The Birth of Intertextuality: The Riddle of Creativity 2019953270, 9780415899048, 9780203711057

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The Birth of Intertextuality

Why was the term ‘intertextuality’ coined? Why did its first theorists feel the need to replace or complement those terms – of quotation, allusion, echo, reference, influence, imitation, parody, pastiche, among others – which had previously seemed adequate and sufficient to the description of literary relations? Why, especially in view of the fact that it is still met with resistance, did the new concept achieve such popularity so fast? Why has it retained its currency in spite of its inherent paradoxes? Since 1966, when Kristeva defined every text as a ‘mosaic of quotations’, ­‘intertextuality’ has become an all-pervasive catchword in literature and other humanities departments; yet the notion, as commonly used, remains nebulous to the point of meaninglessness. This book seeks to shed light on this thought-provoking but treacherously polyvalent concept by tracing the theory’s core ideas and emblematic images to paradigm shifts in the fields of science, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and linguistics, focusing on the shaping roles of Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, ­Saussure, and Bakhtin. In so doing, it elucidates the meaning of one of the most frequently used terms in contemporary criticism, thereby providing a much-needed foundation for clearer discussions of literary relations across the discipline and beyond. Scarlett Baron is Associate Professor of Twentieth- and Twenty-First-­ Century Literature at University College London.

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The Birth of Intertextuality The Riddle of Creativity

Scarlett Baron

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Scarlett Baron to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2019953270 ISBN: 978-0-415-89904-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-71105-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

In loving memory of my mother and for my father

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Note on Translations Introduction 1 Darwin’s ‘Universal Acid’ Preamble: Making Biology Literal, Making Literature Biological 34 Darwin’s Theory 37 Open Fields: The Darwinian Revolution 45 Religion 47 Philosophy 51 Herbert Spencer 51 John Addington Symonds 54 Henri Bergson 56

Applications to Literature and Culture 65 Generalizability and Interdisciplinary Extensions 65 Literature and Literary Criticism 66 Herbert Spencer 66 Hippolyte Taine 67 G.H. Lewes 68 Leslie Stephen 70 John Addington Symonds 71 T.S. Eliot 74 Northrop Frye 85

Evolution and Intertextuality 88 Genealogy: Organic Descent, Metaphorical Dissent 90 The Trees of Life of Life and Culture 90 Anastomosis 93 The Rhizome 97

From Analogy to Homology: Memes 98 Creativity and Selfhood 102

xi xiii xv xix 1 33

viii Contents The Intentional Stance 106 The Intentional Fallacy 107 Intentionality, Allusion, and Genetic Criticism 109 2 Nietzsche: Murdering Authority, Liberating Interpretation The Seeds of Intertextuality 113 Biographical Intimations of an Intertextual Outlook 113

113

Overcoming Influence 114 Writing, Reading 119

Theoretical Intimations of Intertextuality 126 Nietzsche’s Critique of Language 126 Illusory Subjects 136

Rhetorical Intimations of Intertextuality 146 Author as Spider, Text as Net 146 After Fixity, Flux 147 The Death of the Author 148 After Destruction, Creation; After Death, Birth 150

The Birth of Intertextuality 151 ‘Some Are Born Posthumously’: Nietzsche’s Posthumous Birth in France 151 Rewriting Nietzsche 153 ‘Text Means Tissue’: Text as Spider’s Web 154 The Death of the Author 157 ‘Words Spoken in the Past’: Intertextuality as Repetition 164

Willing Distortion 166 Nietzsche and the Stages of Revaluation 166 Nietzsche and Flaubert 168 Flaubert, Impersonality, and the Ascetic Ideal 169 Flaubert, Repetition, and Bourgeois Stupidity 175

Philosophical Responses to the Intertextualist Appropriation of Nietzsche 179 Nietzsche and the Unity of Self and Culture 179 Nietzsche and the Problem of Interpretation 180

3 Freud and The Riddle of Creativity ‘A Crusade of Revolution’ 193 ‘Conquistador’ – Freud’s Will to Truth 198 Scientific Ambitions 200 After Darwin and Nietzsche 201 Roads to the Unconscious 204 Self-Analysis and Dream-Analysis 205 ‘The Solution of the Riddle of Dreams’ 207 The Genesis of Dreams 207 The Art of Interpretation 215

192

Contents  ix The Mental Apparatus: Memory and Repetition 216 Memory and the Unconscious 216 Memory and Dreams 217 Analogies for Memory 219 Memory, Repetition, and Pleasure 220 Art and the Riddle of Creativity 222 Art, Dreams, and Psychoanalysis 222 Determinism and the Dream of a Metapsychology 223 Freud-Work: The Theory of Intertextuality 225 Lacan 226 Derrida 228 Kristeva 231 Kofman 233 Demystifying the Author-God 233 Creativity as Combination 234 The Unconscious Determinations of Art 235 Freud’s Non-Mimetic View of Art and the Referential Fallacy 235

Alongside and After Post-Structuralism: Harold Bloom and Extended Mind Theory 236 Harold Bloom 236 Extended Mind Theory and the Cognitive Case against Mimesis 240 Being Reborn Posthumously 245 4 Literary Criticism and the Dream of a ‘Science of Culture’: Saussurean Linguistics, Russian Formalism, Structuralism Saussure and Structuralist Linguistics 248 From Philology to Linguistics via Natural Science 248 Saussure and the Synchronic Turn 249 Langue and Parole 251 Arbitrary Signs 252 Synchrony and Causation 253 Semiology 253

Russian Formalism 254 The Organic Model 255 The Linguistic Model 256 Structuralism: ‘Culture, in all its Aspects, Is a Language’ 257 Roland Barthes and ‘the Constitution of a Unique Science of Culture’ 258 A Shifting Target 260 From Structuralism to Post-Structuralism and from Science to Literature 260 The Demise of a Dream 262

248

x Contents 5 Bakhtin: ‘The Word in Language Is Half Someone Else’s’ From the Shadows to the Limelight: Praise and Confusion in the Bakhtinian Renaissance 263 Intertextuality Avant la Lettre: Bakhtin’s Theories of Language and Literature 270 Against Saussurean Linguistics 270

263

Language as Discourse 272 Language in History 278

Against Russian Formalism 280 Literature and Evolution 284 Genre 286 The Novel 288 The Already 291 Preserving Creativity 297 6 Kristeva and the Birth of Intertextuality General Contexts 301 From Sofia to Paris 301 Philippe Sollers, Tel Quel, Communism 304 ‘The Structuralist Epoch’: ‘Everything Is Illuminated by Reference to Structure’ 306 Contemporary Linguistics and the Human Sciences 307 ‘Doing Something Else’ 313 Two Major Influences: Saussure, Bakhtin 314 Saussure 314

301

The ‘Second Saussurean Revolution’ 314 ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’ 317 Intimations of Intertextuality in ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’ 321

Bakhtin 322 Introducing Bakhtin 323 Placing Bakhtin 327

Enter Intertextuality 332 ‘An Intersection of Textual Surfaces’ 333 ‘A Mosaic of Quotations’ 335 ‘Absorption and Transformation’ 337 Exit Intersubjectivity 338 ‘A Permutation of Texts, an Intertextuality’ 339 Genotext and Phenotext 340 ‘Theory of the Text’: A Barthesian Synopsis 342 Conclusion Bibliography Index

345 347 371

Figures

1.1 Darwin’s ‘Tree’ Diagram 1.2 Alfred Kroeber’s Representation of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Human Culture 5.1 Saussure’s Diagram of the ‘Speech Circuit’

44 95 272

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to many more people than I can name for their help over the years I have spent researching and writing this book. I am particularly thankful to those who have read and responded to draft sections of the text. First and foremost among these is Ron Bush, whose kindness in continuing to scrutinize the work of an erstwhile DPhil student has been stupendous and invaluable. As well as benefiting from the ­insight and incisiveness of his questions and suggestions, I have been tremendously buoyed throughout by the knowledge that the book had in him a ready, searching, and ever benevolent reader. Michael Allingham, too, pored over every page with vigilant eye and sharpened pencil, ­expunging idle epithets and rococo flourishes and saving me from many a ­mortifying terminological faux pas. Anthony Ossa-Richardson read the early chapters with truly amazing alacrity and at astonishing speed, sending copious and useful remarks in response to each. My keenly-missed friend Andrew Hay, in whom philosophical knowledge and gentleness were uniquely married, read the Nietzsche chapter (or, as he would have called it, in his delightfully idiosyncratic pronunciation, the ‘Neatshey chapter’) with all his signature brilliance and thoroughness. His ­annotations – like the grain of his voice – reverberate through the pages of this book. Chris Stamatakis read the opening pages even whilst ­oppressed by myriad less optional tasks, slashing aberrant commas and curbing circumlocutory sentences with unfailing precision and unimpeachable délicatesse. Ronan Crowley commented on the Introduction with his characteristic combination of knowledge, discernment, and tact. Colin MacCabe and Joshua Billings sent probing queries which helped me think through the book in its earlier stages. For talk and joy along the way, bookish and otherwise, my heartfelt thanks go to Justine Baron, Andrew Blades, Melanie Caruso, Conor Dwan, Hong Xia Li, William May, James Phillips, and Benjamin Skipp. And always and for everything, to my father, Christopher Baron.

Abbreviations

AC

AP1

AP2 BGE

BT

BW CE CW

D

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ [1895], in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Jacques Roubaud and Pierre Lusson, ‘Sur la “sémiologie des paragrammes” de Julia Kristeva’, action poétique, nos 41–42 (1969; third trimester), ‘Situation de Tel Quel et problèmes de l’avant-garde (1)’, 56–61. Jacques Roubaud et Pierre Lusson, ‘Sur la “sémiologie des paragrammes” de Julia Kristeva (2)’, action poétique, no. 45 (1970; fourth trimester), 31–6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future [1886], trans. Judith Norman, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings [1872], trans. Ronald Speirs, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Scott Lee and Clive Thomson (eds), Le Bulletin Bakhtine 5 (1996), Special Issue: ‘Bakhtin Around the World’. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution [1907], trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem [1888], in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality [1881], trans. R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

xvi Abbreviations DDI DOA Dosse I

Dosse II

EH

F

DI

GM GS

HAH KGW

NCW

Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London: Penguin Books, 1996). Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ [1967], in Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 142–8. François Dosse, History of Structuralism, Vol. 1: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966 [1991], trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). François Dosse, History of Structuralism, Vol. 2: The Sign Sets, 1967–Present [1992], trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Michel Foucault, ‘Fantasia of the Library’ [1967], in Michel Foucault: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 86–109. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981). Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic [1887], trans. Carol Diethe, ed. Keith AnsellPearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs [1882], trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari and others, 40 volumes, in 9 parts (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1967). Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner: From the Files of a Psychologist, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, trans.

Abbreviations  xvii

NF O

OT OTL

P PDP Prosaics RP

SE

SG S/Z TI

Judith Norman, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Nachgelassene Fragmente’, in KGW. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life [1859], ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [1966] (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks, trans. Ladislaus Löb, ed. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 253–64. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text [1973], trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975). Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics [1963], ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis and London: 1984). Gary Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). Julia Kristeva, ‘The Ruin of a Poetics’ [1970], trans. Vivienne Mylne, in Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation, ed. Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 24 vols (London: Vintage, 1999–2001). References are given in the following form: SE volume number: page number. M.M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Later Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986). Roland Barthes, S/Z [1970], trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974). Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols [1889], in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

xviii Abbreviations TP UM WA

WD WDN

WP WT Z

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1980], trans. Brian Massumi (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’ [1969], in Michel Foucault: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38. Writing and Difference [1967], ed. and trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’ [1966], in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Art and Literature, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 64–89. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968). Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’ [1971], in Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 155–64. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Adrian del Caro, ed. Adrian del Caro and Robert Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Note on Translations

All translations for which no source is cited are my own.

Introduction

In 1966, Julia Kristeva coined the term ‘intertextuality’ to designate the notion that ‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations’; ‘any text’, she averred, ‘is the absorption and transformation of another’.1 In 1967, Roland Barthes reprised her definition in his notorious proclamation of ‘The Death of the Author’, asserting that ‘the text is a tissue of ­quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’.2 In the same year, M ­ ichel Foucault cast Flaubert as the inaugurator of a new, self-­consciously citational mode of writing centrally concerned with ‘­existing books’, and indeed ‘produced from other books’.3 Spearheaded by this trio of Parisian theorists, intertextuality exploded onto the literary-­critical scene, rapidly acquiring a currency which has endured despite the debates and revisions which have marked its sixty-year history. ­I nitial interest in the idea continued unabated in subsequent decades, with ­numerous critics pondering the term’s implications and applications.4 Today intertextuality is one of the most frequently used terms in ­literary criticism. While it still elicits scepticism in quarters of the academy which retain a commitment to a ‘humanistic’ model of literary study – and which accordingly regard with suspicion deconstructive and post-structuralist approaches to reason, identity, subjectivity, and intentionality – the term now features on A-level and GCSE syllabi (and

1 WDN, 66. 2 DOA, 146. A little known version of this essay was first published in English in Aspen, nos 5–6 (1967), ‘The Minimalism Issue’, item 3, www.ubu.com/aspen/­ aspen5and6/index.html [accessed 23 July 2019]. The quotations used in this book are drawn from the English translation of the better known version first published in French in Mantéia, vol. V (1968), 12–17. 3 F, 105. 4 In order to avoid punctuational excess, intertextuality usually appears in the ­following pages without framing quotation marks. While the book’s central ­enquiries stem from an interest in the emergence of a new term for what may seem to be ­age-old concerns and practices, it also takes seriously the task of understanding what particular complex of ideas the neologism was coined to name. Whether the more terminological or philosophical valences of the word are intended at any given point should be clear from the surrounding context.

2 Introduction equivalent courses in other countries) and is routinely used in university seminar rooms. Yet in spite of its indubitable success in the marketplace of ideas, intertextuality remains a highly difficult concept to pin down, notwithstanding the synoptic elucidations provided by Graham Allen’s Intertextuality (2000) and Mary Orr’s Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (2003).5 The notion continues to be put to multifarious uses, at times denoting modalities of textual repetition, at others invoking considerably more abstract ideas concerning authorship and the meaning of originality. Intertextuality envisages all texts as inextricably conditioned – in both their production and their reception – by other texts. It casts texts as radically porous entities, whose words and forms are derived from, and whose meanings are glimpsed through, the mediation of other texts. It is in its emphasis on the fundamental interrelatedness of all textual phenomena that much of intertextuality’s appeal resides: the startling vista it adumbrates is one of boundless connectivity. Such an emphasis is well suited to the outlook and sensibilities of writers and readers located in a globalized, hypertextual, information-rich world, and this alignment of life and theory, though it postdates the invention of intertextuality by forty years, has doubtless entrenched its position in critical vocabularies.6 Yet intertextuality, like many of the notions to have emerged under the auspices of post-structuralism, can seem overwhelming as well as seductive – ­daunting in its nebulous abstraction and far-reaching ramifications. This study seeks to shed light on this thought-provoking but treacherously polyvalent concept by attending to the formative contexts of its genesis. The cardinal question which orients its analyses is why. Why was the term ‘intertextuality’ coined? Why did its first theorists feel the need to replace or complement those terms – of quotation, allusion, echo, reference, influence, imitation, parody, pastiche, among others – which had previously seemed adequate and sufficient to the description of literary relations? Why, especially in view of the fact that it is still met with resistance, did the new concept achieve such popularity so fast? Why has it retained its currency in spite of its inherent paradoxes? But first, why ask such questions at all? Why investigate the emergence of a word? This book is informed by a sense of both the indicative and the performative value of words, taking them to be both symptomatic of, and a conditioning force upon, a user’s outlook. On such a view, the lexicon of an academic field reflects its axioms, blind spots, and paradigm shifts – much as a national language reflects a country’s 5 Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Cambridge: Polity, 2003); ­Graham Allen, Intertextuality (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000). 6 Allen devotes the final section of his study to the connections between contemporary experiences of reading and writing online and the theory of intertextuality. See ­‘Intertextuality, Hypertextuality and the World Wide Web’, in Intertextuality, 199–208.

Introduction  3 perspectives and prejudices. Accordingly, it behoves those working in any discipline, and perhaps especially in disciplines in which language is both medium and object of study, to scrutinize their linguistic makeup and practices – to be aware, and indeed wary of, the catchphrases which come to dominate their field. When a term assumes prominence and gradually eclipses more familiar and contending terms, it seems ‘­salutary’ – to echo Marc Angenot – to ask why, and to identify ‘the cognitive stakes’ involved in such a terminological shift.7 For Angenot, such questions raise important issues pertaining to epistemology and to the sociology of intellectual life.8 This study sounds out what values intertextuality encapsulates by examining its prehistory in the cultures of the century or so preceding its emergence as a critical term. The objective is not to argue that the neologism is either indispensable or wrong-headed, but to determine – historically, genealogically – why eminent critics came to proclaim its importance, and why so many academics have adopted their language, in whatever differing acceptations. The term’s emergence has so far been explained with reference to the immediate and proximate contexts of its inception: the rise of post-­ structuralism in the mid-1960s and its erosion of the New Critical idea of the bounded text as the privileged object of literary attention; the turn in France against the existentialist humanism incarnated by Jean-Paul Sartre; the ferment of Marxisant agitation which swept through French academic circles in the late 1960s and which may have played a part in the rejection of the author as a bourgeois construct and of authorial intention as a constricting criterion of interpretation; the emergence of German ­reader-response and reception theory at the hands of Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss in the mid- to late 1960s, which likewise promoted the reader, rather than the author, as the clinching agent of meaning; the influence, via Kristeva, of Mikhail Bakhtin’s newly discovered theories of dialogism and heteroglossia. While these circumstances – chronicled by Graham Allen, Mary Orr, François Dosse, Clayton and Rothstein, among others – undoubtedly functioned as significant triggers, the premise of this study is that a proper understanding of the ‘birth’ of intertextuality – a phrase chosen to chime with Barthes’ annunciation of the ‘birth of the reader’ at the end of ‘The Death of the Author’ – requires a longer historical view.9 7 Marc Angenot, ‘L’“intertextualité”: enquête sur l’émergence et la diffusion d’un champ notionnel’, Revue des Sciences Humaines, vol. LX, no. 189 (January–March 1983), 121–35, 121. 8 Angenot, 121. 9 Allen and Orr, as above; Dosse II; Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). | Susan Stanford Friedman also uses the phrase in this sense in ‘Weavings: Intertextuality and the (Re)Birth of the Author’, asking whether ‘the “birth” of intertextuality as a critical term insist[s] upon the “death” of influence as its conceptual precursor’. – ­Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, 146–80, 146. Tiphaine Samoyault

4 Introduction Accordingly, its purpose is to map a genealogy of the concept which will trace its core ideas and emblematic tropes to their antecedents in a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century epistemological revolutions, starting with Darwin’s evolutionary theory as set out in On the Origin of Species (1859), and taking in the works of Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, and Bakhtin along the way. Amongst the many age-old and new-fangled notions arrayed in the critic’s toolkit, intertextuality stands out as particularly in need of clarification. Whether the fact be blamed on the laxness of its coiners or ascribed to the inherent complexity of the insights it articulates, most commentators agree about the definitional haziness which enwraps it. William Irwin deplores that intertextuality has ‘almost as many meanings as users’.10 Violaine Houdard-Mérot remarks on the difficulty of knowing which of the term’s meanings any particular user intends.11 Even as early as 1983, Angenot, taking stock of the fact that the term ‘escapes all consensus’, called for the term’s sprawling polysemy to be charted and explained.12 Pierre-Marc de Biasi, by contrast, foresaw no end to the term’s semantic plasticity.13 Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein imply a more intrinsic problem with the concept, noting that although intertextuality ‘won partisans fast’, ‘[i]t did not do so because of its own coherence’.14 Jonathan Culler, without impugning its soundness, underscores the ‘difficulty […] of describing intertextuality’ – a difficulty he attributes to the abstraction and all-­ pervasiveness of the phenomena it names.15 Tiphaine Samoyault opens her twenty-first-­century study of the concept by conceding its ­‘theoretical vagueness’.16

likewise devotes a section of her study of intertextuality to the ‘birth of the word’. – ­L’Intertextualité: Mémoire de la littérature (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005), 9. The phrase might also bear an echo of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872) for some readers – though the more significant Nietzschean model for this study is On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), not least for its analysis of the fluctuating value of moral terms and of the place of science in a culture’s conception of its own will to truth. 10 William Irwin, ‘Against Intertextuality’, Philosophy and Literature, vol. 28 (2004), 227–42, 227. 11 Violaine Houdard-Mérot, ‘L’intertextualité comme clé d’écriture littéraire’, Le français aujourd’hui, vol. 2, no. 153 (2006), 25–32, 26. 12 Angenot, 130. 13 Pierre-Marc De Biasi, ‘Théorie de l’intertextualité,’ Encyclopaedia Universalis (Paris, 1989), 514–16; see www.pierre-marc-debiasi.com/textes_pdf/2369.pdf [­accessed 23 July 2019]. 14 Jay Clayton, and Eric Rothstein, ‘Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influence and Intertextuality’, in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, 3–36, 11. 15 Jonathan Culler, ‘Presupposition and Intertextuality’, in The Pursuit of Signs: ­S emiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (1981), augmented edn (New York: Cornell University Press, 2002), 100–18, 102. 16 Samoyault, L’Intertextualité, 5.

Introduction  5 This persistent ambiguity has made intertextuality an easy target. As well as taking aim at its imprecision, detractors have seized upon the term’s modishness, insinuating its incompatibility with scholarly rigour. Irwin, for example, dismisses intertextuality as mere ‘fashionable jargon for traditional notions such as allusion and source study’.17 In his estimation, the coining of a new term for such devices or practices is ‘at best a rhetorical flourish intended to impress’, at worst (the reader deduces) an act of contemptible and fraudulent vacuity.18 Similarly, Heinrich Plett suspects a case of ‘old wine in new bottles’.19 To such observers, the word’s popularity bespeaks neither a new ‘mode of interpretation’ nor a stimulating ‘ontological description’ of textuality, but merely reflects a central claim of woeful banality – namely, that in life as in literature, ‘nothing is new under the sun’. 20 By contrast, Angenot, whose approach seems redolent of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological analyses of academia, registers some of the enthusiasms to which intertextuality at first gave rise, without deeming such occurrences to be either unusual, or alarming, or invalidating.21 Impatience about intertextuality’s sheen of novelty is strongly linked to its association with post-structuralism. Disapproval of intertextuality’s bouquet of Parisian chic, Marxist flavouring, and anti-humanist tendencies is writ large in ‘Against Intertextuality’, Irwin’s forthright diatribe of 2004.22 Tellingly introducing himself as a ‘philosopher of literature’ rather than a theorist – adumbrating an antipathy to ‘theory’ that is everywhere apparent in what follows – Irwin examines with incomprehension the ‘radical claims’ of those he calls ‘the intertextualists’ (a collective

17 Irwin, 229. 18 Irwin, 240. 19 Heinrich F. Plett, Preface to Intertextuality, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), v, and ‘Intertextualities’ (in the same volume), 3–29, 5. 20 Irwin, 229. | The adage, attributed to Solomon in the King James version of Ecclesiastes 1:9, is mentally reprised by Leopold Bloom in Ulysses – one among many of its countless reiterations. – James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Random House, 1986), episode 13, lines 1104–5. 21 Angenot, 125. | Angenot’s article antedates Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus (1984), but postdates Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s Les Héritiers: les étudiants et la culture (1964) and La Reproduction: éléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement (1970). 22 As emerges later in the article, Irwin views ‘theory’ as, in Culler’s terms, ‘a pugnacious critique of common-sense notions’, whose ‘questioning of the most basic premisses or assumptions of literary study’ is as unwelcome as it is aberrant. – Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4. The opposition between these two ‘camps’ is common enough to be satirized by David Lodge in Small World as a clash between a ‘noble tradition of humane learning’, involving ‘literature as the expression of universal and timeless human values’, and ‘the perverse paradoxes of fashionable Continental savants’. – Small World (1984), in A David Lodge Trilogy (London: Penguin, 2003), 395.

6 Introduction term adopted in this study, though without its initial cargo of dismissive hostility).23 Indeed, his distaste is at least in part a response to the theory’s continental provenance and appertaining politics. Intertextuality, Irwin opines, is an item of the Weltanschauung of late 1960s Paris, and its ‘exotic French terminology and personae’ are of a piece with its ‘illogic and distinctly French motivation’.24 The intertextualists’ ‘revolutionary agenda’ and ‘unapologetically political […] motivations’ are also patently anathema to Irwin.25 Indeed, the stylistic opacity of their writing, he suspects, is an aspect of their project to ‘subvert nefariously clear communication’ as a weapon of ‘the power elite’.26 As one of the products of this politically driven ‘obscurity’, intertextuality has, like a pathogen, ‘unnecessarily infected the humanities’.27 In reaction to the intertextualists’ ‘hedonistic sanction for unfettered reading freedom’, Irwin advocates ‘an ethics in writing, such that we do not write in a way that is easily misunderstood, without good reason for writing in such a way’.28 Irwin’s scepticism indicates his position as an outsider to the Parisian literary scene, but ‘intertextuality’ can be located on a fissure which, at the time of its inception, also divided French academia into opposing factions. Bourdieu writes of the ‘break’ between the traditionalists and the critical avant-gardists in this period as ‘a civil war’, explaining that at the beginning of the 1970s Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault ‘held marginal positions in the university system’: [i]n their relation with the philosophical high priests of the Sorbonne […] they appear[ed] like ­religious heretics’, or – in another arresting image of stark enmity – as leaders of potential ‘barbarian invasions’.29 By 1966, when ‘intertextuality’ first entered academic parlance, Barthes had already fallen foul of establishment figures by advocating a more experimental, adventurous ‘nouvelle critique’ as a challenge to the old ‘critique universitaire’.30 In 1965, ­Raymond Picard, Racine specialist and professor at the Sorbonne, had retaliated in Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture, fulminating against the upstart and his clique and the dangers of their offences against ‘clarity, coherence, […] logic’ and ‘cultural patrimony’.31 In

23 Irwin, 227, 230. 24 Irwin, 227. De Biasi’s reading of the notion’s origins in the 1960s, by contrast, is highly positive. For him, intertextuality was ‘born of the great renewal of critical thinking which took place’ in that decade. | Irwin, 237. 25 Irwin, 232, 234. 26 Irwin, 231–3. 27 Irwin, 232. 28 Irwin, 233. 29 Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus [1984; Preface and Postscript, 1988], trans. Peter Collier (Oxford: Polity, 1990), xxiv, xix. 30 Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 61. 31 Raymond Picard, Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture (Paris: J.-J. Pauvert, 1965). | Culler, Roland Barthes, 61, 65–6.

Introduction  7 ­recognition of this split, Angenot writes of the term ‘intertextuality’ as an ‘epistemic banner’, the use of which inevitably amounts to the ‘signalling of a theoretical position’.32 If the fire of intertextuality started in Paris, Irwin concedes that the flames were fanned elsewhere. Indeed, his critique widens to implicate the university ‘professors of modern languages’ who ‘should certainly have been more astute’ than to fall for the allure of intertextuality’s ­‘Parisian apparel’.33 The root cause of their susceptibility to its ‘power of seduction’, he hypothesizes, must have been the demise of classical languages, and their usurpation by English, ‘an arguably lesser’ and ‘less demanding’ subject.34 The glamour of intertextual theory, he suggests, must have been irresistible to English Literature academics desperate to justify their employment and ‘self-importance’.35 Although it does not enter the discussion until its final stages, the root of Irwin’s discontent seems to reside in his adherence to a self-styled ­‘humanist’ model of textual study, one which vehemently rejects the ­theory’s tenets that ‘language and texts operate independently of human agency’ and that a text’s meaning is ‘essentially independent of a­ uthorial intention’.36 A text is not ‘an entity like a monkey’s randomly and accidentally typed Hamlet’, he insists.37 For this reason, i­ntertextuality should be struck from ‘the lexicon of sincere and intelligent ­humanists’.38 This deep-seated antipathy to the fundamental implications of intertextuality for traditional ideas of authorship and interpretation will emerge as one of the leitmotifs of this study. This book’s focus on the fields of natural science, philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and literary theory is not intended to suggest that literature itself played no part in the emergence of intertextuality. On the contrary, its investigations are conducted as complements to the earlier discussion of the role played by Joyce and Flaubert in the emergence of intertextual theory proffered in ‘Strandentwining Cable’: Joyce, ­Flaubert, and Intertextuality (2012).39 There, intertextuality was ­presented as a response to modes of ‘second-hand’ writing which foster the ­apprehension of literature as a domain governed and patterned by repetition.40 Flaubert’s major works – Madame Bovary, The 32 Angenot, 122. 33 Irwin, 239. 34 Angenot, 130. | Irwin, 238. 35 Irwin, 239. 36 Irwin, 240. 37 Irwin, 240. 38 Irwin, 240. 39 Scarlett Baron, ‘Strandentwining Cable’: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality ­(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 40 The question of second-handedness gives its title to Antoine Compagnon’s analysis of quotation in La seconde main ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,

8 Introduction Sentimental Education, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Bouvard and Pécuchet, and the Dictionary of Received Ideas – cultivate impressions of ­textuality as an echo chamber affording ceaseless encounters with things ‘already read’.41 Joyce instils the same sense of literature as a sphere of conscious and unconscious repetition in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – texts in which quotation, cliché, and myriad other forms of second-hand language abound. Flaubert, as the title of his Dictionary of Received Ideas intimates, saw it as his mission to drive home the stale repetitiveness of language and thought. Joyce, though no less lucid about the fundamentally reiterative operations of language, conveys the fact with serenity and humour, describing himself as a ‘scissors and paste man’, and m ­ aking punning allusions to ‘borrowed plumes’, ‘quashed quotatoes’, ‘pelagiarist pens’ in Finnegans Wake.42 ‘Strandentwining Cable’ contends that intertextuality was a theoretical development precipitated by the extremity of Joyce’s and Flaubert’s experiments in ­literary ­bricolage – to use Claude Levi-Strauss’s term for the processes of compilation underpinning art and mythical thought.43 Such a hypothesis concerning the responsiveness of theory to significant literary departures chimes with Kristeva’s, Barthes’, and Foucault’s characterizations of the modernist era as a period in which repetition is framed, and authorship performed, in novel ways.44 Although Joyce and Flaubert seem paradigmatic of the period’s fascination with the act of quotation (as well as related effects of literary impersonality and anti-referentiality), they are far from alone in showcasing such concerns. Indeed, ‘since the end of the nineteenth century’, notes André Topia, ‘the status of quotation has been one of the most crucial and problematic aspects of writing’.45 The observation is supported by recent analyses. In The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (2003), Paul Saint-Amour sets the self-conscious intertextual writing favoured by the modernists and some of their ­nineteenth-century forebears in the context of changes in copyright 1979). Gérard Genette likewise makes secondariness one of the threads linking his study of intertextual processes and effects in Palimpsestes: La littérature du second degré (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982). 41 Barthes writes in ‘From Work to Text’ (1971) that ‘the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read’. – WT, 160. In a similar vein, Foucault writes of Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony as consisting in ‘the repetition of things said in the past’ [la redite du déjà-dit], its elements being ‘derive[d] from existing books’ [des livres déjà écrits]. – F, 105. 42 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake [1939] (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 125, 183. 43 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1962), trans. George Weidenfeld and ­Nicolson (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1966), 11. 44 See WDN; DOA; WA. 45 André Topia, ‘The Matrix and the Echo: Intertextuality in Ulysses’, in Post­Structuralist Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 103–25, 103.

Introduction  9 law. As he shows, the increasing legal and financial incentivization of ­‘original expression’ had an impact upon the thematic and formal makeup of literature and contributed to the reconfiguration of the very notion of ‘original genius’.46 Thus, while the eighteenth century broadly associated originality with genius, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the rising popularity of deliberately derivative, second-hand poetry and the publication of essays penned in defence of plagiarism.47 Saint-Amour charts the j­ourney travelled between Edward Yonge’s assertion that ‘[a]n original […] rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius’ and Kant’s definition of genius as ‘a talent […] entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation’ on the one hand, and the fashion for the ‘cento’ which took hold a century later on the other.48 ‘Centos’, as defined by the nineteenth-century ­miscellanist Charles Bombaugh (with reference to fourth-century ­Roman and eighteenth-century English practitioners), were works ‘wholly composed of verses, or passages promiscuously taken from other authors and ­disposed in a new form or order, so as to compose a new work and a new meaning’.49 As Saint-Amour observes, such ‘mosaic’ or ‘patchwork’ poetry (as it was also called), far from denigrating imitation, made a virtue of ‘textual appropriation […] as a mode of fresh creation’.50 ­Focusing on Victorian writing (and therefore leaving aside earlier vogues for the cento), Saint-Amour charts a shift in the pendulum of literary value away from originality and in favour of ‘text reuse’ (to use a phrase favoured in the field of the digital humanities).51

46 Paul Saint-Amour, The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (London and Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 3, 8. 47 Such synoptic overviews, though a necessary part of academic expositions, are de­ lagiarism ceptive of course. As Robert MacFarlane discusses in Original Copy: P and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford and New York: ­Oxford University Press, 2007), the association between Romanticism and the cult of original genius is an oversimplification. Contrary to the ‘widely held assumption that the romantic generation invented originality as we know it’, ‘no unified or ­consistent doctrinal position towards originality and literary resemblance can easily be ­abstracted from contemporary Romantic documents’. – 29. 48 Edward Yonge, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (1790), both qtd in Saint-Amour, 31. 49 C.C. Bombaugh, Gleanings from the Harvest-fields of Literature, Science and Art: A Melange of Excerpta, Curious, Humorous, and Instructive (Baltimore, MD: T. Newton Kurtz, 1860), 48. 50 Saint-Amour, 47. 51 ‘Text reuse’, a phrase even newer than intertextuality, designates a form of text repetition or borrowing. Text reuse can take the form of an allusion, a paraphrase or even a verbatim quotation, and occurs when one author borrows or reuses text from an earlier or contemporary author. The borrower, or quoting author, may wish to reproduce the text of the quoted author word-for-word or reformulate it completely. We call this form of borrowing ‘intentional’ text reuse.

10 Introduction Robert MacFarlane observes the same aesthetic oscillation in Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2007), showing that in the second half of the nineteenth century a ‘reappraisal of literary originality and plagiarism’ led to artistic creation being recast as ‘a function of assimilation and recombination rather than fresh invention’.52 In 1859, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that ‘there is no pure originality. All minds quote’ and that ‘in proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power’.53 Oscar Wilde reprised this idea, emphasizing the same view of the mind as the locus of repetitive operations: ‘Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some-one else’s opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation.’54 In 1885, he made a virtue of this common trait in asserting that ‘[t]he true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.’55 One of MacFarlane’s conclusions is that ‘intertextuality existed both as an abstract discourse and as a creative practice long before it was christened and variously codified’ in the second half of the twentieth century.56 Examples of the modernists’ partialities for citationality are legion. While Kristeva’s favoured exponents are Lautréamont and Mallarmé, Barthes and Foucault invoke the names of Borges, Flaubert, Kafka, Lautréamont, Joyce, Mallarmé, Roussel, Valery.57 Though Joyce is the lone English-language author in these critics’ surveys, other examples are not hard to find. T.S. Eliot’s poetry, for instance, gave rise to consternation precisely on the grounds of its resort to other writers’ work. ‘The poetic personality of Mr Eliot’, wrote a contemporary reviewer of The Waste Land in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘is extremely sophisticated. His emotions hardly ever reach us without traversing a zig-zag of allusion’. ‘Here is a writer’, he continued, ‘to whom originality is almost an inspiration borrowing the greater number of his best lines, creating hardly any himself.’58 Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore were carrying out their own experiments in assimilation at around the same time, as ‘Unintentional’ text reuse can be understood as an idiom or a winged word, whose origin is unknown and that has become part of common usage. – www.etrap.eu/historical-text-re-use/ [accessed 23 July 2019] 52 MacFarlane, Original Copy, 6. | Saint-Amour, 37. 53 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Quotation and Originality’, in Letters and Social Aims (Boston, MA: James R. Osgood and Company, 1876), 155–81, 158, qtd in SaintAmour, 47, and MacFarlane, 117. 54 Oscar Wilde, De Profundis [1897], The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-­ Davis (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), 479. 55 Oscar Wilde, ‘Olivia at the Lyceum’, in The First Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Robert Ross, vol. 13 (London: Methuen, 1908), 29; first published in the Dramatic Review, 30 May 1885. 56 MacFarlane, 188. 57 See WDN; DOA; WA. 58 Edgell Rickword, ‘A Fragmentary Poem’, Times Literary Supplement (20 ­S eptember 1923), 616.

Introduction  11 were ­Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso (among other bricoleurs) in the sphere of the visual and plastic arts. In the late 1950s and 1960s, trends in art and literature continued to reflect a marked interest in the forms and effects of textual repetition, whether performed in homage (as honorific allusion), or in derision (as parody), or to less clearly ascertainable tonal ends (as pastiche or neutral quotation). The Situationists (members of a radical, principally Parisian movement dedicated to the dismantling of bourgeois ways of living) made reuse or ‘détournement’ central to their aesthetic programme, discussing it in terms which recall those of ‘absorption and transformation’ by which Kristeva defines intertextuality: Détournement, the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble, has been a constantly present tendency of the contemporary avant-garde, both before and since the formation of the SI [Situationist International]. The two fundamental laws of détournement are the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element – which may go so far as to completely lose its original sense – and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.59 The Situationists likened their collective endeavours to the experiments of a ‘research laboratory’, and Guy Debord and Gil Wolman characterize ‘détournement’ as a tactic of ‘extremist innovation’ and an advance on ‘old hat’ forms of opposition to ‘the bourgeois notion of art and artistic genius’.60 ‘Any elements, no matter where they are taken from’, they maintain, ‘can be used to make new combinations’. The more radical the alterations of meaning involved the better: It goes without saying that one is not limited to correcting a work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of those fragments in any appropriate way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish reference to ‘citations’. While Duchamp is dismissed as passé by the Situationists, Lautréamont is hailed as having preached and practised plagiarism well ahead of his time.61

59 ‘Détournement as Negation and Prelude’ [1959], in Situationist International Anthology, trans. Ken Knabb, rev. and expanded edn (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 67–9, 67. 60 ‘Détournement as Negation and Prelude’, 67, and Guy Debord, and Gil J. Wolman, ‘A User’s Guide to Détournement’, in Situationist International Anthology, 14–21, 14–15. 61 Debord and Wolman, 15–16.

12 Introduction The early 1960s saw the formation of the Oulipo group with its investment in permutation and the use of dictionaries and other works as fruitful sources of constraint and sites of intertextual material.62 It was also in the 1960s that Jorge Luis Borges’s Fictions were published in translation, bringing his elaborate, ludic meditations on the conundrums of literary repetition and relationality to a much wider audience. As Antoine Compagnon remarks, ‘Borges’s works probably represent the most sustained exploration of the field of rewriting, its exhaustion.’63 Jean Baudrillard remembers Borges declaring, in the vein of Flaubert and Wilde, that ‘Life itself is a quotation’.64 In ‘The Library of Babel’, Borges’s narrator asserts with certainty that ‘everything has already been written’.65 In ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, the eponymous protagonist aspires to create a text which would coincide ‘word for word and line for line’ with Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and yet no word of which would have been produced by an act of conscious quotation.66 Instead, he dreams of composing an exactly parallel text – a paradoxically verbatim version – of the text by somehow teaching himself to ‘be Miguel de Cervantes’.67 In spite of such illustrations, ‘doctrines of intertextuality’ came, once articulated as a theory of literature, as ‘a kind of shock’. Even in the wake of such admired literary quoters, notes Walter Ong, the critical establishment retained the capacity to be thrown by such an onslaught on ‘the isolationist aesthetics of romantic print culture’.68 In the intervening decades, the capacity to seem all at once banal and shocking, truistic and taboo, has turned out to be one of the most enduring and intriguing tensions of intertextuality’s history. This duality is the more incongruous because postmodern literature continues to manifest a high level of preoccupation with repetition and second-handedness, which it frequently portrays as givens of all literary creation. Reflecting the influence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century citational writing on the one 62 Founded in Paris in 1960, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo) – or, literally translated, ‘Workshop of Potential Literature’ – was formed to explore literature’s mathematical and ludic potentialities. The Oulipo’s ‘S+7’ method of composition, for example, consists in replacing every word of an existing text by the seventh noun which follows it in dictionary sequence. – Jean Lescure, ‘S+7’ (1961), ‘Oulipo: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle’, www.oulipo.net/fr/contraintes/s7 [accessed 23 July 2019]. 63 Compagnon, 35. 64 Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories, 1980–1985, trans. Chris Turner (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1987), 260. 65 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Library of Babel’, Fictions [1944], trans. Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 65–74, 73. 66 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author the Quixote’, Fictions, 33–43, 37. 67 ‘Pierre Menard’, 37. 68 MacFarlane, 187–8.

Introduction  13 hand and the emergence of intertextual theory itself on the other, such works evince widespread espousal of what Adam Thirlwell ­identifies as ‘Flaubert’s underlying metaphysical theory – that everything can be ­related to everything else, that everything can be a variation on a theme.’69 Though such concerns with the relationship between past and present, or quotation and innovation, are anything but new – the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns and its satirical representation in The Battle of the Books (1704) are but two obvious examples – the theory of intertextuality gives a name to such timeless musings.70 The prevalence of such themes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, and the self-consciousness with which overtly intertextual authors parade their borrowings, are striking. Much like ‘The Library of Babel’ and ‘Pierre Menard’, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980) is ‘a tale of books’ and of men ‘dominated by the library’ (indeed, as Eco stated in 1997, ‘it was more than obvious that in constructing the library I was thinking of Borges’).71 Over the course of 500 pages, Adso, the protagonist and narrator, comes to ‘realize that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves’.72 Books, he understands, in words surely chosen to echo Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ – ‘surviv[e] the death of those who […] produce them’, speaking to each other in ‘a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another’.73 Adso refers to the book he himself has authored – the book we read – as a cento assembled from the books he has read, and wonders whether he has really been, as he thought, ‘speaking of them’, or whether they have in fact ‘spoken through [his] mouth’.74 Such musings touch on issues of authorship, intentionality, referentiality (the capacity of literature to refer to a ‘real world’ beyond the page) which are tightly knotted together at the heart of intertextual theory.

69 Adam Thirlwell, Miss Herbert (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), 76. 70 Though such reflections may be a constant feature of critical thinking about art and literature, Laurent Jenny notes that some periods seem to give rise to bursts of more pronounced intertextual self-consciousness, manifesting intenser and more sustained engagement with the legacy or ‘burden’ – to use Walter Jackson Bate’s term – of the past. – ‘La Stratégie de la Forme’, Poétique, vol. 27 (1976), 257–81, 258. | Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (­Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). 71 Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose [1980], trans. William Weaver (London: Vintage 2004), 5, 184; Umberto Eco, ‘Borges and my Anxiety of Influence’, in On Literature, trans. Martin McLaughlin (London: Vintage, 2004), 118–35, 124. 72 Eco, Name of the Rose, 286. 73 Eco, Name of the Rose, 286. 74 Eco, Name of the Rose, 286.

