. While the “death of the subject” is a phrase entrenched in postmodern theory, it was modernists who witnessed the finale. The death of the subject was a slow process: the demise of unfettered subjectivity can be traced through the philosophers of the post-Kantian tradition. In constructing philosophies that undermine individual autonomy, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Levinas counter the specter of mortality with infinite, everyday desire. Insisting that death inspires philosophical thought, Schopenhauer devotes his life to considerations of the many and varied manifestations of the endless human will. Schopenhauer claims, as does Nietzsche, that the metaphysical realm is a construct meant to lessen the terror of mortality. Religion has also played this role, but for Nietzsche, religion has become more confining than liberating. Nietzsche’s philosophy is focused upon the limitations of traditional modes of thought, and the Enlightenment espousal of the rational, independent subject is a favored target. Nietzsche refuses certainties of knowledge or identity, developing instead an emphatically anti-teleological approach and articulating a desire so powerful and eternal that it enables mere mortals to transcend their former selves. In direct response to Nietzsche’s aversion to any sort of certain end, Heidegger generates an entire theory of being rooted in an uninhibited embrace of finitude. For Heidegger, death cannot be ignored, and continual awareness of its looming finality authenticates our every striving. The philosophical interest in death is dramatically intensified by global warfare. The atrocities of the Second World War are fundamental

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to Levinas’s work; in his preface to Totality and Infinity he equates war with totalizing systems of thought: “The visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy” (21). Both war and philosophy have relentlessly pursued an end, an ultimate meaning to which all else is sacrificed. Like his predecessors, Levinas opposes teleological certitudes with our lived experience of infinite desire, but Levinas’s desire exists in relation to another human being. For Levinas, the tragedy of existence is not so much its end as the fact that we are forced to exist so emphatically alone, so entirely separate from those around us. Levinas refuses to posit the self, striving towards its own completion, as the defining unit of existence. Instead, he argues that otherness defines the individual, even in death. For Levinas, we are afraid of death because it signifies a complete giving over to something beyond our control: “My death comes from an instant upon which I can in no way exercise my power” (TI 234). In striving to be authoritative over and about ourselves, we perceive death as a moment in which we are most vulnerably defined by otherness; in suggesting as much, Levinas counters Heidegger’s presentation of dying as the ultimate solitary experience. But Levinas’s argument is also part of a longer historical and intellectual trajectory that includes Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; Levinas describes the mortal subject as consumed by longing, be it via the will, the will to power, passionate angst, or – in Levinas’s most radical termination of self-importance – endless desire for the other. As in philosophy, so too in literature: in modernist writing, fear of finitude is one catalyst for the turn to daily, infinite forms of longing. The final section of Woolf’s elegiac To the Lighthouse is punctuated by Mr. Ramsay’s refrain, drawn from William Cowper’s “The Castaway” (1799): “We perish’d, each alone.” Cowper’s poem describes a sailor tossed overboard in an ocean storm, and is written from the viewpoint of fellow sailors who know that the castaway is strong enough to survive for some time and will be horrifically aware that friends are near but unable to assist. Adrift on a sea of grief after the death of his wife, Ramsay clearly finds the poem cathartic; his reiteration of the final stanza prompts the following observation from Lily Briscoe: “like everything else this strange morning the words became symbols, wrote themselves all over the grey-green walls. If only she could put them together . . . then she would have got at the truth of things” (199). Lily’s desire for truth in art echoes antiquated philosophical pursuits, and Woolf clearly wants us to understand as much, because Ramsay’s children are far less idealistic about their father’s ranting. Cam and James feel they will shriek if he recites the poem one more time on the way to