14 Introduction Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual (1978) features a postscript which reveals, at the very last minute, that (This book contains quotations, some of them slightly adapted, from works by: René Belleto, Hans Bellmer, Jorge Luis Borges, Michel Butor, Italo Calvino, Agatha Christie, Gustave Flaubert, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Jarry, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Michel Leiris, Malcolm Lowry, Thomas Mann, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Harry Mathews, Herman Melville, Vladimir Nabokov, Georges Perec, Roger Price, Marcel Proust, Raymond Queneau, François Rabelais, Jacques Roubaud, Raymond Roussel, Stendhal, Lawrence Sterne, Theodore Sturgeon, Jules Verne, Unica Zürn).75 By this mischievous final twist, Perec reveals what had seemed a highly original, hyper-realistic universe to have been a veritable ­‘mosaic of ­quotations’. Thirlwell demonstrates the enduring appeal of such p ­ layful intertextual disclosures by including his own ‘slightly adapted’ q ­ uotation from Perec in the postscript to The Escape (2009): This book contains quotations, some of them slightly adapted, from works by W.H. Auden, Saul Bellow, Bertolt Brecht, Mel Brooks, Constantine Cavafy, Blaise Cendrars, George Eliot, Ella Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gustave Flaubert, Edward Gibbon, Alfred Goldman, Robert Graves, Alfred Hitchcock, Courtney Hodell, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, Christophe Honoré, Horace, Bohumil Hrabal, Peter Stephan Junk, Franz Kafka, Velimir Khlebnikov, ­Ladislav Klíma, Stéphane Mallarmé, Thomas Mann, Groucho Marx, Thomas Middleton, Vladimir Nabokov, Marcel Ophuls, Georges Perec, Petronius, Alfred Polgar, Alexander Pope, Cole Porter, ­A lexander Pushkin, François Rabelais, Saïan Supa Crew, Viscount Samuel, William Shakespeare, Tupac Shakur, Stendhal, Laurence Sterne, ­A lexander Stille, Suetonius, Tacitus, Junichiro Tanizaki, Leo Tolstoy, Paul Valéry and Virgil. Such acknowledgements place the book’s realistic illusion in inverted commas. In this breach of the novel genre’s implicit promise to speak of more than books – to adapt Adso’s remark in The Name of the Rose – a narrative text is recast as a citational puzzle. Such cases stand out for their combination of audacity and systematicity, but Perec and Thirlwell’s fascination with literature’s ineluctable ­anchoring in the past is widely shared. Angela Carter, for instance, whose

75 Georges Perec, Life A User’s Manual: Fictions [1978], trans. David Bellos (London: Collins Harvill, 1987), 579.

Introduction  15 novels marshal literary precedents into carnivals of quotation, stated in 1985 that she ‘regard[ed] all of western Europe as a great scrap-yard from which you can assemble all sorts of new vehicles… bricolage’.76 In an image emblematic of what intertextual relations can involve of both containment and transformative tension, she declares that, ‘I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the new wine makes the old bottles explode.’77 Such ludic approaches to novel-writing and the public appreciation of these authors’ works need to be considered alongside the media fracas which periodically erupts in response to allegations of literary ­plagiarism. The controversies surrounding Ian McEwan’s use of Lucilla Andrews’ memoirs of nursing in London during World War I as a source for ­Atonement (2001), and Michel Houellebecq’s use of a Wikipedia entry on the reproduction of flies in The Map and the Territory (2010), to name but two such causes célèbres, comport with Ong’s observation concerning intertextuality’s enduring capacity to trouble audiences habituated to regard individual invention as sacrosanct in the artistic domain. The outrage which the detection of second-hand writing still elicits demonstrates how entrenched are ideas of artistic originality as the ultimate criterion of aesthetic value.78 It also explains why acknowledgement pages are now routinely appended to novels (not in the jocular spirit writ large in Perec’s and Thirlwell’s postscripts, but as a matter of authorial and editorial caution in an era of extensive copyright regimes and potentially litigiously minded readerships). The same unresolved dichotomy of attitudes is apparent in the reception of poetry. Marjorie Perloff’s subject in Unoriginal Genius is the ‘new citational and often constraint-bound poetry’ which has proliferated in ‘an age of literally mobile or transferrable text’ – one in which ‘the Internet has made copyists, recyclers, transcribers, collators, and reframers of 76 Angela Carter, ‘Interview with John Haffenden’, in Novelists in Interview, ed. John Haffenden (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), 76–97, 92. 77 Angela Carter, Shaking a Leg: Selected Journalism and Writings (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997), 37. 78 See Michael White, ‘Who’s Right or Wrong in the Atonement Debate?’, Guardian, 8 December 2006, www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2006/dec/08/plagarism [accessed 23 July 2019]; Ian McEwan, ‘An Inspiration, Yes. Did I Copy from Another Author? No’, Guardian, 27 November 2006, www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/ nov/27/bookscomment.topstories3 [accessed 23 July 2019]]; see the discussion of Medbh McGuckian’s ‘borrowings’ in www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/poetryround-up-kate-tempest-the-phenomenon-is-back-1.3661513 [accessed 23 July 2019]; John Lichfield, ‘I Stole from Wikipedia But It’s Not Plagiarism, Says Houellebecq’, Independent, 8 September 2010, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/ news/i-stole-from-wikipedia-but-its-not-plagiarism-says-houellebecq-2073145.html [accessed 23 July 2019]; Henry Samuel, ‘Leading French Author Houellebecq Accused of Wikipedia Cut and Paste’, 7 September 2010, Telegraph, www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/worldnews/europe/france/7986859/Leading-French-author-­H ouellebecqaccused-of-Wikipedia-cut-and-paste.html [accessed 23 July 2019].

16 Introduction us all’.79 ‘[C]itationality’, she affirms, ‘is central to twenty-first-century poetics’: in recent and contemporary poetry, ‘already existing words and sentences are framed, recycled, appropriated, cited, submitted to rules, visualized, or sounded’.80 In Uncreative Writing, Kenneth Goldsmith likewise defines the poetry of our times as the art of an environment in which information is ‘managed’, ‘parsed’, ‘organized’, and ‘distributed’, and in which writers adept in the handling of word-processing and internet technologies ‘function more like programmers than traditional writers’.81 But although this new writing may ‘ha[ve] an electronic gleam in its eyes’, it ‘tak[es] inspiration from radical modernist ideas and juic[es] them with twenty-first century technology’.82 Nonetheless, all the high modernists’ citational proclivities and canonical standing, as Perloff remarks, failed to prepare the poetry world for the claim, now being made by conceptual poets from Kenneth Goldsmith to Leevi Lehto, Craig Dworkin to ­Caroline Bergvall, that it is possible to write ‘poetry’ that is entirely ‘unoriginal’ and nevertheless qualifies as poetry.83 Like Ong and the authors defending themselves against charges of plagiarism, Perloff notes the bizarre coexistence of intertextuality – both in theory and practice – and of an inherited and so far undethronable cult of originality. Against the background of such ambivalence, Perloff and Goldsmith write in praise of ‘unoriginal genius’ and ‘uncreative writing’. Yet it is worth noting that even as they argue in favour of works assembled through ‘text reuse’, both unwittingly display a certain residual anxiety or discomfort about the ramifications of the writing they advocate. Both, in anticipation of the scepticism of their imagined audience, prise intertextuality apart from its logical consequences for authorship. Perloff, for example, relies on a sleight of hand to salvage enshrined ideals of originality and genius. These much mythologized values need not be abandoned, she maintains, if they are simply redefined: ‘If the new “conceptual” poetry makes no claim to originality – at least not originality in the usual sense – this is not to say that genius isn’t in play. It just takes different forms’.84 She is also at pains to emphasize the demanding nature of even the unoriginal poet’s work: against the commonly vented

79 Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by other Means in the New Century (Chicago and London: 2010), xi, 17, 49. 80 Perloff, 17, xi. 81 Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 1, 4. 82 Goldsmith, 4. 83 Perloff, 12. 84 Perloff, 21.

Introduction  17 suspicion that second-hand writing requires little or no skill, and little or no labour, she maintains that ‘writing a poem is no easier than it ever was. Just different’.85 Goldsmith, for his part, tackles another concern citational writing might arouse, namely that no criteria exist by which to evaluate its merits: ‘judgement and quality’, he assures his readers, remain as important as ever. He does not, however, set out what measures might be used. The omission is telling of the difficulties involved in the appraisal of art when age-old aesthetic principles are brought into question. Moreover, though Goldsmith incisively debunks ‘creativity’ as ‘the most trite, overused, and ill-defined concept in a writer’s training’, he is adamant that subjectivity remains fully engaged in acts of ­‘uncreative writing’. Indeed, ‘the suppression of self-expression’, he avers, ‘is ­i mpossible’ – even going so far as to state that ‘[t]he act of choosing and reframing [passages for reuse] tells us as much about ourselves as our story about our mother’s cancer operation’. 86 Where intertextual ­t heory correlates a text’s citational facture with i­ mpersonality (in the act of writing, claims Barthes, ‘the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death’), Goldsmith’s advocacy of ‘patchwriting’ instead asserts the continuing supremacy of the ­author as an intentional subject.87 ­Perloff and Goldsmith’s promotion of ­u noriginal, uncreative writing thus evinces a surprising inconsistency reflecting an unwitting conservatism: celebrating second-hand ­w riting on the one hand, they balk at its logical implications for an author’s genius and originality on the other. At a time when so much current writing seems knowingly or unknowingly to engage with its tenets, elucidating the meaning of intertextuality seems a pressing and necessary task. The rest of this introduction provides a précis of those aspects of the term which have given rise to most misunderstanding. The first area of confusion surrounding intertextuality arises from uncertainty as to whether the notion should be taken to designate a law of literature – the axiom that all texts are ‘mosaics of quotation’ – or serve as an umbrella term for a set of formal devices and effects. Is intertextuality, in other words, about textuality in general, or about particular

85 Perloff, 49. 86 Goldsmith, 9. | Violaine Houdard-Mérot, who like Goldsmith instructs her students in the art of using extant texts in the production of their own, marvels that even the centos penned in creative writing workshops should be ‘very different from each other’ and ‘staggeringly like their authors’. – ‘L’Intertextualité comme clé d’écriture littéraire’, 29. 87 DOA, 142. | Goldsmith defines ‘patchwriting’ as ‘a way of weaving together various shards of other people’s words into a tonally cohesive whole’. – 3.

18 Introduction instances of textual relation?88 The answer is that this ambiguity charts a terminological drift. Intertextuality was originally formulated as an ontological insight, but swiftly came to be used as a way of describing localized instances of connection. The first acceptation relates the internal makeup of texts to their framing contexts, which enable both their production (by providing the materials of their genesis) and their reception (by making each new textual ‘arrival’ detectable and decipherable). Nietzsche expresses a variant of the latter idea in Ecce Homo (written in 1888) when he asserts that the ‘untimeliness’ – or ­radical novelty – of his insights render him all but incomprehensible to his contemporaries. Only the future, he maintains, can bring forth the contexts by which his works will become truly legible.89 T.S. Eliot, writing in a less explicitly personal vein in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), similarly emphasizes the crucial role of relationality in the processes of interpretation and canon-formation. ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone’, he affirms: His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.90 As Eliot emphasizes, the perception of a text’s relations to the existing body of texts modifies ‘the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole’.91 Or as Kristeva put it several decades later, ‘every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it’.92 Or again in Laurent Jenny’s words, ‘[w]ithout intertextuality, the literary work would quite simply be imperceptible, in the same way as an utterance in an as yet unknown language […] Outside of a system, the work is […] unthinkable.’93 In this perspective, intertextuality is ‘less a name for a work’s relation to particular prior texts than a designation of its participation in the discursive space of a culture’.94 In 1971, Jacques Derrida formulated a cognate description of the operations of language itself, lending further credibility to Kristeva’s 88 For an excellent discussion of intertextuality’s ontological significance, see John Frow, ‘Intertextuality and Ontology’, in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, ed. M. Worton and J. Still (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 45–55. 89 EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, §I, 99–102. 90 T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ [1919], Selected Essays [1932] (­L ondon: Faber and Faber, 1963), 15. 91 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 15. 92 Kristeva, Revolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 339; qtd and trans. in Culler, ‘Presupposition’, 105. [This portion of the text does not feature in the abridged English translation of Kristeva’s treatise.] 93 Jenny, ‘La Stratégie de la Forme’, 257. 94 Culler, ‘Presupposition’, 103.

Introduction  19 theory of intertextuality (which was itself derived from the model of linguistics). ‘Every sign’, he wrote in ‘Signature Event Context’, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written […] can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given ­context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely ­nonsaturable fashion.95 This ‘essential iterability’ – the fact of a text’s constituent parts ­being separable, excisable, quotable, translatable – means that snippets of texts bear ‘other […] possibilities’ when ‘inscrib[ed] or graft[ed]’ into ‘other textual chains’.96 Iterability – which seems virtually ­synonymous with intertextuality in Derrida’s linguistic discussion – is presented here as a feature of all writing even at the level of the individual ‘mark’ (the pictogram, the hieroglyph, the letter).97 In its emphasis on cut-and-pastability, decontextualization and recontextualization, reuse and reinterpretation as fundamental features of writing, Derrida’s account of iterability agrees with Kristeva’s picture of the textual realm as one of ‘permutation’ or ‘intertextuality’.98 Though first unfurled as a maxim of a very general order, intertextuality rapidly came to be used as an anodyne, all-purpose way of denoting any kind of connection between texts. But the term is ill-suited to serve such uses precisely by virtue of its generality. The invocation of intertextuality spares the commentator the effort of specifying whether the instance of text reuse in question is a quotation, an allusion, or an echo – terms which signal judgements about authorial intentionality and the degree of similarity between the texts under discussion.99 As a new term in the close-reader’s glossary, intertextuality therefore has little to promise in the way of enhanced understanding or appreciation. As Culler explains, ‘it is a difficult concept to use because of the vast and 95 Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’ [1971], in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 307–30, 320. 96 Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, 317. 97 Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, passim. 98 In ‘The Bounded Text’, Kristeva defines the text as ‘a permutation of texts, an intertextuality’. – ‘The Bounded Text’, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Art and Literature, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 36–63, 36; first published as ‘Le texte clos’, Langages, vol. 12 (December 1968), ‘Linguistique et littérature’, 103–25, and then in Semiotike (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969), 36–63. 99 Will Kynes usefully distinguishes these terms according to the degrees of explicitness and intentionality involved: ‘Often a quotation represents its source verbatim, but it need not do so, as long as it involves an explicit reference […] An allusion is an intentional implicit reference to an earlier expression. It lacks a citation formula and often only loosely represents its source, though some verbatim repetition may occur. Echoes are unintentional implicit references to earlier expressions.’ – My Psalm Has Turned into Weeping: Job’s Dialogue with the Psalms (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 31.

20 Introduction undefined space it designates, but when one narrows it so as to make it more usable one […] falls into source study of a traditional and positivistic kind (which is what the concept was designed to transcend)’.100 Noting that the term had slipped its initial moorings, Kristeva and Barthes sought to distinguish intertextuality from the binary relations typically charted in influence and source studies: ‘since this term has often been understood in the banal sense of “study of sources”’, wrote Kristeva in 1974, ‘we prefer the term transposition’.101 Culler’s pragmatic solution to the problem is to integrate both understandings of the term – the particular and the general, the narrow and the broad. Binary relations between texts, he suggests, fall within intertextuality’s infinite ambit: The study of intertextuality is thus not the investigation of sources and influences as traditionally conceived; it casts its net wider to include anonymous discursive practices, codes whose origins are lost, that make possible the signifying practices of later texts.102 On this capacious model – in effect, a Venn diagram of intertextuality – quotation, allusion, echo, parody, pastiche, imitation are joined within the vast umbrella of intertextuality by unconscious manifestations of repetition – clichés, proverbs, advertisements, songs, catchphrases, and other snippets of reused language attributable to no particular source or author.103 These are the ‘quotations without inverted commas’ evoked by Roland Barthes in ‘From Work to Text’.104 All are species of intertextual relationship between texts; all are specific manifestations of the general observation that all texts are ‘mosaics of quotation’. In the decades following the coinage of intertextuality, critics such as Laurent Jenny, Gérard Genette, and Michael Riffaterre, deeming Kristeva’s and Barthes’ model unworkable in its generality, honed more textually rooted – or ‘structuralist’ – approaches designed to make intertextuality a more serviceable concept.105 In so doing, they may indeed have rendered the term and its newly sprung cognates (‘metatextuality’, ‘transtextuality’, ‘hypertextuality’) hermeneutically operational, but they did so by going against the spirit which presided over its coining.106 100 Culler, ‘Presupposition’, 108. 101 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language [1974], trans. Margaret Walker (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 60. 102 Culler, ‘Presupposition’, 103. 103 As Compagnon observes, ‘What are stereotypes and clichés except, precisely, quotations?’ – 29. 104 WT, 160. 105 Allen names Genette and Riffaterre as the pre-eminent exponents of what he terms a ‘structuralist’ – that is, ‘more circumscribed’ – rendition of intertextuality. – 96. 106 The terms are proposed by Gérard Genette in Palimpsestes.

Introduction  21 The second of the term’s most thorny ambiguities pertains to impersonality. The emphasis on the erasure of self involved in writing is one of the keynotes of intertextuality’s first appearance. With epigrammatic simplicity, Kristeva announces in ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’ that ‘[t]he notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity’.107 From the outset, quotation and impersonality are presented as two sides of the same coinage. If texts are ‘mosaics of quotation’, if they are ­‘tissues’ made up of ‘quotations from the innumerable centres of culture’, it ­follows that single authorship is an illusion, a convenient and familiar myth, a dead metaphor. In reality, writers are less agents than – as ­Barthes calls them – passive ‘scriptors’.108 For MacFarlane, authors so conceived are ‘point[s] of interchange’; for Saint-Amour, they are ‘nodes in an unceasing circulation of ideas and language’, ‘anonymous points of reciprocity and “flow”’.109 If individuals themselves are but conduits of the cultural fabric which produces them, then all works of literature are collectively authored. As the nouveau romancier Michel Butor remarked with equanimity in 1969, There is no such thing as an individual work. The work of an ­individual is a kind of knot produced within a cultural tissue in which the individual does not so much immerse himself as simply appear. The individual is, from the first, a moment in this cultural tissue. A work is thus only ever a collective work.110 This aspect of intertextual theory – like that concerning text reuse – seems to have been suggested by the partialities of canonical authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Flaubert emits influential statements about the necessity for the author of a literary work to remain invisible in his work.111 Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus reprises the idea, describing the artist as one who, ‘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’.112 In ‘Crise de vers’ (1897), Mallarmé advocates the ‘elocutionary disappearance of the poet’ – as Kristeva notes in ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’.113 In the 1910s, the Yeatses and the 107 108 109 110 111

WDN, 66. DOA, 145. MacFarlane, 90. | Saint-Amour, 50. Michel Butor, Introduction, L’Arc, vol. 39 (1969), 2–6, 2. For example, ‘The author in his work must be like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful; you can sense him everywhere but you cannot see him.’ – Flaubert to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, 18 March 1857, Selected Letters, trans. Geoffrey Wall (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 258. 112 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 181. 113 WDN, 76.

22 Introduction S­ urrealists, in Ireland and France respectively, experimented with modalities of automatic writing, seeking to surrender personal agency and suspend conscious control in the act of writing.114 In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, T.S. Eliot describes good writing as a ‘process of depersonalization’ entailing a ‘continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of ­personality’. Self-erasure, rather than a hard-earned particularity of excellent writing, becomes a law of all writing. The ­transformation – from counsel of compositional perfection to timeless fact – casts these authors’ labour and passionately held convictions in curious new light, portraying the fruit of Flaubert’s stylistic agonies, for example, as a ­simple inevitability. Even the most seemingly personal writing is impersonal, a­ ccording to intertextual theory; such is the nature of language and literature. As Barthes writes in ‘The Death of the Author’, Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.115 Foucault concurs, describing writing as the creation of ‘an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears’, and a process, pursuing Barthes’ metaphor, in which the writer becomes ‘a victim of his own writing’.116 Derrida’s account of language and its defining iterability likewise makes impersonality constitutive of writing, which retains its legibility in the absence both of its author and its intended reader.117 Writing, he states, is an autonomous medium ‘cut off from all absolute responsibility’; on this logic, conceptions of writing as ‘communication of consciousnesses’ beg for revision.118 Barthes’ formulation of impersonality has fared well and is a staple of university literary courses. The same ironic disparity between theory and practice prevails on this point as in cases of supposed plagiarism. In theory, the ‘death of the author’ seems to be accepted by critics and deemed important enough to instil in younger generations of readers; in practice, the abiding, indeed increasing, popularity of author interviews (on radio and television, in bookshops, newspapers, and at literary 114 Bette London, Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships (Ithaca, NY, and ­L ondon: Cornell University Press, 1999), 179–212, and J.H. Matthews, The Surrealist Mind (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991), 31–57. 115 DOA, 142. 116 WA, 116, 117. 117 ‘[M]y future disappearance in principle will not prevent [the mark] from functioning’; ‘[m]y “written communication” must […] remain legible despite the absolute disappearance of every determined addressee’. – Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, 316, 315. 118 Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, 316.

Introduction  23 festivals) shows that readers have retained a seemingly unquenchable interest in authorial accounts of creation. Even more paradoxically, the alacrity to discuss intention is as common among literary academics as in the arena of mainstream commercial publishing. As MacFarlane points out, ‘originality remains enshrined in academic discourse’: Despite the accretive and highly indebted nature of academic research and writing, and despite post-structuralism’s lessons, delivered from deep within the academy, that ‘originality’ is nothing more than a special effect of reception, it remains a cardinal value of academic works.119 Such witting and unwitting forms of resistance to the far-reaching ramifications of intertextuality for human self-conceptions (specifically as they pertain to authorship and originality) pepper intertextuality’s history. Indeed, the following chapters uncover the degree to which deconstructive approaches to the mystery of creativity have floundered, with demystifying explanations of writing either eliciting overtly defensive reactions or leading to the adoption of split, inconsistent positions. It is not so much that such theories are unmentionable, but that having once been formulated and seemingly accepted on intellectual grounds they are confined to the territory of theory rather than being allowed to enter and alter the realms of practice and belief. In this sense, intertextuality remains, for all its spectacular success, taboo precisely in respect of its most valuable – because most radical – insights. In this light, the term’s banalization in common usage – which bespeaks the silencing of its most fundamental implications – might be interpreted as further evidence of the strength of cultural investments in the preservation of creativity as the guarantor of human exceptionality – the fiercely clung-to testament of the species’ unique capacity for consciousness and free will. The third of the intractable issues nested in intertextual theory consists in ‘the referential fallacy’. This is the idea that, because ‘books speak of books’ – as Adso reflects in The Name of the Rose – literature, rather than having any purchase on the ‘real world’ of sensory, psychological, and social experiences, in effect constitutes a closed loop within which a text can only ever refer to another. As Derrida notoriously puts it in Of Grammatology, ‘[t]here is nothing outside of the text’; and as Barthes phrases it with equal axiomatic confidence in S/Z, ‘nothing exists outside the text’.120 For its coiner, Michael Riffaterre, the ‘referential fallacy’ denotes 119 MacFarlane, 3. 120 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology [1967], trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ­corrected edn (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 158. | Roland Barthes, S/Z [1970], trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 6.

24 Introduction the firm belief of language users in nonverbal reference, their assumption that words mean by referring to a reality without the pale of language, to objects that exist in themselves before they become signs. As against this shibboleth, Riffaterre contends that the very core of the literary experience is that perceiving mode known as intertextuality. The text refers not to objects outside of itself, but to an intertext. The words of the text signify not by referring to things, but by presupposing other texts.121 The abandonment of the fallacy, he explains, paves the way for a higher form of literary appreciation: the ‘destruction of mimesis is the corollary to an epiphany of semiosis’.122 This ‘extreme view’, which stands in ‘vivid opposition to the ­standard philosophical view’, has not been widely espoused.123 Jeffrey Eugenides lightly satirizes the position in The Marriage Plot when an English ­major affirms that ‘[b]ooks aren’t about “real life”. Books are about other books’– an opinion which strikes the novel’s protagonist as (in a ­characteristic instance of the duality of responses to intertextuality) ‘both insightful and horribly wrong’.124 Intertextuality, as routinely used – that is, as a designator for text reuse – does not tend to imply so drastic a separation between literature and reality. ‘If it were a piece of literature’, as Arthur Danto puts it, the Referential Fallacy would offer a metaphor of extreme ­dislocation, putting life as a whole beyond the range of reference, displaying an existence lived out in an infinite windowless library, where book sends us to book in a network of reciprocal relationships the reader can inhabit like a spider.125 But even critics who remain committed to the idea of ‘semantical ­ligatures’ connecting language and literature to a world of material ­objects frequently identify self-referentiality – or intertextuality – as ‘one

121 Michael Riffaterre, ‘Interpretation and Undecidability’, New Literary History, vol. 12, no. 2 (Winter 1981), 227–42, 228–9. See also Michael Riffaterre, ‘Sémiotique intertextuelle: l’interprétant’, Revue d’esthétique, vol. 1–2 (1979), 128–50, 128. 122 Riffaterre, ‘Interpretation and Undecidability’, 239. 123 Arthur Danto, ‘Philosophy as/and/of Literature’, in Literature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 11. 124 Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot [2011] (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), 28. 125 Danto, 20.

Introduction  25 of the fundamental components of a work’s literariness’.126 Samoyault, for example, frames the binary in far less dichotomous and less mutually exclusive terms, averring that literature is ‘as much’ engaged in ‘a relationship with itself, with its history’ as in a relationship ‘with the world’.127 It need not be the case, in other words, that belief in some degree of referentiality ‘blinds the reader to intertextuality’.128 Intertextuality, in this acceptation, denotes literature’s inward-facing tendencies, its preoccupation with the memorialization and repetition of its own past. Such a construal of literature as at least in part about self-­referentiality foregrounds the importance of sensations of recognition – feelings of ‘déjà-lu’ or ‘already-read’ – in experiences of literary pleasure.129 The fourth aspect of intertextual theory which has given rise to ­misunderstanding concerns the plurality of perspectives it encompasses – its accommodation of both writerly and readerly points of view. Is it – to frame the matter as a question – a theory of literary production or literary reception? While some have sought to circumscribe its use by emphasizing either the role of the writer (for Jenny, ‘the very essence of intertextuality’ is ‘the labour of assimilation and transformation which characterizes any intertextual process’), others give primacy to the role of the reader (for Riffaterre, intertextuality is ‘the perception by the reader of the relationship between a work and others that have preceded or succeeded it’).130 But the opposition, as Daniel Ferrer points out, identifying the root of the ambiguity, is a false dichotomy: writers, after all, are readers before they are writers.131 Accordingly, a hermeneutic theory is by necessity also a genetic theory. As the foregoing summary makes clear, intertextual theory took shape through occasional pronouncements rather than through any programmatic manifesto-like flowering. ‘Intertextual theory’ is in this sense a phrase retrospectively applied to a relatively disparate assortment of contemporary statements. The syncretism and abstraction of these foundations have engendered much perplexity. To understand both the notion’s appeal and the resistances it elicits, this book reconstructs its prehistory in radical intellectual departures of the preceding century, unfolding according to a broadly chronological scheme whilst seeking to foster an integrated sense of the connections

126 Danto, 10. | Michael Riffaterre, ‘La trace de l’intertexte’, La Pensée, vol. 215 (­October 1980), 4–18, 4. 127 Samoyault, L’Intertextualité, 5. 128 Riffaterre, ‘Interpretation and Undecidability’, 233. 129 Barthes, S/Z, 19. 130 Jenny, 259–60. | Riffaterre, ‘La trace de l’intertexte’, 4. 131 Daniel Ferrer, ‘Quelques remarques sur le couple intertextualité-genèse’, in La ­C réation en acte: Devenir de la critique génétique, ed. Paul Gifford and Marion Schmid (Amsterdam and New York: Brill | Rodopi, 2007), 205–16.

26 Introduction between the periods and the fields of discourse it traverses. Each chapter addresses the writing of key figures in the genealogy of intertextuality as they ponder the meaning and workings of creativity. It situates these thinkers within historical and disciplinary contexts and analyses the uses to which their texts are put by the intertextualists, exploring all the suppressions and distortions thereby involved. As well as being a story of shifting intellectual paradigms, the story of intertextuality is also one of academic situations and personal relationships. Accordingly, each chapter – pace the death of the author – opens with a synopsis of the relevant facts of each protagonist’s life, highlighting how they responded to each other’s works and thus cumulatively and collectively – as well as ­i ndividually – shaped intertextual theory. Chapter 1 opens this genealogical survey by fixing its analytical gaze on ‘[t]he quiet, kindly, unassuming Charles Darwin’, whose probing into the ‘mystery of mysteries’ – ‘the origin of species’ – had the impact of an intellectual ‘bomb’ on the Victorian ideological landscape.132 It sets out his implicitly atheistic vision of organic life as a system of densely interrelated adaptations and shows how his theory of evolution – which makes change a function of repetition and difference – paves the way for the intertextualists’ portrayal of literary relations. It also traces wariness about intertextuality to its roots in Darwin’s theory, with all it implies about the ‘higher’ human faculties’ reducibility to material phenomena. Arguing against the all but universal belief in the emergence of new species by godly intervention or ‘special creation’, and in favour of gradualist ‘transmutation’, Darwin altered a Christian picture of immutable, essential order, and turned it into a self-regulating kaleidoscope characterized by flux. Under the sway of his hypothesis, the natural world became an evolving, historical realm, this new conception in turn precipitating a ‘revolution in Western thought’. The chapter considers the Origin of Species’ repercussions on religious, philosophical, and literary thought. ‘Everything interpenetrates’, states Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution: the chapter sounds out the ramifications of this insight in the writings of Herbert Spencer, John Addington Symonds, and Bergson himself, focusing especially on the Origin’s implications for human intelligence, consciousness, and creativity.133 Such early responses to Darwin’s ‘universal acid’ manifest reasoned and admiring excitement about the triumph of the scientific method and the new theory’s potential to shed light on other disciplinary fields.134 Yet their exalted materialism comes laced with a residual mysticism about literary creation. Whether c­ onscious or unconscious, 132 Philip Appleman, ‘Darwin: On Changing the Mind’ [1969], reprinted in Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Philip Appleman, second edn (New York and ­L ondon: W.W. Norton, 1979), 529–51, 538. | O, 5. 133 CE, 291. 134 DDI, 63.

Introduction  27 the inconsistency enacts an urge to protect human self-­esteem from the ‘death-blow’ which a more rigorous application of ­evolution to culture would represent.135 Bergson, for example, ­ultimately refuses to countenance mankind’s continuity with the rest of the animal world. Symonds’s essays display a similar failure of nerve in discussion of literature and the canon. While opining that criticism should be ‘treated as a branch of science’, he acknowledges that human pride balks at the depiction of the writer as a merely accidental nexus of aleatory processes, and seeks to reassure his readership that notions of value and merit need not be wholly abandoned (suggesting, for instance, that the glory formerly bestowed upon great authors should henceforth redound on the country which provided the conditions for their creativity to flower). The chapter considers the attempts by these and other commentators – ­Hippolyte Taine, G.H. Lewes, Leslie Stephen, T.S. Eliot, Northrop Frye – to think through the significance of Darwin’s discoveries for criticism. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, E ­ liot (whose interest in evolution is well documented) places relationality, flux, and history at the heart of his critical vision, deploying scientific analogies which cast the poet as a ‘finely perfected medium’ of forces ­operating beyond his or her agency.136 Yet Eliot, like Symonds before him, seeks, in a gesture which anticipates later twentieth-century responses to intertextuality, to retain mystery and genius as defining elements of literary creation. ‘Great poetry’, for Eliot – whatever his insistence on the critical task of uncovering the relations between artworks – is beyond explanation.137 A new poem, he insists, cannot be explained by anything that went before. This defensive discursive action, more recently repeated by Perloff and Goldsmith, fences off creativity from the deconstructive infringements of science. The chapter goes on to identify the organic tropes used in literary c­ riticism as evidence of the changing paradigms presiding over the field. The move ­ arwinian – symbol of away from the genealogical – at once biblical and D the tree, associated with what Barthes calls the ‘myth of filiation’, in favour of such images as the rhizome and anastomosis, reflects the more extensive relationality writ large in intertextual theory.138 Finally, the chapter discusses attempts by recent and contemporary biologists and philosophers to extend e­ volutionary mechanisms to the sphere of culture. Richard Dawkins’s postulation of the meme as a ‘unit of cultural transmission’ is read alongside the intertextual outlook according to which ‘any text is a mosaic

135 John Addington Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, Essays Speculative and Suggestive [1880], third edn (London: Smith, Elder: 1907), 4. 136 T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 18. 137 T.S. Eliot, ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ [Gideon Seymour Lecture, University of ­M innesota, 1956], in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), ­103–18, 108. 138 WT, 160–1.

28 Introduction of quotations’, a ‘permutation’ of already extant components.139 Amongst many commonalities, both theories entail the renunciation of the idea that we are ‘magical autonomous agents’ endowed with identity and free will. Instead, they implicitly demand acceptance of what ­Francis Crick refers to as the ‘Astonishing Hypothesis’ – the idea that ‘we’ are but ­temporary conglomerations of genes and memes, and that c­ reativity, as follows, is but a disunified, automatic functionality. If Charles Darwin, ‘gentlest of revolutionaries’, sought to soften the blow of his ‘bomb’ on his contemporaries, Nietzsche had no such qualms about the consequences of his own ‘dynamite’.140 Chapter 2 considers his crucial role as a forerunner to the intertextualist view of creativity. Through readings of his works and close attention to key essays by B ­ arthes and Foucault, it highlights the ways in which Nietzsche’s ­philosophy – especially his pronouncements concerning language, the death of god, and the act of interpretation as an expression of the will to power – was transposed in some of the most influential literary-­critical statements of the 1960s and 1970s. The connections which emerge from these juxtapositions are not merely conceptual, but extend to the distinctive styles adopted by Barthes and Foucault in emulation of the rhetorical and metaphorical modes of persuasion favoured by the ‘philosopher-artist’.141 The chapter starts by delving into the biographical backdrop of ­Nietzsche’s proto-intertextual outlook, exploring his acute sensitivity to influences (such as those of Schopenhauer and Wagner) and his a­ damant asseverations concerning the dangers of reading and concomitant need for self-protection. Turning to his philosophical writings, the ­chapter surveys his description of language as a ‘net’, the world as a ‘text’ characterized by infinite connectivity, belief in subjecthood as ‘crudely fetishistic’, and his account of the processes of artistic creation and ­reception.142 Tracing the use made of these ideas by Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida in the 1960s, the chapter brings out the formative impact of Nietzsche’s writings. The atheistic thrust of their theories of writing as an impersonal, ‘anti-theological’ activity and their liberation of interpretation (via the proclamation of the death of the author and the birth of the reader) are revealed to be corollaries of his radically deconstructive philosophy.143 And yet this post-structuralist appropriation of Nietzsche

139 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene [1976] (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 192. | WDN, 66. | Kristeva, ‘The Bounded Text’, 36. 140 Philip Appleman, Introduction to Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, xvi. | EH, ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, §1, 143–4. 141 Jacques Derrida names Nietzsche as the first philosopher to have addressed, among other themes, ‘the concept of the philosopher-artist’. – ­M argins of Philosophy [1972], trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 305. 142 TI, ‘“Reason” in Philosophy’, §5, 169. 143 DOA, 147.

Introduction  29 was perpetrated at the cost of a number of distortions, which the chapter exposes by comparing the philosopher and his epigones’ assessments of Flaubert. More than Nietzsche and Darwin, Freud shook the dominant Cartesian picture of a unitary consciousness, instigating yet another major shift in human self-conceptions. With ‘undaunted courage’, the ­‘Viennese libertine’ and his followers rejected the orthodoxies of their day.144 Chapter 3 investigates the ways in which Freud’s fascination with ‘the riddle of the miraculous gift that makes an artist’ shapes i­ntertextual theory.145 His treatise on the interpretation of dreams, his depiction of the mind as a textual space, his attention to the part played in the unconscious by condensation and displacement, his study of the roles of memory and repetition in psychic life – all join to conjure a naturalistic, demystified view of creativity which resonates with the biological and philosophical writings of Darwin and Nietzsche. Freud’s search for ‘the solution of the riddle of dreams’ led him, as well as to his hypotheses regarding their genesis in the agencies of the mind, to the formulation of an ‘art of interpretation’.146 In his approach to the psychoanalytical task of unscrambling what dreams scramble – on the necessity of reading against the grain of the ‘dream façade’ – Freud stands out as one of the inaugurators of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ for which post-structuralism would become known.147 As well as considering the elaborations of Freud articulated by Jacques Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, and Sarah Kofman in the 1960s, the chapter ponders H ­ arold Bloom’s mobilization of more narratively dramatic psychoanalytical ­tenets to counteract the deconstructive abstraction of intertextual theory. Though Bloom accords relationality the same prominence afforded it by the intertextualists (stating, for example, that ‘there are no texts, only relationships between texts’), he – like Symonds, Bergson, Eliot, Perloff, and Goldsmith – seeks to preserve the mystery of creativity by ringfencing the mental activities of authors from the full implications of the insight.148

144 Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, ed. and abridged by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus [1961] (London: Penguin in association with the ­Hogarth Press, 1993), 479, 392. The phrase ‘Viennese libertine’ was used by the New York neurologist Allen Starr on 4 April 1912 at a meeting of the Neurological Section of the New York Academy of Medicine, as was subsequently reported in the New York Times. 145 ‘Address Delivered at the Goethe House at Frankfurt’ [1930] – SE 21: 211. 146 SE 5: 590. | SE 20: 43. 147 SE 5: 491. | The phrase ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ was first coined by Paul Ricoeur in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation [1970], trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 30. 148 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading [1975] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 3.

30 Introduction As the Darwin chapter stretches from 1859 to the present by scrutinizing the overlap between intertextual and memetic theory, and as the Nietzsche chapter leads to reflections on the pitfalls of contemporary critical pluralism, Chapter 3 shines a light on the alignment between the extension of Freud’s writings in intertextual theory and ‘post-­cognitivist’ (or ‘extended mind’) theories of writing which likewise contend that we are not free actors with control over our choices so much as conduits for unconsciously made decisions. Chapter 4 marks a turn to the fields of linguistics and literary theory. It attends to twentieth-century ideas which, even more directly than the Darwinian, Nietzschean, and Freudian revolutions, paved the way for the coining of intertextuality by Julia Kristeva in 1966. The genealogical searchlight is aimed at attempts by literary scholars to derive from linguistics a scientific model which would endow their own discipline with rigour and systematicity. Saussure’s description of words as arbitrary signs bearing no natural connection to their referents, his distinction between langue and parole, and between synchronic and diachronic approaches to language, are envisaged as crucial stepping stones leading – via Russian Formalism and its aspiration to the algorithmic analysis of culture – to Barthes’ structuralist dream of ‘a unique science of literature’.149 Though Barthes would come to renounce that ‘euphoric dream of scientificity’, that theoretical moment left its imprint on the scientistic tenor of Kristeva’s early essays on intertextuality.150 Chapter 5 addresses the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin – which in the 1960s were newly re-emerging from the shadows of his oppression at the hands of the Soviets – and their crucial influence on intertextual theory. Rejecting the ‘theoretism’ of Saussure’s presentation of language and literature, Bakhtin proposes a ‘metalinguistics’ whose aim is precisely to study those aspects of the ‘life of the word’ which fall outwith the bounds of linguistics, with its armature of strict causal laws.151 Words, in Bakhtin’s writings, are charged with a contextual significance not accounted for by existing frameworks. They emit ‘sideward glances’, ‘make digs’ at others, ‘transfer from one mouth to another’, lead ‘socially charged lives’; utterances are always ‘half someone else’s’, and speech is always shaped by its addressee, ‘literally cring[ing] in the presence or the anticipation of someone else’s word, reply, objection’.152 For Bakhtin, dialogue is not merely a series of utterances between speakers; it is a ­quality inherent 149 Roland Barthes, ‘To Write: An Intransitive Verb’, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 11–21, 13; first published in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 134–45, and then as ‘Écrire: verbe intransitif’, in Le Bruissement de la langue, ed. François Wahl (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984), 21–31. 150 Roland Barthes, ‘Réponses’, Tel Quel, vol. 47 (1971), 89–107, 97; qtd in Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics [1975] (London: Routledge, 2002), 44. 151 PDP, 181. 152 PDP, 196. | PDP, 202. | DI, 293. | PDP, 196.

Introduction  31 in all language use, spoken or written: every utterance, he maintains, is moulded from within by the circumstances of its emergence. As well as emphasizing the pullulating relationality of language use, Bakhtin overturns the synchronic emphasis dominant in structural linguistics in favour of a renewed attentiveness to time and history. With Bakhtin, literary theory makes a return to its nineteenth-century investment in ‘the processes of evolution’ at work in the cultural realm. Bakhtin’s account of the novel as a genre rife with intonational quotation marks – ‘a system of languages […] interanimat[ing] each other’ – ­provides the starting point for Kristeva’s introduction of intertextuality in ‘Word, Dialogue, Novel’, and inflects her definition of texts as arenas of quotation, absorption and transformation, and permutation.153 Yet like others considered in this book before him, Bakhtin clings to the possibility of genuinely creative acts, writing against the idea of creation as a wholly determined ­phenomenon. He thus registers, as it were in advance, a position about one of ­intertextual theory’s most drastic implications – that concerning the dissolution of the shibboleth of creative origination. The sixth and final chapter narrows in on Kristeva’s coinage of ­i ntertextuality in ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’. Rehearsing her arrival in Paris from Sofia in 1965, it situates her early work in the context of 1960s structuralism and of her meetings, collaborations, and personal relationships with Tzvetan Todorov, Lucien Goldmann, Barthes, Sollers, and Derrida; her close association with Tel Quel; her shifting affinities with Marxism; and her experience of the ‘effervescent atmosphere’ of ‘Mai 68’.154 Against this high-octane intellectual and social backdrop, and among mentors and colleagues who held that ‘everything is illuminated by reference to structure’, Kristeva, from the outset, wished to ‘do something else’.155 Despite drawing on Chomsky’s generative ­g rammar and aligning herself with linguists Émile Benveniste and A.J. Greimas in her self-appointed mission to formalize literary creativity, she also felt the urge to ‘go beyond’ established forms of structuralism.156 Synthesizing her responses to Saussure’s newly published work on anagrams in Latin poetry and her readings of Bakhtin in the original Russian, Kristeva, working on the premise that all textual incorporations must follow the same rules, set out to describe the ‘mechanism of conjunction’

153 ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, DI, 41–83, 47. 154 Catherine Calvet and Cécile Daumas, ‘Julia Kristeva et Philippe Sollers: “Le vrai personnage du couple, c’est le temps”’, Libération, 24 July 2015, www.liberation.fr/ debats/2015/07/24/julia-kristeva-et-philippe-sollers-le-vrai-personnage-du-couplec-est-le-temps_1353323 [accessed 23 July 2019]. 155 Roland Barthes, ‘Why I love Benveniste (1)’, in The Rustle of Language, 162–4, 163. | Julia Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, L’Infini, vol. 1 (Winter 1983), 39–54, 44. 156 Julia Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, in The Tel Quel Reader, ed. ffrench and Lack (New York: Routledge, 1998), 25–49, 25.

32 Introduction between texts.157 Her attempts to deploy ‘the procedures of formal logic’ in ­service of literary analysis came in for virulent criticism by ­m athematicians incensed by what they saw as an error-strewn travesty of science more akin to incantatory magic than to path-blazing academic enquiry.158 But the unapologetic opacity Jacques Roubaud and Pierre Lusson deplored seems, if anything, to have augmented the ‘success’ of intertextuality, enveloping it in an aura of profundity which seems not to have deterred Kristeva’s readers. It may seem paradoxical to seek to uncover the origin of a term whose very point is to assert the illusoriness of such endeavours. But this study, heeding the lessons of its justly eminent protagonists, makes no claim to discover a singular origin, nor does it imply that any such could be found (on the contrary, the emphasis in the following pages is always on ­plurality of source and interpretation). Neither does it claim to be comprehensive. The enquiries presented here could, like all investigations, have been broadened in various directions. They could have included other thinkers alongside those it has selected as being of the utmost ­importance. It could have surveyed the impact of technologies of print, photography, audiovisual recording, word-processing, and internet connectivity.159 It could have reached further back in time, or further outwards in geographical space. What it shows – without having circumscribed its range too narrowly or unfeasibly widened its scope – is that intertextuality has a prehistory in culture, that it is a cultural node born of the intersection of powerful intellectual currents, that it too is the product of the ‘absorption and transformation of other texts’. And what its historical excavations also reveal is that most of the term’s current uses invoke a tight tangle of paradoxes which are as representative of contemporary critical practice as they were of the efflorescence of late 1960s theory.

157 Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 32. 158 Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 38. | AP1 and AP2. 159 This is territory explored by Marshall McLuhan in From Cliché to Archetype (New York: Viking, 1970).

1 Darwin’s ‘Universal Acid’

This chapter shows intertextual theory to be one of the products of ­Darwin’s evolutionary theory. It argues that both the theory, as it emerged in the 1960s, and the sceptical unease with which it was and continues to be greeted, are related to its roots in Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’.1 ­Indeed, wariness about intertextuality can ultimately be traced to ­anxieties about ‘evolution’ – a theory so multitudinous and far-reaching in its ramifications that it seems to many to threaten to ‘leak out’ from its p ­ rimary domain (the organic world) and dissolve the ‘higher’ human faculties – consciousness, intelligence, creativity – and their correlatives – free will and selfhood – into mindless, algorithmic processes. The fear is that an evolutionary approach, consistently applied to culture and to what Darwin called the ‘thinking principle’, will ‘not just explain but explain away the Minds and Purposes and Meanings that we all hold dear’.2 Such qualms are misplaced, but the sense they bespeak of the vast extent of evolution’s corollary consequences is well warranted. As Daniel Dennett puts it in ventriloquizing such anxious early responses to the theory, if mindless evolution could account for the breathtakingly clever ­artifacts of the biosphere, how could the products of our own ‘real’ minds be exempt from an evolutionary explanation? Darwin’s idea […] threatened to spread all the way up, dissolving the ­illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding.3 This chapter’s exploration of Darwin’s impact on critical theory unfolds in four parts. The first gives an account of Darwinian evolutionary theory.

1 The phrase is drawn from the title of Daniel Dennett’s book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London: Penguin Books, 1996). 2 The phrase appears in Darwin’s The Transmutation Notebooks, and is quoted by Jonathan Howard, Darwin: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 80: ‘There was one continuous “thinking principle” throughout the animals which Darwin viewed as being contingent on the presence of an organized nervous system’. | DDI, 63, 82. 3 DDI, 63.

34 Darwin The second surveys the epistemological revolutions the theory instigated. The third considers early applications of the scientific theory to literature and culture. The fourth discusses its implications for understandings of consciousness, intelligence, selfhood, creativity, and literary criticism. But first, a preamble.

Preamble: Making Biology Literal, Making Literature Biological In 2001, the Canadian experimental poet Christian Bök embarked upon the composition of a work he had already entitled The Xenotext Experiment.4 His aim: to write a poem in the medium of DNA and implant it in a living cell. Initially inspired by scientific endeavours to store data by encoding textual information into sequences of genetic nucleotides, Bök’s project is motivated by the ambition to ‘make literal’ a vision conjured by William Burroughs in 1962.5 ‘Word is an organism’, Burroughs wrote in The Ticket That Exploded, adding that ‘The word is now a virus.’6 The Xenotext Experiment is an attempt to turn life – in all its particulate, biological minutiae – into the material substance (rather than, as traditionally, the thematic substance) of literature: ‘the biochemistry of living things’, notes Bök, ‘has become a potential substrate for inscription’.7 In this context, the genome, no longer simply a code borne by nature which humanity has learnt to decipher, ‘can […] become a “vector” for heretofore unimagined modes of artistic innovation and cultural expression’.8 Bök’s objective is not merely to test out a futuristic archival system, or even to ‘extend poetry […] beyond the formal limits of the book’: it is also to mobilize the reactive qualities of organic matter to produce a reading-and-writing assemblage, ‘a machine for writing a poem’.9 Thus, while the first stanza of Bök’s short poem consists of words translated into the form of a functional genetic sequence through the use of a specially designed chemical cipher, the second stanza consists of protein ‘words’ secreted by the organism in response to this ‘foreign’ matter. By this process, ‘any style of life / is prim’ yields ‘the faery is rosy / of glow’.10 4 The title of the experiment is built on the Greek prefix ‘ξενο-, ξεν’-’, ‘the combining form of ξένος a guest, stranger, foreigner’. – OED. 5 Stephen Voyce and Christian Bök, ‘The Xenotext Experiment: An Interview with Christian Bök’, Postmodern Culture, vol. 17, no. 2 (January 2007), §60. 6 William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded [1962] (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 49. A nucleotide is defined as ‘any of the individual units of which nucleic acids are composed’ (OED). 7 Voyce and Bök, ‘The Xenotext Experiment’, §64. 8 Voyce and Bök, ‘The Xenotext Experiment’, §64. 9 Voyce and Bök, ‘The Xenotext Experiment’, §68 and §67. 10 As Bök explains, this stanza was itself, of course, wholly ‘programmed’. Indeed, the constraint of ‘scripting’ a suitable poetic reaction was one of the project’s

Darwin  35 Bök’s prophecies – that ‘DNA might become yet another poetic ­ edium’, that in the future ‘every geneticist [might] become […] a poet m in the medium of life’ – may seem hubristic, delusional, exalting, or alarming.11 But whatever the intellectual and emotive charges they may carry, their realization is no longer implausible. In 2011, Bök announced that ‘The Xenotext works!’; and his poem, along with his description of its history and biochemical functioning, was published in 2015.12 Biologists have long relied on bibliographic and textual analogies to convey to a lay audience the aims and procedures of their work. ­Twentieth- and twenty-first-century references to the genome as a ‘code’ or ‘information system’, to DNA as an ‘alphabet’, to the ‘translation’, ‘decoding’, ‘copying’, and ‘editing’, of the ‘messages’ involved in genetic transmission, to genome projects as ‘mammoth task[s] of information and word processing’, even to the ‘copyrighting’ of individual genes, are such common currency as to have become virtually invisible as metaphors, to the point that ‘it is now hard to imagine that genes did not always transfer information or that there were other ways of knowing and doing’.13 The casting of the genome as a ‘Book of Life’ has its own particular history – one explored by Lily E. Kay’s history of the genetic code – but the conception of biological knowledge as an act of reading forms part of a tradition which reaches back to ancient Judaic, Hellenic, and Christian conceptions of the ‘Book of Nature’ as the ‘Word of God’ and companion volume to the Bible.14 As this chapter will show, such metaphorical thinking was pervasive in nineteenth-century science writing – as is reflected, for example, in many intrinsic difficulties. – Christian Bök, ‘The Xenotext Works!’, 2 April 2011, www.­poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the-xenotext-works/ [accessed 13 ­February 2019]. 11 Voyce and Bök, ‘The Xenotext Experiment’, §68, §67, §64. 12 ‘Yesterday, I received confirmation from the laboratory at the University of Calgary that my poetic cipher, gene X-P13, has in fact caused E. coli to fluoresce red in our test-runs – meaning that, when implanted in the genome of this bacterium, my poem (which begins “any style of life/ is prim…”) does in fact cause the bacterium to write, in response, its own poem (which begins “the faery is rosy/ of glow…”). I have finally demonstrated the viability of the gene (which has taken me about a year to design).’ – Bök, ‘The Xenotext Works!’ | As announced in ‘The Xenotext Experiment’ (§66), the book comprises ‘the chemical alphabet for the cipher, the genetic sequence for the poetry, the schematics for the protein, and even a photograph of the microbe, complete with other apparati, such as charts, graphs, images, and essays, all outlining our ­results.’ – Christian Bök, The Xenotext: Book 1 (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2015). 13 Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), xv. | The ethical issues raised by this new form of ‘information’ were thought through and discussed in terms of patenting, copyright, and property law almost from the outset. 14 Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?, and ‘The Book of Nature’, Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 210–11.

36 Darwin Charles Darwin’s reference, in an image explicitly borrowed from his friend Charles Lyell, to the ‘natural geological record’ as ‘a history of the world imperfectly kept’.15 Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who famously articulated the case against the evolutionary hypothesis, drew on ­another textual image to assert that ‘all creation is the transcript in matter of ideas eternally existing in the mind of the Most High’.16 As Kay notes, the image of nature as a text has remained ‘a potent metaphor in the mind and in the laboratory’ throughout the twentieth and early ­t wenty-first centuries.17 The 1950s and 1960s saw the application of information theory to genetics, and the return, promoted by such ­illustrious theorists as Roman Jakobson, to the idea of the existence of close parallels, and perhaps even literal, ontological continuities, between linguistics and ­biology, language and DNA.18 Conceived at the dawn of the twenty-first century, The Xenotext ­E xperiment intertwines the strands of an already densely tangled vein of analogical thinking which was powerfully galvanized by the publication of Darwin’s evolutionary theory in On the Origin of Species and fuelled by every subsequent biological breakthrough. Depending as it does upon research at the bioengineering frontier, and exploiting the metaphorical 15 The analogy is one of a number of such bibliographic or linguistic images in ­Darwin’s writing. This one occurs in Chapter 9 of the Origin, entitled ‘Imperfection of the Geological Record’: For my part, following out Lyell’s metaphor, I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and on each page, only here and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly-­changing language, in which the history is supposed to be written, being more or less different in the interrupted succession of chapters, may represent the apparently abruptly changed forms of life, entombed in our consecutive, but widely separated formations. – O, 229 ‘Lyell’s metaphor’ is drawn from Volume III, Chapter 3 of the Principles of ­Geology, in which he argues against ‘popular theories respecting catastrophes’ by developing an invented scenario involving the discovery of cities buried ‘at the foot of Vesuvius, immediately superimposed upon each other’. Though an antiquary might be tempted to ascribe to a volcanic eruption the linguistic shift discernible from the ­ oman city, to the Italian city, he would likely be wrong to do so, Greek city, to the R for ‘many other dialects may have been spoken in succession, and the passage from the Greek to the Italian may have been very gradual, some terms growing obsolete, while others were introduced from time to time’. – Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology [1830–33] (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 378. 16 Samuel Wilberforce, ‘Darwin’s Origin of Species’, Quarterly Review, vol. 102 (1860), 225–64, 259; qtd in Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (London: Penguin, 1992), 499. 17 Kay, xviii. 18 Kay, 310–3.

Darwin  37 idioms that drive the work of many present-day geneticists, Bök’s project stands as the contemporary culmination of an age-old interest in thinking about the relations between nature and culture.19 It is against an earlier version of the same post-Darwinian discursive backdrop that the theory of intertextuality emerged in the 1960s. The following pages outline the ways in which advances in science, and the analogies to which they gave rise, reshaped the twentieth-century ­literary-critical landscape.

Darwin’s Theory Darwin’s theory of evolution, as presented to the world in his Origin of Species, was the fruit of a notoriously long gestation. It was during his five-year journey (1831–36) as naturalist aboard HMS Beagle that ­Darwin witnessed and documented the phenomena which would, in time, inform its principal tenets.20 The theory’s written genesis began in 1837, when Darwin, in what Jonathan Howard calls ‘a torrent of c­ reative insight of extraordinary intensity’, set to work compiling 900 pages of notes based on the observations made during his circumnavigation of the globe. 21 Darwin returned to these notes in 1842, ­compressing their sprawling mass into a 35-page sketch, and again in 1844, e­ xpanding the sketch into a 230-page essay. In 1854, he finally set to the task of formalizing his theory for publication, marshalling into order a body of evidence accumulated over the course of seventeen years. On 18 June 1858, he received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace outlining ‘exactly the same theory as [his]’, and rushed, in a state of acute anxiety, to claim priority by preparing the ‘Abstract’ which appeared as On the Origin of Species on 24 November 1859.22 19 The Xenotext Experiment is the fruit of Bök’s collaboration with Stuart A. ­Kauffman, MacArthur Fellow and iCore Chair at the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary. – Voyce and Bök, ‘The Xenotext Experiment’, §65. 20 Darwin wrote about the trip in his 1839 Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S Beagle, Under the Command of Captain Fitzroy, R.N., From 1832 to 1836 (London: Henry Colburn, 1839). 21 Howard, 6. 22 Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Including an Autobiographical Chapter, ed. Francis Darwin, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1887), vol. 1, 85. On 1 July 1858, Wallace’s letter led to a joint reading of his and Darwin’s work at the Linnaean Society. – See Desmond and Moore, 470. In the event, Wallace’s good grace about the matter was unimpeachable. – See Howard, 114–6. | The word ‘Abstract’ featured in the title Darwin first proposed. But his publisher, John Murray, insisted it be excised: ‘Darwin was set to call it An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties though Natural Selection, and even with the Victorians’ propensity for top-heavy titles ­Murray saw the profits draining away.’ – Desmond and Moore, 474. Before Wallace’s essay precipitated the composition of his ‘Abstract’, Darwin

38 Darwin Darwin’s theory went against the grain of a number of entrenched religious, scientific, and popular beliefs. Its first key proposition – as adumbrated by the book’s title – concerned the non-constancy of species. The idea was not new (it had, most notably, caused considerable controversy when Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was anonymously published in 1844), but neither was it widely accepted. 23 As Darwin remarks in his Autobiography of 1876, belief in what the nineteenth century called ‘transmutation’ was very much a minority position in the years preceding the Origin: It has sometimes been said that the success of the ‘Origin’ proved ‘that the subject was in the air’, or ‘that men’s minds were prepared for it’. I do not think that this is strictly true, for I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists, and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanence of species.24 This agrees with Philip Gosse’s confident assertions regarding immutability in Omphalos, a book published in 1857, just two years before the Origin: I assume that each character has been, and is, indelible and ­immutable; I believe […] there is a large preponderance of the men of science […] who will be at one with me here. 25 As Darwin acknowledges throughout the Origin, his vision of ceaseless, limitless change went directly against the contending and dominant doctrine of ‘special’ or ‘independent’ creation, according to which new species were periodically introduced into the world by an omnipotent, designing deity. 26 Even within Darwin’s close circle of scientific friends, had envisaged a ‘colossal book’. – Howard, 8. ‘I find to my sorrow that it will run to quite a big Book’, he wrote in 1856. – The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ed. F. Burkhardt and S. Smith, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–91), vol. 6, 238. Even his much shorter ‘Abstract’ comprises fourteen chapters, running to over 300 pages in twenty-first-century editions. 23 Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Other Evolutionary Writings [1844], ed. James A. Secord (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1994). 24 Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809–1882, With Original Omissions Restored, ed. Nora Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), 123–4. | In contrast to this, however, Howard avers that ‘By the middle of the nineteenth century virtually all philosophical speculation about the origins of things was evolutionary (though not Darwinian) in character.’ – Howard, 98. 25 Philip Henry Gosse, Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (London: John Van Voorst, 1857), 112. 26 ‘I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic beings […] which may be effected in the long course of time by nature’s power of selection’. – O, 84. Examples of Darwin’s

Darwin  39 there were those – the eminent geologist Charles Lyell, in particular – who found the idea of transmutation impossible to accept. Indeed, ­Darwin almost certainly had Lyell in mind in stating in his Introduction that ‘Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created.’27 In addition to making godly interventions superfluous to an explanation of the world, Darwin’s theory, drawing on the facts geology had ­provided in preceding decades, effected a radical historicization of ­nature. 28 Whereas eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classifications of  ‘the natural system’ assumed an immutable order, Darwin’s theory of mutation demanded that ‘every production of nature’ be regarded as having ‘had a history’. 29 Repeatedly, he emphasizes the ‘long lapse of ages’ through which the world has come to reach its present state: What an infinite number of generations, which the mind cannot grasp, must have succeeded each other in the long roll of years!30 The centrality of flux and history to Darwin’s theory amounted to an unambiguous rejection of the essentialist thinking which underpinned prevailing nineteenth-century naturalist taxonomies. Darwin’s title – On the Origin of Species – adumbrates what his book has to say about the constructedness of the very category of ‘species’ as well as about the origins of all animal life. Indeed, Darwin’s answer to what he terms the ‘mystery of mysteries’ – ‘the origin of species’ – is that species have

unambiguous rejection of ‘special creation’ can be found on O, 121 and O, 126–7. In the second instance, Darwin deplores the hypothesis of ‘independent creation’ on the grounds that It makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception; I would almost as soon believe with the old and ignorant cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as so mock the shells now living on the seashore. 27 O, 8. Darwin later expresses the hope that Lyell’s position may be open to revision: the most eminent palæontologists, namely Cuvier, Agassiz, Barrande, Falconer, E. Forbes, etc. and all our greatest geologists, as Lyell, Murchison, Sedgwick, etc., have unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the immutability of species. But I have reason to believe that one great authority, Sir Charles Lyell, from further reflection entertains grave doubts on this subject. – O, 229 28 For example, Darwin comments on the tree diagram featured in the book by asserting that ‘each horizontal line has hitherto been supposed to represent a thousand generations, but each may represent a million or hundred million generations’. – O, 96. The ‘lapse of time’ accounting for the makeup of the earth’s geological strata gives rise to many exclamations: ‘What an infinite number of generations, which the mind cannot grasp, must have succeeded each other in the long roll of years!’ – O, 208, 212. 29 The phrase is used many times in the Origin, and its meaning specifically discussed on 305–6. | O, 357. 30 O, 66, 212.

40 Darwin no origin: that, far from having any real existence, they are but useful ­conventions postulated by scientists in their attempts to tabulate ‘the natural system’.31 The ‘mystery’, as Darwin explains, simply vanishes under close scrutiny, for there is ‘no clear line of demarcation’, ‘no ­infallible criterion’, ‘no golden rule’, ‘no fundamental distinction between species and varieties’.32 The recognition of the reality of transmutation made the quest for the ‘origin’ of such groupings futile. The perception of the differences between them, and the evaluation and formalization of their degree, were both retrospective and arbitrary: ‘I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other’.33 Darwin’s argument reconfigured the prevalent nineteenth-century idea (historically, a medieval Christian concept derived from Plato and ­A ristotle) of the scala naturae or ‘Great Chain of Being’ – a godly ­ordained, hierarchical structure ‘leading from the lowest animalcules to the glory of mankind’.34 When Darwin used the phrase, he did so ­explicitly to refute the existence of clear-cut distinctions between ­species, arguing that the continuum of differences everywhere apparent in the natural world meant that plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations.35 Just as Darwin dismissed the possibility of discovering the past o ­ rigin of species, so he reconfigured the nineteenth century’s sense of the future. Contemporary thinking – again in keeping with a tradition derived from 31 O, 5. 32 O, 42, 46, 219, 205. 33 O, 43. 34 Howard, 22. The scala naturae is explicitly evoked at a number of points in the Origin. For example: ‘The inhabitants of each successive period in the world’s history have beaten their predecessors in the race for life, and are, in so far, higher in the scale of nature’. – O, 253. Darwin in effect redefines the scala naturae, erasing any implication of hierarchy, and using the phrase to conjure a merely descriptive notional map of the natural order as it stands. Only the tautological criteria of evolutionary survival and reproduction (tautological because they amount simply to the observation that a species is fit because it is alive), and relations of kinship, are relevant in the configuration of the Darwinian scale. As Howard explains, Throughout the eighteenth century the scale of nature was arrayed along the dimension of time and identified with progress. The relationship between this metaphysical conception and the natural world remained hopelessly confused by the elusiveness of the evaluative principle, by the continuing existence of the primitive forms alongside the highest products of evolution, and by the entire absence of any mechanism for deriving one from the other. – Howard, 23 35 O, 58. Also, 60, 69, 82 (‘orders now widely separated in the natural scale’).

Darwin  41 Aristotle and reinforced by Christian doctrine – tended to be strongly teleological. The Aristotelian idea of a ‘final cause’ (‘the end or purpose for which a thing is done, viewed as the cause of the act’) had become intertwined with that of progress.36 As Howard observes, The concept of perfection in the natural world was integral to pre-Darwinian rationalizations of nature as evidence of the designing hand of a providential Creator.37 ‘Teleology, as commonly understood’, wrote Thomas Henry Huxley in 1864, ‘received its deathblow at Mr Darwin’s hands’. 38 Evolutionary theory undercut Christian optimism, replacing ideas of perfection and progress – of progress towards further perfection – with that of chance. The scientist John Herschel, who was committed to the idea of change occurring in nature only as the outcome of the decisions of ‘an intelligence, guided by a purpose’, reportedly called it ‘the law of the higgledy-­ pigglety [sic]’.39 Darwin wrote pointedly against attempts to rationalize rudimentary organs (organs ‘bearing the stamp of inutility’) by invoking fantastical ends, deriding the view that these had been ­created ‘“for the sake of symmetry”, or in order “to complete the scheme of nature”’.40 Although his theory is frequently misrepresented as standing for progressive evolution, any ‘improvement’ was, for Darwin, ­relational or adaptational rather than intrinsic or essential.41 Likewise, he observed, discussions of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ forms were plagued by the failure to define these terms.42 If ‘higher’ meant anything in the description of biological forms, it denoted for Darwin the possession of organs which

36 The phrase, denoting ‘the end or purpose for which a thing is done, viewed as the cause of the act’, was ‘introduced into philosophical language by the schoolmen as a translation of Aristotle’s fourth cause, τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα or τέλος’. – OED. 37 Howard, 92. 38 Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘Criticisms on The Origin of Species’ [1864], reprinted in Thomas Henry Huxley, Collected Essays, 9 vols [1896–1911], vol. 2: Darwiniana (London: Macmillan, 1893), 82. 39 J.F.W. Herschel, Physical Geography of the Globe (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1861), 12. | ‘I have heard by round about channel that Herschel says my Book “is the law of higgledy-pigglety [sic]”.’ – Charles Darwin to Charles Lyell, 10 December 1859, Darwin Correspondence Project, www.darwinproject.ac.uk/ letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-2575.xml;query=2575;brand=default [accessed 23 July 2019]. 40 O, 331, 333. 41 As anthropologist Derek Freeman notes, Darwin’s position was one of ‘lifelong rejection of the doctrine of necessary progress’. – ‘The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer’, Current Anthropology, vol. 15, no. 3 ­(September 1974), 211–37, 218. 42 ‘I am aware that it is hardly possible to define clearly what is meant by the organisation being higher or lower.’ – O, 324.

42 Darwin evolution had rendered ‘more distinctly specialised for different functions’.43 Natural selection, he maintained, ‘leads to the improvement of each creation in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life’.44 Such ameliorations, as Darwin repeatedly stressed, are realized only by increments. As he several times points out in the Origin, the old adage that ‘nature makes no leaps’ holds true: ‘natural selection […] can never take a leap, but must advance by the shortest and slowest steps’.45 Evolution is non-saltational – a ‘slowly changing drama’ of ‘gradual modification’ unfolding over aeons and aeons.46 Only such a ‘principle of gradation’ could explain the complexity of an organ like the eye, the product of unreckonable centuries of accumulated, infinitesimal change.47 The Origin features numerous explanations of what this gradualism entails: that species are connected to each other by ­myriad ‘intermediate links’ which together form ‘a finely graduated organic chain’.48 What emerges from such statements is a picture of the organic world, evolved by ceaselessly occurring if minute variations, as a sphere ­characterized by massive interconnection. It is this interpenetration of all matter that Darwin is at pains to underscore through his refrain-like reiteration of the importance of the ‘intermediate linking forms’ by which all life is woven together.49 Darwin’s image of ‘a finely graduated chain’ (an image evidently chosen as an allusion to the ‘Chain of Being’) is emblematic of this ­emphasis on connectivity. Yet the metaphor’s linearity stands in awkward ­juxtaposition with the Origin’s description (and visual representation) of evolution as a branching process. Species and varieties, as Darwin drives home in chapter after chapter, form ‘one long and branching chain of life’.50 Branching is key to Darwin’s theory, for by it is implied ‘the common descent of all species of living things on earth from a single unique origin’.51 As the biologist Ernst Mayr explains, this view of nature’s evolutionary structure distinguishes Darwin’s account from other theories 43 O, 247. 44 O, 98 (italics mine). 45 O, 146. See also O, 154 (‘On the theory of natural selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, “Natura non facit saltum”’), and O, 181. 46 O, 232, 230. 47 O, 168, 140. 48 O, 206. 49 O, 47. Darwin deploys a great many synonymous phrases to drive home his sense of the natural world’s intricate connectivity, referring, for example, to ‘fine intermediate gradations’, ‘transitional varieties’, ‘transitional forms’, ‘transitional links’, ‘connecting links’, ‘fine, intermediate, fossil links’, ‘finest graduated steps’. – O, 219, 130, 206, 208, 220, 252. 50 O, 222 (italics mine). 51 Ernst Mayr, ‘Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought’, Scientific American (24 ­November 2009) (first published in July 2000 and based on a lecture given in

Darwin  43 advanced in earlier decades. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, for instance, had ‘endorsed linear evolution, a teleological march toward greater perfection that had been in vogue since Aristotle’s concept of Scala Naturae, the chain of being’.52 Stephen Alter agrees: this branching model was a new feature in transmutationist t­ heory, not found prior to Darwin. The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste ­Lamarck, writing in 1809, and the anonymous author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), each had retained a ‘great chain of being’, a progressive evolutionary ladder extending from the simplest and lowest organisms directly up to humankind.53 This important innovation, famously represented by the diagram printed in the Origin, made evolution genealogical.54 Darwin called the mechanism by which ‘the great Tree of Life’ was shaped natural selection, defined as the ‘preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations’.55 Although Darwin tried to convey the fact as ‘truly wonderful’, and withheld explicit discussion Stockholm on 23 September 1999), www.scientificamerican.com/article/­darwinsinfluence-on-modern-thought/ [accessed 23 July 2019]. 52 Ernst Mayr, ‘Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought’. Writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the first naturalist to articulate a fully integrated theory of universal evolution. Unlike Darwin, however, he held that acquired and deliberately cultivated patterns of behaviour could be inherited. ­Gillian Beer notes that ‘[i]n Lamarck’s theory conscious endeavour, as well as reflexive habit, are agents of evolutionary change’, and points out that while ‘[i]ntention is the key to Lamarck’s concepts’, Darwin’s writing constantly seeks to dissolve the illusion of human agency as a force for evolutionary change. – Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 19. 53 Alter, 18. 54 ‘The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during each former year may represent the long succession of extinct species […] so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.’ – O, 99–100. Darwin called the image ‘my simile of tree’. In 1856, Darwin read an article of Wallace’s (‘On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species’, published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History in 1855), in which intimations of his incipient discovery of natural selection were legible, if cryptic. ‘Darwin missed its import, as did others. It is “nothing very new”, he scribbled on his copy of the Annals. “Uses my simile of tree”, but “it seems all creation with him.”’ – Desmond and Moore, 438. 55 O, 100, 63. | In ‘Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought’, Mayr usefully highlights the scientific rivals to Darwin’s theory, emphasizing what is often forgotten: that even among those who did not object to evolution on religious or philosophical grounds, his scientific contentions regarding the mechanism of evolution were not

44 Darwin

Figure 1.1  D  arwin’s ‘Tree’ Diagram. Source: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection ­(London: John Murray, 1859), 117.

of the consequences of this genealogical scheme for mankind, it was this strand of his argument, second only perhaps to the implied superfluity of god to the creation of the universe, which ignited Victorian outrage. 56

immediately accepted. Darwin’s natural selection had to prove its superiority over rival hypotheses: For 80 years after 1859, bitter controversy raged as to which of four ­competing evolutionary theories was valid. “Transmutation” was the establishment of a new species or new type through a single mutation, or saltation. “Orthogenesis” held that intrinsic teleological tendencies led to transformation. Lamarckian ­evolution relied on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. And now there was ­Darwin’s variational evolution, through natural selection. Darwin’s theory clearly emerged as the victor during the evolutionary synthesis of the 1940s, when the new ­discoveries in genetics were married with taxonomic observations concerning systematics, the classification of organisms by their relationships. 56 ‘It is a truly wonderful fact – the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from ­familiarity – that all animals and all plants throughout time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group […] The several subordinate groups in any class cannot be ranked in a single file, but seem rather to be clustered round points, and these round other points, and so on in almost endless cycles.’ – O, 99. | This aspect of Darwin’s theory, though he took care not to spell out any of its

Darwin  45 Crucially, Darwin’s ‘great Tree of Life’ asserted humanity’s continuity with the rest of the organic world. All difference became a matter of degree rather than of kind. To many contemporaries, humanity appeared to have been unacceptably toppled from its pedestal – rendered equal, in Pope Pius IX’s words, to the ‘dumb animals’ over whom the god of Genesis had granted it dominion.57

Open Fields: The Darwinian Revolution Although not without personal ambition, Darwin was ‘the gentlest of revolutionaries’, avoiding controversy as much as possible, remaining out of the limelight, and following the furious debates opposing his friends and adversaries from the security of his rural retreat at Down House, in Kent.58 But of course he knew as he was writing it that the ­Origin was likely to cause ‘a considerable revolution in natural history’ and beyond.59 In Philip Appleman’s words, the Origin was ‘a bomb’

particulars (confining himself to a glance to a future in which ‘[l]ight will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’), excited particular fury among his contemporaries, giving rise to vicious satirical cartoons and turning a single remark at a routine society meeting into one of the best-known lines of the century. – O, 359. As Desmond and Moore reflect, a witty repartee on Saturday 30 June 1860, at a section meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, was destined to be blown out of all proportion to become the best known “victory” of the nineteenth century, save Waterloo. When Bishop Samuel Wilberforce asked Thomas Henry Huxley ‘whether it was on his grandfather’s side or grandmother’s side that he was descended from an ape’, Huxley retorted by mocking Wilberforce’s ignorant and bombastic intervention: If […] the question were put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means & influence & yet who employs these faculties & that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into grave scientific discussion I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape. – Desmond and Moore, 492, 495, 497 57 ‘Pride […] reduces this same man to the level of the dumb animals, perhaps even to raw matter’. – Pope Pius IX (whose papal reign lasted from 1846 to 1878), qtd in Philip Appleman, ‘Darwin: On Changing the Mind’, Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Philip Appleman, 2nd edn (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1979), 529–51, 537–8. 58 Appleman, Introduction, Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, xvi. | I rejoice that I have avoided controversies, and this I owe to Lyell, who many years ago, in reference to my geological works, strongly advised me never to get entangled in a controversy, as it rarely did any good and caused a miserable loss of time and temper. – Darwin, Autobiography, 126 59 O, 356.

46 Darwin dropped by ‘the quiet, kindly, unassuming Charles Darwin’ into the ‘satisfied and satisfying world’ of Victorian England.60 The passage of time has not dampened Darwin’s resonance for scientists. Writing in 1959, on the hundredth anniversary of the Origin’s publication, the historian of science Bert James Loewenberg hailed the book as ‘a revolution in Western thought’.61 In 2000, Ernst Mayr likened Darwin to Luther, Calvin, Locke, Leibniz, Rousseau, and Voltaire, averring ‘Modern thought [to be] most dependent on Charles Darwin’.62 For Howard, meanwhile, No working biologist can read and understand Darwin’s work without realizing the overwhelming importance it has had for the development of biological thought in general.63 Indeed, the consensus among twentieth- and twenty-first-century ­scientists and philosophers of science is not merely that ‘Darwin was right’, but that the revolution he began, and the realization of the extent of its repercussions in other spheres of knowledge, are still underway.64 Daniel Dennett, for instance, notes that ‘new waves of Darwinian thinking keep coming’, and that the ‘mind-boggling’ implications of evolution have yet to be fully grasped.65 By this he means not merely that genetic engineering and evolutionary theories of culture are still in their early stages, but that the ‘far-reaching implications for our vision of what the meaning of life is or could be’ have neither been comprehensively ­explored nor accepted.66 These emphases on the interdisciplinary reach of evolutionary theory ring in tune with Darwin’s own anticipation, at the end of the Origin, of the intellectual developments to which his ­insights would likely lead: In the distant future I see open fields for far more important r­ esearches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary 60 Appleman, ‘Darwin: On Changing the Mind’, 534. 61 Bert James Loewenberg (ed.), Charles Darwin: Evolution and Natural Selection (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1959), qtd in ‘Darwin: On Changing the Mind’, 537. 62 Mayr, ‘Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought’. 63 Howard, Preface, n.p. 64 John Hermann Randall, Jr, ‘The Changing Impact of Darwin on Philosophy’ [1961], in Darwin, ed. Appleman, 314–25, 325. Randall continues: ‘The way he suggested we look at the world still is, to our best and most critical knowledge, pretty close to what the world is actually like. On the hundredth anniversary of the publication of his magnum opus, and hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth, could any featherless biped, or indeed any rational animal, claim a better record?’ 65 DDI, 63. 66 DDI, 19.

Darwin  47 achievement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.67 Later sections of this chapter will discuss the ramifications of evolution for conceptions of intelligence, creativity, and criticism. The most immediate responses to Darwin’s theory, however, came from the spheres of religion and philosophy – and these are those examined next. Religion The most virulent attacks on Darwin came from the religious establishment, quick to sense the threat his theory represented for the ­belief system it upheld. Though wary of being associated with aggressive ­anti-religious sentiment himself (not least for familial reasons), D ­ arwin was fully conscious of the dynamite charge his theory carried, and primed his great supporter Thomas Henry Huxley for the defence of his ‘deity “Natural Selection”’, jokingly referring to his friend as his ‘good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel – i.e. the devil’s gospel’.68 Huxley, who became notorious as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, gleefully rubbed salt into the Church’s wounds by comparing his friend’s impact to the ‘gigantic movement’ of the Reformation.69

67 O, 359. 68 Darwin to Asa Gray, 5 June 1861, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 2, 373. | Darwin to T.H. Huxley 8 August 1860, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 2, 331. | Darwin’s religious scepticism was a cause of particular and enduring distress to his wife Emma, who frequently expressed the wish that his work would not lead to a complete turn away from Christian faith and thus extinguish the hope of eventual reunion with lost loved ones after death. Darwin was also nervous about the disapproval which the publication of his theory would arouse amongst the Cambridge scientist-clerics – Henslow, Sedgwick, Jenyns – who ‘had all helped to make his career and reputation’. – Desmond and Moore, 280–1, 507, 294. Darwin is candid about his own disbelief in his Autobiography: disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine. – Qtd in Howard, 12 69 ‘We are in the midst of a gigantic movement, greater than that which preceded and produced the Reformation, and really only the continuation of that movement.’ – ­ uxley, T.H. Huxley to his wife, 8 August 1873, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry H ed. Leonard Huxley, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1900), vol. 1, 397.

48 Darwin Without being spelled out (‘I do not discuss the origin of man […] I do not bring in any discussion about Genesis, &c. &c.’), the bald incompatibility of Darwin’s account with the story of Creation enshrined in the Bible was plain to see.70 Where Genesis told of the Creation of a perfect world in six days, Darwin’s scheme made the evolution of the world into its current form a process unfolding over aeons.71 Darwin’s materialist theory, as his religious detractors immediately discerned, dispenses with all supernatural explanations of the world, effectively ‘[e]liminating God from science’.72 In an essay of 1890 entitled ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, the poet and literary critic John Addington Symonds argued that Evolution, like Copernicus’s ‘heliocentric theory of the Solar System’, turned Christian myths such as those of Eden and the Fall, ‘previously accepted as a matter of literal and historical fact’, ‘into symbol, allegory, metaphor’.73 Evolution also ‘destroyed the old conception of miraculous occurrences’, and ‘scholastic teleology’ was superseded by ‘more rational notions of order’.74 Indeed, if Darwin remained diplomatically evasive on the matter of the existence of god, the Origin features some unambiguous attacks against the doctrine of ‘special creation’: the view which most naturalists entertain, and I formerly e­ ntertained – namely, that each species has been independently created – is erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are not immutable.75 Darwin knew that this view was particularly dear to adherents of ‘natural theology’, a school of thought that had become ascendant in the eighteenth century and epitomized by William Paley’s Natural Theology, or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802). ‘Natural theology’ was, in Howard’s summary, ‘a counsel of optimism, a belief in the essential goodness of the Creator’.76 By contrast, Darwin impugns belief in special creation

70 Darwin to Lyell, 28 March 1859, The Life and Letters of Charles, vol. 2, 152. 71 As well as being incompatible with Genesis, the almost unimaginably vast ­time frame outlined in the Origin contradicted more recent attempts to date the Creation exactly. In the seventeenth century, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, had ­famously posited man’s creation at 9:00 A.M. on October 23 in the year 4004 B.C. – Philip Appleman, ‘Darwin: On Changing the Mind’, 533. 72 Ernst Mayr, ‘Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought’. 73 John Addington Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, Essays Speculative and Suggestive [1880], 3rd edn (London: Smith, Elder: 1907), 1–26, 2–3. 74 Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, 4. 75 O, Introduction, 8. 76 Howard, 16–18. Howard also remarks that ‘There is no doubt that Darwin’s deep immersion in natural theology at Cambridge did him a great service. The adaptation of plants and animals to their conditions was a real phenomenon which any evolutionary theory would have to explain.’ – 17.

Darwin  49 as a form of deliberate blindness and a libel upon god: ‘To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown cause. It makes the works of God a mere mockery and a deception.’77 But to many the relinquishing of this falsely comforting ‘preconceived opinion’ seemed unthinkable and a prospect to be combatted at all costs, whatever the scientific evidence Darwin provided.78 Such was, for instance, the position of even so eminent a scientist as Adam Sedgwick, Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge and President of the Geological Society of the British Association.79 In his anonymous review of the Origin in The Spectator, he professed ‘detestation’ of a theory he deemed ‘unflinching’ in its ‘materialism’ and ‘baseless’ in its claims concerning natural selection.80 Somewhat less surprisingly perhaps, a writer for the American periodical Catholic World in 1878 asserted that The theory of evolution has no scientific character, is irreconcilable with the conclusions of natural history, and has no ground to stand upon except the worn-out fallacies of a perverted logic. To call it ‘hypothesis’ is therefore to do it an honor which it does not deserve. A pile of rubbish is not a palace, and a heap of blunders is not a hypothesis.81 In only slightly less vitriolic language, Pope Pius IX disparaged ‘the aberrations of Darwinism’ as a ‘fabric of fables’, and called for the t­ heory to be invalidated on scientific grounds: the corruption of this century, the guile of the depraved, the danger of oversimplification demand that such dreamings, absurd as they are, since they wear the mask of science, be refuted by true science.82 Amidst the struggle for public opinion, some of Darwin’s supporters regretted his own timidity, pinpointing his occasional resort to ­Christian

77 O, 126. 78 O, 355. 79 Sedgwick was a mentor of Darwin’s for a time in Cambridge, and Darwin was fully aware of his position regarding the scientist’s duty to provide moral guidance as well as knowledge. – Desmond and Moore, 94–5, 236. 80 Adam Sedgwick, ‘Objections to Mr. Darwin’s Theory of the Origin of Species’ [1860], in Darwin, ed. Philip Appleman, 220–2, 222. Sedgwick had been open with Darwin concerning his dismay about the book – describing parts of it as ‘utterly false and grievously ­m ischievous’ and evoking the ‘absolute sorrow’ it caused him to read it – in a private letter sent on 24 November 1859. – Desmond and Moore, 487. 81 ‘Dr Draper and Evolution’, Catholic World, vol. 26 (1878), 775, qtd in A ­ ppleman, ‘Darwin: On Changing the Mind’, 536. 82 Pope Pius IX, qtd in Appleman, ‘Darwin: On Changing the Mind’, 536.

50 Darwin phrases. The feminist sociologist Harriet Martineau, for example, found fault with her friend’s confusing rhetorical tergiversations: The theory has not a theological basis. I think it a pity that 2 or 3 expressions wd [sic] seem to warrant the notion: but I believe them to be […] used as ordinary current expressions, without reference to their primitive meaning.83 Martineau is right in her detection of inconsistencies in Darwin’s ­language. His use of the lexical field of creation testifies to the difficulty he experienced in eradicating the traces of the Christian myth of origins from his text. He refers to his hypothesis as ‘the theory of descent from a few created forms’, to the time elapsed since ‘the first creature […] was created’, and calls ‘the works of the Creator’ superior to ‘those of man’.84 The book’s final pages are marked by an intensification of this obfuscating, conciliatory language, with Darwin referring to ‘the laws impressed on matter by the Creator’. From the second edition (tweaked by Darwin in response to the book’s early reception, including by his Christian wife), this politely capitalized figure is granted pride of place amid the ample cadences of the book’s famous closing sentence: There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.85 Even when such deistic overtones are muted, intentionalist ­rhetoric infiltrates Darwin’s treatment of the elected stopgap, a reverently ­capitalized and gallantly gendered ‘Nature’, seemingly summoned to fill the vacuum left by the silence surrounding god. Praising her ‘higher workmanship’, Darwin writes of ‘the hand of Nature’ selecting for the good ‘of

83 Harriet Martineau to George Holyoake, 26 December 1859, The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau, vol. 4, Letters, 1856–1862 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), 208–9. She continues: ‘What a work it is! – overthrowing (if true) revealed religion on the one hand, & Natural [theology] (as far as Final Causes and Design are concerned) on the other. The range and mass of knowledge takes away one’s breath.’ 84 O, 343, 2359, 142. 85 O, 359, 360. By contrast, see Darwin’s discussion of the meaning of the ‘Natural System’: ‘many naturalists think that something more is meant by the Natural System; they believe that it reveals the plan of the Creator; but unless it be specified whether order in time or space, or what else is meant by the plan of the Creator, it seems to me that nothing is thus added to our knowledge’. – O, 304–5. | Regarding Darwin’s differences from his wife in matters of religious belief, see note 68 of this chapter. | For a discussion of related changes to the second edition, see Gillian Beer, Introduction to O, vii–xxv, xx–xxi.