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the lighthouse, and, although reluctantly admiring his eccentric habit of quoting aloud, Cam sees it as yet another means by which her father demands too much attention and sympathy. Ramsay’s recitation of the last lines of “The Castaway” particularly sparks Cam’s outrage: “But I beneath a rougher sea / Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he” (TTL 225). These lines direct the reader’s attention away from a drowning man to the speaker who is both heroized and consumed by selfhood: like the narrator of Cowper’s poem, Ramsay wants his family to understand that it is his plight that is the most severe. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf posits Ramsay’s self-absorption as a kind of living death worse than dying itself. Foreshadowing Levinas, Woolf is keenly aware that the most awful part of life is not perishing alone, but living alone. The moment of death Woolf famously consigns to parentheses in a parenthetical portion of her novel – the much-discussed second section, “Time Passes.” Actual family deaths generate only some of the grief in this book; as Lily explains, the more pervasive tragedy is not Mrs. Ramsay’s demise, “not palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spirits subdued.” And at the heart of this problem – again, as observed by Lily – is the fact that without Mrs. Ramsay, the family home is “a house full of unrelated passions” (201). Mr. Ramsay cannot grasp the disjunctive quality of everyday desire – can neither acquiesce to others, nor long for the banal – because he is caught up in an unrequited, self-affirming ambition. As such, his “interest in ordinary human things” is intermittent and evanescent (211). By contrast, Mrs. Ramsay lived in a world of small pleasures and minute desires, replete with a “rhapsod[ic] . . . self-surrender” (203). Mrs Ramsay yearned for ignorance, was glad, Lily thought . . . to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy? This is knowledge? Aren’t things spoilt then, Mrs Ramsay may have asked. (232)

Lily projects upon Mrs. Ramsay a will to unknow very unlike her own approach toward the everyday: “One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy” (272). Here Lily strives to grasp all through art in a manner akin to Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. But in considering and rejecting these sorts of extreme positions, To the Lighthouse charts a voyage away from finality and mortality, toward the infinite considerations of quotidian, other-directed longing. Like Woolf, Joyce and Stein were propelled by a fear of finitude

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towards an exploration of everyday endlessness. In a letter to his brother written in 1906, Joyce asserts, “I am troubled every night by horrible and terrifying dreams: death, corpses, assassinations in which I take an unpleasantly prominent part”; that same year, he told a reluctant publisher: “It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories” (Selected 90, 96). The final story of Dubliners – the collection to which Joyce refers – offers an exemplary account of leaving an autonomous self behind, and the mourning just such a process engenders. Proclaiming “The Dead” as a lynchpin in Joyce’s oeuvre, Richard Ellmann suggests that in yielding to a fuller knowledge of his wife’s past and present desires, protagonist Gabriel Conroy “no longer possesses himself, and not to possess oneself is in a way a kind of death” (Joyce 249). Self-abandonment facilitates a giving way to the other. “How I hate God and death! How I like Nora!” wrote Joyce to the woman who was to become his lifelong partner (Selected 27). Within this cheery elevation of Nora Barnacle lies Joyce’s understanding that longed-for otherness mitigates fears of finality, and is a source of eternality more sustaining than any metaphysical or religious beyond. Not coincidentally, Joyce’s most arrogant, self-serving protagonist is also most afraid of death: in Stephen Hero, Stephen insists: “No young man can contemplate the fact of death with extreme satisfaction” (168). Stephen’s lofty language evades the mundane earthiness of death, a viscerality to which Bloom is far more readily attuned – at Paddy Dignam’s funeral, Bloom’s thoughts dwell on the gas that corpses produce, and the “lungs, hearts, livers” that must be lying round the cemetery (133). While Stephen mourns self-righteously for his lost family members, in Bloom’s presence mortality becomes less tragic than comic, as the near-riotous journey on the way to his friend’s burial attests. Come Ulysses, Stephen’s horror of mortality turns into easy, shared laughter about death. Stein’s narrative risibility is also motivated by her thoughts on dying. In The Geographical History of America she writes anxiously, “I feel that it is a failure not to live longer” and “the one that is dead has no time” (71, 213). In this book, Stein is both afraid and dismissive of mortality, writing that it “does not make any difference . . . no matter if everybody is dead there are always all the same just the same all the same” (118). The death of the self is frightening; it is also irrelevant. But as Stein explains, confronting her fear of mortality contributed to the creation of her literary style: So little by little which is not enough I found that enough is not enough and not enough should be treated roughly. So finally I became attached to one word at a time even if there were always one after the other. (195)