Darwin  51 the being which she tends’.86 Natural selection, by extension of the same logic, is rendered as an omniscient, omnipotent, but ceaselessly labouring force, daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.87 Insufficient though it was to quell Christian upset, the ­personification of nature left the door open to a paradoxical form of materialist and ­spiritual optimism which retains traction to this day. Philosophy Christian worldviews were not the only ones affected by Darwin’s ­theory: for deists, agnostics, and atheists as well, evolution demanded the revision of many beliefs. Indeed, though Darwin was certainly ‘not a philosopher’, many philosophers agree that his work ‘had more impact on philosophical thinking than that of any other scientist’.88 Herbert Spencer In fact, the percolation of evolutionary thinking into philosophy had ­begun even before Darwin published his Origin. Herbert Spencer, the eminent Victorian polymath whose name remains familiar in the ­t wenty-first century primarily for its negative associations with ‘Social Darwinism’ and that most sensational of phrases, ‘the survival of the fittest’, was the first philosopher of evolution.89 He achieved extremely 86 O, 50, 65, 66. 87 O, 66. 88 Tim Lewens, Darwin (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 1. Lewens points out that Darwin sometimes referred to himself as a ‘philosophical naturalist’: ‘by this he meant not that his aim was to ponder the philosophical consequences of his ideas, but that he meant, as a mere ‘natural historian’ might not, to try and explain those phenomena which the Origin so painstakingly repertoried. Being a ­‘philosophical naturalist’ was what led Darwin to advance his evolutionary hypotheses: that the organic evolves and that all living things are related on the Tree of Life by common descent on the one hand, and that natural selection is the mechanism by which this evolution is governed.’ – Lewens, 2. | Janet Radcliffe Richards, ‘Darwin the Philosopher?’, The Lancet, vol. 358 (6 October 2001), 1118. 89 Spencer coined the term in 1864: ‘This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called “natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life”. That there is going on a process of this kind throughout the organic world, Mr. Darwin’s great work on

52 Darwin ­ uropean high renown in his own day, becoming ‘the single most famous E intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century’.90 In a limited sense, he has an even greater claim to being identified as a thinker of ‘evolution’ than Darwin, having used the term long before it made its first appearance in the sixth edition of the Origin in 1872.91 Spencer began writing about issues of social and intellectual evolution in 1850 in Social Statics. His 1855 Principles of Psychology continued the discussion of ‘the genesis of mind in all its forms, sub-human and human’.92 Spencer envisaged evolution as a universal explanatory mechanism from at least as early as 1857, when his essay ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’, was published in the Westminster Review.93 By 1858, he had elaborated a prospective catalogue for his ten-volume ‘System of Synthetic Philosophy’ (to comprise his First Principles, Principles of Biology, Principles of Psychology, Principles of Sociology, and Principles of Ethics), the completion of which would occupy him for most of the rest of his life. At the heart of Spencer’s ‘Synthetic System of Philosophy’ lies the ambition to extend the reach of evolutionary laws beyond the organic world and show that ‘this law of organic evolution is the law of all evolution’: Whether it be in the development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, in the development of Society, of G ­ overnment, of Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, this same advance from the simple to the complex, through ­successive differentiations, holds uniformly. From the earliest the Origin of Species has shown to the satisfaction of nearly all ­naturalists’. – ­Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology, 2 vols (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1864), vol. 1, 444–5; see also 468. Darwin himself first used the term with reference to Spencer in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868) before including it in the fifth edition of the Origin (1869). 90 Thomas Hylland Eriksen, and Finn Sivert Nielsen, A History of Anthropology (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2001), 37. 91 Regarding Darwin’s introduction of the term, see R.B. Freeman, The Works of Charles Darwin: An Annotated Bibliographical Handlist, 2nd edn (Folkstone: ­Dawson, 1977), 79. Spencer used the term for the first time in an essay entitled ‘Manners and Fashion’, first published in the Westminster Review, vol. 61 (April 1854), and reprinted in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (London: Williams & Norgate, 1891), vol. 3, 1–51, 23. In later years, he explained that he chose it ‘as a word fit for ­expressing the process of evolution throughout its entire range, inorganic and ­organic’. – The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, ed. David Duncan (London: Methuen, 1908), 551n. See International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968), ‘Herbert Spencer’, www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Herbert_Spencer. aspx ­[accessed 23 July 2019]. 92 Spencer, qtd in Freeman, ‘The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and H ­ erbert Spencer’, 215. 93 Herbert Spencer, ‘Progress: Its Law and Causes’, Westminster Review, vol. 67 (April 1857), reprinted in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, 3 vols (London: ­Williams and Norgate, 1991), vol. 1, 8–62.

Darwin  53 c­ osmical changes down to the latest results of civilization, we shall find that the transformation of the homogenous into the heterogeneous, is that in which Evolution consists.94 Spencer barely acknowledges Darwin’s work in his own writings. In First Principles, published three years after the Origin, Darwin’s theory of natural selection is confined to a footnote.95 Spencer felt confident of the superiority of his all-encompassing scheme. Darwin’s hypothesis, in his view, could simply be incorporated into his own broader theory: yesterday I arrived at a point of view from which Darwin’s doctrine of ‘Natural Selection’ is seen to be absorbed into the general theory of Evolution as I am interpreting it.96 The convoluted phrasing of the assertion suggests something of the mental contortions involved in so subsuming Darwin’s theory. And ­indeed, in reality, ‘[t]he disparity between Spencer’s “general doctrine of evolution” and Darwin’s theory of the origin of species was immense’.97 As Derek Freeman explains, The theories of Darwin and Spencer were unrelated in their origins, markedly disparate in their logical structures, and differed decisively in the degree to which they depended on the supposed mechanism of Lamarckian inheritance and recognized ‘progress’ as ‘inevitable’.98 Spencer’s work was markedly less scientific and altogether more mystical: Spencer’s doctrine, not having resulted from any kind of sustained empirical enquiry, was explicitly deductive in its structure, and rested on the metaphysical supposition that all evolutionary change was due to the persistence of an immanent ‘Power’ that was both ‘unknown and unknowable’. In marked contrast, Darwin’s theory, as he published it in 1859, was authentically scientific, for, ­without recourse, for all practical purposes, to metaphysics or ‘final causes’ it postulated, on the basis of massive factual evidence, a non-­ teleological mode of evolutionary change and incorporated a precise definition of the mechanism of natural selection which (as has since been conclusively demonstrated) does indeed result in the genetic evolution of populations of living organisms.99 94 Herbert Spencer, First Principles (London: Williams and Norgate, 1862), 148–9. 95 Freeman, ‘The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer’, 216. 96 Spencer to his father, 9 June 1864, qtd in Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, 2 vols (London: Williams and Norgate, 1904), vol. 2, 99–100. 97 Freeman, ‘The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer’, 215. 98 Freeman, ‘The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer’, 212. 99 Freeman, ‘The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer’, 215.

54 Darwin As Freeman’s synopsis makes clear, Spencer’s theory suffers from a number of pitfalls, both in terms of its scientific methodology and in terms of its mystical bent. Spencer continued to believe that all phenomena, including evolution, are ultimately attributable to ‘one cause’, or ‘one force’ or ‘Power’ that ‘transcends human knowledge and conception’.100 The same disposition to substitute faith for evidence subtends Spencer’s enduring commitment to the idea of ‘human perfectibility’.101 It was this belief in the transmission of acquired characteristics – his unwavering adherence to ‘extreme Lamarckian assumptions’ – which, exposed as they were by the major discoveries in cytology (the study of the structure and function of cells) made in the 1880s and the subsequent advances of Mendelian genetics, finally led to ‘the overshadowing and ultimately the eclipse of the misconceived evolutionary theory’ he had defended from the 1840s until his death in 1903.102 Piqued by Spencer’s eminence, Darwin privately dismissed his work as ‘dreadful hypothetical rubbish’, rejecting his conclusions as the products of drastically unsound speculation: His deductive manner of treating every subject is wholly opposed to my frame of mind. His conclusions never convince me […] His fundamental generalisations (which have been compared in importance by some persons with Newton’s laws!) – which I daresay may be very valuable under a philosophical point of view, are of such a nature that they do not seem to me to be of any strictly scientific use. They partake more of the nature of definitions than of laws of nature.103 However wrong he turns out to have been, Spencer remains an important figure in the history of evolutionary thinking: his abiding passion for the extrapolation of evolutionary laws to all other domains of knowledge makes him a precursor to many later intellectual projects, and the high regard he enjoyed in his lifetime did much to prepare the way for later applications of evolution to culture. John Addington Symonds In his Essays Speculative and Suggestive of 1890, John Addington Symonds acknowledged the importance for philosophy of Darwin’s discoveries as well as of Spencer’s application of evolution to ‘every branch 1 00 Spencer, qtd in Freeman, ‘The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and ­Herbert Spencer’, 215. 101 Freeman, ‘The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer’, 215. 102 Freeman, ‘The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer’, 218. 103 Darwin to Charles Lyell, 25 February 1860, Darwin Correspondence Project, www. darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-2714.xml;query=dreadful%20 hypothetical%20rubbish;brand=default;hit.rank=1§hit.rank1 [accessed 23 July 2019]. | Darwin, Autobiography, 109.

Darwin  55 of knowledge’.104 Taking stock of their combined impact, and seeking to identify ‘the main fact in the intellectual development of the last half-century’, he found it in ‘the triumph of the scientific method in relation to all man’s thought about the universe’, and, specifically, in its culmination ‘in the hypothesis of Evolution’.105 For Symonds, evolution was not, as it was for Spencer, a matter of certainty. Rather, it was a speculative framework, an avenue for research: Evolution, in the widest sense of the term, has to be viewed as a generalisation which combines the data of previous scientific and philosophical thought in a new conception of the universe. Like all such generalizations, it is hypothetical, provisional. […] It must rather be regarded as a comprehensive scheme of thought, inviting demonstration, stimulating discovery, and capable of manifold application.106 Like Spencer, Symonds acknowledges the unsustainability of Christian belief in the light of evolution (‘Evolution destroyed the old conception of miraculous occurrences’).107 And like Spencer, Symonds continues to espouse a different kind of mysticism verging on deism: ‘This does not dispel the mystery which surrounds life. It does not pretend, when rightly understood, to give a final or sufficient explanation of Being.’108 In fact, Symonds links evolution to hopes of spiritual renewal: the Philosophy of Evolution, instead of crushing the aspirations of humanity and reducing our conceptions of the world to chaos, may be expected to reanimate religion and to restore spirituality to the universe.109 Symonds envisions ‘[t]he fundamental conception […] that all things in the universe exist in process’ as the basis of ‘the Evolutionary method of thought’.110 For Symons, this insight constituted a serious challenge to Christianity and other established belief systems. For if such an extrapolation were ­accepted, even religions would emerge as what they are, transient systems of thought – subject to change, and bound, like all things, to wax and wane: By penetrating our minds with the conviction that all things are in process, that the whole universe is literally in perpetual Becoming, it 104 John Addington Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to ­Criticism’, in Essays Speculative and Suggestive, 27–52, 27. 105 Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, 1. 106 Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, 2. 107 Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, 4. 108 Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, 5. 109 Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, 2. 110 Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, 5.

56 Darwin has rendered it impossible for us to believe that any one creed or set of opinions possesses finality. Religions, like all things that are ours and human, have their day of declension; nor can Christianity form an exception to the universal rule.111 Henri Bergson A focus on becoming is central to the next major philosophical attempt to think through the ontological and epistemological implications of evolutionary theory. In 1907, very nearly half a century after the Origin appeared, almost two decades after the publication of Symonds’ essay, and four years after Spencer’s death, the French philosopher Henri Bergson published Creative Evolution, arguing against the idea of special creation and insisting on the need for philosophy to adjust to the fact of evolution: ‘the language of transformism’, he stated, ‘forces itself now upon all philosophy’.112 For Bergson as for Symonds before him, it was imperative that philosophers should renounce a worldview characterized by stasis, and learn to see life as the ‘indivisible process’ that science had found it to be.113 Symonds had asserted the unity of life, portraying ‘[t]he whole scheme of things […] as a single organism’.114 Likewise, B ­ ergson insists that ‘in the domain of life the elements have no real and separate existence’.115 The world implied by evolutionary theory is a realm of extreme interconnection. Nothing is separable, particulate. Every cell on ‘the genealogical tree of life’, marvels Bergson, is linked to every other, ‘united with the totality of living beings by invisible bonds’.116 Nature emerges as, in Michel Foucault’s words, ‘a teeming continuity of beings all communicating with one another, mingling with one another, and perhaps being transformed into one another’.117 Evolution turns a world of bounded, straightforwardly apprehensible objects into a world of processes without discrete beginnings or endings. The proliferation of life is matched by the interpenetration of its parts: ‘everything interpenetrates’.118 Within such a network, causal connections of the kind sought by scientists necessarily prove elusive, the slightest change in the system being attributable to an ‘almost infinite number of infinitesimal causes’.119 Amid this fusion, it becomes ‘impossible to isolate phenomena from their antecedents and their consequents’.120 Living beings cannot be studied outwith the 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, 5. CE, 30. CE, 34n. Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, 5. CE, 34n. CE, 49–50. OT, 152. CE, 291. CE, 64. Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, 5. Naturalists had observed as much before, of course, but, not having a hypothesis which would explain the fine and

Darwin  57 ­matricial ecosystems by which they are formed and with which they are interwoven at every point. Moreover, for Bergson, living organisms are merely secondary to the process – life itself – which they exist to channel: ‘the living being is above all a thoroughfare […] the essence of life is in the movement by which life is transmitted’.121 Spencer, Symonds, and Bergson’s related analyses can, for the p ­ urposes of exposition, be considered under the headings of process, intelligence, consciousness and language, and creation. PROCESS, BECOMING

The emphasis, in the writing of Spencer and Symonds, on ‘progress’ or process, is central to the insights subsequently set out by Foucault in The Order of Things (1966). The pre-evolutionary world, he there r­ ehearses, had been a stable system in which organic entities were classified and arranged as points along a ‘scale’, ‘ladder’, or ‘chain’ of nature. This ‘classical age’, as he dubs it, was an age in which knowledge was c­ onstituted and displayed by juxtaposition in ‘herbariums, collections, gardens’. It was the age of the taxonomical table, in which each living thing was assigned a place in a timeless system: the locus of this history is a non-temporal rectangle in which, stripped of all commentary, of all enveloping language, creatures present themselves one beside another, their surfaces visible, grouped according to their common features122 For Foucault, the eighteenth-century scientific predilection for envisaging the world through the visual medium of such static tables meant that biology, as the study of life itself, simply ‘did not exist’: if biology was unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history.123

e­ xtensive integration of the organic world, could but wonder at the fusions everywhere ­apparent. Michel Adanson, writing in the eighteenth century, held that nature is ‘a confused mingling of beings’ that seem to have been brought together by chance: here, gold is mixed with another metal, with stone, with earth; there, the violet grows side by side with an oak. Among these plants, too, wander the quadruped, the reptile, and the insect; the fishes are confused, one might say, with the aqueous element in which they swim, and with the plants that grow in the depths of the waters… This mixture is indeed so general and multifarious that it appears to be one of nature’s laws.’ – Cours d’histoire naturelle [1772] (Paris: Fortin, Massin et Cie, 1845), 4–5, qtd in OT, 161. 121 CE, 142. 122 OT, 143. 123 OT, 139. This is repeated on 175: ‘natural history, in the Classical period, cannot be established as biology. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, in fact, life does not exist: only living beings.’

58 Darwin With the advent of biology in the nineteenth century, ‘life becomes one object of knowledge among others’.124 Prior models of knowledge – typically built upon a layered scaffolding of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Christian premises and based on the quest for essence and stable ­definition – were opened to question and revision.125 Darwin’s tree seemed a world away from the tabular catalogues of Cuvier or Buffon. With his Origin, history entered the epistemological frame, effecting ‘a fundamental temporalizing of all our thinking’.126 Botanists and natural historians had looked to anatomical structure to erect an ordered system (a ‘mathesis’, in Foucauldian terminology) based on similarity, ‘the likeness of surfaces and lines’.127 Darwin and other evolutionary scientists looked beyond apparent structure, studying invisible functions, and showing seemingly skeletal and biological ­analogies to be rooted in parentage. This shift, which Foucault dates to Cuvier rather than to Darwin (suggesting the sway of national narratives on the writing of history and philosophy), involved a shift from flatness to depth, exterior to interior, and caused the insertion of ‘a whole ­profound mass of time […] history’ into ‘the old flat world of animals and plants, engraved in black on white’.128 INTELLIGENCE

Darwin, Spencer, Symonds, and Bergson agree in conceiving of human intelligence as an evolved and evolving function rather than the product of an act of mysterious creation. Darwin’s Origin closes on the expectation of future discoveries in the understanding of the mental faculties. For Symonds, ‘the genius of a Newton or Shakespeare is the ultimate known product of elemental matter shaped by energies and forces’.129 For ­B ergson, ‘the intellect is only one of [evolution’s] ­aspects or ­products’.130 Bergson differs from his precursors, however, in considering the limitations of intelligence. Indeed, as he points out (and 124 OT, 177. 125 ‘To Aristotle, definition was not merely a verbal process or a useful tool of thought; it was the essence of knowledge. It was the cognitive grasp of the eternal essences of Nature, a fixed, necessary form of knowing because an expression of the fixed, necessary forms of Being.’ – Appleman, ‘Darwin: On Changing the Mind’, 534. 126 Randall, Jr, ‘The Changing Impact of Darwin on Philosophy’, 317. As Appleman remarks: ‘Natural selection pictured the world in a constant process of change, but without any apparent prior intention of going anywhere in particular or of becoming anything in particular.’ – ‘Darwin: On Changing the Mind’, 537. | And ‘it is in this classified time, in this squared and spatialized development, that the historians of the nineteenth century were to undertake the creation of a history that could at last be “true” – in other words, liberated from Classical rationality, from its ordering and theodicy: a history restored to the irruptive violence of time.’ – OT, 143–4. 127 OT, 149. 128 OT, 150. 129 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Art and Literature’, 27. 130 CE, 116.

Darwin  59 notwithstanding the achievements of minds such as those of Newton and Shakespeare), the fact of human intelligence having been honed by evolutionary processes explains its shortcomings. Because it developed in order to optimize animal ­survival by facilitating swift action (such as escape from predators), human intelligence is constitutionally blinkered to the flux which is the law of the organic world.131 Reliant as they are on the detection and analysis of p ­ atterns of repetition and difference to anticipate future events, human brains instinctively and systematically decompose continuous ­processes into segments.132 Where there is movement, the intelligence registers only a series of discrete states.133 Such spontaneous, indeed automatic behaviour presents obvious practical benefits, but these, as Bergson points out, have nothing to do with knowledge or understanding.134 Human intelligence, in other words, has evolved in ways which ­necessarily hinder its ability to grasp the reality of evolution.135 And ­because evolution is the law of all things, ‘The intellect is ­characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life.’136 This, according to ­B ergson, ­explains why ‘becoming’ has for aeons remained beyond our grasp, and why the challenge of modern philosophy is to respond to the findings of biology and confine Aristotle’s theory of nature to history.137 It is the philosopher’s task, argues Bergson, to overcome the practical purposes for which intelligence evolved.138 Although all three are in agreement about the ontological fact of life as process, Spencer, Symonds, and Bergson differ markedly in their assessment of how philosophy should position itself in relation to science. While Spencer posits the universality of evolutionary law, Symonds views evolution as an analogical discovery procedure, a working hypothesis which might lead to important breakthroughs in the realm of culture. Symonds, that is, retains a strong and explicit awareness of his use of evolution as a metaphor, an exploratory device rather than a truth.139 131 ‘We regard the human intellect, on the contrary, as relative to the needs of action.’ – CE, 168. 132 ‘[O]ur intellect […] succeeds by making, in the flux of the real, instantaneous cuts, each of which becomes, in its fixity, endlessly decomposable’. – CE, 273. 133 ‘Of the discontinuous alone does the intellect form a clear idea.’ – CE, 170. 134 CE, 171. 135 ‘The intellect is not made to think evolution’. – CE, 179. 136 CE, 182. Or as Nietzsche remarks, ‘the conditions of life might include error’. – GS, §121, 117. 137 ‘[B]ecoming itself slips through our fingers just when we think we are holding it tight’. – CE, 180. | CE, 192. 138 ‘It is the philosophers who are mistaken when they import into the domain of ­speculation a method of thinking which is made for action.’ – CE, 171. 139 ‘I have pictured those phases of incipient and embryonic energy, of maturely ­perfected type, of gradual disintegration, and of pronounced decadence, under the metaphor of organic development and dissolution. But it must be remembered that this is, after all, a metaphor.’ – Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary ­Principles to Criticism’, 37. | John Holmes notes as much in ‘Victorian Evolutionary

60 Darwin In marked contrast, Bergson calls for philosophy and ­science to part ways. ‘[P]hilosophy’, he insists, ‘cannot and must not accept the ­relation established […] between metaphysics and science’.140 In ­particular, ­philosophers cannot be content merely to ‘leave the consideration of facts to positive science’.141 Knowingly or unknowingly ­reprising Nietzsche’s attack on scientists’ misplaced confidence in their access to truth, ­Bergson sees it as the philosopher’s task to interrogate the assumptions and the language of science.142 However, Bergson rejoins Spencer and Symonds in the startling ­mystical swerve which takes hold in Creative Evolution’s final sections. Having seemed intent on the presentation of a lucid, scientifically informed, comparative assessment of contending strands of evolutionary thinking, Bergson’s writing takes a sharp turn away from materialism in his book’s closing pages, and concludes in a flurry of references to god, souls, and ‘supermen’.143 Bergson’s key point in this impassioned peroration concerns humanity’s inassimilable difference from other animals. As many nineteenth-century commentators had noted, and as the title of The Descent of Man (1871) made explicit, Darwin’s theory entailed a drastic re-appraisal of mankind’s place within the natural world.144 ‘Evolution’, as Symonds had noted in 1890, ‘dealt a death-blow at the assumptions of human self-conceit’.145 But while Symonds felt able to state that ‘[w]e have accepted the probability of man’s development from less organised types of animal life with tolerable good-humour, after a certain amount of rebellious disgust’, Bergson took the diametrically opposite view, asserting the existence of a ‘radical difference’ between mankind and the rest of the animal world.146 In seeming contradiction with his own emphatic insistence on organic continuity earlier in the book, Bergson places man on a pedestal: ‘man comes to occupy a

140 141 142 143

144

145 146

Criticism and the Pitfalls of Consilience’, in The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures, ed. Nicholas Saul and Simon J. James (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), 101–12, 110–11. CE, 212. CE, 212. See OTL. ‘It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will, man or ­superman, had sought to realize himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way.’ – CE, 290. Looking back from the twentieth century, Appleman sees ‘the Darwinian ­revolution’ as ‘a revolution in man’s conception of himself’ as well as a revolution in science. – Appleman, ‘Darwin: On Changing the Mind’, 537. | Loewenberg puts the matter plainly: ‘Man was seen to be a part of nature, and nature was seen to be a part of man.’ – Charles Darwin, 21. Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, 4. Symonds, 4. | CE, 287 (‘Radical therefore, also, is the difference between animal consciousness, even the most intelligent, and human consciousness.’).

Darwin  61 privileged place. Between him and the animals the difference is no longer one of degree, but of kind’.147 CONSCIOUSNESS AND LANGUAGE

What makes humanity different is consciousness. Indeed, much of ­Bergson’s thesis concerns the emergence of consciousness and the ­distinction between two radically different types of knowledge: ‘instinct’ or ‘intuition’ on the one hand, ‘intelligence’ on the other.148 Bergson posits a proportional relation between choice and intelligence, and one of inverse proportionality between choice and instinct.149 Consciousness, he writes, signifies hesitation or choice. Where many equally possible actions are indicated without there being any real action (as in a deliberation which has not come to an end), consciousness is intense. Where the action performed is the only action possible (as in an activity of the somnambulistic or more generally automatic kind), consciousness is reduced to nothing.150 Consciousness, according to Bergson, means choice, invention, freedom. And it is through the ‘immaterial body’ of language that consciousness becomes ‘incarnate’.151 Thanks to language, humanity emerges as ‘the unique, exceptional success which life has won at a given moment of its evolution’.152 Once it emerges, consciousness becomes (in a way that is not satisfactorily explained) ‘the motive principle of evolution’.153 In a baffling return (admittedly couched in the conditional mood) to pre-evolutionary thinking, Bergson sees humanity as the ‘raison d’être’, and end or telos of all evolutionary processes.154 All other elements of 147 CE, 200. 148 CE, 158. 149 ‘[T]he consciousness of a living being may be defined as an arithmetical difference between potential and real activity’. – CE, 160. 150 CE, 159. 151 ‘[L]anguage, which furnishes his consciousness with an immaterial body in which to incarnate itself’. – CE, 288. 152 CE, 289. 153 CE, 200. 154 Bergson asserts, for example, that ‘man might be considered the reason for the existence of the entire organization of life on our planet’ and that ‘It is in this quite special sense that man is the “term” or “end” of evolution.’ – CE, 203 and 289. Such statements stands in marked contrast, if not in outright contradiction, to earlier pronouncements in which Bergson defines life itself as ‘creative’, or anti-teleological, evolution: ‘Life in its entirety, regarded as a creative evolution, is something analogous; it transcends finality, if we understand by finality the realization of an idea conceived or conceivable in advance.’ – CE, 244–5.

62 Darwin the organic world are reduced to the status of metaphorical ‘soil’, their purpose appearing, in retrospect, to have been solely to provide the conditions in which humanity might flower.155 All other species are described as stepping stones on humanity’s upward journey, to be regarded as ‘mere’ refuse once their role has been fulfilled.156 Endowed with consciousness as it is, Bergson sees no limit to humanity’s potential.157 Having so emphatically defined life as pure process, and pictured it as ‘an immense wave’, a flowing ‘current’, a ‘vital impetus’, or ‘élan vital’, Bergson recasts process as progress, and in so doing introduces a largely unexplained contradiction into his account.158 Indeed, for Bergson, consciousness, though it emerges from gradualistic modifications, effects a radical rupture in the tree of life. The grandiose imagery and mystical sweep of his prose – which all at once echoes and departs from Darwin’s conclusion to the Origin – infuses the peroration with its own rhetorical élan: On flows the current, running through human generations, subdividing itself into individuals. […] Thus souls are continually being created, which, nevertheless, in a certain sense pre-existed. They are nothing else than the little rills into which the great river of life ­divides itself, flowing through the body of humanity.159 In his belief in the possibility of humanity’s emancipation from its genealogical tree, Bergson goes well beyond Spencer’s Lamarckian belief in ‘progress’ and Symonds’s (equally Lamarckian) depiction of human history as ‘a slow and toilsome upward effort on the part of our ancestors from the outset’.160 In his restoration of the hierarchies Darwin had abolished through his rigorously relativistic definitions of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’, Bergson in effect reintroduces saltationality – a ‘sudden leap’ separating humanity from its forebears – into his account of the descent of man.161 That for him this descent is an awesome ascent, a unique and almost supernatural evolutionary pole-vault, is clear from his description of humanity as ‘one immense army galloping’ – a force ultimately

155 ‘The organized world as a whole becomes as the soil on which was to grow either man himself or a being who morally must resemble him.’ – CE, 290. 156 CE, 290. 157 ‘The animals, however distant they may be from our species, however hostile to it, have none the less been useful traveling companions […] who have enabled [consciousness] to rise, in man, to heights from which it sees an unlimited horizon open again before it.’ – CE, 290–1. 158 CE, 290, 294, 277, 284. 159 CE, 294. 160 Symonds, 4. 161 CE, 203.

Darwin  63 having the power ‘to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death’.162 As later sections of this chapter will argue, this contradictory refusal to countenance the full extent of mankind’s continuity with the rest of the animal world also arguably motivates certain kinds of resistance to intertextuality, a theory in which is nested a view of the evolution of humanity’s mental faculties by, as Darwin puts it, ‘gradation’.163 CREATION

As well as providing a model for intertextual theory’s depiction of ­textuality as an inextricably meshed matricial system, Bergson, ­fulfilling the implicit promise of his title, touches explicitly on the ­philosophical ­question of creation itself. The hypothesis of the world as a godly creation, the fruit of a supreme designing intelligence, is swiftly d ­ ismissed.164 For Bergson, life itself is ‘creative evolution’, ‘endlessly continued ­creation’, ‘unceasing transformation’.165 It is precisely to this aspect of life, ­however, that human beings are constitutionally blind. Bergson rejects the traditional view of creation as magical, saltational genesis. Origins seem mysterious to us, holds Bergson, because ‘we want the genesis of [the universe] to have been accomplished at one stroke or the whole of matter to be eternal’.166 Confusion on this matter – the kind of confusion that has led to belief in gods – springs from the limitations of our evolved intelligence. Creation itself, argues Bergson, is a wrongheaded concept, born of our attempts to make sense of the world by breaking it down into discrete, manageable parts: Everything is obscure in the idea of creation if we think of things which are created and a thing which creates, as we habitually do, as the understanding cannot help doing.167 Bergson allows that some degree of ‘creation’ enters into human acts: Every human work in which there is invention, every voluntary act in which there is freedom, every movement of an organism that manifests spontaneity, brings something new into the world.168

162 163 164 165 166 167 168

CE, 295. O, 359. CE, 30. CE, 178, 195, 252. CE, 262. CE, 270. CE, 261.

64 Darwin But such ‘creations’ are formal rather than substantial, consisting merely in permutation and reorganization.169 Bergson’s chosen analogy is to the poet’s handling of the alphabetic sequence: Consider the letters of the alphabet that enter into the composition of everything that has ever been written: we do not conceive that new letters spring up and come to join themselves to the others in order to make a new poem. But that the poet creates the poem and that human thought is thereby made richer, we understand very well170 Bergson was an ‘international celebrity’ in the period in which Creative Evolution was published: Between 1905 and 1914 Bergson became the most inspirational and popular lecturer in France, consistently commanding large, overflowing crowds at the Collège de France171 Creative Evolution was his most popular book, running to twenty editions between 1907 and 1918.172 But Bergson’s prominence was in large part a factor of controversy. He was in fact the object of vitriolic ­attacks by other philosophers. And it is not difficult to see why the s­ emantic imprecision, logical lapses, and exalting lyrical sweep of ­B ergson’s prose exasperated those working in a more analytical ­tradition. Léon Blum, for example, decried Bergson’s ‘anarchical mysticism’, and in Le Bergsonisme, ou une philosophie de la mobilité (1912), the most ­sustained and aggressive of these attacks, Julien Benda deplored his writing as an instance of ‘the very darkest romanticism’.173 The onslaught, which Charles Péguy referred to as ‘perhaps the boldest frontal assault in our time against a dominant philosophical school’, would be continued in Benda’s La ­Trahison des Clercs (1927), in which Bergson is pinpointed as both cause and symptom of a form of intellectual corruption threatening the integrity of contemporary society.174 Notwithstanding such fiery dismissals, Bergson’s influence was ­enormous – and relevant not least, as will appear below, for the role it played in shaping T.S. Eliot’s ideas of the relation between tradition and the individual talent.

169 CE, 261. 170 CE, 262. 171 Robert C. Grogin, ‘Rationalists and Anti-Rationalists in Pre-World War I France: The Bergson-Benda Affair’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, vol. 5, no. 2 (Winter 1978), 223–31, 223, 224. 172 Grogin, 224n. 173 Julien Benda, qtd in Grogin, 225, 226. 174 Grogin, 225, 227.

Darwin  65

Applications to Literature and Culture Generalizability and Interdisciplinary Extensions The interdisciplinary adaptability of Darwin’s theory is rooted in its ­abstraction, which springs from the fact that it was, by necessity, based on a number of generalizations. The theory was speculative in three principal ways: first, because the Origin focused on a limited (though vast) sample of species and evolutionary phenomena; second, because it was advanced in spite of what Darwin candidly and repeatedly refers to as ‘the imperfection of the geological record’; third, because the discovery of genes and the Modern Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s still lay decades in the future.175 As a result of these lacunae, Darwin’s theory is, in Dennett’s terms, ‘substrate neutral’ or ‘algorithmic’ in its formulation, consisting in a system of relationships between unspecified variables: Its being the idea of an algorithmic process makes it all the more powerful, since the substrate neutrality it thereby possesses permits us to consider its application to just about anything. It is no respecter of material boundaries.176 It is this adaptability which prompts Dennett to compare Darwin’s theory to ‘universal acid’: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.177 This exportability represents ‘reductionism incarnate’ – reductionism being understood not in the negative sense of excessive and inadequate simplification it has misleadingly accrued, but as a promise ‘to unite and 175 Darwin conceded that this imperfection was ‘the most obvious and gravest o ­ bjection which can be urged against my theory’. – O, 207. | The ‘Modern Synthesis’ ­denotes ‘the fusion of Mendelian genetics and Darwin’s natural selection […] Darwin showed that evolution involves selection interacting with variation within p ­ opulations, ­Mendel that the bases of this variation are discrete units of heredity (genes).’ – ­M ichal Allaby, A Dictionary of Zoology, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199233410.001.0001/ acref-9780199233410-e-5476 [accessed 23 July 2019]. 176 DDI, 82. 177 DDI, 63. | John Dewey expresses a similar idea: ‘Doubtless the greatest dissolvent in contemporary thought of old questions, the greatest precipitant of new m ­ ethods, new intentions, new problems, is the one effected by the scientific revolution that found its climax in the “Origin of Species”.’ – ‘The Influence of Darwinism on P ­ hilosophy’ [1909], in John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy: And Other Essays in Contemporary Thought [1910] (New York: Henry Holt, 1951), 1–19, 19.

66 Darwin explain just about everything in one magnificent vision’.178 As Howard points out, such reductionism, rightly understood, is the ultimate aim of modern evolutionary biology: The whole point of understanding the modern theory of evolution is to understand that human life and human society are to a certain extent biological issues, painfully difficult to deal with in these terms, but still biology.179 Literature and Literary Criticism Much attention has been paid in recent decades to the responses to ­evolutionary thinking explicitly or implicitly inscribed in the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The names typically invoked in this regard including George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Reade, Mrs Mary Humphry Ward, George Gissing, Charles Kingsley, George Meredith, Algernon Swinburne, ­Samuel Butler, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Émile Zola, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad.180 ‘Less familiar’, as Appleman points out, ‘is the history of literary-critical responses to evolution’.181 Responses to evolutionary theory by literary intellectuals writing in the second half of the nineteenth century – most notably Hippolyte Taine, Leslie Stephen, G.H. Lewes, and John Addington Symonds – show them to have been keenly interested in what literary criticism might learn from biology. Each ponders the ways in which literature might lend itself to the same kind of systematic analyses, and thus produce the same exhilarating sense of progress, as the natural sciences. Herbert Spencer In his First Principles (1862), Spencer finds the law of evolution exemplified in ‘all products of human thought and action; whether concrete or abstract, real or ideal’. In a very cursory survey (which he nonetheless 178 DDI, 82. 179 Howard, Preface, n.p. 180 See Beer, Darwin’s Plots; George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988); Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Roger Ebbatson, The Evolutionary Self: Hardy, Forster, Lawrence (Brighton: ­Harvester Press and Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1982); Redmond ­O’Hanlon, ­Joseph ­C onrad and Charles Darwin: The Influence of Scientific Thought on ­C onrad’s ­Fiction (Edinburgh: Salamander Press, 1984); also see Appleman, ­‘Darwin: On Changing the Mind’, 547–8. 181 Appleman, ‘Darwin: On Changing the Mind’, 548.

Darwin  67 deems a ‘basis of induction […] sufficiently wide’), he considers the evolution of language from ‘the exclamation’ to a body of ‘sixty thousand or more unlike words, signifying as many unlike objects, qualities, acts’; of painting and sculpture; of the ‘industrial and aesthetic’ Arts; of the Fine Arts; of ‘fiction and […] drama’.182 In all, he details a pattern of e­ volution towards greater realism. Increasingly, he notes, ‘­improbabilities, like the impossibilities which preceded them, are disallowed’.183 Hippolyte Taine Hippolyte Taine’s History of English Literature (1866) includes an introduction which sets out his view that the study of literature belongs to the study of history. Works of art, he states, are like fossils bearing witness to the men that produced them.184 Taine’s view (shared in the period by such proponents of aesthetic physiology as Grant Allen – d ­ isciple of ­Herbert Spencer – and Constance Naden) is that literature is produced by its authors in response to ‘the necessities of their organs and the original bent of their intellects’.185 Taine advocates a mode of study of literature which, instead of yielding static taxonomies, would open a window onto ‘the living man’, ‘the man who acts, the man corporeal and visible, who eats, walks, fights, labours’.186 The aim of such endeavours, however, should not be to stop at such anthropological facts, but to gain access to the reality of ‘the genuine man’ in all his invisible ­interiority.187 It is this ‘underworld’, and, beyond it, the evolution of our psychology, which is ‘proper to the historian’.188 Taine adopts a strictly causal, m ­ aterialistic view of even ‘moral’ or ‘physical’ phenomena – ambition, courage, and truthfulness, he maintains, lend themselves to such ­enquiries as much as do digestion, muscular movement, or animal heat.189 Asserting belief in the systematicity of human ideas and behaviour, Taine identifies ‘the race, the surroundings, and the epoch’ as key categories, applying an ­evolutionary model to the analysis of civilizations and their literatures.190

182 Spencer, First Principles, 196, 162–3, 165, 194, 195. 183 Spencer, First Principles, 195. 184 Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature [1866], 2nd and revd English edn, trans. H. Van Laun (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1872), iv. 185 Taine, 2; Grant Allen’s Physiological Aesthetics (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1877) opens by stating that ‘The object of the present work is to elucidate physiologically the nature of our Æsthetic Feelings.’ 186 Taine, 2, 3. 187 Taine, 4. 188 Taine, 4. 189 Taine, 6. 190 Taine, 7, 10. | That Taine has Darwin in mind is signalled by an allusion the title of the Origin:

68 Darwin In this Darwinian perspective, literature emerges as a realm governed by deterministic relations of influence: the one artist is the precursor, the other the successor; the first has no model, the second has; the first sees objects face to face, the ­second sees them through the first; […] in short […] the first work has determined the second […] the one which follows has always the first for its condition191 The elements of a civilization, he explains, are as inextricable as those of an organic whole: in a civilisation, religion, philosophy, the organisation of the family, literature, the arts, make up a system in which every local change induces a general change, so that an experienced historian, studying some particular part of it, sees in advance and half predicts the character of the rest.192 Taine’s hypothesis is of a ‘law’ of cultural change. If moral entities were quantifiable, as physical ones are, the future forms of art and ­civilization could be forecast: if these forces could be measured and computed, one might deduce from them as from a formula the properties of future civilisation 193 As Taine’s mission statement unfolds, the metaphoric cross-overs between literary and organic evolution proliferate. Historians must, he opines, seek after the ‘laws of human vegetation’.194 G.H. Lewes That the idea of a science of criticism was being widely discussed in this period is clear from an article published by George Henry Lewes in The

191 192 193 194

Although the vastness of the distance lets us but half perceive – and by a doubtful light – the origin of species, the events of history sufficiently illumine the events anterior to history, to explain the almost immovable steadfastness of the primordial marks. – Taine, 10 Taine, 13; ‘determined’ is my translation of the original ‘déterminé’, substituted for Laun’s erroneous ‘outlived’. Taine, 17. Taine, 14; ‘properties’ is my translation of the original ‘propriétés’, substituted for Laun’s erroneous ‘specialities’. Taine, 19; ‘laws of human vegetation’ is my translation of the original ‘règles de la végétation humaine’, substituted for Laun’s inadequate ‘rules of human growth’.

Darwin  69 Fortnightly Review (of which he was also the editor). The essay begins by intimating the currency of the debate in the culture at large: ‘From Science to Criticism is a long step, yet in many quarters the question is being raised, Why have we no science of Criticism?’195 Lewes’s piece, as he explains, is penned in response to two sets of remarks – the first by an exasperated commentator in the Pall Mall Gazette who, noting ‘the diametrically opposite dicta of two critical journals on the same work’, deplored that there appear to be ‘no canons of criticism’; the second by a writer calling for ‘a doctrine in Literature’ in the latest Revue des Deux Mondes.196 Lewes proceeds to outline his own position, which is that ‘[c]riticism is itself an art and not a science’, and, moreover, that he is ‘very far from thinking that such a science is desirable’.197 Lewes’s objections to the idea are several. A ‘canon of criticism’ or ‘doctrine of literature’, in his view, could be based only on past writing and would, for this reason, be unlikely to yield laws suited to the description of future writing. Retrospective and partial, such a ‘science’ could offer no predictive guidance as to the future direction of literary evolution: supposing the science perfect in its construction (a large supposition!), it could only explain the works and processes of an art that had developed itself up to a certain point; it could not explain, it could not even divine what would be the new evolutions of the art under the new conditions of advancing civilisation.198 Lewes’s resistance to the idea of such a formal canon stems from a concern that it might come to be treated as a body of prescriptive laws which, if enforced, would arrest ‘progress’. Had such a ‘doctrine’ been implemented in the past, he explains, ‘the innovator would have been ­repressed’. Such a system could ‘only be an oppressive mistake’, a threat to artistic originality.199 Lewes’s libertarian defence of unfettered ­creation is inspired by the negative precedent of ‘Europe’, which, he remembers, ‘once had a literary doctrine’ which ‘repress[ed] all originality and all progress’.200 The inconsistencies, even the ‘anarchy’ of critical response considered in the mass, are, in his judgement, a price worth paying for artistic freedom: ‘Criticism may suffer; but Art is freer.’201

195 George Henry Lewes, ‘On the Science of Criticism’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 6 (15 August to 1 December 1866), 759–61, 759. 196 Lewes, ‘On the Science of Criticism’, 759. 197 Lewes, ‘On the Science of Criticism’, 761, 759. 198 Lewes, ‘On the Science of Criticism’, 759–60. 199 Lewes, ‘On the Science of Criticism’, 760. 200 Lewes, ‘On the Science of Criticism’, 760. 201 Lewes, ‘On the Science of Criticism’, 760.

70 Darwin That the debate about the purpose of criticism is framed by new knowledge about evolution is clear from Lewes’s analogy to the laws of Nature: Because the Laws of Nature are more or less discoverable and reducible to a system, it is supposed that the Laws of Art must be equally discoverable. There is, however, this difference: Art is in a state of perpetual evolution, new forms arise under new conditions, and new inventions introduce new laws. 202 Lewes fails to specify the nature of this difference; what he seems to imply, however, is that the evolution of Art is less predictable than that governing the natural world, the alterations it involves so proliferating as to forbid definitive formalization. Leslie Stephen When Leslie Stephen reviewed the English translation of Taine’s H ­ istory of English Literature in 1873, it was to express approval of ‘the a­ pplication of a genuine comparative method’ to the study of l­iterature. 203 For too long, ‘home-bred critics’ had discussed authors like Shakespeare ‘as an isolated phenomenon unrelated to the general ­movement of ­European, or even of English thought’. Taine, by contrast, had ‘done much to ­inculcate a sounder method, and to widen our ­intellectual horizon. He has the force which belongs to the apostle of a new theory’. For Stephen, Taine proves that as ‘our history is continuous, so our great writers are the natural expressions of its dominant ideas.’204 While endorsing Taine’s premise, Stephen does not share Taine’s optimism about the proximate realization of a science of history and criticism. 205 ­Lauding Taine’s ­evolutionary vision and perhaps recalling his ambition to discover ‘the laws of human vegetation’, he deploys an analogy of his own to link the literary and organic realms: Botany becomes more fruitful as we investigate the relations ­between a given flora and the various conditions of its growth. In the same way a Dante, Shakespeare, or a Goethe is a flower of literature in no more fanciful metaphor. We first understand the full significance of their writings when we have made ourselves familiar with the intellectual soil from which they spring. 206

202 Lewes, ‘On the Science of Criticism’, 760. 203 Leslie Stephen, ‘Taine’s History of English Literature’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 84 (December 1873), 693–714, 693. 204 Stephen, 693. 205 Stephen, 693. 206 Stephen, 694.