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In one sense, this statement concedes to the continuities of succession: each word, like each moment, must follow another. But more importantly, it affirms Stein’s development of the continuous present, a written form that enables her to take control of unstoppable temporal flow. This mastery allowed her to “[find] a comfortable means by which to avoid [the] thoughts of death” which one critic suggests underpin all of her work (Goebel, “‘If Nobody Had to Die’” 241). As discussed in Chapter 3, Stein’s ability to disrupt and affirm continuity heightens the risible qualities of her writing for the reader, which is perhaps why she often speaks comically about the future, as in “Not to the future but to the fuchsia” (Lectures 193). Shared humor liberates Stein from mortal constraints. The final sentences of Stein’s Two read: “She was ready and not coming. He could not go. They did not stay away” (142). Nearly forty years later, simultaneous denial and assertion of the self in relation defines Beckett’s work. In his trilogy, Molloy ends with the protagonist writing proclamations about the weather and time which are immediately contradicted, while the final lines of The Unnamable famously read “you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (418). Irresolution affirms continuity, as does otherness. It has been argued that a shared awareness of mortality defines Beckett’s work from the outset; as such, Beckett bypasses an individual fear of death (Ricks, Beckett’s Own Dying Words). But similarly integral to Beckett’s writing is his tacit suggestion that we are all, at least partly, already dead – many of his characters describe themselves as no longer living.9 Levinas claims that otherness defines even individual death, and Beckett’s self-conscious renderings of death in life similarly extend the temporal horizon to the breaking point: while engaging continually in the pastness of desire and time Beckett also pitches his narratives into the most unattainable of futures: the afterlife. In so doing, Beckett affirms the banality of the dead subject and insists that the infinite realm is very much part of an utterly quotidian here and now. Beckett attributes to his dead figures everyday desires such as boredom – eternity the unnamable describes as “monotonous beyond words” (352) – and anticipation, as when a graveyard is considered a place where “the dead lie waiting” (Texts for Nothing 116). For Beckett, even in the complete diminishment of death, there is always more: more activity, language, communication, more self and otherness, more time, more longing. As a speaker in Texts for Nothing affirms, “nothing like breathing your last to put new life into you” (74). A combined anxiety about and interest in death, then, is one rationale for exploring the insubstantiality of the self, and for affirming the

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endlessness of shared daily longing. But as discussed in Prosaic Desires, extreme individual longings have also had a part to play. In Hardy’s later work, self-affirming pursuits solely ambitious or passionate result in disintegrated subjects. Desires explicitly powerful and sexual do not sustain, and nor does a single-minded drive for knowledge. Like Schopenhauer, Woolf’s Rachel Vinrace and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus endeavor to access a transcendent realm through the epiphany, a total knowledge of material or aesthetic essence in which the self ceases striving and time takes on an eternal quality. But the epiphany proves dead-ended, meaningless to anyone other than the perceiver, a form of solipsistic ecstasy. By contrast, the vagaries of Joyce’s and Woolf’s depictions of the will to unknow prompt an interest in the infinities of uncertainty, of which the endlessly unknowable other is the most cogent representative. We can long on our own, but solitary desires do not sustain. Experienced alone, boredom merely perpetuates itself joylessly. Woolf’s melancholic Orlando does not want to throw himself repeatedly on the ice, look into frozen waters, and think of death. And neither does Adele of Stein’s Q.E.D. want to laugh by herself. As an audience member awaiting the pageant in Woolf’s Between the Acts suggests, the self on its own is inexplicable, meaningless: others can be defined in relation, but “‘Myself’ – it was impossible” (BA 124). How to anticipate a war alone? Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds resolves to make herself her only priority but is forced to return eternally to the collective: “Everybody did, everybody died and everybody did” (48). In the early years of the twentieth century, Joyce’s first novels – Stephen Hero and Portrait – culminate in a dead-ended aesthetic; Woolf’s first novel climaxes with her protagonist’s death; Stein’s first novella ends in deadlock. Come the fiction of the late thirties and early forties, singular deaths are no longer the focus; instead, shared, everyday longings regenerate the finite subject. Mortality and absolute knowledge are associated dead-ends, while the willed refusal of certainty opens up an infinity of interpretation. As Stephen Dedalus says of himself and Buck Mulligan, “My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between” (U 279). The “seas between” individuals are fundamental to Ulysses; Bloom counters Stephen’s self-centered intellectual yearning, and he also recognizes that existence is founded not in certain knowledge but in others whose expression will always remain mysterious. Life is not transparent but is instead a wealth of what Woolf considers “infinite discords” and “shivering fragments” (PA 393). Fragmented, evanescent, and minute: eminently banal and near-indiscernible, everyday longings nevertheless proliferate infinitely and, in turn, infinitely sustain. In Woolf, as in Joyce and later, in Levinas, a self reflected whole and entire is prone to

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boredom, while interest emerges from speculation on the most mundane kinds of otherness – a severed toenail, a mark on a wall – rendered in the creative act, for others. While individuals may laugh alone, groups intensify laughter; the desire to laugh is catalyzed and enhanced by otherness, and laughter is in turn a welcome form of excess in the midst of mortal existence. In shared laughter we are, as Stein writes, “hanging onto the everlasting feeling” of infancy and childhood (LGB 15). And in Stein’s Two, shared sound-making signals the longing that exists even between bickering siblings. On occasion, Stein’s others are familial but dictatorial; in Stein’s and Woolf’s last works, dictators lead countries with disastrous consequences. In Between the Acts and Mrs. Reynolds, Woolf and Stein transpose the subject–other dyad to an international playing field, portraying exchanges between individuals that determine what occurs between nations. This creative decision effects a full-scale ideological inversion where prosaic desires are concerned: in early Woolf, Joyce, and Stein, grandiose, all-consuming desires are abandoned in favor of infinite, unpredictable daily longings. By the 1930s, mundane yearnings facilitate an understanding of longing on a global scale, and can even effect widespread change. In Stein’s Mrs Reynolds in particular, passively waiting for the demise of totalitarian regimes succeeds only when individuals abandon their self-absorbed, anticipatory lassitude and resolve to wait on – help, console – those around them. Stein’s characters attend to one another with varying levels of success and a great deal of failure. But their willingness ultimately defines existence: “Mrs. Reynolds never told any one this but it was something which made her daily life be what it was” (37). In Woolf, Joyce, Stein, and Beckett, and to a lesser but significant degree Hardy also, mortality is not, and cannot be, transcended; in distinctly different ways, and via distinctly different kinds of desire, each author abandons his or her early depictions of characters struggling for autonomy. Satiation, endpoints, and emphatic assertions of singular desires and selfhood are increasingly critiqued and jettisoned. Desire does not merely serve to meet individual needs or fill individual lack. Instead, shared and infinitely proliferating desires imbue mortality with eternality.

Notes 1. Many associations are made between Beckett and Schopenhauer, and most are disappointingly simplistic; critics often mention that they are united in

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a sense of despair, or in the assertion, as per John Calder, that the world operates via the will, a will that is inherently evil (The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett 25, 76). Typical in this regard is Rubin Rabinovitz’s contention that Beckett’s earliest protagonists long to withdraw into themselves, and that as his work proceeds, “the outer world deteriorates, one gains a clearer view of inner reality, and it is the inner reality that shapes and colours one’s perception of the outer world” (The Development of Samuel Beckett’s Fiction 182; for more from Rabinovitz on Beckett’s introspection, see also Innovation in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction). For arguments conflating Beckett’s various characters into single protagonists, see David Hesla on Molloy (“Being, Thinking, Telling, and Loving”) and Eyal Amiran’s Wandering and Home. In a long essay on the over-emphasis on Descartes in mid-century Beckett criticism, Edourd Morot-Sir nevertheless maintains that the cogito remains the ultimate springboard for reflection in Beckett (“Samuel Beckett and Cartesian Emblems”). More recently, Paul Davies reaffirms that Beckett’s protagonists are the casualties of the Cartesian mind–body split (“Three Novellas and four nouvelles”). Anthony Uhlmann argues that Beckett and Levinas are aligned in their attempts to rethink “the relation of same and other” but suggests that for Beckett and Derrida silence and expression are key components of the faceto-face exchange in ways Levinas overlooks (Beckett and Postructuralism 159–60). But in Totality and Infinity, Levinas describes expression as the primordial event of signification and argues that the face, in and of itself, is the visual representation of what exceeds the subjective (51, 92). On the significance of the need to be observed by the other in Beckett, see Kenner, Samuel Beckett (187), James Knowlson, Light and Darkness in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett (39), and Richard Begam, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (54), who locates the origins of this motif in 1 Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I am known.” Begam interprets this quotation as the individual’s coming to know God, suggesting that Beckett reads the same passage as an encounter in which the individual comes closer to self-knowledge (78). Face-to-face encounters arise repeatedly in Molloy and Malone; see also “Ding-Dong” in More Pricks than Kicks (44–6), First Love (77), Mercier and Camier (391), Molloy (9), and “Horn Came Always” in For to End Yet Again and Other Fizzles (33–4). Similarly, Kenner writes: “That things and events are extracted in selfdefense from an unintelligible continuum of changes is one of philosophy’s self-cancelling propositions, assailing the very fact of its own affirmation. It is thus ideally suited to Beckett’s characteristic comedy of the impasse” (Samuel Beckett 99). See also Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity, where Begam places Beckett within an intellectual trajectory including Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, thinkers for whom modernity ends with the completion of the philosophical centrality of the subject; although not cited in Begam’s work, Levinas is among the earliest proponents of just such a position. Beckett’s description of in-betweens is endemic: in “Draff” of More Pricks,