Darwin  71 But criticism, in Stephen’s view, has not conducted the groundwork which could justify its aspirations to scientific status, and Taine’s ­endeavour still languishes ‘in the days of superficial classification’. 207 Like Lewes before him, Stephen identifies the impossibility of predicting literary developments as a major obstacle to criticism’s scientific ambitions: Granting that a science of history is conceivable, its bases are scarcely laid […] we feel at once the absence of anything like a scientific ­nomenclature […] Far from having arrived at the stage of ­prediction, we have not yet arrived at the stage of trustworthy observation. We are limited to mere empirical statements, and are reduced to the unsatisfactory method of ex post facto explanations. We cannot ­predict a Shakespeare, though when he has actually come, we can give some ostensible proof that he must have appeared in this shape and no other. 208 Stephen pinpoints other weaknesses of Taine’s history, presenting him as more intent on substantiating caricatural clichés about the English than on ‘supplying a basis for scientific theories’. 209 Ultimately, Taine, in his opinion, offers no more than ‘clever guesses at truth’, the sum of which is a theory ‘picturesque rather than scientific’. 210 John Addington Symonds Symonds’s ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Art and Life’, published in his Essays Speculative and Suggestive of 1890, is another attempt to think about literature in evolutionary terms. To Symonds, the extension of evolutionary insights to culture seemed a logical, unshirkable consequence of the acceptance of the scientific theory: If we believe, as we are now constrained to believe, that all things in nature […] are products of an evolutionary process, we must ­logically apply that process to things which humanity […] has brought forth. 211 All knowledge – as Spencer had been setting out in the volumes of ­his System of Synthetic Philosophy (1896) – would be brought within the same framework: ‘I believe that any endeavour to bring criticism into 207 Stephen, 697. 208 Stephen, 694. 209 Stephen, 695. 210 Stephen, 697, 704. 211 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 52.

72 Darwin vital accord with the leading conceptions of our age will be found to rest on firm foundations’. 212 Symonds’s call is for rigour and clear-­ sightedness – for realism rather than idealism in the approach to art. To treat ‘criticism as a branch of science’, as he advocates, is to abandon the old paths of caprice and predilection, abandon the ­ambitious flight of ideal construction, and confine ourselves for this while to the investigation of points in which the evolution of the spirit seems to resemble the evolution of nature.213 For Symonds – as previously for Spencer, Darwin, Taine, and later for Bergson – the mind, like every other organ, forms part of ‘a gradual unbroken chain of sequences’; as such, it must come eventually ‘to be treated on evolutionary principles’. 214 The concept of genius is invoked only to be swiftly redefined as a nodal point situated at the intersection of a number of natural forces. For the ‘Evolutionist’, he explains, (to reprise a quotation already given above) ‘the genius of a Newton or Shakespeare is the ultimate known product of elemental matter shaped by energies and forces.’215 Literature emerges from this description as an impersonal realm, swept free of the magic and aura of genius, and envisioned as the outcome of blind, aleatory processes. Symonds rightly senses the resistance his treatment of criticism ‘from an evolutionary point of view’ is likely to elicit, anticipating disquiet at his suggestion that ‘products of the human mind’ be regarded as ‘subordinate to the same laws of development as living organisms’. 216 Such ideas reiterate the account given by Charles ­Darwin’s uncle, Francis Galton, in his 1869 Hereditary Genius, a book in which he proposed to show ‘that a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world’. 217 In an image later reprised by Bergson, Galton concludes that ‘individuality’, even in cases of ‘extraordinary genius’ is misunderstood, and that we are all part of a wider organic and cosmic fabric: our personalities are not so independent as our self-consciousness leads us to believe […] all life is single in its essence, but various, ever varying, and inter-active in its manifestations […] men and all other living animals are active workers and sharers in a vastly more 212 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 52. 213 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 52. 214 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 27, 29. 215 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 27. See p. 58 above. 216 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 48. 217 Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1969), 1.

Darwin  73 extended system of cosmic action than any of ourselves, much less of them, can possibly comprehend. 218 As Symonds notes in his more specific discussion of culture, human pride balks at the depiction of the writer as a merely accidental nexus of evolutionary forces – at the idea that creative individuals may not in fact be fully in control of their own decision-making: Our pride and sense of human independence rebel against the belief that men of genius obey a movement quite as much as they control it, and even more than they create it. 219 On such a view, not only genius, but any merit in creation, is ­evacuated from the cultural realm. Writers become exponents rather than agents, vectors in a complex and dynamic field of natural and cultural forces rather than autonomous and self-conscious personalities. Having stated this, however, Symonds attempts to reassure his ­readership that ‘Pheidias and Shakespeare are not less than they were because we know them as necessary to a series. Their eminence remains their own.’220 Moreover, to salvage a sense of the value of the canon, he argues, in what is perhaps a failure of philosophical nerve, that the glory previously showered on the author of great works should instead redound on the country or cultural movement which provided the conditions for such literature to flower. Symonds – perhaps inspired by Taine’s ideas regarding the formative importance of ‘race’, ‘nation’, and ‘epoch’ – ‘throw[s] personal achievement somewhat in the shade’, paying tribute instead to a kind of collective, national achievement: ‘no one is more convinced than I am of the intimate connection between all art and the spirit of the race which has produced it’. 221 The ‘roots’ of art, he continues, run ‘deep down in the stuff of national character’ and ‘[m]en cannot escape the influences of their age’.222 The artist whom others consider a genius, Symonds contends, does not so much create as adopt a given form: he is himself controlled by the ‘germ of a specific type of art’ as he ‘seeks expression through its medium’. 223 Authors who assume their place in a national series are merely accessory to this ‘germ’ and its growth, acting as conduits rather than guiding forces. On this view, Marlowe and Shakespeare are ‘subordinated’ to the ‘totality of the phenomena’ which the ‘Evolutionist’

218 Galton, 2, 373. 219 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 30. 220 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 31. 221 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 30, 48. 222 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 49. 223 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 31.

74 Darwin critic must study if he is to discern the ‘law of sequence’ operating on a movement from its ‘embryo’ stage through to its ‘decadence’. 224 In the light of such statements, Symonds’s continued references to ­national boundaries are problematic and mutually contradictory. Whilst acknowledging that Roman art and other ‘hybrids’ ‘do not obey the same laws of evolutionary progress as the specific art-growths of a ­single race and a continuous era’, he discusses Attic drama, ­Elizabethan drama, Gothic architecture, and Italian painting as though these were ­circumscribed movements involving no cultural exchange.225 Artistic hybridity, he notes, is characteristic of the art and literature of ­modern Europe. 226 The novel, in particular, ‘is one of the most “hybridisable genera” known to us in literature […] no less certainly a “hybridisable genera” than the Orchis’. 227 Being ‘a mongrel of many types’, the novel is a mixed form typical of modernity and reflective of the porousness of national boundaries as they relate to culture: What art loses in force and impressiveness, in monumental dignity and power to embody the strong spirit of creative nations, it now gains in elasticity and disengagement from the soil on which it springs.228 As cultural hybridity increases, so does generic complexity and the concomitant difficulty of unravelling a work’s ‘crossings, blendings, and complicated heredity’. 229 Under such conditions, surmises Symonds, ‘[p]ersonal capacity, the liberty of individual genius, the caprice of coteries, assert themselves with more apparent freedom’. 230 T.S. Eliot The next major figure in this current of evolutionarily minded criticism is T.S. Eliot, a poet and essayist whose interest in the Darwinian revolution and its philosophical offshoots is well documented. As Lois Cuddy notes,

224 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 37. Symonds notably mixes metaphors, drawing on the language of zoology (‘embryonic elements’), the language of botany favoured by Spencer, Taine, and Stephen (‘phases of germination, expansion, efflorescence, and decay’), the language of mathematics (‘the ­parabola of art’), and the language of physics (‘shifting the centre of gravity from men as personalities to men as exponents of their race and age’). – ­Symonds, 37, 37, 44, 30–1. He ­remains conscious of the metaphoricity of his account, however, specifically enjoining his reader to remember, for example, that ‘the metaphor of organic development and dissolution […] is, after all, a metaphor. – Symonds, ‘On the Application of ­Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 37. 225 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 42. 226 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 51. 227 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 51. 228 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 51. 229 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 51. 230 Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Criticism’, 51.

Darwin  75 the importance of the doctrine of evolution circulating in ­America and Europe during Eliot’s formative years cannot be ­underestimated […] From childhood on, Eliot was immersed in what Western ­academicians and scientists called the Age of Evolution. His social class accepted evolution’s assumptions about Progress as a principle of life.231 Cuddy’s reference to ‘Progress’ has a notably Spencerian ring, and for good reason. Looking back on this period of his life in 1948, Eliot recalled that ‘Herbert Spencer’s generalized theory of evolution was in my childhood environment regarded as the key to the mystery of the universe.’232 In light of so adamant and sweeping an acknowledgement, Cuddy seems justified in claiming that in the years of Eliot’s youth ‘[n]o area of knowledge was excluded’ from the dominant paradigm: ‘the doctrine of evolution […] became a guiding principle of thought and a way of ordering experience.’233 Spencer was by no means alone in Eliot’s evolutionist pantheon. In 1921, Eliot used one of his ‘London Letters’ to The Dial to reflect on the ways in which biology had ‘influenced the imagination of non-scientific people’ in the nineteenth century, averring that ‘Darwin is the representative of those years, as Newton of the seventeenth, and Einstein perhaps of ours.’ More recent scientific advances, Eliot suggests, had begun to supplant biology’s sway over the layperson’s worldview and displaced ‘creative evolution’ as the dominant watchword of the day. That quintessentially Bergsonian expression, he opined, ‘is a phrase that has lost both its stimulant and sedative virtues’. 234 As his use of Bergson’s titular locution suggests, the French philosopher assumed for a while an important place in Eliot’s thinking. As is well known, he first fell under Bergson’s spell during the year he spent studying in Paris in 1910–1911, during which he attended his Friday lectures at the Collège de France. As Peter Ackroyd narrates, He later recalled the packed lecture hall, and the atmosphere of ­excitement which the philosopher generated. Indeed he suffered a ‘temporary conversion’ to Bergsonism. […] He affirmed the ­relativity of all conceptual knowledge, and his descriptions of the flux or chaos which lay beyond the reach of such knowledge would have appealed to the young poet of the ‘Preludes’. 235

231 Lois A. Cuddy, T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Evolution: Sub/Versions of Classicism, Culture, and Progress (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 13, 15. 232 T.S. Eliot, A Sermon Preached in Magdalene College Chapel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948). 233 Cuddy, 13. 234 T.S. Eliot, ‘London Letter’, The Dial, vol. 71, no. 4 (October 1921), 452–5, 455. 235 Peter Ackroyd, T.S. Eliot (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), 40–1.

76 Darwin Sometime in the course of the same academic year, Eliot wrote a lengthy paper on Bergson’s philosophy as part of his academic work for Harvard. The paper, which survives in manuscript, dealt principally with Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory whilst also touching critically on Creative Evolution. 236 That Eliot knew the work well is not in doubt: his annotated copy of the text survives. 237 Providing f­ urther evidence of the poet’s interest in evolutionary matters at this time, R ­ obert Crawford points out that at Oxford in 1915 he ‘attended lectures on “Mental Evolution” which dealt with primitive man and the biological theories of Darwinian pangenesis’. 238 Furthermore, in reviewing a book about The Philosophy of Nietzsche in the same year, Eliot commented on the author’s lack of engagement with evolutionary theory: even in so brief a discussion we should have liked to see Nietzsche’s views on evolution and change compared with those of Bergson and James, and to hear more of his attitude towards Darwinism, and something of his affinities with Butler. 239 One of the aspects of Bergson’s thought which captured Eliot’s ­attention in his student paper was his monism – his commitment to the idea of a ‘single force, a single current’ at the heart of the universe. 240 As Ackroyd implies, a partiality for the reductionist idea of a unifying current governing all things is also evident in Eliot’s subsequent interest in the philosophy of F.H. Bradley. 241 While M.A.R. Habib sees Bergson as ‘one element’ among the poet’s ‘large array of intellectual impulses’, Philip Le Brun advances a much stronger claim, asserting that he was influenced to such a degree in fact that, had he not known Bergson’s philosophical writings, Eliot’s major formulations about poetry  – about tradition, the associated sensibility of the artist, and the work 236 M.A.R. Habib, ‘“Bergson Resartus” and T.S. Eliot’s Manuscript’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 54, no. 2 (April 1993), 255–76, 255–6. 237 In 1912, Eliot made a gift of Bergson’s Introduction to a New Philosophy to his mother for Christmas. In 1916, she would tell Bertrand Russell that she had ‘read Bergson’s Creative Evolution and attended a course of lectures thereon, largely influenced by Tom’s enthusiasm, which […] became later a “diminishing quantity”’. Though Ackroyd deems Eliot’s Bergsonian ‘allegiance’ to have ended by 1913, there is plenty to suggest that the impression he made was enduring and that his interest in Evolution itself was not shortlived. – Ackroyd, 20, 41. 238 Robert Crawford, The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot (Oxford: ­Clarendon Press, 1987), 68. 239 T.S. Eliot, review of ‘The Philosophy of Nietzsche’ (by A. Wolf), International ­Journal of Ethics, vol. 26, no. 3 (April 1916), 426–7, 427. 240 T.S. Eliot, ‘Draft of a Paper on Bergson’, Ms. 1910–11, Eliot Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 21–2, qtd in Habib, 266. 241 Ackroyd, 49.

Darwin  77 of art as objective correlative – would have been quite different from what they are. 242 Although Le Brun probably goes too far in diagnosing ‘an actual f­ ailure on Eliot’s part to recognize what he gained from Bergson, and perhaps some process of repression’, there are certainly striking parallels between the evolutionary intellectual framework in which Eliot’s youth was spent and his description of the dynamics of the literary tradition and the task of the critic in such essays as ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923), ‘Experiment in Criticism’ (1929), and ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ (1956). 243 ‘TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT’

In 1919, Eliot published ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, which, as Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding affirm, has proved ‘a fountainhead and indispensable reference point for subsequent examinations of cultural and artistic traditions’, and ‘has a strong claim to be seen as the most resonant and widely discussed critical statement of twentieth-­ century Anglo-American literary theory’. 244 Eliot opens ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ by noting the prevailing prejudice in the reception of poetry in favour of ‘what is i­ndividual’. By contrast, Eliot calls for criticism to foreground the continuities rather than the differences between literary works. Like Symonds ­before him, Eliot views writers not primarily as ‘personalities’ but as ‘necessary link[s]’ within a wider totality or ‘living whole’.245 The field of l­iterature is defined in terms of connectivity. Value is declared to be relational rather than intrinsic. Art, for Eliot, is a realm in which works are ­‘measured by each other’. 246 As he famously states, No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the 242 Habib, 257. | Philip Le Brun, ‘T.S. Eliot and Henri Bergson’, The Review of English Studies, vol. 18, no. 70 (May 1967), 149–61 [hereafter Le Brun §1], 149. 243 Philip Le Brun, ‘T.S. Eliot and Henri Bergson’, The Review of English Studies, vol. 18, no. 71 (August 1967), 274–86, 285. 244 Giovanni Cianci, and Jason Harding, Introduction to T.S. Eliot and the C ­ oncept of Tradition, ed. Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 2007), 1, 11. 245 Eliot was an occasional reader of Symonds. See, for example, the reference to ­Symonds’s The Renaissance in Italy (1875–86) in Eliot’s letter of 2 September 1930 to his brother Henry – The Letters of T.S. Eliot, vol. 5, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), 307. | Symonds, 30–1. | Eliot, ­‘Tradition’, 19. | Symonds, 40–1. | Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 17. Eliot in fact explicitly attacks the common view of poetry as the expression of personality, a view which is ‘related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul’. – ‘Tradition’, 19–20. 246 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 15.

78 Darwin dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. 247 The insistence on the relevance of the dead invokes the genealogical methods prized by many disciplines in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it seems redolent of Darwin’s emphasis on the unity of ‘the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications’.248 In practical terms, Eliot calls for what Stephen, praising Taine, had called ‘the application of a genuine comparative method’ in criticism. 249 It is in his description of what occurs when a new work of art is ­produced that Eliot’s writing most clearly recalls the dynamic and ­inextricably intermeshed cultural systems envisaged by Spencer, Taine, and Symonds: what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of ­novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. 250 Eliot’s sense of literature as a ceaselessly evolving system in which the past is altered by the present as much as the present is shaped by the past, is a quintessentially intertextual view of art. The extent of the mutual interdependence he portrays between the new work, the ­‘intermediate links’, and the peripheral reaches of the network (‘the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered’), vividly recalls Bergson’s ­emphasis on the complete interpenetration of elements in the organic world (‘everything interpenetrates’). 251 Likewise, the parallels are ­striking between Bergson’s and Eliot’s depictions of the emergence and incorporation of the new into an adaptive whole, and the mutual ­appraisal of past and present. Bergson writes that a new form ‘flows out of previous forms, while adding to them something new, and is 247 248 249 250 251

Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 15. O, 100. Stephen, 693. Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 15. CE, 291.

Darwin  79 e­ xplained by them as much as it explains them’. 252 Eliot closely transposes this in stating that Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. 253 Eliot’s emphasis on the idea of an augmented literary ‘whole’ minutely responsive to ‘infinitesimal causes’ also echoes Bergson, who in Time and Free Will, for example, discusses the addition of ‘some new note’ to a ‘musical phrase’ which is then ‘constantly altered in its totality’. Each new development ‘alters the nature, the appearance and, as it were, the rhythm of the whole’. ‘The supervention of each term’, writes Bergson, ‘brings about a new organisation of the whole’. 254 When Eliot writes that ‘after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered’, the connection seems indubitable. 255 As Aleida Assmann observes, Eliot returns to the idea of the ‘whole’ ‘with the insistence of a religious invocation’.256 Having italicized the term in discussing the effect on the ‘whole existing order’ of ‘the ­supervention of novelty’, Eliot endows it with organic associations by evoking ‘the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors’, and his concomitant ‘conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written.257 Indeed, one of the major tensions in Eliot’s essay lies in the intersection within it of two paradigms: on the one hand, a predominantly nineteenth-century paradigm of wholeness relating to the organic, and hence the historical and temporal; on the other, a paradigm of wholeness strongly espoused in the early twentieth century and associated with systematicity and simultaneity. 258 This tension, as will become apparent, is replicated in intertextual theory, with all the suggestiveness and inconsistencies such ambivalences typically entail. According to Assmann, Eliot’s essay reflects an attempt not to deploy a purely Bergsonian sense of the literary realm as an analogue to the organic, but, on the contrary, and in ­keeping 52 CE, 393. 2 253 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 15. 254 CE, 389. | Bergson, Time and Free Will [1889] (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911), 106, 123, qtd in Le Brun §1, 155. 255 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 15. 256 Aleida Assmann, ‘Exorcizing the Demon of Chronology: T.S. Eliot’s Reinvention of Tradition’, in T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, 13–25, 19. 257 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 17. 258 ‘Throughout the nineteenth century, the traditional paradigm for wholeness had been the organism. […] At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new paradigm of wholeness emerged – system.’ – Assmann, 19.

80 Darwin with another direction in contemporary thinking (most obviously manifest in Saussurean linguistics), to sever history from ‘the tradition’. This eminently paradoxical splicing is the source of the essay’s richness but also of a measure of self-contradictoriness. In Saussurean terms which anticipate matters to be fully explored in Chapter 4, ­Eliot refuses to choose between synchronic and diachronic perspectives (a choice ­Saussure thought was essential to scientific thinking about l­anguage). In Assmann’s words, Eliot’s essay does not simply oppose temporal history to a timeless tradition, but constructs a sphere in which they can interact in a controlled way […] The synchronic glance that encompasses the simultaneity of temporally separated elements does not altogether arrest, let alone exclude, time. […] Eliot’s concept of tradition is detemporalized, but not rendered motionless. 259 In Jewel Spears Brooker’s formulation, the ‘temporal, dynamic ­dimension’ of Eliot’s concept means that it is ‘not static (not merely ­spatial, while also not merely temporal)’. 260 By allowing organic and systemic metaphors to coexist, Eliot invests his essay with an evocative but also confusing ambiguity – an ambiguity magnified, as Assmann points out, by his definition of ‘the tradition’ itself as ‘the historical sense’. 261 Eliot uses the metaphor of liquid current to outline his view of the attitude which the poet should adopt to the past, again closely reprising Creative Evolution. Bergson, it will be recalled, refers to life itself as current, wave, or river (‘this current of life’, ‘an immense wave’, ‘the great river of life […] flowing through the body of humanity’) coursing through nodal points along its way.262 Similarly, ‘[t]he poet’, states Eliot, ‘must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations’. 263 The ‘main current’, for Eliot (in a delineation of g­ eographical ­boundaries which recalls Symonds’s conception of national art ­movements) is ‘the mind of Europe – the mind of [the poet’s] own country […] a mind which changes’. 264 But whereas Symonds pictures ­parabolas of improvement and decline, positing the rise and demise of literary c­ ycles, Eliot stresses the enduring vitality of earlier movements, with even ­obscure authors and works irrigating the literature of the present. While

259 Assmann, 19, 21. 260 Jewel Spears Brooker, ‘Writing the Self: Dialectic and Impersonality in T.S. Eliot’, in T.S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, 41–57, 45. 261 Assmann, 19. 262 CE, 26, 266, 270. 263 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 16. 264 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 16.

Darwin  81 Symonds wrote of the ‘exhausted’, lifeless germs of extinct artistic practices, Eliot holds that change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. 265 The new in art is a matter not of magical creation ex nihilo but of selective combination, in which the poet assumes a largely passive role, acting as a mere vector or vehicle: the poet is but a ‘finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations’. 266 Science, impersonality, recombination, diachronic evolution, and synchronic simultaneity: all of the key elements of intertextual theory are present in Eliot’s essay. ‘THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM’

Eliot returned to many of these ideas in ‘The Function of Criticism’, an essay written in 1923 in response to a critique of ‘Tradition and the ­Individual Talent’ by John Middleton Murry.267 In this piece, ­Eliot ­several times restates his vision of literature as matrix, writing of ‘­organic wholes’ and ‘systems in relation to which, and only in relation to which, individual works of literary art, and the works of individual artists, have their significance’.268 The task of the critic, as he sees it, is to uncover ‘the relation of the work of art to art, of the work of literature to literature’.269 Like ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, ‘The Function of Criticism’ evinces Eliot’s preoccupation with order, and bespeaks his sense of the need for the consideration of ‘what aims and methods of criticism should be followed’ ‘in the common pursuit of true judgement’.270 The essay is an attempt ‘to find a scheme’ or ‘a formula’ – in other words to establish ‘common principles for the pursuit of criticism’. 271 ‘EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM’

Eliot’s 1929 ‘Experiment in Criticism’ develops the same concerns – how to judge, how ‘to interpret the past to the present, and to judge the 265 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 16. 266 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 18. 267 John Middleton Murry, ‘On Fear; and on Romanticism’, Adelphi, vol. 1, no. 4 (September 1923), 269–77; reprinted as ‘On Editing; and on Romanticism’, in John Middleton Murry, To the Unknown God: Essays towards a Religion (London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 74–85. 268 Eliot, ‘Function’, 23–4. 269 Eliot, ‘Function’, 25. 270 Eliot, ‘Function’, 25. 271 Eliot, ‘Function’, 34, 31, 29.

82 Darwin present in the light of the past’. 272 It chronicles ‘the growth of the historical attitude’ and the increasingly interdisciplinary approach taken to literature. 273 Indeed, in remarking upon the way in which ‘[t]he awareness of the process of time has obscured the frontiers between literature and everything else’, Eliot betrays an interest in the Spencerian project to unify all realms through the discovery of their ruling axioms: The various attempts to find the fundamental axioms behind both good literature and good life are among the most interesting ‘experiments’ of criticism in our time. 274 While Coleridge is praised for relating criticism to philosophy – ­specifically, to aesthetics and metaphysics – the French critic Charles Augustin SainteBeuve (1804–1869) is lauded as the ‘first interesting historian in criticism’.275 In fact, and in terms telling of Eliot’s evolutionary intellectual bent, Sainte-Beuve is identified as ‘not only an historian but a biologist in criticism’ in recognition of ‘his implicit conception of literature, not only as a body of writings to be enjoyed, but as a process of change in history, as a part of the study of history’.276 The observation prompts Eliot to consider a ‘good recent piece of literary criticism’, Herbert Read’s Phases of English Poetry (1928), to gauge what assumptions underpin contemporary writing about literature. He finds it to be infused – much as is his own description of Sainte-Beuve – with the language of recent natural science: On the second page he tells us that his is an inquiry into the evolution of poetry, and speaks presently of English poetry as a ‘living and developing organism’. Even these few words should give a hint of the extent to which the critical apparatus has changed with the general changes in scientific and historical conceptions, when a literary critic can treat his audience to terms like ‘evolution’ and ‘living organism’ with the assurance of their being immediately apprehended. He is taking for granted certain vague but universal biological ideas.277 To this observation concerning the extent to which critical language is shaped by contemporary developments in other fields, Eliot adds another. The patterns Read writes about are only possible, he opines, because of the gradual accumulation of historical knowledge about literature. 272 T.S. Eliot, ‘Experiment in Criticism’, in Tradition and Experiment in Present-Day Literature: Addresses Delivered at the City Literary Institute (London: Humphrey Milford for Oxford University Press, 1929), 198–215. 273 Eliot, ‘Experiment’, 202. 274 Eliot, ‘Experiment’, 207, 209. 275 Eliot, ‘Experiment’, 203–4. 276 Eliot, ‘Experiment’, 204. 277 Eliot, ‘Experiment’, 205.

Darwin  83 It is the panorama unveiled by such research which has ‘fostered in us the sense of flux and evolution’, and made it possible for critics to write of ‘the evolution of poetry’. 278 ‘THE FRONTIERS OF CRITICISM’

‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ covers some of the same ground at a remove of almost thirty years. 279 History is such, Eliot again explains, that the point of view of any generation always differs from those of the generations which preceded it and those which will follow it. And because, as he noted in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, ‘change is a development which abandons nothing en route’, each generation, looking at masterpieces of the past in a different perspective, is affected in its attitude by a greater number of influences than those which bore upon the generation previous. 280 The meaning of ‘literary criticism’ itself, Eliot continues, has undergone an ‘evolution’ he could not have anticipated.281 As in the field of literature, the arrival of an important new work of criticism demands the reorganization of all parts of the whole, which, in turn, is liable to alter the definition of ‘literary criticism’.282 Presumably with structuralism in mind, Eliot attributes the recent ‘transformation of literary criticism’ he has observed to the new tendency to envisage literature in the light of ‘the social sciences on the one hand, and the “study of language” on the other’.283 Eliot goes on to discuss the limitations of the source-hunting approach to the explanation of poetry. Such criticism, usually presented in highly scholarly form, is ‘the criticism of explanation by origins’. 284 By way of illustration, Eliot trains his sights on recent attempts to explain literary works through the excavation of the materials which entered into their composition, honing in on the example of John Livingston Lowes’ work on The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. 285 In framing his appraisal of such research, Eliot articulates a thoroughly intertextual view of literary creation. Yet in his simultaneous retention of mystical ideas of genius, mystery, and transmutation (the term being

278 Eliot, ‘Experiment’, 205. 279 T.S. Eliot, ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ [Gideon Seymour Lecture, University of Minnesota, 1956], in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 103–18, 103. 280 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 16, and ‘Frontiers’, 104. 281 Eliot, ‘Frontiers’, 104. 282 Eliot, ‘Frontiers’, 104. 283 Eliot, ‘Frontiers’, 104. 284 Eliot, ‘Frontiers’, 107. 285 John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston, MA, and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927).

84 Darwin used here in its alchemical rather than evolutionary sense), Eliot, like Bergson and others before him, rejects the purely materialistic perspective his insight might allow: Lowes showed, once and for all, that poetic originality is largely an original way of assembling the most disparate and unlikely material to make a new whole. The demonstration is quite convincing, as evidence of how material is digested and transformed by the poetic genius. […] How such material as those scraps of Coleridge’s reading became transmuted into great poetry remains as much of a mystery as ever. 286 It is striking to note how closely Kristeva, with her description of texts as sites of ‘absorption’ and ‘transformation’ and ‘mosaics of quotation’, and Barthes, with his image of texts as ‘tissue[s] of quotations’, adopt the same language.287 The key difference lies in Eliot’s enduring commitment to the idea of poetic genius and the supreme ‘mystery’ of ‘transmutation’. It is also worth noting the similarity between Eliot’s description of the critic’s task and that which present-day genetic critics give of theirs. ­According to Eliot, Lowes ‘was engaged on an investigation of process, an investigation which was, strictly speaking, beyond the frontier of literary criticism’. 288 Such a quest for an understanding of creativity itself is what drives genetic criticism. 289 In this connection, Eliot makes an example of that author who has perhaps been most extensively studied by genetic critics: James Joyce. Specifically, Eliot identifies Finnegans Wake – ‘that monstrous masterpiece’ – as the object of a kind of ­forensic ‘detection’ in which source-hunting passions are given free rein: ‘those exegetists […] have set themselves to unravel all the threads and follow all the clues in that book’.290 But the point of Eliot’s discussion of such criticism – and of the ‘wrong kind of interest’ aroused by his notes to The Waste Land ‘among the seekers of sources’ – is that such explanation is not necessarily the best path to, and cannot be taken as a substitute for, 286 287 288 289

Eliot, ‘Frontiers’, 108. WDN, 66. | DOA, 146. Eliot, ‘Frontiers’, 108. The discipline’s initial practitioners knew that ultimate success in the ambition to comprehend the creative process would require analysis of large bodies of works drawn from a plethora of different disciplines spanning the arts and the sciences. The scope of this vast endeavour is documented in the pages of the Parisian journal Genesis: Revue internationale de critique génétique (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1992–2010 and Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne: 2010–). Special issues have been devoted to the fields of mathematics, philosophy, photography, linguistics, cinema, graphic novels, to name but a few among many possible examples. 90 Eliot, ‘Frontiers’, 108. 2

Darwin  85 ‘understanding’. 291 Eliot’s scepticism about ‘the attempt to understand a poem by explaining its origins’ is part of a wider unease about causal explanation. 292 What follows this expression of disquiet r­ egarding the ambitions of archival, source-hunting work encapsulates the malaise often occasioned by intertextual theory which, by seeking to explain creativity, seems to threaten to ‘explain away the Minds and Purposes and Meanings we all hold dear’.293 Eliot’s acceptance of evolution finds its outer limit at the point where it impinges upon mind and meaning, ‘threaten[ing] to spread all the way up, dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding’. 294 Such anxiety is writ large in Eliot’s next step, which is to define ‘great poetry’ as, precisely, that which is beyond explanation. The study of sources, he remarks, and the process of which it affords a glimpse, ­‘responds to the drive of a good many readers that poetry should be ­explained to them in terms of something else’.295 But, he counters, there is, in all great poetry, something which must remain unaccountable however complete might be our knowledge of the poet, and that is what matters most. When the poem has been made, something new has happened, something that cannot be wholly ­explained by anything that went before. That, I believe, is what we mean by ‘creation’. 296 ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ thus rests on an unresolvable tension between the language of evolution (and tacit acceptance of the relevance of Darwin’s theory to the cultural realm) and the refusal to countenance the idea of criticism as detective science (‘[w]e are in danger even of ­pursuing criticism as if it were a science, which it can never be’) in which explanation amounts to understanding. 297 On the contrary, the essay draws boundaries around creativity, defining poetry itself as a mystery beyond knowledge – as that which, precisely, falls outwith the scope and sequence of any causal chain. Northrop Frye One of the most influential figures to pick up the baton from Eliot and his precursors in thinking about the relations between evolution and 291 Eliot, ‘Frontiers’, 110. 292 ‘Perhaps the form of criticism in which the danger of excessive reliance upon causal explanation is greatest is the critical biography’, writes Eliot. – ‘Frontiers’, 110–11. 293 DDI, 82. 294 DDI, 63. 295 Eliot, ‘Frontiers’, 112. 296 Eliot, ‘Frontiers’, 112. 297 Eliot, ‘Frontiers’, 117.

86 Darwin literature was the Canadian critic and theorist Northrop Frye. In his Anatomy of Criticism of 1957, Frye calls for criticism to be practised with the same seriousness and methodological rigour as a science. He is forthright in naming Eliot’s assertion that ‘existing monuments of literature form an ideal order among themselves’ as his point of departure: ‘This is criticism, and very fundamental criticism. Much of this book attempts to annotate it.’298 Eliot’s dual (and arguably paradoxical) sense of the literary field as both a synchronic and a diachronic realm is central to his essay’s appeal. ‘[E]thical criticism’, in Frye’s view, ‘deals with art as a communication from the past to the present, and is based on the conception of the total and simultaneous possession of past culture’.299 In Eliot’s wake, Frye aspires to forge ‘a synoptic view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism’.300 The first step towards the fulfilment of such an aim, he argues, is to establish criticism’s coherence as a separate field from that of literature itself. In a language of dour abstraction reminiscent of Eliot’s own essayistic prose style, Frye emphasizes the need for a distinction to be drawn between criticism as ‘a structure of thought and knowledge’, and literature which is ‘not itself an organized structure of knowledge’.301 Criticism can be – and should aim to be – systematic; literature itself is not. One of the problems Frye seeks to address by this distinction is the failure of criticism to progress. Works of criticism fill the ever-­lengthening shelves of libraries and yet in perusing this dense and expanding field, he laments, ‘one misses that sense of consolidating progress which belongs to science’: we have no clear notion of progress in the criticism of Shakespeare, or of how a critic who read all his predecessors could, as a result, become anything better than a monument of contemporary taste, with all its limitations and prejudices.302 As this remark makes clear, Frye is emphatic about the need for ‘­genuine criticism’ to be disentangled from ‘the history of taste’. The field, he insists, must be rid of ‘[f]ashionable prejudice’ and ‘sonorous nonsense’ – ‘all the literary chit-chat which makes the reputations of p ­ oets boom and crash in an imaginary stock-exchange’.303 Criticism, if it is to be a ‘field of genuine learning’ involving ‘systematic study’, must be as scientific 298 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays [1957] (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 18. 299 Frye, 24. 300 Frye, 3. 301 Frye, 5, 12. 302 Frye, 8–9. 303 Frye, 18. Frye’s emphatic attack on the kinds of ‘definite positions’ and ‘value-­ judgements’ adopted and defended by John Middleton Murry brings into relief the

Darwin  87 as chemistry and philology are scientific; it must disentangle itself from subjective judgements which are a ‘weakness’ – the source of ‘error and prejudice’.304 The criticism advocated by Frye must substitute ‘coordination and description’ for ‘subordination and value-judgement’: it must, in other words, be descriptive and neutral rather than judgemental, personal, or ideological.305 The body of existing criticism, according to Frye, lacks order; chronology alone is insufficient to the production of meaningful systematicity: Only one organizing principle has so far been discovered in ­literature, the principle of chronology. This supplies the magic word ‘tradition’, which means that when we see the miscellaneous pile strung out along a chronological line, some coherence is given it by sheer sequence.306 For one thing, chronological arrangement alone does not account for the fact that – as Eliot also notes in his definition of the ‘tradition’ – ‘the greatest classics’ often seem to ‘revert’ to the ‘primitive formulas’ of much earlier works.307 A superior logical principle of classification is needed. Aristotle’s Poetics, notes Frye, is laudably scientific, with the philosopher approaching poetry as a biologist would approach a system of organisms, picking out its genera and species, formulating the broad laws of literary experience, and in short writing as though he believed that there is a totally intelligible structure of knowledge attainable about poetry which is not poetry itself, or the experience of it, but poetics.308 But as evolutionary theory precipitated the revision of earlier classificatory systems, so criticism needs ‘to leap to a new ground’ and discover a

stringency of his own outspoken attack on practitioners of a kind of ‘debauchery of judiciousness’ for which he feels only contempt: There are no definite positions to be taken in chemistry or philology and if there are any to be taken in criticism, criticism is not a field of genuine learning. […] One’s ‘definite position’ is one’s weakness, the source of one’s liability to error and prejudice, and to gain adherents to a definite position is only to multiply one’s weakness like an infection. The idea that a technique has ever or might ever be devised ‘for separating the excellent from the less excellent’ is denounced as ‘an illusion of the history of taste’. Instead, Frye calls for ‘a steady advance toward undiscriminating catholicity’. – Frye, 19, 20, 25, 19, 20, 20. 304 Frye, 19, 17 and 29, 19, 19. 305 Frye, 26. 306 Frye, 16. 307 Frye, 17. 308 Frye, 14.

88 Darwin paradigm which would accommodate change in the literary field on the ‘assumption of total coherence’ across time and space: Criticism seems to be badly in need of a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole.309 Rejecting mere temporal sequence on the one hand, and static Aristotelian tabulations on the other, Frye seeks a model which would enable critics to identify the ‘converging patterns of significance’ that cluster around ‘profound masterpiece[s]’.310 In effect, Frye’s proposal is for a model in which both the straight line of chronology and the limited grid of genre are superseded by a centred constellation. In a hypothesis which incorporates the idea of evolution as a tendency to augmenting complexity (an ‘advance’, as Spencer defined it, from the simple to the complex, through successive differentiations’), Frye wonders whether literature might be envisaged ‘not only as complicating itself in time, but as spread out in conceptual space from some kind of center that criticism could locate’.311 In his explicit and unselfconscious longing for totality and systematicity, Frye epitomizes the ordering aspirations of mid-century structuralism.

Evolution and Intertextuality To recapitulate what has been established so far: Darwin’s ‘universal acid’ and the various strands of analogical thinking to which it gave rise in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries form part of the ideological foundations of intertextual theory. Indeed, the nebulous unease the notion of intertextuality still arouses is in some measure attributable to its prehistory in the altered worldview ushered in by evolution. ­Sceptical responses to the theory replicate the ambivalence of early cultural evolutionists, such as Spencer, Bergson, and later Eliot, whose extensions of evolutionary science to culture were laced with insistence on humanity’s exceptionality – its ‘radical difference’, in Bergson’s phrase, from the rest of the animal world.312 Though they, like Darwin, looked forward to a time when ‘each mental power’ – including consciousness, i­ntelligence, language – would be proven to have developed ‘by gradation’, they also, paradoxically, sought to preserve creation as an intentional, even m ­ ystical act, fully warranting the praise, or blame, by which it is traditionally 309 310 311 312

Frye, 16. Frye, 17. Spencer, First Principles, 148. | Frye, 17. CE, 287.

Darwin  89 fêted (and justifying censure when the supposed creation is discovered to be fraudulent or plagiarized).313 The impersonality of the biological laws by which Darwin’s material world is governed, and the implied atheism of his vision, resonate with, and in fact likely abetted, Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of god in The Gay Science (1882).314 The intellectual repercussions of Nietzsche’s inflammatory statement will be explored in detail in ­Chapter 2, but even considered alone Darwin’s Origin bore major philosophical consequences. His tacit demotion of the ‘Creator’ opened age-old categories to question. For example, his answer to the question of the ‘origin of species’ is a rejection of its premises.315 Darwin’s reframing of that problem, as John Dewey noted in 1910, illustrates a recurring pattern in the history of knowledge: Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavor and preference take their place. Doubtless the greatest dissolvent in contemporary thought of old questions, the greatest precipitant of new methods, new intentions, new problems, is the one effected by the scientific revolution that found its climax in the ‘Origin of Species’.316 More broadly, the superfluity of the ‘god hypothesis’ to Darwin’s ­account imperilled a view of the world dominated by stability in favour of one characterized by flux. Yet the picture painted was less one of fragmentation or chaos than of a unified ‘Becoming’ binding the ­elements of the world in a dense and intricately meshed ‘web of complex relations’.317 The cultural interpretations of evolution examined in this ­chapter are representative of a many-pronged shift in intellectual and p ­ ublic ­discourse which paved the way for intertextual theory – a body of statements in which literary works are reconfigured as ‘texts’ (a term itself chosen to designate entities without clear boundaries), produced and held, like organisms, within a total matrix in which ‘everything interpenetrates’.318 Likewise, as Darwin depicts Nature as an ‘entangled bank’ and the organic world as an ‘inextricable web of affinities’, so the intertextualists in the 1960s portray a textual universe in which

313 O, 359. 314 GS, §125, 119–20. The key statements of what Nietzsche’s madman-spokesman refers to in The Gay Science as ‘[t]his tremendous event’ are to be found in that same book, but there are numerous allusions to the death of god in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and elsewhere. 315 O, 5. 316 Dewey, 19. 317 Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, 5. | O, 58. 318 WT. | CE, 291.