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Belacqua’s corpse is described as lying on the bed “like the water between Buda and Pest . . . hyphen of reality,” a description extended to the servant who precedes Watt at Knott’s house, for whom, “hymeneal still it lay, the thing so soon to be changed, between me and all the forgotten horrors of joy” (180; 202). So too does a speaker in Texts for Nothing wonder, “How are the intervals filled . . . ?” even as the Unnamable describes himself as partition, tympanum (97; 386). 7. For an example of a reading of “Lessness” as a post-apocalyptic narrative, see Calder, 100. 8. In Subjects of Desire, Butler suggests that a refusal of the death wish emerges in modernist writing, and defines the post-modern era as well (15). 9. See for instance “Draff” of More Pricks than Kicks, where the dead Belacqua soldiers on, or The Calmative, where the protagonist proclaims himself “too frightened this evening to listen to myself rot, waiting . . . for the slow killings to finish in my skull” (47). In The Trilogy, Molloy suggests that he has ceased to live (24), Malone believes he will “go on dying as [he has] always done” (226), and the unnamable considers himself already dead.

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alterity, 15–16, 61; see also otherness ambition, 1–2, 6, 21, 28, 30, 40, 44–5, 65, 72, 90–1, 140, 183, 187, 190 anagnorisis, 49–50, 63, 65 Anderson, Sherwood, 116 anticipation, 8, 23–4, 32, 67, 76, 139–71, 172n, 173n, 174–5, 177, 179–81, 184, 189 Aquinas, Thomas, 36, 68n Aristotle, 26n, 36, 49, 64, 68n, 73, 76, 79–80, 110 Armstrong, Martin, 113, 136n, 137n, 139 Augustine, 26n Bakhtin, Mikhail, 107, 136n Banfield, Ann, 170 Barnacle, Nora, 188 Barthes, Roland, 74, 102n Bataille, Georges, 18, 23, 113–14, 133, 136n, 137n Baumgarten, A. G., 42 Baudelaire, Charles, 93, 102n Beckett, Samuel, 5, 24, 44, 175–85, 191, 191n, 192n, 193n Company, 177 The Expelled, 178 First Love, 192n For to End Yet Again, 192n How It Is, 177–8 “Lessness,” 176, 181–3, 193n Malone Dies, 177, 102n, 193n Mercier and Camier, 178–9, 192n Molloy, 177–8, 189, 193n More Pricks than Kicks, 192n, 193n Murphy, 178 Proust, 178–9 Texts for Nothing, 176, 189, 193n The Unnamable, 180, 189, 193n Waiting for Godot, 175

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Watt, 177–9, 193n Whoroscope, 178 Begam, Richard, 192n Beja, Morris, 67n, 68n, 69n Bergoffen, Debra B., 79 Bergson, Henri, 12, 23, 110–14, 121, 133 Blanchot, Maurice, 18 Boone, Joseph, 25n boredom, 7–8, 23, 32, 44, 67, 72–101, 101n, 102n, 103n, 110, 141, 153, 176–9, 184, 189–91 Bredin, Joseph G., 36 Brooks, Peter, 25n Brownstein, Marilyn L., 147 Bruns, Gerald L., 18 Budgen, Frank, 31 Burton, Robert, 72 Butler, Judith, 5, 27n, 59, 70n, 193n caress, 15, 146, 181; see also fecundity Cave, Terence, 65 cesspools, 152, 172n Column, Mary and Padraic, 68n Connor, Steven, 18, 70n, 178 Currie, Mark, 101n Darwin, Charles, 106, 111, 114, 121 Davies, Paul, 192n Davis, D. Diane, 137n death, 29–32, 34, 36–41, 46–54, 58, 64, 67, 67n, 84–5, 89–90, 96, 113, 122, 141, 144–6, 149–52, 156–9, 162, 166–8, 170, 185–90, 193n; see also mortality decadence, 69n de Certeau, Michel, 27n Deleuze, Gilles, 59 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 16–17, 27n, 70n, 192n

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Descartes, René, 11, 25n, 44, 85, 178, 192n desire, 5, 10–16, 19, 29–30, 34, 43–4, 56–7, 59, 64, 68n, 74, 90–1, 108, 110, 114, 129, 141, 155, 157, 160, 170, 176–7, 179–80, 182–4, 186–7, 190–1; see also ambition, anticipation, boredom, knowledge, lack, laughter, power, will Dydo, Ulla E., 109, 116, 118, 127, 135n, 137n Eagleton, Terry, 48–9 Eliot, T. S., 58 Ellmann, Richard, 30, 37–8, 46, 50, 58, 68n, 188 entropy, 182–4 epiphany, 22, 30–1, 33–42, 45–7, 49, 51–4, 63–6, 67n, 68n, 69n, 85–6, 113, 140, 142, 151, 169, 184, 190; see also face to face encounter, moments of being Esslin, Martin, 182 eternal recurrence, 26n, 78–9, 82, 95, 182 ethics, 9, 10, 14, 16–18, 21, 61, 70n, 184 everydayness, 4–8, 14, 16, 19–22, 24, 27n, 30, 35, 39, 44, 52, 57, 59, 64, 74, 79–80, 84–5, 87–8, 90–1, 98–9, 108, 110, 114, 118, 139, 141, 151–3, 159–60, 167–8, 171, 176–7, 187–9 existentialism, 9, 83, 97 face to face encounter, 14, 22, 63–4, 97, 127–8, 153, 169, 178, 181–2 Falconer, Rachel, 67n fecundity, 15, 63, 83, 146, 168–70, 181 Felski, Rita, 27n Foucault, Michel, 5, 25n Freud, Sigmund, 4–5, 15, 25n, 44, 84, 102n, 106, 110–14, 121, 133, 136n Froula, Christine, 25n Gardiner, Michael, 27n, 110 Genesis, 27n, 36, 50, 61 Goodstein, Elizabeth, 75–7, 86, 98, 100, 102n Gould, Gerald, 109, 113 Green, Henry, 21, 27n Green, Matthew, 72 Grieg, J. Y. T., 112–13 Gunter, Peter A., 136n, 137n Hardy, Thomas, 1–7, 22, 28, 39, 44, 65, 110, 185, 190–1 Far from the Madding Crowd, 7

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The Hand of Ethelberta, 1–7, 28 Jude the Obscure, 7 A Pair of Blue Eyes, 6, 8 The Return of the Native, 6–7 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 7 Under the Greenwood Tree, 8 The Well-Beloved, 2–4, 6–7, 28 Harrison, Kate, 36, 43, 49 Hatab, Lawrence J., 136n Heath, Stephen, 25n Hegel, G. W., 4, 102n Heidegger, Martin, 9, 12–13, 16, 20, 23, 26n, 43, 75, 79, 80–5, 94–7, 100, 141–6, 149, 151–4, 157–63, 167–9, 171, 172n, 174–6, 185–6 Hemingway, Ernest, 21 Hitler, Adolf, 24, 144, 157, 165–7, 171n, 172n; see also World War II Hobbes, Thomas, 110 Horkheimer, Max, 48 humour, 104, 107–8, 110, 114, 116, 124, 133 Husserl, Edmund, 9, 142 Hussey, Mark, 87 Huxley, Aldous, 21, 81–2, 102n hysteria, 2–3, 7–8 il y a, 83–4, 93, 95, 97 infinity, 11–15, 19, 33–4, 44, 47–50, 57–8, 60, 62, 74, 77, 108–9, 114, 120, 122–4, 129, 131, 157, 168–70, 175, 177–8, 180–1, 184, 186, 188–90 Irigaray, Luce, 9 Jacobs, Joshua, 68n Janaway, Christopher, 45 Joyce, James, 6, 10, 17, 19, 22, 28, 37–40, 46, 55, 58, 65, 67, 67n, 75, 80, 99–100, 104, 113–14, 119, 136n, 176, 184–5, 187–8, 190–1 Finnegans Wake, 69n, 105 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 22, 28, 30, 33–7, 40–1, 51–2, 54, 63, 65, 68n, 69n, 71, 105, 190 Stephen Hero, 22, 30–2, 34, 36–7, 40, 42, 45, 48–9, 52, 55–6, 69n, 102n, 105, 188, 190 Ulysses, 22, 25n, 30–2, 35, 40–1, 48–53, 55–67, 69n, 70n, 71–4, 100–1, 101n, 102n, 104–10, 133–5, 136n, 137n, 184, 188, 190 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 10, 11–12, 20, 41–3, 47, 70n, 110, 185