90 Darwin i­nterrelatedness is the only defining fact: in Kristeva’s words, ‘every text is a mosaic of quotations’. Similarly, while Darwin writes of a network of ‘exquisite’ and ‘beautiful adaptations’, Kristeva construes ‘every text [a]s the absorption and transformation of another’.319 There is a parallel, too, between the relativism which permeates depictions of both realms: on the one hand, material entities evolving without the intervention of any designing agent; on the other, texts taking shape at the hands of impersonal, metaphorically ‘dead’ authors, determined by biological and cultural conditions over which they have little or no control. In each case, the basis of a metaphysically grounded belief in value is collapsed. Genealogy: Organic Descent, Metaphorical Dissent These overarching discursive parallels should not occlude important differences. The most significant of these concerns intertextuality’s departure from the evolutionary model in its treatment of genealogy. For Darwin, the observation of extreme connectivity both informs and follows from the conviction that ‘all true classification is genealogical’. 320 In his ‘Abstract’, a sacred genealogy – the ‘Chain of Being’ at the apex and origin of which sits the Christian god as father and creator – is replaced with a different genealogical model which emphasizes the importance of inheritance but also acknowledges the irretrievability of origins lost in an unfathomably distant past. This section explores the use made by twentieth-century theorists of organic tropes specifically chosen for their departure from the symbol of the tree. The Trees of Life of Life and Culture It was, as mentioned above, by way of a ‘tree’ diagram that Darwin ­illustrated his theory. His naming of his skeletal explanatory diagram as a tree, as Gillian Beer points out, was strategic: On the page […] it could as well be interpreted by the eye as shrub, branching coral, or seaweed. But Darwin saw not only the explanatory but the mythic potentiality of his diagram.321 In other words, Darwin consciously chose to mobilize the resonant symbol of the tree to lend mythopoeic power to his own account of ­human history. While Darwin remarks that his choice is not original (‘[t]he affinities of all the beings of the same class’, he notes, ‘have

319 O, 49. | WDN, 66. 320 O, 309. 321 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 86.

Darwin  91 sometimes been represented by a great tree’), his own ‘Tree’ is capitalized for grandeur, and invested with a wonder conveyed through expansive lyrical cadences (‘the great Tree of Life […] with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications’).322 The Tree evidently evokes the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. But ‘Life’ in Darwin’s world is full of the breeding and death associated with the biblical Tree of Knowledge so that Darwin, to quote Beer, ‘makes the tree of life and the tree of knowledge one’.323 Though the Trees of Life and Knowledge are undoubtedly the primary targets of Darwin’s allusion, his Tree may have summoned other trees in his audience’s minds. It may, for example, have evoked the Tree of Jesse, the symbol of the genealogy of Christ given in the Bible and an ­object of pictorial depictions since the eleventh century.324 As Petter Hellström shows, Darwin was undoubtedly also thinking of yet another tree, drawn to his attention by Thomas Carlyle. In On Heroes, ­Hero-­Worship, and the Heroic in History, which Darwin read in 1841, Carlyle writes of Yggdrasil, the tree representing the ‘old Norse view of Nature’. ‘All Life’, states Carlyle, ‘is figured by them as a Tree’.325 As these examples suggest, trees are intimately connected to the ­centrality of genealogy in Western thought. As Gian Balsamo avers, ‘the telling of the physiologic, literal facts of one’s descent sets immediately at play the trope of the genealogical tree, as a metaphor of ­consanguineous continuity’.326 And for the theorist Gilles Deleuze, w ­ riting in 1980, ‘[t]here is always something genealogical about a tree’.327 Intertextual theory, notwithstanding its alignment with many aspects of the evolutionary worldview (including, crucially, its emphasis on the ­interrelatedess

22 O, 99. 3 323 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 107. 324 The Tree became a popular theme in the medieval period especially. It takes root from a passage in the Book of Isaiah (11:1), which gives metaphorical expression to Jesus’s lineage: ‘There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots’. There are genealogies in the Bible from as early as Genesis itself (which makes sense, since this is where generation begins), but the details of Christ’s genealogy are given in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Indeed, the Book of Matthew introduces itself as ‘[t]he book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham’. 325 As Petter Hellström notes, ‘The similarities between Carlyle’s world tree and ­Darwin’s evolutionary tree were striking. Darwin not only drew on Carlyle’s vision but also on his words: “I find no similitude so true as this of a Tree,” wrote Carlyle in 1841. “I believe this simile largely speaks the truth”, echoed Darwin in 1859.’ – Petter Hellström, ‘The Tree of Life: With Darwin from Genesis to Genomics’, Guardian, 19 April 2016, www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2016/apr/19/ the-tree-of-life-with-darwin-from-genesis-to-genomics [accessed 23 July 2019]. 326 Gian Balsamo, Pruning the Genealogical Tree: Procreation and Lineage in ­Literature, Law and Religion (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, and London: Associated University Press, 1999), 19. 327 TP, 6.

92 Darwin of all organic matter), departs from the arborescent model of genealogical thinking. The symbol of the tree, synonymous as it has virtually become with descent, filiation, and influence, is sidelined in favour of less structurally constraining symbols. Intertextual theory is in part an attempt to undermine the dominance of genealogical thinking in literary criticism. Like structuralism (to be discussed in detail in Chapter 4), intertextuality is founded upon a certain scepticism about the value of historicist interpretations – readings that are either determined by, or seek to determine, literary histories. It evinces and enjoins caution about genealogical frameworks that ­organize, or rather constitute, knowledge about literature in terms of precursors and successors, sources, influences, canons, and traditions. Indeed, the theory rejects the traditional genealogical trope which casts ­authorship as the seal of paternity, questioning the three-part ­equation between authors and fathers, and authors and gods. In summing up the view he goes on to debunk, Barthes writes that The Author is supposed to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child.328 It is to prise texts and reading free from this ‘myth of filiation’ that ­Barthes calls for a distinction between ‘work’ and ‘text’: The work is caught up in a process of filiation. […] The author is reputed the father and the owner of his work […] As for the Text, it reads without the inscription of the Father […] the Text […] can be read without the guarantee of its father, the restitution of the inter-text paradoxically abolishing any legacy.329 As this makes clear, Barthes ascribes to intertextuality a key role in the dismantling of antiquated views of authorship. The ‘restitution of the inter-text’ he mentions here is to be distinguished from the study of sources and influences and the belief in origins such study implies: The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-­ between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the ‘sources’, the ‘influences’ of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation.330 328 DOA, 145. 329 WT, 160–1. 330 WT, 160. In ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, which was published in the same year as Barthes’ article, Derrida carries out his own deconstruction of the tropaic amalgamation of god/father/author. Tracing the founding analogies to Plato, Derrida reverses

Darwin  93 Instead of conceiving of the creation of texts in terms of lineal descent, intertextuality takes a bird’s eye view of the relations between texts, exploding the binary and diachronic thinking epitomized by traditional influence studies. Whereas influence functions within what Clayton and Rothstein call ‘dyads of transmission’ (the kind writ large in the Oedipal narratives of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence), intertextual theory envisages literature as a domain of ‘meshing systems’, a realm of massive and impersonal connectivity.331 Accordingly, the theorists resort in their writing to tropes which are less hierarchical, more multi-directional than that of the tree. Anastomosis One of the figures used to marshal these revisionary energies, that of anastomosis, appears to be derived from the works of James Joyce, whose w ­ riting combines an extreme degree of intertextuality with a marked thematic preoccupation with the connections between literary creation and natural evolution.332 Indeed, the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses, in which the word ‘anastomosis’ first occurs, was written under the conceptual aegis of ‘faunal evolution’.333 According to the OED, ‘anastomosis’ designates intercommunication between two vessels, channels, or distinct branches of any kind, by a connecting cross branch. Applied originally to the cross communications between the arteries and veins, or other canals in the animal body; whence to similar cross connections in the sap-vessels of plants, and between rivers or their branches. the usual formulation of the relations between text and author, suggesting that, in ­analogical terms, a text might more accurately be thought of as an orphan, a being whose very existence is predicated on the absence of its father. If an author-father were present and able to speak for himself, then no text-child would be needed to promulgate his speech and disseminate his views in writing. Writing, claims ­Derrida, is thus a mode of speech predicated on genealogical rupture rather than genealogical continuity: on a separation between the author of a speech and that speech itself. Derrida claims that ‘[t]he specificity of writing […] would thus be intimately bound to the absence of the father’. This absence is described as ‘the genealogical break and the estrangement from the origin’. – Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson [1981] (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 67–186, 82, 80; first published as ‘La Pharmarcie de Platon’, in Tel Quel, nos 32 and 33 (1968) and then in La Dissémination (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972). 331 Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, ‘Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influence and Intertextuality’, in Clayton and Rothstein (eds), Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, 3–36, 3, 17. | Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence [1973], 2nd edn (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 332 Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann uses the term to refer to the author’s handling of the relations between past and present in The Consciousness of Joyce (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 10. 333 See Scarlett Baron, ‘Joyce, Darwin, and Literary Evolution’, in Joyce in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Nash (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 183–199.

94 Darwin In its vegetal acception, the process of ‘anastomosis’ seems strongly related to arborescent branching. However, ‘anastomosis’ makes away with some of the tree’s key defining features: its trunk, its vertical structure, the outward directionality of its branches. Moreover, anastomosis, a process rather than a bounded object, arises between things and, as such, suggests more connectivity than does the image of a tree. Joyce uses the term in a dense passage which interweaves biblical and secular musings about beginnings, and in which it is stated that we are all bound to Eve by ‘successive anastomosis of navelcords’.334 Human genealogy is pictured here as a mesh of anastomosing umbilical cords, the surreal image standing in stark tension with the schematic clarity pertaining to family trees. ‘Anastomosis’ occurs twice in Finnegans Wake, where it refers, first, to the intertwining of bodies, and second, to that of flowers and alphabetical letters.335 The term is used in the latter case as an image for the ­writing process as a kind of scriptural, typographical interbreeding (‘type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, with sendence of ­sundance […] all, anastomosically assimilated’). The sense conveyed of the fertility of cross connections between texts agrees with the c­ ultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber’s identification of anastomosis as the defining cultural process. In 1923, Kroeber distinguished the Trees of Life and Culture in the following terms: the course of organic evolution can be portrayed properly as a tree of life, as Darwin has called it, with trunk, limbs, branches, and twigs.

334 Joyce, Ulysses, episode 14, line 300. See Scarlett Baron, ‘Joyce, Darwin and Literary Evolution’, and Scarlett Baron, ‘Joyce, Genealogy, Intertextuality’, Dublin James Joyce Journal, vol. 4 (2011), 51–71. Joyce’s notebook for the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses, where the word first appears, points to Oliver Goldsmith as his source – a perfect example of one of his writing’s less than obvious lines of descent. In The Citizen of the World (1760–2), the anatomical term is used to image the kissing of happy lovers as ‘one perpetual anastomosis’: Choang was the fondest husband, and Hansi the most endearing wife in all the kingdom of Korea […] They walked hand in hand wherever they appeared; ­shewing every mark of mutual satisfaction, embracing, kissing, their mouths were ever joined, and to speak in the language of anatomy, it was with them one ­perpetual anastomosis. Joyce could also have come across the term in Zoonomia, or, the Laws of Organic Life (1794), which was authored by Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin. 335 The first instance reads as follows: ‘Humperfeldt and Anunska, wedded now ­evermore in annastomoses by a ground plan of the placehunter, whiskered beau and ­donahbella’; the second, ‘type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, with sendence of sundance, since the days of Plooney and Columcellas when Giacinta, Pervenche and Margaret […] all, anastomosically assimilated’. – Joyce, ­Finnegans Wake, 585, lines 22–4 and 615, lines 1–5, respectively.

Darwin  95

Figure 1.2  A lfred Kroeber’s Representation of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Human Culture. Source: Alfred Kroeber, Anthropology: Race, Language, Culture, Psychology, History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1923), 260.

The course of development of human culture in history cannot be so described, even metaphorically. There is a constant branching-out, but the branches also grow together again, wholly or partially, all the time. Culture diverges, but it syncretises and anastomoses too […] The tree of culture […] is a ramification of such coalescences, assimilations, or acculturations.336 Anastomosis first emerges as a literary-critical figure for textual ­assimilation in the criticism of Roland Barthes in the early 1970s. In S/Z (1970), a book written in the immediate aftermath of the coining of ‘intertextuality’ (1966) and soon after the publication of his own ‘Death of the Author’ (1967), Barthes writes of the degree of ‘anastomosis’ ­between a text’s signifiers as a measure of its quality according to ­‘classical’ ­criteria: ‘the closer and better calculated the anastomosis of the signifiers, the more the text is regarded as “well written”’.337 ­However, 336 Alfred Kroeber, Anthropology: Race, Language, Culture, Psychology, History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1923), 260–61. 337 Barthes, S/Z, 173.

96 Darwin because Barthes’ argument here concerns the meshing of ‘narrative networks’ in what he calls a ‘classic’ or ‘readerly text’, ­‘anastomosis’ cannot be taken here as a synonym for intertextuality, a phenomenon Barthes himself associates with ‘writerly’ – that is, more radical – texts.338 Rather, it is used to denote a form of literary integration which is attributed to the exquisite craftsmanship of a classic, old-style ‘author-god’.339 In an essay written the following year and published in The Rustle of Language, Barthes again uses the term as a vague synonym for authorially controlled forms of connectivity, referring to the ‘thousand anastomoses’ by which the dichotomies structuring Proust’s In Search of Lost Time are resolved.340 More than two decades later, in Ariadne’s Thread (1992), J. Hillis Miller devotes an entire chapter to ‘anastomosis’.341 The explicit starting point for the discussion is Joyce’s use of the image, but Miller takes the term in its broadest possible sense, using it to evoke ‘the network of anastomoses joining character to character in a novel, or the characters to the narrator, or the author to the narrator to the character to the ­critic’.342 In short, the term is made to stand for ‘personal relations’ of the most manifold kind. It is in criticism written about the French novelist George Perec’s connections to Joyce in the 1990s that ‘anastomosis’ becomes synonymous with intertextuality. This is the case in Dominique Bertelli’s and Jacques Mailhos’ essays about Perec’s intertextual connections to Joyce. In the latter, anastomosis is used to evoke a form of fusion between world and literature far outstripping traditional conceptions of art as mimesis. ­Finnegans Wake is said to ‘achieve a total anastomosis with universal history (including universal literary history) and collective memory’, and Perec is said ‘to achieve the same kind of universal integration, of total anastomosis of the world and of literature’.343 This shade of meaning picks up on an important strand of intertextual theory which seeks to expose the ‘referential fallacy’.344

338 That is a ‘readerly’ as opposed to a ‘writerly’ text, a text in the experience of which the reader is ‘intransitive’ – Barthes, S/Z, 4–6. 339 DOA, 146. 340 ‘Une idée de recherche’ [1971], in Le Bruissement de la langue: Essais critiques IV, ed. François Wahl (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984), 327–32, 331–2. 341 J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale ­University Press, 1992). 342 Hillis Miller, 154. 343 Dominique Bertelli, ‘TransPhormER/ECrire’, Études littéraires, vol. 23, no. 1–2, (1990), 159–68, 163, 165, 168. | Jacques Mailhos, ‘The Art of Memory: Joyce and Perec’, in Transcultural Joyce, ed. Karen R. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 1998), 151–69, 161. 344 As discussed in the Introduction, the ‘referential fallacy’, as defined by Michael ­R iffaterre, designates ‘the firm belief of language users in nonverbal reference, their

Darwin  97 The Rhizome In 1980, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari proposed the rhizome as an alternative to the figure of the genealogical tree. The OED defines a ‘rhizome’ as ‘an elongated, usually horizontal, subterranean stem which sends out roots and leafy shoots at intervals along its length’ and ‘rhizomatic’ (with reference to Deleuze) as ‘resembling an interconnected, subterranean network of roots. Hence: non-hierarchical, interconnected’. For Deleuze, the ‘arborescent’ model of thought epitomized by the tree is detrimental, focusing interpretations of literature and culture into an arbitrary hierarchical straitjacket. By contrast, ‘[t]he rhizome’, he declares, ‘is an antigenealogy’: ‘[t]here are no points or positions in a rhizome such as those found in a structure, tree, or root’, ‘The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance’.345 The rhizome’s abstraction as a concept seems designed to facilitate its extrapolation to the most diverse fields of thought.346 Its defining principles are of ‘connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be’.347 The value of the rhizome lies in its resistance to arborifi[cation], which enshrines a static structure.348 As ‘an acentered, non-hierarchical, nonsignifying system […] defined solely by a circulation of states’, the rhizome functions as a codeword for ‘all manner of “becomings”’.349 In thinking ‘rhizomatically’ about a book, the only important question concerns its connections to other entities: We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier, we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are ­inserted and metamorphosed.350 The literary relevance of such insistence on a book’s continuity with all that lies beyond it is also highlighted by Deleuze and Guattari’s mention

345 346

347 348 349 350

assumption that words mean by referring to a reality without the pale of language, to objects that exist in themselves before they become signs’. As against this, R ­ iffaterre contends that ‘The text refers not to objects outside of itself, but to an intertext. The words of the text signify not by referring to things, but by presupposing other texts.’ – Michael Riffaterre, ‘Interpretation and Undecidability’, 228–9. TP, 7, 10, 26. ‘A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social ­struggles.’ – TP, 6. TP, 5. TP, 11, 14, 20. TP, 22. TP, 2.

98 Darwin of William Burroughs and James Joyce as examples of rhizomatic writing, and by their reference to their own quotations as instances of a text being ‘plugged into’ other texts: We have been criticized for overquoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary ­machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work.351 The rhizome’s derivation from the vocabulary of botany is relevant to that strand of intertextual theory which seeks to unravel ideas of writing as (referential) representation. Books, according to Deleuze and Guattari, are like plants – natural growths which no more mirror the world from ‘outside’ than a flower mirrors the garden in which it blooms: contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world […] Mimicry is a very bad concept since it relies on binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different nature.352 Like anastomosis, the rhizome is evidently deployed as a revision of the age-old trope of ‘the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order’. 353 The ambition to literalize this abstract idea of a book ‘form[ing] a rhizome with the world’ subtends Bök’s attempt to begin to realize a future in which the book ‘might in fact become indistinguishable from buildings, machinery, or even organisms’. As he states in an interview of 2007, ‘I want each of my own books to burgeon into the world’.354 From Analogy to Homology: Memes Although marked by an ‘exuberantly metaphorical drive’, Darwin’s ­writing, like that of many of his contemporaries, manifests what Beer calls ‘romantic materialism’ – ‘a desire to substantiate metaphor, to convert analogy into affinity’.355 The Origin comes to a close with the anticipation of a future in which ‘[t]he terms used by naturalists […] 351 TP, 3. | ‘Take William Burroughs’ cut-up method: the folding of one text onto another, which constitutes multiple and adventitious roots (like a cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under consideration. […] Joyce’s words, accurately described as having ‘multiple roots’, shatter the linear unity of the word, even of language, only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge.’ – TP, 4. 352 TP, 10. 353 TP, 6. 354 Voyce and Bök, ‘The Xenotext Experiment’, §15. 355 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 34, 37.

Darwin  99 will cease to be metaphorical’, as well as in which natural selection will come to shed light on the ‘open fields’ of psychology and ‘the origins of man and his history’.356 Twentieth- and twenty-first-century research has gone a long way in exploring the ‘open fields’ Darwin envisaged, bringing into focus ­innumerable unexpected ramifications of his theory. In some cases, the pursuit of ‘Universal Darwinism’ – ‘the application of Darwinian thinking way beyond the confines of biological evolution’ – has proceeded by the same analogical and metaphorical means as Darwin himself employed.357 There has been considerable resistance to such reductionism in some quarters – and such resistance has been most intense, in Dennett’s ­experience, when ‘a Darwinian theory of creative intelligence’ has been mooted, and with it the possibility that all the works of human genius can be understood in the end to be products of a cascade of generate-and-test procedures that are, at bottom, algorithmic, mindless.358 The categorical, often knee-jerk rejection of the Darwinian idea of ‘the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation’ seems emotionally rather than rationally driven.359 As ­Dennett asks, if mindless evolution could account for the breathtakingly clever ­artifacts of the biosphere, how could the products of our own ‘real’ minds be exempt from an evolutionary explanation?360 And If Darwinian mechanisms can explain the existence of a skylark, in all its glory, they can surely explain the existence of an ode to a nightingale, too. A poem is a wonderful thing, but not clearly more wonderful than a living, singing skylark.361

356 O, 357, 359. 357 Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine [1999] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5–6. 358 Daniel Dennett, ‘Could There Be a Darwinian Account of Human Creativity?’, in Evolution: From Molecules to Ecosystems, ed. Andrés Moya and Enrique Font (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 359 O, 359. 360 DDI, 63. 361 Daniel Dennett, ‘In Darwin’s Wake, Where Am I?’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 75, no. 2 (2001), 11–30, 15.

100 Darwin Every aspect of human life, including all items of human culture, ­Dennett argues, are blooms on the Tree of Life.362 Minds – that is, brains – are no different from other organs – they are ‘stupendously complex “machines”’ evolved by ‘one algorithmic process or another’.363 Unlike Bergson, Darwin maintains that ‘the difference between us and other animals is one of huge degree, not metaphysical kind’.364 The key difference is language, ‘the primary medium of culture’ and one of which ‘the information-encoding properties […] are practically limitless’.365 Cultural evolution is an area of Darwinian extrapolation in which claims of analogy and homology have proved most difficult to disentangle. One of the most seemingly insuperable obstacles confronting the unification of organic and cultural phenomena is that culture does not appear – superficially at least – to be particulate. (It should be recalled, however, that organic matter itself did not appear to be particulate until the discovery of genes, via Mendel’s theory of inheritance, in the twentieth century.)366 In 1976, the biologist Richard Dawkins spearheaded the attempt to overcome this difference by positing a particle of cultural transmission.367 In the spirit of Herbert Spencer’s search for ‘one law’ of ‘progress’, Dawkins asserted ‘one fundamental principle’: that ‘all

362 ‘[E]very possible living thing is connected by isthmuses of descent to all other living things […] the technologists themselves, and their tools and methods, are firmly located on the Tree of Life’. – DDI, 121. 363 DDI, 370, 51. 364 DDI, 370. 365 DDI, 338, 371. 366 Henig summarizes the story and purport of Mendel’s long neglected breakthrough: After working on peas and plant species for seven long years, Mendel had recorded and analyzed his findings in a two-part lecture to a local scientific society in 1865. The lecture was later published in the society’s Proceedings – and then was all but ignored for the rest of Mendel’s life. When his work was rediscovered by William Bateson in 1900, Mendel was found to have proposed laws of inheritance that ultimately became the underpinning of the science of genetics […] he believed the traits passed from parent to offspring as discrete, individual units in a consistent, predictable, and mathematically precise manner. In Mendel’s wake followed a steady string of discoveries: that these hereditable units can be found in the genes, which in turn are found on the chromosomes, which in turn are found in the cell nucleus. By the 1940s scientists knew that the meaningful information of the genes was packed into a molecule called DNA; by the 1950s they could build a physical model of the DNA molecule and interpret the code through which DNA talks to the cell. – Robin Marantz Henig, A Monk and Two Peas: The Story of Gregor Mendel and the Discovery of Genetics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), 2, 6, 7 67 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene [1976] (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univer3 sity Press, 1989).

Darwin  101 life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities’.368 But as ­culture itself is not made of genes (though it is made by humans made of genes), genes cannot be ‘the sole basis’ of an evolutionary understanding of ‘modern man’.369 While the gene long held sway alone, ‘a new kind of replicator has recently emerged’.370 Dawkins defines this hypothetical second replicator – the ‘meme’ – as ‘a unit of cultural transmission, or unit of imitation’: Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes f­ ashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.371 There are some crucial differences between genes and memes h ­ owever. First, the rate of memetic transmission far outstrips that of genetic transmission: the meme ‘leaves the old gene panting far behind’.372 Second, cultural transmission need not be genealogical: unlike genetic transmission which is ‘vertically’ transmitted from parent to offspring, ­cultural transmission, sometimes referred to as ‘horizontal transmission’, is not dependent upon sexual reproduction nor confined to bloodlines. It takes place between contemporaries, friends, neighbours, colleagues; it ­happens when we read a book, a paper, or posts on a social media platform, when we see a painting, film, or play, when we listen to music or play a game. Third, the replication of memes is very much less exact than that of genes: The memes are being passed on to you in altered form. This looks quite unlike the particulate, all-or-none quality of gene transmission. It looks as though meme transmission is subject to continuous mutation, and also to blending.373 Dennett, like Dawkins, sees alteration as the rule rather than the ­exception in horizontal (i.e. memetic) transmission: Minds (or brains) […] aren’t much like photocopying machines at all. On the contrary, instead of just dutifully passing on their messages […] brains seem to be designed to do just the opposite: to transform, 368 Herbert Spencer, ‘Progress: Its Law and Causes’, Westminster Review, vol. 67 (April 1857). | Dawkins, 192. 369 Dawkins, 191. 370 Dawkins, 192. 371 Dawkins, 192. 372 Dawkins, 192. 373 Dawkins, 194–5.

102 Darwin invent, interpolate, censor, and generally mix up the ‘input’ before yielding the ‘output’. Isn’t one of the hallmarks of cultural evolution and transmission the extraordinarily high rate of mutation and recombination? We seldom pass on a meme unaltered, it seems.374 The observation leads Dennett to proffer anastomosis as an image for the blending which defines cultural evolution: the whole power of minds as meme nests comes from what a ­biologist would call lineage-crossing or anastomosis (the coming back together of separating gene-pools).375 This agrees with Kroeber’s description of the growth of the Tree of Culture as a process of anastomosis and chimes with critical depictions of Joyce’s writing (in response to the author’s own use of the term) as ‘anastomosic’.376 Creativity and Selfhood Though the idea of the meme has, in typical memetic fashion, entered popular parlance, designating ideas or images which have, in another biological metaphor, ‘gone viral’ on the internet, Dawkins’s memetic theory remains merely hypothetical.377 If memetics were to become more thoroughly grounded in science – become a homology rather than an ­analogy – the fact would have major consequences for the understanding of literature (as of other arts and culture in general). Such a discovery might, for instance, validate Kristeva’s view that ‘every text [a]s the absorption and transformation of another’ by demonstrating that literary composition rests on the same algorithmic mental processes as meme theorist Susan Blackmore has in mind in stating that ‘[h]uman creativity is a process of variation and recombination’.378 374 DDI, 354–5. 375 DDI, 355. 376 Stephen Jay Gould’s account of cultural evolution, quoted by Dennett, also reads as a rephrasing of Kroeber’s distinction: ‘The basic topologies of biological and cultural change are completely different. Biological evolution is a system of constant divergence without subsequent joining of branches. Lineages, once distinct, are separate forever. In human history, transmission across lineages is, perhaps, the major source of cultural change.’ – Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 65, qtd in DDI, 355. 377 This acception is listed as the second meaning of ‘meme’ in the OED, and the first illustrative quotation of this usage dated to 1998. It is defined as ‘an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations.’ 378 Blackmore, 15. | Literature might in fact constitute a privileged realm for the study of evolution in the infosphere. This is because literature is more particulate than other

Darwin  103 But even if the validation of memetic theory is postponed or abandoned, it can – as mere hypothesis – shed useful light on aspects of intertextual theory. The two ideas, coined almost simultaneously, are cognate products of evolutionary theory and rich in consequences for human self-conceptions. In particular, memetic theory and intertextual theory seem closely aligned in their implications for the human sense of self. Memetic theory, writes Blackmore, ‘strikes at our deepest assumptions about who we are and why we are here’. Instead of the ‘magical autonomous agents’ we want to be, memetics reveals us to be enthralled to ‘autonomous selfish memes’.379 Neuroscience provides corroboration for this disillusioned (and to many, deeply antipathetic) view: the description that neuroscientists are building up of the way the brain works leaves no room for a central self. There is no single line in to a central place, nor a single line out; the whole system is massively parallel.380 According to Francis Crick, one of the researchers credited with the discovery of DNA in 1953, the lucid apprehension of such facts forces confrontation with the ‘Astonishing Hypothesis’, the possibility that ‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.381 This demystifying and depersonalizing conception of the self rejoins the purport of musings by Nietzsche and Freud concerning the conventionality of the pronoun ‘I’ (to be explored in Chapters 2 and 3). If our minds are just ‘temporary conglomerations’ of genes and memes, the self, as it is usually understood – that is, as an original locus of individual consciousness – is an illusion.382 It is a powerful, perhaps irresistible, illusion; a beneficial, perhaps even a necessary one, but an illusion all

379 380 381 382

cultural forms: poems and novels can break down into stanzas and paragraphs, lines and sentences, words and letters. Indeed, numerical, computer-­aided stylistic analysis, based on the quantifiability of such component parts, comes in and out of literary-critical fashion. Linguistics relies on related techniques for the study of vast corpuses of written or spoken material. The structuralists, as Chapter 4 explores, attempted to study stories by the dissection and classification of their component parts. Blackmore, 170, 8. Blackmore, 224. Blackmore, 221. Blackmore, 236.

104 Darwin the same.383 According to one widely used analogy, the self we experience and speak of is a story that we tell ourselves, a convenient ‘central abstraction’ around which memories and personality traits (that is, certain patterns of behaviour) coalesce.384 Dennett is a proponent of this account of subjectivity: we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behavior, more or less unified, but sometimes disunified, and we always put the best ‘faces’ on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the center of that autobiography is one’s self. And if you still want to know what the self really is, you’re making a category mistake. […] One can discover multiple selves in a person […] all that has to be the case is that the story doesn’t cohere around one self, one imaginary point, but coheres (coheres much better, in any case) around two different imaginary points.385 This understanding of the self as a fictional object – a mere ­‘centre of narrative gravity’ – radically makes away with ideas of free will and agency.386 The self is in this perspective an a posteriori ­rationalization of what has happened to us, not a real entity capable of actual d ­ ecision-making. As Dennett puts it with characteristically ­imaged forthrightness: ‘we are not the captains of our ships; there is no conscious self that is unproblematically in command of the mind’s resources’.387 What we usually have in mind in speaking of our selves is a locus of responsibility somehow insulated from the causal fabric in which it is embedded, so that within its boundaries it can generate, from its own genius, its irreducible genius, the meaningful words and deeds that distinguish us so sharply from mere mechanisms.388 What we are, instead, is ‘a pack of neurons’ or ‘pack of memes’ making ‘our’ decisions for ‘us’.389

383 As Nietzsche remarks in The Gay Science, ‘the conditions of life might include error’. – GS, §121, 117. 384 Daniel Dennett, ‘The Self as a Centre of Narrative Gravity’, in Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, ed. Frank S. Kessel, Pamela M. Cole, and Dale L. Johnson (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992), 103–15, 105. | Galen Strawson argues against this view in ‘I am not a story’, Aeon, 3 September 2015, https://aeon.co/essays/ let-s-ditch-the-dangerous-idea-that-life-is-a-story [accessed 23 July 2019]. 385 Daniel Dennett, ‘The Self as a Centre of Narrative Gravity’, 103–15, 114. 386 Dennett, ‘The Self as a Centre of Narrative Gravity’. 387 Dennett, ‘The Self as a Centre of Gravity’, 113. 388 Dennett, ‘In Darwin’s Wake, Where Am I?’, 23–4. 389 Blackmore, 235.

Darwin  105 Affronting though this may be to our entrenched beliefs in human intelligence, personal sovereignty, and ‘desert-entailing responsibility’, it is a description fully congruent not only with the dissolution of the subject central to intertextual theory but also to the state of selflessness or impersonality which many artists and authors report experiencing in moments of creative invention.390 This is the state of disembodied, passive surrender to ‘inspiration’ described by Nietzsche in Ecce Homo. The experience is one of being just an incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of overpowering forces […] You listen, you do not look for anything, you take, you do not ask who is there; a thought lights up in a flash, with necessity, ­without hesitation as to its form, – I never had any choice.391 It is the state prescribed by T.S. Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, when he declares that ‘[t]he emotion of art is impersonal’ and that ‘[t]he progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’.392 If Eliot writes of poetry which involves ‘this process of depersonalization’ as ‘approach[ing] the condition of science’, Coetzee images literary creation as a similarly impersonal, mechanical process, involving the interplay of finely calibrated feedback loops: As you write – I am speaking of any kind of writing – you have a feel of whether you are getting closer to ‘it’ or not. You have a sensing mechanism, a feedback loop of some mind; without that mechanism you could not write. It is naïve to think that writing is a simple twostage process: first you decide what you want to say, then you say it. On the contrary, as all of us know, you write because you do not know what you want to say. Writing reveals to you what you want or wanted to say. What it reveals (or asserts) may be quite different from what you thought (or half-thought) you wanted to say in the first place. That is the sense in which one can say that writing writes us. Writing shows or creates (and we are not always sure we can tell one from the other) what our desire was, a moment ago.393 On Dennett’s argument, age-old ideas of creativity as an experience of seer-like intuition or oracular possession, modernist ideas of creativity as the accomplishment of, or surrender to, depersonalization, and ­indeed 390 Galen Strawson, ‘What More Do We Want?’, review of Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room, Times Literary Supplement, vol. 4280 (April 19, 1985), 431. 391 EH, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, §3, 126. 392 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 22. 393 Eliot, ‘Tradition’, 17, and J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 18.

106 Darwin contemporary ideas of creativity as a discovery procedure involving nebulous sensing mechanisms and feedback loops, are all alike acknowledging or making a virtue of the inaccessibility of our in ­ own cognitive processes. As he remarks of the champion chess-player Gary Kasparov (chosen as Dennett’s example of extreme, creative, ­problem-solving intelligence): It won’t do to say that Kasparov uses ‘insight’ or ‘intuition’ since that just means that Kasparov himself has no privileged access, no insight, into how the good results come to him. […] nobody knows how Kasparov’s brain does it – least of all Kasparov.394 The exemplary statements of Nietzsche, Eliot, and Coetzee (representative as they are of countless others) point instead to the truth of ­creativity as a disunified, automatic functionality in which intentionality plays no part, except as one of the most powerful ‘cognitive illusions of our ­species – overwhelmingly persuasive to us because of design shortcuts in our cognitive systems’.395 The Intentional Stance Dennett refers to this almost irrepressible phenomenal illusion as ‘the intentional stance’. A philosopher evidently versed in literature and ­literary theory, Dennett implicitly connects the intellectual realization concerning the absence of real intentionality in the world both to Wimsatt and Beardsley’s attack on the ‘intentional fallacy’ (1946), and to Barthes’ proclamation of the death of the author (‘Does the author disappear?’ asks one of his headings).396 Again, the coincidence of dates is noteworthy: while Barthes’ ‘Death’ was first published in English in 1967 and in French in 1968, Dennett’s first formulation of ‘the intentional stance’ as his ‘theory of mind’ appeared in 1971.397 The intentional stance, which some scientists argue we are genetically predisposed to assume, enables us to ‘make sense of each other’.398 The intentional stance is ‘an extraordinarily powerful tool for prediction’, which consists simply in treating others as rational agents whose ­beliefs

394 Dennett, ‘In Darwin’s Wake, Where Am I?’, 22. 395 Daniel Dennett, The Intentional Stance [1987] (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1990), 4. 396 W.K. Wimsatt Jr., and M.C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, The Sewanee ­Review, vol. 54, no. 3 (July–September 1946), 468–88. 397 Daniel Dennett, ‘Intentional Systems’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 68, no. 4 (February 1971), 87–106. In 1987, this article was replaced by The Intentional Stance as ‘the flagship expression of [his] position.’ – Intentional Stance, 3. 398 DDI, 379. | Dennett, Intentional Stance, 11.

Darwin  107 and desires are inferable and whose behaviour is foreseeable – in endowing them, that is, with intentionality.399 If this account of how we all live our lives sounds too obvious to state, Dennett acknowledges as much: ‘Our use of the intentional strategy is so habitual and effortless’ that it is ‘easily overlooked’.400 Just as ‘[w]e approach each other as intentional systems’, he continues, we approach products of human creativity as intentional products.401 The intentional stance is used in reverse engineering, when scientists seek to understand how and why a new product has been designed in precisely the way it has. In the realm of artistic interpretation, to adopt the intentional stance means to ‘try to figure out what the designers had in mind’, to ‘treat the artifact under examination as a product of a process of reasoned design development, a series of choices among alternatives, in which the decisions reached were those deemed best by the designers’.402 The intentional stance is called a stance precisely to foreground the fact that the almost irresistible belief upon which it rests is a ‘fallacy’. Although Dennett may well have named the ‘intentional stance’ after Wimsatt and Beardsley’s influential article of 1946 – or at least relished the parallel when he became aware of it (as is suggested by his inclusion of a quotation from the piece as an epigraph in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) – the position he advances is significantly different from theirs.403 The Intentional Fallacy Wimsatt and Beardsley write against the adoption of the intentional stance in literary criticism. In a sense, the common practice of reading a ­literary work in quest of the author’s presiding ‘intention’ (a word which appears between quotation marks in Wimsatt and Beardsley’s first sentence) is testimony to Dennett’s observation concerning our constant unthinking adoption of the intentional stance in our lives. But as Dennett ­emphasizes the falseness of intentionality to the reality of our disunified, meme-driven ‘selves’ (whilst acknowledging its practical utility), Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard of judging the success of a work of literary art’.404 On the face of it, this is no denial of intentionality but a rejection of the idea that it is either possible to ascertain or a valid yardstick for the assessment of a work’s value. Their call is for 399 400 401 402 403 404

Dennett, Intentional Stance, 24. Dennett, Intentional Stance, 22. Dennett, Intentional Stance, 49. Dennett, Intentional Stance, 229–30. DDI, 22. Wimsatt and Beardsley, 468.

108 Darwin ‘objective criticism of works of art as such’ – criticism separate from enquiries as to ‘whether the artist achieved his intentions’.405 As the intertextual ­theorists were later to find, the question of intention, and the refusal to allow it is as an aesthetic criterion, entails many specific truths about inspiration, authenticity, biography, literary history and scholarship, and about some trends of contemporary poetry, especially allusiveness. There is hardly a problem of literary criticism in which the critic’s approach will not be qualified by his view of ‘intention’.406 Whatever the role of intention ‘as a cause of a poem’, Wimsatt and Beardsley insist that it should not be the ‘standard’ of critical assessments. In fact, they contend, conventional causal connections need to be reversed. Defined as ‘design or plan in the author’s mind’, intention is posited on the basis of certain artistic qualities in the work of art: thus, ‘It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention of an artificer.’407 In terms fairly closely reprised by Barthes in ‘The Death of the Author’ two decades later, Wimsatt and Beardsley, using the image of genealogical rupture discussed earlier in this chapter, break the poem free from the sway of its fathering author: The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public.408 Intentionalist criticim is what is described (and decried) by Barthes when he states that 405 406 407 408

Wimsatt and Beardsley, 471. Wimsatt and Beardsley, 468. Wimsatt and Beardsley, 469. Wimsatt and Beardsley, 470. In ‘The Death of the Author’, Barthes, summarizing the idea of authorship he sets out to topple, writes that The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. – DOA, 145

Barthes’ conclusion, that ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’, also seems an echo of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s claim that ‘[t]he poem belongs to the public’, though there is a significant difference between Wimsatt and Beardsley’s ‘public’, implicitly consisting in the opinions of a body of authoritative critics, and Barthes’ democratically liberated and empowered individual reader. – DOA, 148.

Darwin  109 To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to ­furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author […] beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’ – victory to the critic. […] In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an ­anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his ­hypostases – reason, science, law.409 As this discussion of the classic ‘Author-God’ suggests, the intentional stance is causally related to the teleological argument for the existence of god, also sometimes referred to as the ‘argument from design’.410 The existence of god, as William Paley explains in his Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802), is inferred by the adoption of the intentional stance in the consideration of the world’s exquisite, intelligent design: suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place […] There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. […] Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.411 Intertextuality stands sharply at odds with such theological thinking: as a theory which repudiates intentionality, it rides on the crest of a wave of ­atheistic currents – Darwinian theory and Nietzschean philosophy pre-­ eminent among them – which gathered momentum in the nineteenth century. Intentionality, Allusion, and Genetic Criticism Wimsatt and Beardsley discuss the intentional fallacy’s particular ­relevance to questions of allusion, the identification of which amounts to 409 DOA, 147. 410 DOA, 146. 411 William Paley, Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature [1802], 2nd edn (London: R. Faulder, 1802), 1, 3–4, 19.

110 Darwin a judgement regarding intentionality. Will Kynes distinguishes allusion and echo by this criterion: allusions originate in the mind of the author; echoes merely in the mind of the reader.412 The intentionalist tradition has led to considerable investment in the detection and analysis of allusion in literary criticism. As Wimsatt and Beardsley note, it has become a kind of commonplace to suppose that we do not know what a poet means unless we have traced him in his reading – a supposition redolent with intentional implications.413 Or as Barthes ironically remarks, when an allusion is uncovered, ‘victory to the critic’.414 Wimsatt and Beardsley choose Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land as a particularly vexed illustration of the difficulty of determining intentionality, ultimately suggesting that the notes should be judged like any other part of the poem.415 The problem of judging allusions and determining their relation to their ‘sources should be solved’, they opine, not ‘the way of biographical or genetic enquiry’ – by, for instance, asking the poet himself whether he had Donne or De Nerval in mind in writing of mermaids in ‘The Love Song of E. Alfred Prufrock’ – but ‘the way of poetic analysis and exegesis, which inquires whether it makes any sense if Eliot-Prufrock is thinking about Donne’.416 ‘Critical inquiries’, in other words, ‘are not settled by consulting the oracle’.417 Such a position, and the prescient reference to ‘genetic enquiry’, remains relevant to the practice of literary criticism today, seventy years after it was first articulated. Contemporary criticism is more concerned than ever with the detective pursuit and empirical demonstration of allusion. In the age of the internet or epoch of the ‘digital humanities’, in which researchers benefit from the assistance of the algorithms of myriad search engines, the ascent of genetic criticism as an ever more widely used approach is testimony to the endurance of intentionalist approaches, even as they seek to reinvent themselves under new guises and adorn themselves with the language and trappings of positivistic, verifiable science. While genetic criticism was founded in the name of a quest to understand creativity in general, it tends, in practice, to ­involve the painstaking, methodologically governed repertorying, à la Lowes, of vast compendia of sources, often presented in the form of edited

412 Will Kynes, My Psalm Has Turned into Weeping: Job’s Dialogue with the Psalms (Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2012), 31. 413 Wimsatt and Beardsley, 482. 414 DOA, 147. 415 Wimsatt and Beardsley, 483–4. 416 Wimsatt and Beardsley, 486. 417 Wimsatt and Beardsley, 487.

Darwin  111 notebooks and working drafts.418 Likewise, the high contemporary valuation of archival studies, whether for the purposes of biographical or historical contextualization, and the continuing trend for the cataloguing of authors’ libraries, testify to the undeterred regard in which intentionalist criticism is held, and the unabating energy with which it is practised. For this reason, the argument articulated by Wimsatt and Beardsley seventy years ago retains its currency: the ‘judgment of poems is different from the art of producing them’.419 Wimsatt and Beardsley’s observation concerning the amalgamation of genesis and interpretation is entrenched by the sheer number of such studies: ‘The day may arrive when the psychology of composition is unified with the science of objective evaluation, but so far they are separate.’420 In effect, their remark here unwittingly pinpoints what later emerged as one of the weaknesses of ‘intertextuality’, which – as a term and a theory – makes no distinction between writing and reading, specifying no point of view from which texts are to be considered. As Wimsatt and Beardsley also rightly note, the fascination with sources is perhaps, to a degree, incompatible with aesthetic appreciation. To appraise a work of art is, according to a classical aesthetic tradition, to draw a boundary around it: For all the objects of our manifold experience, specially for the intellectual objects, for every unity, there is an action of the mind which cuts off roots, melts away context.421 The delimitation of such circumscribed units is precisely what intertextual theory argues against, replacing a vision of literature as a ­series of monumental works or ‘bounded texts’ with one of literature as an ­infinite mesh of textuality.422 Wimsatt and Beardsley – soon to be echoed by ­Eliot in ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ – use ‘the whole glittering parade’ of Lowes’ scholarly work on Coleridge and its ­unfurling of ‘more and more sources’, to impugn genetic criticism as the abandonment of interpretation, the privileging of documentation over aesthetic response, and source-hunting over emotion.423

418 In its original conception, genetic criticism would seem to have much common ground with ‘cognitive poetics’ – ‘the application of cognitive science to ­illuminate the study of literary reading’. – Peter Stockwell, ‘­Cognitive Poetics and Literary Theory’, Journal of Literary Theory, vol. 1, no. 1 (2007), 135–52, 135. 419 Wimsatt and Beardsley, 476. 420 Wimsatt and Beardsley, 476. 421 Wimsatt and Beardsley, 480. 422 Kristeva, ‘The Bounded Text’. 423 Wimsatt and Beardsley, 478, 479.

112 Darwin This chapter has sought to outline the specific role of Darwin’s ­theory as one of the deep foundations of intertextuality, tracing the manifold connecting links between the ‘intellectual revolt’ he instigated and one of the dominant literary-critical notions of our time.424 Charting the extrapolation of his evolutionary framework to culture over a period of over a century, it shows how his atheistic and materialistic view of a natural world in flux came to inform many important strands of ­nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century thinking about literature. Many of the ideas touched upon in these pages will be revisited from other angles in subsequent chapters, which trace how they enter into Nietzschean philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis; how they are adapted in the writings of the structuralists; how they feature in the writings of Bakhtin; and how all of these, in turn, come to shape literary post-structuralism.

423 Dewey, 1.

2 Nietzsche Murdering Authority, Liberating Interpretation

This chapter establishes Nietzsche’s importance to several of the founding texts of intertextual theory. Because his role is at times more implied than openly stated, and because coded allusions to Nietzsche may not be as clear now as they were in France in the 1960s, the e­ xtent of his ­significance within the genealogy of intertextuality has not been fully grasped (often, his significance has not been noticed at all). In ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), S/Z (1970), ‘From Work to Text’ (1971), The ­Pleasure of the Text (1973), ‘Fantasia of the Library’ (1967), and ‘What Is an Author?’ (1969), Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault ­reconfigure writing and interpretation in ways which amount to a ­transposition of Nietzsche’s linguistic, metaphysical, and hermeneutic positions to literature.1 Moreover, both theorists perform these ­revaluations – of texts, authorship, and reading – by deploying rhetorical strategies which also align them with Nietzsche. By emulating Nietzsche’s strikingly ­metaphorical modes of writing, Foucault and Barthes, following in the footsteps of the ‘philosopher-artist’, turn style into a powerful vector of their essays’ persuasive force.2 The first part of Chapter 2 presents N ­ ietzsche’s ­proto-intertextualist views. The second considers closely their appropriation by the 1960s theorists. The third outlines the theory’s deviations from ­Nietzsche and tries to resolve some of its problems by examining recent discussions – principally by Alan Schrift, ­A lexander Nehamas, and Ken Gemes – of the tension in his works between philological monism and critical pluralism.

The Seeds of Intertextuality Biographical Intimations of an Intertextual Outlook Certain facts about Nietzsche’s life, and some of his discursive positions about, for instance, the dangers of falling under overpowering influences 1 DOA. | S/Z. | P. | F. | WA. 2 Jacques Derrida names Nietzsche as the first philosopher to have addressed, among other themes, ‘the concept of the philosopher-artist’. – Margins of Philosophy, 305.

114 Nietzsche and the activities of reading and writing, may at first make him seem an unlikely link in the chain of events leading up to the canonical formulations of intertextual theory. But these biographical facts and statements in fact betray Nietzsche’s extreme personal awareness of interconnection between selves and texts – a sensitivity entirely consonant with intertextuality’s reconfiguration of selves and texts as interpenetrating networks. Overcoming Influence Nietzsche’s youthful tendency to fall under the sway of overwhelming influences is well documented, not least by Nietzsche himself. His early admiration for Arthur Schopenhauer and the infatuation he experienced for Richard Wagner are the best examples of this proclivity. THE CASE OF SCHOPENHAUER

The third of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, written and published in 1874 when Nietzsche was thirty years old and had been working as a professor of philology in Basel for five years, was entitled ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’. In this essay, Nietzsche expresses admiration for Schopenhauer as a model for living as well as for thinking. It was for precisely such a model that Nietzsche had been longing when he first read him: It was thus truly roving through wishes to imagine I might discover a true philosopher as an educator who could raise me above my insufficiencies insofar as these originated in the age and teach me again to be simple and honest in thought and life, that is to say be untimely, that word understood in the most profound sense. […] It was in this condition of need, distress and desire that I came to know Schopenhauer.3 Nietzsche’s response was instant and impassioned: I am one of these readers of Schopenhauer who when they have read one page of him know for certain they will go on to read all the pages and will pay heed to every word he ever said. I trusted him at once and my trust is the same now as it was nine years ago. Though this is a foolish and immodest way of putting it, I understand him as though it were for me that he had written.4 At a time when his own writing was still relatively conventional, N ­ ietzsche was deeply impressed by Schopenhauer’s style: ‘He ­understands how to 3 UM, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, 125–94, 133. 4 UM, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, 133.

Nietzsche  115 express the profound with simplicity, the moving without rhetoric, the strictly scientific without pedantry’.5 Schopenhauer’s influence was immediately discernible in Nietzsche’s philosophical writing. As the Danish critic Georg Brandes would note in the first substantial essay to be written about Nietzsche, ‘[a]s a thinker his starting-point is Schopenhauer; in his first books he is actually his disciple’.6 Nietzsche’s early works, observes Brandes, feature many of Schopenhauer’s ‘favourite expressions’.7 It was from Schopenhauer that Nietzsche derived his initial approbation and subsequent ­revulsion for asceticism – a disgust that would eventually shape his idea of the will to power, which is at once a striking verbal reprisal of, and sharp conceptual deviation from, Schopenhauer’s ‘will’ as set out in The World as Will and Representation (1818).8 Where Schopenhauer sees the will as an evil, tormenting force to be denied, and death as the only real good, ­Nietzsche’s will is a principle of affirmation: the worldview it structures is far removed from the pessimism and renunciation a­ dvocated by Schopenhauer.9 ‘[Y]our educators can only be your liberators’, wrote Nietzsche in his Schopenhauerian Untimely Meditation; for Nietzsche ‘as for any other aspirant, there remained one more step to be taken, that of liberating himself from the liberator’.10 Nietzsche had come to Schopenhauer’s writings at a time when, having broken from Christianity, ‘set sail upon a sea of doubt’, the philosopher offered ‘firm land upon which he temporarily came to rest’.11 Although he eventually came to realize that even Schopenhauer had lived in ways which infringed his teachings, he never really lost his respect for the ‘sage of Frankfort’, from whom he had received his first intimation of how a philosopher might work 5 UM, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, 134. | R.J. Hollingdale refers to Schopenhauer’s ‘fine style’ as ‘the most attractive literary style any German philosopher to that time had had at his command.’ – Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, revd edn [1965] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 67, 66. 6 Georg Brandes, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. A.G. Chater ­(London: William Heinemann, 1914), 4. 7 Brandes, 10. 8 As Hollingdale notes, It is true that he received the concept of the primacy of the will from Schopenhauer, but the will to power is so different from Schopenhauer’s will that the two principles have virtually nothing in common except the word ‘will’, and if ­Nietzsche had been more careful with his terminology he might have employed some other expression. – Nietzsche, 67 9 Hollingdale, Nietzsche, 68. 10 UM, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, 129. | Brandes, 10. | In later writings, Nietzsche’s thoughts continued to identify liberation as the outcome of any worthwhile educative process: in Human, All Too Human (1878–80), he states both that ‘[t]here are no educators’ because ‘[a]s a thinker one should speak only of self-education’, and that ‘[t]he teacher [is] a necessary evil’. – HAH, §267, 374 and §282, 379. 11 Hollingdale, Nietzsche, 67.

116 Nietzsche entirely alone and yet in the end prove victorious. But for Schopenhauer’s philosophy he did at last lose all respect, considering it not only totally mistaken but a grave symptom of the decadence of Western man.12 THE CASE OF WAGNER

‘I loved Wagner’, writes Nietzsche in Ecce Homo (1889).13 Overcoming Wagner’s influence proved a far more difficult task for Nietzsche, intellectual devotion being blended in this case with strong emotional attachment. When the two first met on 9 November 1868, Nietzsche’s enthusiasm was stoked by the discovery of their shared appreciation of Schopenhauer, who formed the subject of their very first conversation. As Nietzsche reported in a letter to his friend Erwin Rohde written that same evening: I had a longish talk with him about Schopenhauer; and you can imagine what joy it was for me to hear him speak of him with a quite indescribable warmth, saying how much he owed him and how he was the only philosopher who understood the nature of music….14 Wagner rapidly became a ‘beloved tyrant’: ‘Nietzsche was overwhelmed, and his devotion to Wagner soon left all restraint behind. His letters of this period witness to the boundlessness of his infatuation.’15 The break with Wagner, when it occurred around 1878, after a ­decade’s friendship verging, on Nietzsche’s side, on adoration, was e­ xtremely painful, triggering emotional turmoil and chronic bouts of (very likely

12 Hollingdale, Nietzsche, 67. 13 EH, ‘The Case of Wagner’, §1, 138. 14 Hollingdale, Nietzsche, 40. | To Carl von Gersdorff, another friend, Nietzsche would later send an ­assessment of Wagner in terms of Schopenhauer: ‘I have found a man who reveals to me as no other the image of what Schopenhauer calls “the genius” and who is quite possessed by that wonderfully intense philosophy. He is none other than Richard Wagner’. – 4 August 1869, qtd in Hollingdale, 57. 15 Hollingdale, Nietzsche, 40–1 and 57. The intensity of Nietzsche’s affection has given rise to some speculation about the possibly Oedipal tenor of his feelings for Wagner: ­‘ Wagner was thirty-one years older than Nietzsche – old enough, that is, to be his ­father […] It is a commonplace of commentary that Wagner became a “father ­figure”, and there were indeed special reasons why he was peculiarly fitted to assume the role Pastor Nietzsche had vacated twenty years before. He was just the age Pastor Nietzsche would have been had he lived, both men having been born in 1813; he was born in Leipzig and his voice retained strong traces of the Saxon dialect, which he would sometimes exaggerate for comic effect; and it is also a fact that he looked like Pastor Nietzsche.’ – Hollingdale, Nietzsche, 41, 62. | Avital Ronell refers to ‘the extreme form of attachment’ which bound Nietzsche to Wagner in Test Drive (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 300.

Nietzsche  117 psychosomatic) sickness. Yet Nietzsche was able, looking back, to ­express extreme (and, patently, deliberately revisionary) gratitude for an association which he never ceased to regard as uniquely fertile: None of my other personal relationships amounts to much; but I would not give up my Tribschen days for anything, days of trust, of cheerfulness, of sublime chance – of profound moments… I do not know what other people’s experience of Wagner has been: no clouds ever darkened our skies.16 From the outset of his career – as the title of his Untimely Meditations proclaim – Nietzsche wanted to be untimely. This had been part of Schopenhauer’s attraction – ‘through Schopenhauer we are all able to educate ourselves against our age’.17 Wagner was envisaged in the same terms: he was the only living person with whom Nietzsche was willing, for a while, to envisage himself a contemporary. He saw the two of them as being engaged in a struggle against the times, and against present-day Germany. In Nietzsche’s fantasy of their life and future, he and W ­ agner would stand together, proudly and productively out of step with the wasteland of contemporary German culture: Being what I am, with my deepest instincts foreign to anything ­ erman, so that even the proximity of a German slows down my G digestion, my first contact with Wagner was also the first time in my life I was really able to breathe freely: I saw him, I worshipped him as a foreign country, as the opposite of – a living protest against – all ‘German virtues’. […] Wagner is the antidote par excellence for all things German, – poison, this I won’t deny….18 Dreams of such a contestatory alliance floundered as Wagner became gradually enslaved to the cult of his own personality and to the cult of Germany with which it had become enmeshed. Nietzsche could not ­remain close to an artist whose fulfilment depended on vigorous self-­ promotion and on the rapturous public reception by which it was r­ epaid. In turning his back (or so it seemed to Nietzsche) on his almost supernatural potential, in jettisoning his genius by seeking validation from ‘the rabble’, Wagner threatened to annihilate the promise of his disciple as well.19 Looking back in later years, Nietzsche expresses thankfulness 16 EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, §5, 92. Tribschen was the name of Wagner’s home in the Swiss canton of Luzern between 1866 and 1872. 17 UM, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, 146. 18 EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, §5–6, 92–3. 19 Brandes, 47. | In Ronell’s terms, Nietzsche saw that Wagner had become ‘too agglutinated to his time […] There was no resistance, finally, to Wagner among Germans,

118 Nietzsche even for the danger in which Wagner had thereby placed him. The very perilousness of the situation had brought out the best in him: I think that I know better than anyone what tremendous things Wagner could do, the fifty worlds of foreign delights that only he had wings to reach; and being what I am, strong enough to take advantage of the most questionable and dangerous things and become even stronger in the process, I name Wagner as the great benefactor of my life.20 The threat recalled in Ecce Homo is that of incorporation. Wagner had failed to resist it; he had been taken over, swallowed up by the G ­ erman culture Nietzsche had hoped they might together oppose: ‘What have I never forgiven Wagner for? That he condescended to the Germans,  – that he became reichsdeutsch… Wherever Germany extends it spoils culture.’21 For Nietzsche, the risk was twofold, or two-tiered – consisting, on the one hand, of absorption into Wagner and in the concomitant sacrifice of his personal fulfilment on the altar of the composer’s greater glory, and, on the other, of absorption, by association, into the culture at large. What had made alliance with Wagner so irresistible for Nietzsche – aside from the recognition of his stupendous musical talent – was a sense of their shared radicalism, their difference from the masses. Nietzsche needed to define himself in opposition to the status quo. He had relished feeling himself to be part of an elite intellectual aristocracy of two. When Georg Brandes wrote from Copenhagen expressing agreement with Nietzsche’s ‘profound disgust with democratic mediocrity’ and ‘aristocratic radicalism’, the philosopher replied with fulsome approval of the phrase: ‘The expression Aristocratic Radicalism, which you employ, is very good. It is, permit me to say, the cleverest thing I have yet read about myself.’22 When Wagner’s perceived change put Nietzsche’s own separation from the rest of the world at risk, the only course open to him was to reject ­ ermans of the Reich. Wagner melted into his time, which was a time clocked by G ­Nietzsche in terms of decadence, weariness, impoverishment.’ He saw, also, that Bayreuth had become ‘an institution, an excuse for national complacency, and the launching pad for self-congratulatory mythologemes. Bayreuth quickly ­became the appropriated site for the Reich’. – Test Drive, 283, 300. 20 EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, §6, 94. According to Ronell, even Nietzsche’s attacks on Wagner are legible as expressions of thankfulness: Attack for Nietzsche is more often than not an indication of gratitude. One wants to express gratitude, among other things, for having withstood the hardest tests, for having held one’s ground (more or less) and survived (more or less) an experience of merger. – Test Drive, 283–4 21 EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, §5, 93. 22 Brandes to Nietzsche, 26 November 1887, and Nietzsche to Brandes, 2 December 1887, both qtd in Brandes, 63–4. Brandes accordingly chose the phrase as the title of his influential 1889 essay on Nietzsche: ‘An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism’, in Brandes, Friedrich Nietzsche, 3–55.

Nietzsche  119 his former idol. And so, as Brandes notes, ‘From having been Wagner’s prophet he developed into his most passionate opponent.’23 Writing, Reading WRITING: RUPTURE AS PRINCIPLE

Nietzsche’s experiences with Schopenhauer and Wagner appear to have given rise to an acute writerly anxiety of influence. ­Writing in 1889, Georg Brandes comments on Nietzsche’s reluctance to ­acknowledge his intellectual models and sources. Whilst granting Nietzsche an uncontroversial originality of style (‘[i]n his passionate aphoristical form he is unquestionably original’), Brandes laments his refusal to recognize certain debts. Nietzsche’s silence, as Brandes points out, is particularly conspicuous where his resemblances to others are strongest: he evidently regards it as perfectly absurd that he would have to thank a contemporary for anything, and storms like a German at all those who resemble him in any point. 24 Ernest Renan’s influence on Nietzsche, ‘in his entire conception of culture and in his hope of an aristocracy of intellect’, noted Brandes, can scarcely be doubted, and ‘One is therefore surprised and hurt to find that Nietzsche never mentions Renan otherwise than grudgingly.’25 Dwelling on Eduard von Hartmann and Eugen Dühring as other slighted figures, Brandes remarks that Nietzsche’s response to his own seemingly generalized ­a nxieties about influence was not always one of mere silent occlusion: ‘in one respect he always remained the German professor: in the rude abuse in which his uncontrolled hatred of rivals found vent’.26 23 Brandes, 3. As well as in Ecce Homo, this passionate opposition is expressed at length in The Wagner Case (1888) and Nietzsche contra Wagner (privately printed in 1889, published in 1895). 24 Brandes, 52. 25 Brandes, 52 and 36. It was precisely because of his failure to be consistent in his ‘aristocratism of the intellect’ that Nietzsche vehemently chastises Renan in the ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’ section of Twilight of the Idols (1889): His desire to present an aristocratism of the spirit is no minor ambition: but at the same time, when faced with its counter-principle, the évangile des humbles, he falls down on his knees and does not stop there… What good is all this free-­ thinking, modernity, cynicism, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest! – TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, §2, ‘Renan’, 192 26 Brandes, 55. Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), was, according to Brandes, ­Nietzsche’s ‘predecessor in his fight against Schopenhauer’s morality of pity’. Brandes deems Eugen Dürhing (1833–1921) to be a forerunner to Nietzsche’s pessimism, and notes with consternation that Nietzsche ‘calls Dürhing his ape. Dühring

120 Nietzsche Nietzsche’s erasure of such scholarly affinities was partly motivated by disaffiliation from the country of his birth. As was intimated above in the discussion of Nietzsche’s reaction to Wagner’s populism, Nietzsche felt himself to be – indeed, prided himself on being – out of place in Germany, looking to ancient Greece, and later to contemporary France, for examples of more vital cultures (it suited him, symbolically, that both he and Wagner should have been resident in Switzerland). His feelings towards his country seem to have amounted, if not to rage, then certainly to contempt – ‘It is even my ambition to be considered the despiser of the Germans par excellence’. ‘I find the Germans impossible’ and ‘Germans are canaille’, he rants.27 Although Nietzsche’s loathing for Germany and German culture runs as a theme throughout his oeuvre, his target likely had to do with the accident of the personal circumstances which located him there. As the foregoing pages will already have shown, Nietzsche ardently resisted becoming subsumed to any place or person. Especially after his passions for Schopenhauer and Wagner had been spent, he was careful to isolate ­himself from overpowering influences. After resigning his chair in ­Basel for health reasons, he travelled from place to place incessantly, ostensibly seeking after a better climate and greater peace but probably equally driven by a psychological disposition to roam, and avoid becoming ­rooted. 28 Wherever he found himself, Nietzsche cultivated a sense of distance, enjoying the isolation and the symbolic hauteur afforded him by his mountain retreats. ‘When Zarathustra was thirty years old he left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains’, opens Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 29 Throughout the book, Zarathustra chants of the pain and ­exultation of ­solitude: ‘I come from heights that no bird has ever reached’, ‘I am a wanderer and a mountain-climber, he said to his heart. I do not like the plains and it seems I cannot sit still for long.’30

is a horror to him as a plebeian, as an Antisemite, as the apostle of revenge, and as the disciple of the Englishmen and of Comte’. – 52 and 54. 27 EH, ‘The Case of Wagner’, §4, 142. 28 Hollingdale, Nietzsche, 110. Hollingdale doubts Nietzsche’s illnesses were any more than a pretext for his itinerant lifestyle: The son of an intensely nationalistic and rooted family, he became a rootless ­cosmopolitan. The ill-health which plagued him in later years can hardly be held to account for it, as it sometimes has been; on the contrary, a sick man would be more likely to avoid travel and domestic uncertainty than a fit one. He never married and never became a father himself, and he eluded involvement with those institutions which provide most men, even the most brilliant, with a stable background to their lives.

– Nietzsche, 8

29 Z, ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’, §1, 3. 30 EH, ‘Why I Write such Good Books’, §3, 103. | Z, III, ‘The Wanderer’, 121. As Ronell notes, ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’, the second part of the second volume of

Nietzsche  121 Nietzsche’s reaction to the surrounding culture went beyond the choice of an itinerant existence and a penchant for mythological ­mouthpieces. There is a strand of violence to his writings which seems motivated ­directly by his sense of his position within an inimical, smothering culture. At times, he seems content to settle for mere misunderstanding between himself and his readers: ‘One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.’31 More often, however, the longing for difference and distance gives rise to fantasies of revolutionary violence. In the third of his Untimely Meditations, ­Nietzsche muses that the philosopher feels ‘perpetual bitter resentment’ at having to ‘present a semblance [of normality] to the world’, and ‘this constraint fills him with volcanic menace’. When philosophers come out of the ‘cave’ of their concealment, their aspect is ‘terrifying’: ‘when they ­re-emerge it is always as a volcanic eruption’.32 In Ecce Homo, ­Nietzsche describes his Untimely Meditations as ‘assassination attempts’ or ‘attentats’ on German culture and himself as ‘a terrible explosive that is a ­danger to everything’.33 Though his ‘explosives’ may take time to detonate, ­Nietzsche is confident that they will, in time, take effect: I know my lot. One day my name will be connected with the memory of something tremendous, – a crisis such as the earth has never seen, the deepest collision of conscience, a decision made against everything that has been believed, demanded, held sacred so far. I am not a human being, I am dynamite.34 Rupture, as Avital Ronell emphasizes by recapitulating the many breaks that punctuated Nietzsche’s life, proved a leitmotif, even a p ­ rinciple, of the philosopher’s life.35 ­ uman, All Too Human (first published in 1880, three years before the first two H parts of Zarathustra), depicts a figure ‘propelled by the effects of breakup […] an early generation of nomad, [who] travels in shifts and ruptures, intellectually torn from any lasting habitat by an experience of homelessness tied to time’. – Test Drive, 314. 31 GS, § 381, 245. Likewise, Nietzsche states in Ecce Homo that ‘as surely as Wagner is among Germans merely a misunderstanding, just as surely am I and always will be.’ – 31. 32 UM, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, 140–1. 33 EH, ‘The Untimely Ones’, §2, 112 and §3, 115. Nietzsche’s original ‘Attentaten’ is translated as ­‘attentats’ in Ecce Homo, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 2004). 34 EH, ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, §1, 143–4. 35 In Ronell’s analysis, Friedrich Nietzsche broke with everyone and everything that tried to have a ­substantial hold on him. In his life and in his afterlife Nietzsche broke the code of any program that tried to hold him to its truth. The list of Nietzsche’s breakups remains impressive: moving to Basel and then on to Italy, he broke with the German areas of the world map; insisting that his origins were Polish, he broke away from a ‘racially’ codified contract with national identity; in his first book he broke with philology, his official academic discipline and job description; as a philosopher, he

122 Nietzsche READING AS DANGER, OR: THE NEED FOR SELF-PROTECTION

As this makes clear, Nietzsche’s recalcitrance to acknowledge influences forms part of a wider resistance to contemporary culture in all its manifestations. But Nietzsche was both more self-aware and more consistent in both these tendencies than Brandes perceived. Indeed, the need for such sources to be avoided, ignored, or, if exposure occurred, overcome, was an article of faith with Nietzsche. In Ecce Homo, the philosopher is forthright about the measures required to protect himself from contamination by the outer world. He takes care, for example, to insulate himself from written thoughts that might ‘climb secretly over the wall’ of his mind. To read, for Nietzsche, is to leave oneself exposed, to ‘walk among foreign disciplines and souls’.36 In reading the permeable mind makes itself vulnerable to foreign ideas. Reading threatens the hermetic isolation the strong thinker requires. To read is to jeopardize independence and originality: When I am hard at work, you will not find me with books: I try not to be around anyone who is talking or even thinking. And that is what reading would certainly mean… Have you ever really noticed that chance and any sort of external stimulus have too violent an effect, ‘strike’ too deeply at the profound tension of the spirit? This is the tension that the spirit and basically the whole organism is condemned to by pregnancy. You need to steer clear of chance, of external stimuli as much as possible. In spiritual pregnancy a certain cleverness of instincts directs you to wall yourself in; would I let an alien thought secretly scale this wall?  – And that is what reading would certainly mean….37 ‘And that is what reading would certainly mean…’. Twice ­Nietzsche ­repeats his horrified aposiopesis. Reading is much more than an ­encounter with the physical pages of books. Books signify disease: in reading, the self is besieged by the seductive voices of other ‘alien’ selves.38 If, as Nietzsche asserts, reading is a sin against the self

refused to found a school and as a teacher he told his disciples to lose him; in his work he broke with the human and tried to figure the transhuman; in his time he broke with his time. […] His relation to the break is perhaps equally significant, however. Not one to hide behind the overturning momentum of events, Nietzsche announced and explained the break; he did not slither away or forget. He was responsible for his breaks, more often than not he initiated them, and he took responsibility for them. – Ronell, Test Drive, 289–90 36 EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, §3, 89. 37 EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, §3, 89. 38 EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, §3, 8.

Nietzsche  123 (‘Early in the ­morning, at the break of day, when everything is fresh, in the dawn of your strength, to read a book – that is what I call depraved! – –’), blindness is a redemptive blessing: My eyes alone put an end to any bookworm behaviour, in plain language: philology: I was redeemed from the ‘book’, I did not read anything else for years – the greatest blessing I ever conferred on ­myself!  – That lowermost self, buried and silenced by constantly having to listen to other selves (– and that would certainly mean reading!) slowly woke up, shyly and full of doubts, – but it finally started talking again.39 This voluntary sequestration from the words and selves of others is crucial because it allows Nietzsche to avoid the academic trap of ­reactive thinking. The kind of academic reckoning of scholarly dues Brandes finds missing in Nietzsche’s writing comes in for special disdain in Ecce Homo, as the symptom of a form of thinking akin in its passive responsiveness to a biological reflex: Another clever idea and principle of self-defence is to react as infrequently as possible and avoid situations and conditions where you would be condemned to unhook your ‘freedom’, as it were, your ­i nitiative, and turn into a simple reagent. A parable would be how you interact with books. Scholars who spend basically all their time ‘poring over’ books – a modest estimate for a philologist would be 200 a day – ultimately become completely unable to think for t­ hemselves. When they are not poring over books, they are not thinking. When they think, they are responding to some stimulus (– a thought they have read about). In the end, all they do is react. Scholars spend all their energy saying yes and no, criticizing what other people have already thought, – they do not think for ­t hemselves any more… Their instinct for self-defence has worn out, otherwise they would be defending themselves from books.40 The fantasy which underpins this account of the self is that of creation ex ipso, out of the self. Nietzsche prides himself on his experiences of inspiration, instances in which his ‘lowermost self’ spontaneously, ­irresistibly dictates to him: – Does anyone at the end of the nineteenth century have a clear idea of what poets in strong ages called inspiration? If not, I will describe it. – If you have even the slightest residue of superstition, you will

39 EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, §8, 96. | EH, ‘Human, All Too Human’, §4, 118–19. 40 EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, §8, 96.

124 Nietzsche hardly reject the idea of someone being just an incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of overpowering forces. The idea of revelation in the sense of something suddenly becoming visible and audible with unspeakable assurance and subtlety, something that throws you down and leaves you deeply shaken – this simply ­describes the facts of the case. You listen, you do not look for anything, you take, you do not ask who is there; a thought lights up in a flash, with ­necessity, without hesitation as to its form, – I never had any choice. A delight whose incredible tension sometimes triggers a burst of tears, sometimes automatically hurries your pace and sometimes slows it down; a perfect state of being outside yourself, with the most distinct consciousness of a host of subtle shudders and shiverings down to the tips of your toes […] All of this is involuntary to the highest degree, but takes place as if in a storm of feelings of freedom, of unrestricted activity, of power, of divinity….41 During such moments of almost hallucinatory vividness, Nietzsche’s very identity is brought into question. Inspiration seems at once personal – rendered in the first person (‘I will describe it’; ‘I never had any choice’) – and impersonal – ‘a perfect state of being outside yourself’, reflected in the adoption of different pronouns (‘[y]ou listen, you do not look for anything, you take, you do not ask who is there’). The phenomenon is likened to powerful natural occurrences (thoughts flashing like lightning, a storm) but also to supernatural events and extreme ­sensations and emotions (‘incarnation’, ‘overpowering forces’, ‘revelation’, ‘delight’, ­‘incredible tension’). The ‘philosopher-artist’ experiences himself as ‘mouthpiece’ or ‘medium’ but also as a being of ‘power’ and even ‘divinity’. Nietzsche’s desire to be an aberration, ‘a destiny’, extends to his anticipation of his own continuing incomprehensibility. Although he allowed himself to dream of an ideal reader (‘[w]hen I imagine a perfect reader, I always think of a monster of courage and curiosity who is also supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer’), his ambition to be untimely entailed going against the grain of every cultural trend so radically as to render himself illegible.42 Because the language he was speaking was completely new – because it was, in other words, free from any trace of intertextuality – it would be as good as imperceptible: Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things – including books – than they already know. You will not have an ear for something until experience has given you some headway into it. Let us take the most extreme case, where a book talks only about events ­lying ­completely 41 EH, ‘Human, All Too Human’, §4, 118–19. | EH, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, §3, 126–7. 42 EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, §3, 103.

Nietzsche  125 outside the possibility of common, or even uncommon, experience, – where it is the first language of a new range of ­experiences. In this case, absolutely nothing will be heard, with the associated acoustic illusion that if nothing is heard, nothing is there. At the end of the day, this has been my usual experience and, if you will, the originality of my experience.43 Nietzsche even rejects the claim of those who say they have understood him. His acceptance, he predicts, will be posthumous: The time has not come for me either. Some people are born posthumously. […] the fact that people do not hear me these days, that they do not know how to accept anything I say, these facts are not only understandable, they even strike me as the way things should be.44 After all, being comprehensible would mean risking absorption, would give the lie to his own much vaunted exceptionality and untimeliness. To defend himself against intimations of his own future neglect, ­Nietzsche affirms non-reception as an aspect of his ambition: ‘I am even more pleased about my non-readers’.45 Why is Nietzsche so intent on sealing himself off from all forms of society? The answer is given in the Schopenhauerian untimely ­meditation, which begins with Nietzsche’s impatience with the human tendency ‘to think and act like a member of a herd’.46 Human beings seem to him to be ‘like factory products’, prone to ‘sluggish promenading in b ­ orrowed fashions and appropriated opinions’ and ‘fettered by the chains of fear and convention’.47 Nietzsche, by contrast, aspires to be a ‘true helmsman’ rather than a ‘herdsman’.48 Brandes’s account summarizes N ­ ietzsche’s position as one of contempt for ‘the masses’, ‘the vulgar mob’, ‘the ­plebeian herd’, and ‘the rabble’.49 But such terminology says more about Brandes than it does about Nietzsche, for it mistakes the ­target of the philosopher’s complaint, which has less to do with class or poverty than with an all but universal laziness of thought: ‘When the great thinker 43 EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, §3, 101. 44 EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, §1, 100. Between the third Untimely ­Meditation and Ecce Homo, Nietzsche’s position thus evolves from tacit sympathy for Schopenhauer’s ‘triumphing when he did finally acquire readers’ to the adoption of a precisely antithetical stance: ‘My triumph is precisely the opposite of Schopenhauer’s, – I say ‘non legor, non legar’ [or ‘I am not read, I will not be read].’ – UM, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, 139, and EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, §1, 100. 45 EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, §2, 102. 46 UM, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, 127. 47 UM, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, 127. 48 UM, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, 128. 49 Brandes, 20, 30, 47.

126 Nietzsche despises mankind, he despises its laziness: for it is on account of their laziness that men seem like factory products’.50 That is the meaning of Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism. It is a position closely connected to his critique of language, and specifically, to his intertextual conception of language as an entrapping, self-referential web. Theoretical Intimations of Intertextuality Nietzsche’s Critique of Language THE NET OF LANGUAGE

In 1966, Michel Foucault claimed that Nietzsche was the first to have engaged in a ‘radical reflection upon language’.51 In an early essay e­ ntitled ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’ (1873), Nietzsche (anticipating many of Saussure’s insights) argues that language is a merely conventional edifice of concepts erected upon metaphorical foundations and arbitrary metonymical distinctions.52 According to Nietzsche, the differences posited by language between genders and biological species are random to the point of whimsy: We divide things by genders, designating trees as masculine and plants as feminine. What arbitrary transferences! […] What a­ rbitrary demarcations, what one-sided preferences, now for one property of a thing and now for another!53 In Nietzsche’s view, language is a system bearing no intrinsic connection to the world it purports to name and reflect. The world and the words and

50 UM, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, 127. 51 OT, 332. 52 OTL, 253–64. As is emphasized in this edition’s ‘Note on the texts’, the essay has a liminal status in Nietzsche’s oeuvre: ‘Although [the essay was] not published in Nietzsche’s lifetime, he did have [it] copied out in fair hand and circulated privately.’ – xlv. The essay was translated into French for the first time in 1969 – a development not unconnected to the proliferation of linguistically focused analyses of Nietzsche’s thought in the following decade. – See Das Philosophenbuch: Theoretische Studien / Le Livre du philosophe: Études théoriques, bilingual German-French edition, trans. Angèle Kremer-Marietti (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1969). | As Alexander Nehamas remarks, Prefiguring one of the great intellectual events of the next century, Nietzsche in effect claimed that nothing in the world has any intrinsic features of its own and that each thing is constituted solely through its interrelations with, and differences from, everything else. […] the world for Nietzsche, like language for Saussure, is a whole without which no part can exist, and not a conglomerate of independent units. – Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard U ­ niversity Press, 1985), 82 53 OTL, 255–6.

Nietzsche  127 grammar evolved by human beings to describe it constitute two entirely separate realms. There is no correspondence, no binary ­relationship, no relationship of truth or necessity between signs and their signifieds. ­Because ‘correct perception’ is ‘a self-contradictory ­absurdity’, the ­relationship between subject and object, word and thing, is an ‘aesthetic’ one, akin to ‘a halting translation into an entirely foreign language’.54 Individual experiences are lost and corrupted in the pale ­account given of them by the language of the herd. What begins as a unique, ineffable sensation, a radically singular physiological response to a stimulus, is disfigured by translation into the common denominator of ordinary language.55 As ­Nietzsche reiterates in Twilight of the Idols (1889), the process is a drastically flattening one, by which the world is drained of its plurality and the individuality of human experience utterly erased: Our true experiences are completely taciturn. They could not be communicated even if they wanted to be. This is because the right words for them do not exist. […] Language, it seems, was invented only for average, mediocre, communicable things.56 However creative they may be, metaphors inevitably diminish the world’s multiplicity, turning the merely analogous into the identical, reducing the similar to the same. ‘[I]f the same image is produced ­millions of times and transmitted through many generations’, the ­figurative comes to seem literal, the metaphorical simply true. Yet as Nietzsche e­ mphasizes, ‘the congealment and solidification of a metaphor by no means guarantees the necessity and exclusive justification of that m ­ etaphor’.57 Then, by yet another flawed stage of inductive reasoning (‘the equation of non-equal things’), metaphors used to render particular sense-impressions are generalized into ­ eing ‘the residue of a metaphor’) by which abstract concepts (a concept b specificity is further effaced.58 The ‘truths’ humans believe in, being extrapolated from such concepts, are revealed as tissues of unexamined lies: What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which have 54 OTL, 260. | ‘A juxtaposition of the different languages shows that what matters about words is never the truth, never an adequate expression; otherwise there would not be so many languages.’ – OTL, 256. 55 This translation into the undifferentiating stuff of common parlance is already a second-degree translation, for as Sarah Kofman explains, ‘The starting-point, the “impression’”, is itself a metaphor, a transposition of a nerve stimulus which varies from one individual to the next, producing individual sensation-images in the symbolic language of one of the five senses.’ – Nietzsche and Metaphor [1972], trans. Duncan Large (London: Athlone Press, 1993), 35. 56 TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, §26, 205. 57 OTL, 260. 58 OTL, 256, 258.

128 Nietzsche been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, decorated and which, after lengthy use, seem firm, canonical and binding to people: truths are illusions that are no longer remembered as being illusions, metaphors that have become worn out and stripped of sensuous force, coins that have lost their design and are now considered only as metal and no longer as coins.59 Nietzsche holds up ‘scientists’ – by which he means those engaged in academic system-building – for particular scorn. When they marvel at the way in which the world seems to abide by certain laws, scientists revel merely in the cleverness with which they have built a structure into which the world can be made to fit: Just as the bee builds cells and fills them with honey at one and the same time, so science works inexorably on the great columbarium of concepts, the burial place of intuition, building new and ever higher storeys, propping up, cleaning and renovating the old cells and, above all, striving to fill that colossal, soaring frame by fitting the whole empirical world, i.e. the anthropomorphic world, into it.60 Nietzsche emits this diagnosis through several of his own ‘boldest metaphors’ (‘the prison walls’ of belief, ‘the great columbarium of concepts’, ‘the burial place of intuition’), the high metaphoricity of his style (particularly conspicuous in a philosophical essay) drawing attention to the metaphorical makeup of all language, and thus to the fabulations scientists seek to pass off as truths.61 Whereas such academic writers, including other philosophers, typically favour a self-effacing style of straightforward statement intended to imply that they are setting out a factual, truthful account, Nietzsche, on the contrary, uses flamboyant language to emphasize that any views expressed are ‘his views, his judgements, and his values’. As Alexander Nehamas explains, He is constantly resisting the dogmatic self-effacement that is ­ irected at convincing an audience that the views with which they d are presented are not their authors’ creations but simply reflections of the way things are.62

59 OTL, 257. 60 OTL, 261–2. 61 OTL, 256, 259, 261. ‘On Truth and Lie’, unlike many of Nietzsche’s later works, is, structurally if not stylistically, a fairly classical essay: it is written in ­continuous prose rather than arranged as a series of numbered aphorisms, and consists of ­philosophical argument (however highly imaged) rather than illustrative narrative (like Zarathustra for instance). 62 Nehamas, Life as Literature, 35.

Nietzsche  129 Nietzsche’s essay makes no claim to outline the ‘thing in itself’ or truth of language: his deliberately idiosyncratic, ‘unphilosophical’ style makes it impossible for the reader to forget that this is an interpretation delivered from a particular perspective. Nietzsche’s critique of language rejoins the imputation of laziness l­evelled at the herd on the opening page of ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’. Because they fail to think, people – even people, like scientists, whose task is notionally to think seriously and interrogate assumptions encoded in patterns of speech – lie even when they believe themselves to be telling the truth. There is more to this complaint than a criticism of cliché, the mere visible froth atop a sea of mendacious metaphors. Nietzsche’s critique is directed at the foundations of all language, however seemingly neutral, however seeming literal. Having said this, Nietzsche also, in a typically paradoxical turnaround, acknowledges that human life and human society depend upon this intellectual failure. For ‘in order to exist’ society imposes on us the obligation to be truthful, i.e. to use the customary metaphors or, to put it in moral terms, the obligation to lie in accordance with a firm convention, to lie in droves in a style binding for all. Of course man forgets that this is his predicament and therefore he lies, in the manner described, unconsciously and according to the habit of hundreds of years – and arrives at a sense of truth precisely by means of this unconsciousness, this oblivion.63 The scope of the problem is evidently one which far exceeds the matter of individual or institutional or herd laziness. Although he laments the lack of lucidity which underpins the hubristic, insufficiently considered claims of science to advance human knowledge, Nietzsche also recognizes that linguistic automatism is irrepressible: ‘these representations are produced in us and out of us with the same necessity as a spider spins its web’.64 Further, the ‘drive to create metaphors’, he asserts, is the ‘fundamental drive of man’, ‘the primal force of human imagination’.65 Indeed, humanity’s metaphorical bent is no less than essential to life; for as Nietzsche notes in 1885: ‘a belief can be a condition of life and nonetheless be false’.66 As Nehamas explains, The world we construct, Nietzsche repeatedly insists, is absolutely necessary, and we could not live without it; for us it is as real as can be. 63 OTL, 257. 64 OTL, 261. 65 OTL, 262, 259. 66 WP, §483, 268. The same idea is expressed in The Gay Science (‘the conditions of life might include error’) and Beyond Good and Evil (‘[w]e do not consider the falsity of a judgement as itself an objection to a judgement’). – GS, §121, 117 and BGE, I, §4, 7.

130 Nietzsche We are not in error to live in it, to think and talk about it as we do, and to continue to do so. Our error is to believe that the ways in which we think and talk about it make by themselves any commitment about the real nature of the world, the world that is the common object of all the different perspectives on it. Our error consists in believing that our logic, language, mathematics, or any other practice is metaphysically loaded in the first place, that any such practice can be our guide to the nature of reality.67 Language is no ‘prison wall’ if we abandon the illusion of its referential relationship to the world, if we remember what it is: a human, all too human construct for the facilitation of communication.68 Nietzsche does not suggest that we seek to escape language (he does not believe this to be possible) but that we can overcome its ‘givens’, conceptual grooves, and metaphorical ready-mades by rewriting them, forging new images out of old, and thereby discovering ‘what [i]s possible with language’.69 THE ROLE OF ART

Nietzsche identifies art as a medium in which the lying fabric of linguistic systems is acknowledged and celebrated. It is through the enjoyment of art that mankind can learn to recognize what fiction and the supposedly truthful realm of science have in common. In the experience of art, The intellect, that master of deception, is free and released from its habitual slavery so long as it can deceive without causing harm; it is then that it celebrates its Saturnalia, and is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more adroit and more daring. With creative relish, it muddles up metaphors and shifts the boundary stones of abstraction.70 In this way, myth and art – ‘reveal[ing] the desire to make the existing world of waking man as colourful, irregular, free of consequences, incoherent, delightful and eternally new, as the world of dreams’ – have the power to ‘tear’ through ‘the rigid and regular web of concepts’.71

67 Nehamas, Life as Literature, 95–6. 68 OTL, 256. 69 EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, §4, 104. | Language, according to Nietzsche, is indispensable: it is a ‘huge structure of concepts, to whose beams and boards needy man clings all his life in order to survive’. – OTL, 263. For Nehamas, Nietzsche views language, ‘metaphysically tainted’ as it inevitably is, as ‘a misleading but ineliminable guide to the structure of the world’. And so, for all the vituperative tone of some of his remarks, contends Nehamas, Nietzsche ‘does not criticize this language directly, since we cannot do without it, and he does not offer alternatives to it, since there are none. He simply lays its vulnerabilities bare.’ – Life as Literature, 93–4. 70 OTL, 263. 71 OTL, 262.