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Index Kenner, Hugh, 20, 41–2, 50, 54, 62, 68n, 69n, 176, 178, 192n Kiberd, Declan, 51, 53 Kierkegaard, Søren, 72–4, 78–9, 97, 83, 101, 101n Kimball, Jean, 69n Kimmins, C.W., 113 Kirwan, James, 47 knowledge, 7, 22, 28–34, 36–56, 58, 60–7, 68n, 71, 75–6, 110, 129–30, 141, 151, 176, 184–5, 190 Kuhn, Reinhard, 76, 101n, 102n lack, 6, 11, 14, 16, 19–22, 24, 26n, 44, 181, 191; see also desire Lamos, Colleen, 25n laughter, 2–3, 6, 8, 23, 32, 57, 65, 67, 104–35, 135n, 136n, 137n, 138n, 139, 142, 159, 176–7, 184, 188, 191 Lawrence, D. H., 25n Lee, Hermione, 39, 85, 99, 171n Lefebvre, Henri, 27n Lepenies, Wolf, 73, 76 Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 9–18, 21–4, 26n, 27n, 48, 60–4, 70n, 75, 83–5, 92, 97–8, 101, 102n, 103n, 108–9, 114, 127–8, 130, 133, 141–2, 145–6, 153–8, 161, 167–9, 171, 177–81, 184–7, 189, 190, 192n; see also caress, ethics, face to face, fecundity, il y a Lewis, Wyndham, 21, 69n, 106, 118, 184 Lingis, Alphonso, 145 love, 1–3, 6–8, 14–15, 21, 27n, 29–30, 40, 44, 50, 61, 64–5, 132–3, 182 Löwith, Karl, 26n Ludovici, Anthony, 106, 113 McIntyre, Gabrielle, 25n Malcolm, Janet, 143 Mao, Douglas, 20 melancholy, 72–7, 79, 84–6, 89–91, 98–100 Mellow, James R., 114, 138n Miller, Andrew John, 147 Miller, J. Hillis, 7–8, 147 Millot, Catherine, 37 Mleynek, Sherryll, S., 31, 50 modernism, 10, 13, 19–21, 24, 25n, 31, 35, 40, 43, 59, 73, 75, 77–80, 91, 99, 100–1, 106–8, 110–14, 130–3, 137n, 176–7, 184, 186 moments of being, 22–3, 30, 39, 66, 85 Monson, Tamlyn, 84, 102n Morot-Sir, Edouard, 192n

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mortality, 10–11, 13, 19, 23, 29, 31, 34–5, 38, 45–7, 57, 62–3, 83, 98, 109, 122, 126, 136n, 158, 179, 181, 184–5; see also death Nehamas, Alexander, 26n Nichols, Ashton, 35, 67n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 12–13, 16, 20, 22–3, 26n, 27n, 31, 43, 49, 54–9, 64–5, 70n, 75, 78–9, 82, 84, 95, 100, 106, 108, 111–15, 120, 130, 133, 136n, 142, 145, 175, 177, 182, 185–6; see also eternal recurrence, will to power otherness, 4–6, 8–10, 13–20, 48, 60–4, 66, 74, 76, 83–5, 91, 93, 96, 101, 110, 112, 114, 124–6, 131, 133, 146, 149, 154–8, 163–4, 167–9, 176–8, 180, 182, 184–7, 189–90, 192n Parvis, Emad, 80 Pater, Walter, 69n phenomenology, 12, 15, 21 Phillips, Adam, 74, 76 Piddington, Ralph, 113, 121 Pippin, Robert, 6 Plato, 10–11, 13, 22, 26n, 76–7, 108, 110, 137n, 184 Pound, Ezra, 60 power, 4, 15–16, 19, 20, 25n, 40, 184–6; see also will to power prophecy, 163–4, 167, 173n Proust, Marcel, 16, 18–19, 179 Provine, Robert, 110 psychoanalysis, 4–6, 25n, 44, 69n, 103n, 111 Rabinovitz, Rubin, 192n Randall, Bryony, 27n Renan, Yael, 135 Richardson, Dorothy, 137n Ricoeur, Paul, 16 Riquelme, John Paul, 69n Robbins, Jill, 17, 26n Rosenfeld, Natania, 144 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 74 Ruotolo, Lucio, 88, 102n Russell, Bertrand, 102n Russell, John, 27n Sanders, Barry, 135n, 137n Scarry, Elaine, 48 Schmitz, Neil, 109, 127, 135, 135n Scholes, Robert, 49, 69n

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Schopenhauer, Arthur, 5, 16, 20, 22, 30, 43–9, 55–6, 59, 65, 68n, 69n, 74, 78, 89, 101n, 102n, 110, 176, 179, 185–6, 191n Sears, Sallie, 147 Sevareid, Eric, 115, 116 sex, 4–5, 10, 15–16, 19–20, 25n, 28, 35–6, 40, 45, 68n, 113–14, 155, 184, 190 Sheeks, Wayne, 68n Sheringham, Michael, 20–1 Silverman, Hugh, 25n, 26n sleep, 153–4, 162–3, 168–9, 172n, 173n Sluga, Hans, 142–3 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 76–7, 102n Stalin, Joseph, 157, 165; see also World War II Stein, Gertrude, 6, 10, 19, 23–4, 74, 99, 102n, 105–7, 114–18, 141–3, 145–7, 152–3, 171, 172n, 174, 176–7, 184–5, 187–9 Brewsie and Willie, 172n Lectures in America, 109, 117, 124, 137n, 138n A Long Gay Book, 23, 109–10, 118, 122–7, 134–5, 191 The Making of Americans, 117–18, 122, 126, 137n Mrs. Reynolds, 24, 141–2, 145, 157–70, 171n, 172n, 173n, 175, 190–1 Q.E.D., 23, 105, 107, 109–10, 119–22, 126–7, 132–3, 138n, 190 Tender Buttons, 19, 127, 168 Two, 110, 127–34, 154, 189, 191 Wars I Have Seen, 141–3, 158, 161, 163, 167, 170–1 Stein, Leo, 127 Steward, Sam, 137n subjectivity, 4–6, 8–20, 28, 31, 42–4, 48, 55–6, 58–61, 63, 72–3, 77–8, 82–3, 87, 91, 94, 96–7, 100–1, 104–7, 110–12, 120–4, 134, 153–4, 158, 162, 167–8, 177–8, 183–7, 192n synaesthesia, 29, 39 Terada, Rei, 27n Toklas, Alice B., 109, 115, 121, 131, 134, 135n, 137n transcendence, 11–12, 14, 17, 22, 29, 30–1, 34–5, 39, 41–2, 45–8, 53, 59–60, 62, 66, 67, 79, 82–3, 86, 95, 109, 112–13, 130–1, 133, 136n, 146, 184–5, 190

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Uhlmann, Anthony, 192n unknowability, 31–3, 39–40, 42, 44, 48, 49–58, 60, 62–7, 70n, 96–8, 155–6, 158, 185, 187, 190 utopia, 72–3, 100, 101n, 177 Valente, Joseph, 55 Van Vechten, Carl, 137n Weir, David, 41–2, 68n Wilde, Oscar, 69n Wilder, Thornton, 115–16 will, the, 1–6, 8, 10–11, 13, 15, 26n, 30–1, 41, 43–6, 48, 55–6, 59, 68n, 69n, 171, 176, 185–6, 192n; see also will to power Williams, Raymond, 6–8 will to power, 5, 55, 58–9 Wolfe, Thomas, 35 Woolf, Virginia, 6, 8, 10, 19, 22–3, 28–30, 38–40, 65–7, 74, 76–7, 85–7, 91, 98–101, 110, 139–44, 146–7, 152–3, 163, 170–1, 171n, 172n, 174, 176–7, 184–5, 190–1 Between the Acts, 23, 66–7, 100, 139, 144, 147–57, 168–70, 175, 190–1 Jacob’s Room, 84, 86–9, 99, 100 “The Lady in the Looking-Glass,” 23, 75, 85, 91–8, 100–1, 103n “Modern Fiction,” 8, 66, 100 Mrs Dalloway, 19, 88–9, 139–40 Night and Day, 87–8, 98 Orlando, 19, 23, 74–5, 89–91, 98, 100, 190 Pointz Hall, 140–1, 147, 169, 172n To the Lighthouse, 66, 84, 86, 88–90, 99–100, 186–7 The Voyage Out, 22, 28–9, 36, 39, 65–6, 69n, 84, 87–9, 99, 190 The Waves, 84–5, 88, 100, 102n The Years, 98 Wilde, Alan, 147 World War I, 113, 139, 142, 152; see also World War II World War II, 5, 9–10, 23, 87, 102n, 111, 139–44, 149–50, 152, 156–9, 161–3, 165, 167, 170–1, 171n, 174–5, 185–6, 190; see also Hitler, Stalin, World War I Žižek, Slavoj, 16–17 Zwart, Hub, 136n, 137n

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