Nietzsche  131 Nietzsche’s contention concerning the special power of art is put across by way of a throng of vivid metaphors which themselves constitute an onslaught on the arid ‘web of concepts’ the ‘philosopher-artist’ so deplores. As Sarah Kofman suggests in her ‘microtextual’ analyses of Nietzsche’s writing, the essay itself uses mimetic form to highlight the ideas of interpretation, transvaluation, and will to power which would preoccupy Nietzsche throughout his career.72 He deploys a series of architectural metaphors – the spider’s web, the beehive, the columbarium, the templum, the hut, the tower, the fortress – to illustrate the idea of metaphorical rewriting.73 Not only are Nietzsche’s metaphors evident appropriations of common classical tropes, but in the pattern of their increasing size, solidity, and militariness they represent the human urge – which Nietzsche later calls the ‘will to power’ – to seize, to conquer, to master, to assert dominion. Together, these images conjure an imaginary architectural palimpsest, the waves of imagery enacting Nietzsche’s view of interpretation as appropriation, which is to say, as power.74 The problem with Nietzsche’s use of the word ‘metaphor’ in ‘On Truth and Lie’, as he perhaps came to sense, is that it implies that there is non-­ metaphorical content in the world that is being metaphorically rendered and thus distorted – that the world, in other words, could conceivably be literally rendered. Nietzsche’s disquisition about metaphorical language and the loss of literal signification it entails, suggests, accurately, that Nietzsche is still assuming a world of essences – realities behind appearances – which, for all its inaccessibility, nonetheless exists. In later works, what Nietzsche confusingly refers to in ‘On Truth and Lie’ as ‘metaphor’ (using a figure of speech to represent a general feature of all language) gives way to more general ­notions of ‘text’ and ‘interpretation’, and ultimately ‘will to power’.75 A TEXTUAL WORLD

The world, by dint of Nietzsche’s metaphorical insistence, becomes a text that the will to power appropriates through naming and interpretation. The definition of will to power as interpretation is key to ­Nietzsche’s extension of the metaphor of the text to the whole world. For Nehamas, the decipherment and writing of texts constitute Nietzsche’s core model for understanding the world: Nietzsche […] looks at the world in general as if it were a sort of artwork; in particular, he looks at it as if it were a literary text. And 72 Duncan Large, Introduction to Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, xxii. 73 OTL, 258–9 and 261–2. 74 In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche describes ‘life itself’ as ‘essentially a process of appropriation, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, ­exploiting […] life is precisely will to power’. – BGE, IX, §259, 153. 75 Large, xxiii, and Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, 82.

132 Nietzsche he arrives at many of his views of the world and the things within it, including his views of human beings, by generalizing to them ideas and principles that apply almost intuitively to the literary situation, to the creation and interpretation of literary texts and characters. Many of his very strange ideas appear significantly more plausible in this light. The most obvious connection, of course, is supplied by our common view that literary texts can be interpreted equally well in vastly different and deeply incompatible ways. Nietzsche, to whom this currently popular idea can in fact be traced, also holds that exactly the same is true of the world itself and all the things within it.76 The best-known instance of this textual framework occurs near the opening of On the Genealogy of Morality, when Nietzsche likens the object of his enquiry to ‘the whole, long, hard-to-decipher hieroglyphic script of man’s moral past!’ 77 Humanity itself had been figured as an inscribed surface in the earlier Zarathustra, where faces were described as being as legible as texts: ‘[w]ritten full with the characters of the past, and even these characters painted over with the new ­characters’, they are ‘color-splattered’ palimpsests, ‘paintings of everything that has ever been believed’.78 Such instances fully support Nehamas’s ­contention that Nietzsche looks at the world as if it were a vast collection of what can only, at least in retrospect, be construed as signs […] he likes to think of the world as a text.79 Alan Schrift agrees and emphasizes the extent of Nietzsche’s tendency to think by textual analogy, noting that ‘the universalization of the scope of the interpretive process’ underpins all of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The text requiring interpretation is boundless: ‘there are no privileged objects that can escape the field of interpretive activity, nor is there anything

76 Nehamas, Life as Literature, 3. 77 GM, ‘Preface’, §7, 8. | As was discussed in Chapter 1 (see pp. 35–6), metaphorical descriptions of the history of the world as a book or text can be found in nineteenth-­ century ­biological and geological writing as well. Charles Lyell and Charles ­Darwin, amongst others, resorted to the analogy. In the Origin, Darwin, ‘following out ­Lyell’s metaphor’, likens ‘the natural geological record’ to a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone […] Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines. – O, 229 78 Z, II, ‘On the Land of Education’, 93–4. 79 Nehamas, Life as Literature, 82.

Nietzsche  133 that can bring the process of interpretation to a close’.80 Everything is text; or as Derrida would later extrapolate: ‘There is nothing outside of the text’; or again, as Barthes would put it in S/Z, ‘nothing exists outside the text’, ‘the text […] is […] without edges and without landmarks’.81 Both, in other words, accept and follow Nietzsche’s reconfiguration of ‘the world as text’.82 This core structural analogy goes some way towards explaining why Nietzsche plays so important a part in the emergence of intertextual theory. His works call for, and indeed proffer themselves as examples of, a philosophical practice in which the world – humanity, morality, history, and (less surprisingly) language – is read and rewritten as a text would be. And, because interpretations differ, flux is an ineluctable ­feature of human understandings of the world: the existence of such ‘texts’ as Greek history, or morality, is not equivalent to ‘the existence of static, completed objects’.83 For Nietzsche, interpretation is always in fact reinterpretation. Radical originality is impossible within such a system. To be original, ‘a writing would have to invent a unique code, an impossible original language containing evaluations which had never taken place’.84 And so, ‘[a]ccepting to write’, we write ‘in the knowledge that the whole human race also writes in us’.85 INFINITE CONNECTIVITY, REPETITION

As well as articulating an understanding of the world as sign system which strikingly anticipates the post-structuralist view of the world as a mesh of boundless textualities, Nietzsche’s writing even more obviously paves the way for intertextual theory in its emphasis on interconnection as the most defining feature of his interpretation of the world. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche declares that ‘everything which is happening is inextricably knotted to everything that will happen’, also commenting 80 Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (New York and London: Routledge: 1990), 182. 81 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158. | S/Z, 6, 14. 82 ‘[W]riting’, claims Barthes, ‘refus[es] to assign a “secret”, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text)’. – DOA, 147. 83 Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 194. 84 Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, 119. 85 Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, 119. Kofman’s paraphrase of Nietzsche, as rendered in Duncan Large’s translation, is remarkably close to T.S. Eliot’s insistence on the importance of ‘the historical sense’ in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, also one of the key forerunners to intertextual theory: the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. – ‘Tradition’, 14

134 Nietzsche on ‘the total union of all being’.86 The will to power, which Nietzsche considered to be his core philosophical proposition (‘my claim’), is a principle of interconnection.87 As Nehamas explains, The will to power […] depends on the fact that for Nietzsche all things in the world are interconnected and that their interconnections are crucial to their very character. […] Nietzsche’s continual stress on the interconnectedness of everything in the world constitutes his attack on the ‘thing-in-itself’, by which he understands the concept of an object that is distinct from, more than, beyond, or behind the totality of its effects on every other thing. A thing, he ­insists, cannot be distinguished (except provisionally, as we shall see) from its various interrelations.88 Nietzsche’s second best-known theory, that of ‘eternal recurrence’, is less a cosmological theory than a thought experiment by which to demonstrate the world’s infinite connectivity: Nietzsche […] does not claim that the history of the world repeats itself in an eternal cycle, or even that it is possible that it might do so. Rather, he believes that the world and everything in it are such that if anything in the world ever occurred again (though this is in fact impossible) then everything else would also have to occur again. This is so because Nietzsche accepts the view that the connections that constitute everything in the world, and in particular the ­connections that constitute each person out of its experiences and actions are absolutely essential to that person.89 This acute sense that everything in the world is inextricably connected to everything else has evident ramifications for literature. Nietzsche draws attention to a number of these himself. In the section of Human, All Too Human entitled ‘From the Souls of Artists and Writers’, he ­emphasizes the collective dimension of artistic creation, stating, that ‘A good writer possesses not only his own mind but also the mind of his friends.’90 In this statement, Nietzsche comes close to suggesting what he elsewhere more bluntly asserts: that the artist is in a sense incidental to the 86 HAH, §208, 97. ‘[T]he total union of all being’ is more evocatively rendered as ‘the general intertwining of all that exists’ in Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann’s more recent translation. – (London: Penguin, 2004), 126. 87 BGE, II, §36, 36. 88 Nehamas, Life as Literature, 79. 89 Nehamas, Life as Literature, 6–7. 90 HAH, §180, 119. This again agrees with T.S. Eliot’s later contention that the poet should write with both ‘his own generation in his bones’ and ‘the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer’. – ‘Tradition’, 14.

Nietzsche  135 ­ roduction  of  the artwork – he or she is the mere medium, or to use p ­Barthes’ later term, the mere ‘scriptor’, of surrounding cultural codes.91 In the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche deploys a striking ­accumulation of maternal, agricultural, and scatological metaphors to present the ­artist as an ­indifferent, merely circumstantial channel by which art emerges into the world: it is certainly better if we separate an artist sufficiently far from his work as not immediately to take the man as seriously as his work. After all, he is merely the precondition for the work, the womb, the soil, sometimes the manure and fertilizer on which it grows, – and as such, he is something we have to forget about in most cases if we want to enjoy the work.92 However, as against this conception of art as the fortuitous product of forces which come to exert pressure on a particular artist in ways largely beyond reckoning, Nietzsche elsewhere emphasizes the role of the artist as one of painstaking craftsmanship. In Human, All Too Human, the myth of the ‘artist-god’ as an ‘inspired’ individual is dismissed, not merely because the production of art is collective and contingent but also because the true artist labours long and hard to hone what skills he or she possesses.93 Amid the various kinds of repetition involved in the making of art – whether of existing models or of earlier versions of a work in progress – the artist has learnt to select: In reality, the imagination of a good artist or thinker is productive continually, of good, mediocre and bad things, but his power of judgment, sharpened and practised to the highest degree, rejects, ­selects, knots together; as we can now see from Beethoven’s notebooks how the most glorious melodies were put together gradually and as it were culled out of many beginnings. […] artistic improvisation is something very inferior in relation to the serious and carefully fashioned artistic idea. All the great artists have been great workers, exhaustible not only in invention but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.94 Art has not to do with innate talent: ‘Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents!’, he enjoins. ‘Great men’, contends Nietzsche ‘acquired greatness, became “geniuses” (as we put it)’: ‘They all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the 91 DOA, 145. 92 GM, III, §4, 71. 93 BT, ‘An Attempt at Self-Criticism’, §5, 8. 94 HAH, §155, 83.

136 Nietzsche parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole’.95 That which distinguishes the artist from other individuals, aside from dedication to the slow mastery of a chosen craft, is the ability to discern pattern, and, through the balancing of repetition and difference (the calibration of intertextuality) to produce new work: an artist who sees a new tragedy […] takes pleasure in the ingenious technical inventions and artifices, in its handling and apportionment of the material, in its new application of old motifs and old ideas.96 Even the public, in time, comes to see and experience pleasure from the perception of repetition and variation (or intertextuality): If the same motif has not been treated in a hundred different ways by various masters, the public never learns to get beyond interest in the material alone; but once it has come to be familiar with the motif from numerous versions of it, and thus no longer feels the charm of novelty and anticipation, it will then be able to grasp and enjoy the nuances and subtle new inventions in the way it is treated.97 Nietzsche’s understanding of the realm of art as a domain of minute deviations and incremental rearrangements looks forward to the intertextualists’ description of art as the ‘vast perspective of the already-written’ – to Barthes’ reconfiguration of literature as a network of ceaselessly disassembled and reassembled codes which are themselves ‘fragments of something that has been already read, seen, done, experienced’.98 And, as Barthes repudiates originality, presenting the text as ‘a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’, so Nietzsche composes an aphorism under the heading ‘Against originality’. The art he favours, he there explains, unabashedly foregrounds its relation to tradition rather than parading a veneer of originality: ‘When art dresses itself in the most worn-out material, it is most easily recognized as art.’99 Illusory Subjects THE CRUDE FETISHISM OF SUBJECTHOOD

As Nietzsche asserts in ‘On Truth and Lie’ that there is no possibility of ‘correct perception’, let alone adequate expression, of an object by a subject – the two belonging to ‘absolutely different spheres’ – so he views 95 HAH, §163, 86. 96 HAH, §166, 89. 97 HAH, §167, 89. 98 S/Z, 21, 20. 99 DOA, 146. | HAH, §179, 92.

Nietzsche  137 the subject itself as a linguistic fiction.100 To Nietzsche, subject and object are equally illusory: ‘Subject, object […] Let us not forget that this is mere semeiotics [sic] and nothing real.’101 To believe in the subject, as Nietzsche remarks in Twilight of the Idols, is to subscribe to the ‘crudely fetishistic mindset’ inculcated by grammar.102 In Beyond Good and Evil, he explicitly confronts the drastically anti-Cartesian consequences for subjecthood of his earlier critique of language, vehemently rejecting the fantasy of a unified and transparent self: When I dissect the process expressed in the proposition “I think”, I get a whole set of bold claims that are difficult, perhaps impossible to establish, – for instance, that I am the one who is thinking, that there must be something that is thinking in the first place, that thinking is an activity and the effect of a being who is considered the cause, that there is an “I”, and finally, that it has already been determined what is meant by thinking, – that I know what thinking is. […] Where do I get the concept of thinking from? Why do I believe in causes and effects? What gives me the right to speak about an I, and, for that matter, about an I as cause, and, finally, about an I as the cause of thoughts?103 In the next numbered aphorism, Nietzsche trains his debunking ­scepticism even more closely on the ‘I’: a thought comes when ‘it’ wants, and not when ‘I’ want. It is, ­therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’. It thinks: but to say the ‘it’ is just that famous old ‘I’ – well that is just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly, and by no means an ‘immediate certainty’.104 STYLE

This conception of the subject has evident stylistic ramifications, which ­Nietzsche himself makes explicit in comments about his own remarkable ‘art of style’.105 In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche emphasizes the ­extraordinary multiplicity of his inner states and the panoply of styles required to render them: To communicate a state, an inner tension of pathos, with signs, including the tempo of these signs – that is the meaning of every style; and considering that I have an extraordinary number of inner states, 100 101 102 103 104 105

OTL, 260. WP, §634, 338. TI, ‘“Reason” in Philosophy’, §5, 169. BGE, I, §16, 17. BGE, I, §17, 17. EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, §4, 104.

138 Nietzsche I also have a lot of stylistic possibilities – the most multifarious art of style that anyone has ever had at his disposal. […] Good style in itself – this is pure stupidity, just ‘idealism’, somewhat like ‘Beauty in itself’, ‘the Good in itself’, the ‘thing in itself’….106 In keeping with Nietzsche’s rejection of essences, the Platonic-Kantian idea of ‘[g]ood style in itself’ is rejected. What matters, according to Nietzsche, is that inner multiplicity be matched by stylistic multiplicity, that inner tension be matched by ‘the inner tempo’ of signs capable of capturing a plural and fluctuating self. This Nietzsche certainly realized: the cubistic fragmentation of his oeuvre promulgates the view that – in spite of what the ‘crude fetishism’ instilled by grammar would lead us to believe – there is no transcendentally given ‘Nietzsche-in-himself’. As Schrift comments, Utilizing a multiplicity of styles and metaphors, Nietzsche’s styles confront the reader with the undecidable question ‘Who is ­writing?’ Is it the free spirit? Dionysus? Apollo? Zarathustra? The Anti-Christ? The spirit of gravity? The Wagnerian? Nietzsche? Can we even ask ‘Who is Nietzsche?’107 Making that apparently simple question impossible to answer is, as the following pages will show, one of the ways in which Nietzsche anticipates intertextual theory. The sheer stylistic variety of Nietzsche’s writing is arresting, ­encompassing ‘aphorism, polemic, narrative, autobiography, essay, ­treatise, poem, dithyramb, letter, note’ and more.108 Moreover, within individual texts, dialogic diversity frequently splinters the unity of ­ arrative ­vignette. Within Zarathustra’s Prologue alone, monologue or n we hear many voices ­beside the prophet’s: the voice of the saint in the forest who does not know that ‘God is dead!’, the voice of the tight-rope walker, that of ‘the buffoon of the tower’ who dashes him to the ground, that of the gravediggers who taunt him as he carries the corpse away from the town, that of the old hermit who offers him bread and wine. ­Zarathustra himself, according to Hollingdale, speaks in two voices: while ‘one ­asserts, the other objects and qualifies’.109 Nietzsche’s predilection for the dialogic presentation of ideas, Hollingdale hypothesizes, probably had its roots in his psychological makeup and solitary lifestyle.

106 107 108 109

EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, §4, 104. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 109. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 82. R.J. Hollingdale, Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 16.

Nietzsche  139 Living a lonely, itinerant bachelor’s life, he argues, Nietzsche likely spent much time hearing and talking to (his own) voices: His books […] are essentially a species of talking to oneself. Much of his work was not only thought out but written down while walking, in small notebooks which would fit into a pocket; it would not be surprising if it was also spoken aloud, with gesticulations. […] he spent the greater part of his time metaphorically (or, as I think, at times actually) talking to himself.110 Whatever their psychological sources, Nietzsche’s styles formed part of a deliberate rhetorical strategy. As Ronald Hayman declares, ‘The cultivation of different voices and styles was central to his development as a writer and thinker.’111 Likewise, Nehamas responds to ­Nietzsche’s’ ‘truly astounding variety of styles and genres’ by dubbing ­him ­‘intentionally a philosopher of many masks and many voices’: ‘his ­stylistic variations play a crucial philosophical (or, from his point of view, ­antiphilosophical) role in his writing’.112 Certain techniques – u ­ nderstatement (aphorism), excess (hyperbole), invective (mockery, ­parody), exhortation – are privileged. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the book on which Nietzsche most prided himself, pastiches the biblical rhythms and diction in which his Lutheran childhood was steeped.113 The book verges on blasphemy by embedding iconoclastic, atheistic messages within religiously styles  – flamboyant ­imagery, imprecation, invocation, singing – and themes – solitude in the

110 Hollingdale, 116–17. 111 Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: Nietzsche’s Voices (London: Phoenix, 1997), 9. 112 Nehamas, Life as Literature, 18. | Nehamas, Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks, trans. Ladislaus Löb, ed. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), ix. | ­Nehamas, Life as Literature, 5. 113 Regarding Nietzsche’s use of hyperbole, see Nehamas, Life as Literature, 22, and Robert Pippin, Introduction to Introductions to Nietzsche, ed. Robert Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. | Brandes notes that ‘Nietzsche himself gave this book the highest place among his writings.’ – 44. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche repeatedly showers the book with fulsome praise. – See EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, §1, 100, §4, 104 and EH, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, §1, 123, §6, 129–30. | While Hayman asserts that Nietzsche ‘was approximating to the idiom, syntax, and cadences of the old reverential style, partly to parody them, and partly to construct an echo chamber that would lend extra resonance to the anti-Christian preaching of his pagan prophet’, Brandes goes so far as to state that This work contains Nietzsche’s doctrine in the form, so to speak, of religion. It is the Koran, or rather the Avesta, which he was impelled to leave – obscure and profound, high-soaring and remote from reality, prophetic and intoxicated with the future, filled to the brim with the personality of its author, who again is entirely filled with himself. – Hayman, 8. | Brandes, 43

140 Nietzsche mountains, missionary wandering, visionary prophecy.114 These predilections for forms of under- and overstatement make for a radically unphilosophical style: exclamatory, interrogative, filled with metaphors, with terms in i­talics or in inverted commas, in such a way that it [Nietzsche’s prose] will be for ever distinct from any other philosophical text, unplaceable, atopic.115 Max Nordau, who penned one of the most influential early responses to Nietzsche in his vitriolic attack on the philosopher in Degeneration (1892) failed to see – or pretended to fail to see – anything in these styles beyond the ravings of a madman: From the first to the last page of Nietzsche’s writings the careful reader seems to hear a madman, with flashing eyes, wild gestures, and foaming mouth, spouting forth deafening bombast; and through it all now breaking out in frenzied laughter, now sputtering expressions of filthy abuse and invective, now skipping about in a giddily agile dance, and now bursting upon the auditors with threatening mien and clenched fists.116 Some recent critics continue to cast Nietzsche in this light. George Moore, for instance, writing just over a decade ago, sees Nietzsche as the epitome as the kind of decadence Nietzsche ascribed to Wagner: If we adopt a Nietzschean standpoint – that is, one that seeks to reveal the pathophysiology underlying cultural forms – then the ­extraordinary rhetorical performance in Ecce Homo deteriorates into the posturing of the hysteric; the narcissistic and self-­ mythologizing persona collapses into a pathological vanity and mendacity that seeks to compensate for his chronic lability; and the diversity of his narrative voice is merely the symptom of hysterical capriciousness.117

114 In this respect, Nietzsche’s strategy recalls Darwin, who sought to give weight to his own controversial theory by couching it in biblical terms and images (such as that of the Tree of Life) which would make it seem continuous with the accepted biblical story of creation. (Darwin, however, unlike Nietzsche, was eager to reduce the likelihood of an ideological conflagration.) 115 Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, 5. 116 Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 416. 117 Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 2002), 191.

Nietzsche  141 But Nietzsche did not write as he did from any failure of self-control. Where philosophical tradition demands a carefully weighted rhythm of measured statements and impeccable impersonality, Nietzsche’s styles are deliberately attention-seeking and self-dramatizing, stubbornly ­unphilosophical or anti-philosophical: his exaggerated, swaggering, polemical, self-conscious and self-­ aggrandizing, un-Socratic style […] never lets his readers forget that the argument they are getting involved in is always in more than one sense personal.118 The effect of Nietzsche’s startlingly non-academic mode of rhetorical ‘shouting’ is to uncover the strategies that underpin ordinary ­philosophical language.119 Nietzsche takes issue with philosophy’s long-standing attempt, enshrined by a tradition stretching back to Socrates, to disguise the fact that it is personal, that it is proffered from a particular point of view.120 Nietzsche rebels against the impersonality that is expected of philosophical language: for it is precisely by ­effacing the traces of their personal investment in the views they p ­ ropound that philosophers and other interpreters of the world make their contingent, subjective, perspectivally forged opinions pass for timeless truths. Where impersonal philosophical discourse seeks to make the question of its speaker irrelevant, the implication of Nietzsche’s boisterous r­ hetoric is that these are essentially his views, his judgements, and his values […] He is constantly resisting the dogmatic self-effacement that is d ­ irected at convincing an audience that the views with which they are ­presented are not their authors’ creations but simply reflections of the way things are.121 Finally, Nietzsche’s stylistic shifts and the frequent revisions of his own previously expressed opinions enact the drama of interpretation and reinterpretation which lies at the core of his view of the world. The flux manifest in his own works, and their interrelations, represent the mutability of the world, the mutability of the self in the world, and the mutability of the world as apprehended and depicted by a self-in-progress. 118 Nehamas, Life as Literature, 27. 119 Nehamas identifies ‘the fact that Nietzsche, as he very well knew, shouts’ as ‘the most consistent and the most conspicuous feature of his writing’. – Nehamas, Life as Literature, 23. 120 Nehamas, Life as Literature, 37, 31–2. 121 Nehamas, Life as Literature, 35.

142 Nietzsche GOD

Unlike other philosophers, then, Nietzsche does not conceal the limitations of his interpretations by affecting a god’s eye view of his subject matter.122 He does not play god by affecting omniscience or purporting to speak a Truth, merely expressing a view in which, at the moment of enunciation, he believes. Indeed, one of Nietzsche’s aims across his writing is to undercut such claims to authority and meaning as are paradigmatically represented by the Christian god. Nietzsche’s critique of god is strongly connected to his critique of ­language. God, as ultimate subject, is a purely linguistic creation. As he deplores the drastic simplifications and falsifications involved in communication, so Nietzsche sees belief in god – like most other widely held beliefs – as an unwarranted syntactical inference. Schrift, encapsulating several of the entries in Beyond Good and Evil, explains that for ­Nietzsche: ‘the belief in God [is] a philosophical article of faith derived from our linguistic situation. For what else is the cosmological argument but a linguistic inference from deed to doer.’123 In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche attributes the resilience of belief in god to the force of habit, and, in particular, to the soldering power of grammar, which posits a relationship of causality between subject and object: ‘I am afraid that we have not got rid of God because we still have faith in grammar….’124 Nietzsche sees it as his task, as of all philosophy since Descartes, to attack this constricting and debilitating belief, to ‘assassinate the old concept of the soul, under the guise of critiquing the concepts of subject and predicate. In other words […] to assassinate the fundamental presupposition of the Christian doctrine.’125 The violence of Nietzsche’s language here accords with the violence of his earlier pronouncements concerning the death of god in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. THE DEATH OF GOD

Nietzsche’s tactic in these works – his ‘dynamite’ – is not to make a statement about the existence of god but instead to proclaim, with much trumpeting rhetoric, that god has been killed, hoist by the petard of the ascetic ­Christian morality erected around him.126

122 ‘Nietzsche’s interpretations announce themselves as such.’ – Nehamas, Life as ­Literature, 40. 123 Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 24. 124 TI, ‘“Reason” in Philosophy’, §5, 170. 125 BGE, III, §54, 49. 126 EH, ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, §1, 143–4.

Nietzsche  143 The stages of god’s gradual demise are detailed in the Genealogy of Morality, and briefly intimated in The Gay Science.127 Before the Christian ascetic ideal took hold, claims Nietzsche, ‘the animal man’ had no meaning; his will to power lacked any orienting framework, lacked a goal in pursuit of which to expend itself: ‘something was missing, there was an immense lacuna around man, – he himself could think of no justification or explanation or affirmation, he suffered from the problem of what he meant’.128 When belief in god was arrived at as a solution by which to invest life with meaning, the ascetic ideal provided the will with the direction it craved: ‘the ascetic ideal offered mankind a meaning! […] suffering was interpreted; the enormous emptiness seemed filled; the door was shut on all suicidal nihilism. […] man was saved, he had a meaning […] from now on he could will something’.129 With belief in god came belief in truth.130 For centuries, the will to truth remained unquestioned: with truth posited ‘as God’, it ‘was not allowed to be a problem’.131 But in time the ascetic ideal found extension in science (whose ‘overestima[tion] of the truth’ it shares), and science itself, powered by its practitioners’ will to truth, brought the rationality of belief in god into question: ‘From the very moment that faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, there is a new problem as well: that is of the value of truth. – The will to truth needs a critique’.132 Though even self-dubbed ‘free spirits’ resist this logical step, Nietzsche senses that the death of god, at least, is close at hand, and that the erosion of this belief will precipitate a disaster of unprecedented proportions for humanity: ‘that great drama in a hundred acts reserved for Europe in the next two centuries’, he forecasts, is ‘the most terrible, most questionable drama’ but ‘perhaps also the one most rich in hope…’.133 Nietzsche’s memorable dramatization of this death is principally to be found in The Gay Science, but there are numerous allusions to the event in Zarathustra, and references to it in other works as well.134 The

127 See GS, §357, 219. 128 GM, III, §28, 120. 129 GM, III, §28, 120. As Nietzsche had earlier explained: ‘a basic fact of human will [is] its horror vacui; it needs an aim –, and it prefers to will nothingness rather than not will.’ – GM, III, §1, 68. 130 ‘God is truth […] truth is divine…’ – GM, III, §24, 112. 131 GM, III, §24, 113. 132 GM, III, §25, 113. | GM, III, §24, 113. 133 ‘These are far from free spirits: because they still believe in the truth…’ – GM, III, §24, 111. | GM, III, §27, 119. 134 Ronald Hayman suggests that Nietzsche’s famous declaration may well have been inspired by (amongst others) Heinrich Heine, a poet for whom Nietzsche was w ­ illing to express poetic admiration. In his 1834 On the History of Philosophy and R ­ eligion in Germany, Heine wrote: ‘Our heart is filled with fearful piety. The old Jehovah is

144 Nietzsche Gay Science evokes the ‘tremendous event’ in three separate aphorisms. In the first, god is declared dead, but his shadow – the system of beliefs that has accrued around him – dies hard: ‘God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow. – And we – we must still defeat his shadow as well!’135 In the second, most famous vignette of the event, Nietzsche tells the story of a madman who alights in a marketplace, looking for god. Surrounded by non-believers, he is derided for his faith. There follows a dramatic about-turn and an outpouring of rhetoric: The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again? Don’t lanterns have to be lit in the morning? Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition? – Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe the blood from us? With what ­water could we clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, preparing for death… Do you hear the bell tolling? Down on your knees. They are bringing the sacraments of a dying God.’ – Hayman, 5. 135 GS, §108, 109. Nietzsche was incensed by ‘free-thinkers’ such as David Strauss, Ernest Renan, and George Eliot, who, though they had lost their faith in god, continued to advocate adherence to the framework of Christian morality. In Twilight of the Idols, he rails against such inconsistencies in an entry simply entitled ‘G. Eliot’: They have got rid of the Christian God, and now think that they have to hold on to Christian morality more than ever […] For the rest of us, things are different. When you give up Christian faith, you pull the rug out from under your right to Christian morality as well. […] Christianity is a system, a carefully considered, integrated view of things. If you break off a main tenet, the belief in God, you smash the whole system along with it […] Christian morality […] stands or falls along with belief in God. – TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, §5, ‘G. Eliot’, 193–4 For Nietzsche’s analogous expostulations about Strauss and Renan, see, respectively, his first ‘untimely mediation’, ‘David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer’, UM, 1–55, and TI, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’, §2, ‘Renan’, 192.

Nietzsche  145 what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves? Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? There was never a greater deed – and whoever is born after us will on account of this deed belong to a higher history than all history up to now!’136 The passage, clearly, depicts a catastrophe. The world is ‘unchained’ from its sun: the untethering suggests liberation, and yet the sun is the source of all life. The imagined consequence for humanity is an e­ ndless multi-dimensional fall, a hurtling through cold dark empty space, a straying through an infinite nothing. The murder of god brings with it new responsibility: we must ‘become gods’ – by which Nietzsche means that we must become our own authorities, creating new values and ­putting forward our own interpretations of the world. The passage, as is particularly obvious from that talismanic phrase – resonant with the serpent’s words to Eve in the Garden of Eden (‘ye shall be as gods’) – is full of allusions to Scripture (the Fall, original sin, the crucifixion, atonement), its style enacting the revaluation for which Nietzsche’s texts ardently call.137 In the third passage devoted to the death of god in The Gay Science, Nietzsche concedes that few can be expected to understand ‘what this event really means […] how much must collapse because it was built on this faith – for example our entire European morality’. The n ­ ecessity of the impending disaster is again emphasized – ‘[t]his long, dense ­succession of demolition, destruction, downfall, upheaval now stands ahead’ – but ‘the most immediate consequences’ of this destructive ­labour are now said to be the opposite of what one might expect – not at all sad and gloomy, but much more like a new and barely describable type of light, ­happiness, relief, amusement, encouragement, dawn….138 The ultimate desirability of liberation from the dogmatic yoke of Christian morality is a central tenet of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The choice to depict the decline of belief in god as a death – indeed, an act of violent murder – is an aesthetic and rhetorical one, however. As such, the death of god, as well has having deep philosophical resonance, is one of a number of highly memorable tropes, which, when redeployed by ­Nietzsche’s twentieth-century intertextualist interpreters, confirm his role in shaping 1960s literary theory.

136 GS, §125, 119–20. 137 Genesis 3: 5. 138 GS, §343, 199.

146 Nietzsche Rhetorical Intimations of Intertextuality Intertextual theory’s appropriation of Nietzsche does not merely echo the substance of his polemical arguments concerning authority and interpretation. It also draws on a number of Nietzsche’s most striking figures of speech. This section explores four of the most significant e­ xamples of these assimilations and adaptations. Author as Spider, Text as Net The association between god as the ‘author’ of the world and the author of a book is developed in part through the trope of the spider, which occurs with arresting frequency throughout Nietzsche’s o ­ euvre.139 In ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, the spider and its net function as symbols of humanity and the linguistic nets of language it spins out of itself to fix – hold in place – the world. The ‘infinitely complex cathedral of concepts’ we erect on ‘moving foundations’, Nietzsche states in that early essay, ‘must be like a structure of spiders’ webs, delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, firm enough not to be blown apart by the wind’.140 This association is further developed in Daybreak to deride humanity’s epistemological illusions: ‘We sit within our net, we spiders, and whatever we may catch in it, we can catch nothing at all except that which allows itself to be caught in precisely our net.’141 The spider represents the dire limitations of intellectual system-­ building (‘we achieve nothing more by cognition than the spider achieves by weaving its web, hunting, and sucking the blood of its prey’) and the ‘narcissistic illusion’ involved in its supposed successes.142 As such, it is particularly associated with scholars, specialists, theologians, and indeed, philosophers in general, referred to collectively in Beyond Good and Evil as ‘cobweb-weavers of the spirit’.143 Metaphysicians, ‘arachnoid creators’ spinning god in their own image, come in for special vitriol: ‘They spun around him for so long that in the end he was hypnotized by their movement and became a spider, a metaphysicus himself.’144 As 139 Nietzsche’s spider imagery is discussed by Kofman, in Nietzsche and Metaphor, ­69–73, and Schrift, in Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 90–2. 140 OTL, 259. 141 D, II, §117, 73. 142 Nietzsche, qtd in Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, 72. The saying features in ­Nietzsche’s Werke, 19 vols (Leipzig: Naumann, vols 1–14; Leipzig: Kröner, vols 15–19, 1901–13), Part II, vol. 12, §79, 42. | Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 90–1. 143 João Constâncio, and Maria João Mayer Branco, “Introduction”, in “As the Spider Spins”: Essays on Nietzsche’s Critique and Use of Language, ed. João Constâncio and Maria João Mayer Branco (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012). Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer are singled out by name. 144 Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 91. | AC, §17, 15.

Nietzsche  147 Kofman notes, this witty sketch from The Anti-Christ parodies the teleological proof of the existence of god by inversion: Man-spider transposes his workman-like causality metaphorically into Nature, and he solemnly calls God the workman who produced the world. God, a product of the spider, is himself metamorphosed into a spider weaving intelligible models.145 Zarathustra abounds in related images. In a section entitled ‘On the Tarantulas’, god, father and son, and all their followers are re-­imagined as ‘poisonous spiders’.146 The divine spider lives in a cave (a habitat evidently intended to evoke Plato’s allegory), bears a triangle, symbol of the Trinity, upon its back. Zarathustra’s self-appointed task is to drag down its web of lies: Look here, this is the hole of the tarantula! Do you want to see the tarantula itself? Its web hangs here; touch it, make it tremble. Here it comes, willingly – welcome, tarantula! […] I tear at your web, so that your rage might lure you from your lie-hole lair.147 In a later section entitled ‘On Apostates’, god is represented as the ‘cunning lurking cross spider’ at the origin and centre of this order. ‘There is good spinning among crosses!’, it proclaims, as it weaves its web and fixes fast its values.148 Thus do the fabricated values of Christianity, spun by a spider-like Christ-figure, thicken the web of lies in which humanity, awash in its mendacious linguistic concepts, contentedly basks. After Fixity, Flux Against the fixity of spiders and their webs, Nietzsche calls for flux. In text after text, fluidity is imaged in terms of infinite horizons and endless seas: We have forsaken the land and gone to sea! We have destroyed the bridge behind us – more so, we have demolished the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean; it is true, it does not always roar, and at times it lies there like silk and gold and dreams of goodness. But there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity.149 145 146 147 148 149

Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, 70. Z, II, ‘On the Tarantulas’, 78. Z, II, ‘On the Tarantulas’, 76–7. Z, III, ‘On Apostates’, §2, 144. GS, §124, 119.

148 Nietzsche The death of god makes everything possible – later in The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes in ecstatic terms that ‘we philosophers and “free spirits” feel illuminated by a new dawn […] the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an “open sea”’.150 Likewise, Zarathustra ‘drift[s] on uncertain seas’.151 The untimely prophet and his stunned followers, ‘firstlings and premature births of the next century’, feel that they are entering a new historical realm of exhilarating freedom: ‘my brothers, is everything not now in flux?’, he jubilantly asks.152 The Death of the Author Not content to metaphorically topple the Christian god, Nietzsche also demotes ‘the artist-god’ – to use his own phrase in The Birth of Tragedy – insisting on the necessity of separating a work from its author and denying the creator any interpretative prerogative over his or her text.153 Books, he holds, ‘take on a life of [their] own’.154 The author should abrogate all authority over their interpretation. In 1878 he declares that ‘When his work opens its mouth, the author has to shut his’, and in 1888 that ‘A poet is absolutely not an authority for the meaning of his verse.’155 As early as his inaugural lecture as a professor of philology in Basel in 1869, Nietzsche had sought to debunk the philological valuation of authorial intention as a satisfactory and exhaustive principle of textual interpretation, arguing that ‘Homer’ was not so much an individual with retrievable views as a construct postulated from the texts attributed to him. This is precisely the point of Foucault’s description of the ‘author function’ in ‘What Is an Author’: these aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice.156 150 151 152 153 154

GS, §343, 199. Z, III, ‘On Unwilling Bliss’, 130. Z, III, ‘On Old and New Tablets’, §8, 161. BT, ‘An Attempt at Self-Criticism’, §5, 8. ‘The book become almost human. Every writer is surprised anew how, once a book has detached himself from him, it goes on to live a life of its own […] it seeks out its readers, enkindles life, makes happy, terrifies, engenders new works, becomes the soul of new designs and undertakings – in short, it lives like a being furnished with soul and spirit and is yet not human’. – HAH, §208, 96–7. 155 Friedrich Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims [1879], §140, in HAH, 245.  | Nietzsche to C. Fuchs, 26 August 1888. – Nietzsche Briefwechsel, ed. Giogio Colli, Mazzino Montinari, and Norbert Miller, Annemarie Pieper, in KGW, Part III, vol. 5, 400. 156 WA, 127. As Barthes also notes, ‘To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.’ – DOA, 147.

Nietzsche  149 Nietzsche even goes so far as to imagine the actual, literal death of the author, and, as a young man still himself, feels able to contemplate his old age, decline, and death with equanimity, confident that his ‘fire’ will live on and be disseminated by his writings. The man will die, but the work will survive: The author has drawn the happiest lot who as an old man can say that all of life-engendering, strengthening, elevating, enlightening thought and feeling that was in him lives on in his writings, and that he himself is now nothing but the grey ashes, while the fire has everywhere been rescued and borne forward.157 In the next entry, Nietzsche goes further, imagining the ageing a­ uthor’s paradoxical, ‘malicious joy’ in the observation of his own bodily decay.158 ‘Only as an aesthetic phenomenon [is] existence […] eternally ­justified’, writes Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy.159 On the basis of this and many other comments concerning art and aesthetics, Nehamas emphasizes Nietzsche’s consistency in assessing the worth of his life strictly in terms of his written legacy. Many of ­Nietzsche’s aphorisms support this view: in them, the insignificance and ephemerality of the ‘philosopher-artist’ as a figure of flesh and blood are weighed against the paramount importance of ‘Nietzsche’, the character which his readers would in time come to postulate from his works: only the ‘biography’ that emerges through Nietzsche’s works, and not the ‘life’ out of which they grow, is of any importance. In his eyes, at least, it is only such a character who can influence history and thought and who, like the Socrates who emerges out of Plato’s dialogues, can manifest the will to power in fashioning values and modes of life.160 If Nietzsche seems able to entertain the prospect of his own death with serenity, he considers the death of the author as the cornerstone of 157 HAH, §208, 97. 158 The author knows that there is no treasure of which death can deprive him: The thinker, and the artist likewise, whose better self has taken refuge in his work, feels an almost malicious joy when he sees how his body and his spirit are being slowly broken down and destroyed by time: it is as though he observed from a corner a thief working away at his money-chest, while knowing that the chest is empty all the treasure it contained safe. – HAH, §209, 97 159 BT, §5, 33. This view is repeated in the ‘Attempt at Self-Criticism’ which Nietzsche inserted as a preface in 1886 – BT, ‘An Attempt at Self-Criticism’, §5, 8. 160 Nehamas, Life as Literature, 199.

150 Nietzsche intentionality-driven criticism to be as desirable in the field of a­ esthetics as the death of god is desirable for the world at large. His objection to the elevation of the author to the position of an ‘artist-god’ and ­‘rejection of all authorial/authoritarian privilege’ are consistent with his ‘antipathy toward any factor which tends to inhibit [interpretation] and limit its proliferative play’ and with his dismissal of ‘“totalization” ­ rimary goal of interpretative activity’.161 As Schrift suggests, as the p gods and ­authors are clearly aligned in Nietzsche’s denunciations of ‘the dogmatic, life-­negating ­constraints of divine and linguistic authority’.162 Both ­represent ‘an unjustifiable and unwarranted limitation on the activity of interpretation’.163 Dispensing with these two centres and limits to interpretation, ­Nietzsche refutes the idea that there is but a single Truth about anything (whether god’s word, or the author’s stated or supposed intention) and that any text invites a unique, correct interpretation: Nietzsche suggests there may be an infinite number [of interpretations] insofar as there are an infinite number of possible perspectives to adopt in viewing the text – but not the right one, that is, no one of these interpretations can be asserted as ‘correct’ for all possible perspectives, all possible interpreters, and all possible ends.164 This advocacy of plurality over singularity meshes with a call for ­perspectivism – a call closely related to the critical pluralism which would become central to intertextual theory and to its investment in the ‘birth of the reader’.165 After Destruction, Creation; After Death, Birth The shift from the tyrannical regime of the spider to that of exhilarating freedom involves labour and struggle. As Nietzsche repeatedly emphasizes, destruction is a key forerunner to creation, death to birth. Accordingly, images of death proliferate throughout the Nietzschean oeuvre, representing the precondition of an epochal overhaul or transvaluation. The prevailing fabric of moral and cultural values and beliefs must be ripped down before another can be erected in its place: ‘negation and destruction are conditions of affirmation’ and ‘whoever must be a ­creator in good and evil – truly, he must first be an annihilator and break 161 BT, ‘An Attempt at Self-Criticism’, §5, 8. | Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 142, 186, 187. 162 Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 143. 163 Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 185. 164 Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 185. 165 DOA, 148.

Nietzsche  151 values’.166 In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes in emphatic italics of the work of ‘destruction’.167 There is ‘joy [in] destruction’, he proclaims, but the process, as Zarathustra reflects, is as painful as childbirth: ‘In order for the creator himself to be the one who is newly born, he must also want to be the birth-giver and pain of giving birth.’168 Nietzsche uses many such images pertaining to the fruitfulness of wombs, the process of birthing, and deploys myriad symbols relating to ­fertility, creation, and organic growth (the motif’s importance is signalled by Nietzsche’s choice of The Birth of Tragedy as the title of his first published work).169 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which the death of god is a near-omnipresent (if largely implicit) point of reference, abounds in ­metaphors relating to sowing, gestation, harvesting, and begetting: ‘My wild Wisdom wound up pregnant on lonely mountains’, proclaims the prophet.170 While in The Gay Science Nietzsche refers to men of ‘the contemplative type’ as ‘male mothers’, he notes in the Genealogy of Morality that the philosopher acts according to his ‘“motherly” instinct, that secret love towards what is growing inside him’, just as artists ‘with greatest power and the surest instincts’ attend to their ‘work in progress’ with ‘maternal instinct’.171

The Birth of Intertextuality ‘Some Are Born Posthumously’: Nietzsche’s Posthumous Birth in France Nietzsche was more than merely ‘in the air’ in France in the 1960s: he was a dominant intellectual point of reference. When Tel Quel was founded in 1960, its title and epigraph were chosen as references to ­Nietzsche’s notion of ‘eternal recurrence’, as expressed in Beyond Good and Evil. Praising ‘the ideal of the most high-spirited, vital, world-affirming ­individual’, Nietzsche there asserts that such a man ‘has learned not just to accept and go along with what was and what is, but […] wants it again just as it was and is through all eternity, insatiably shouting da capo’ – or as rendered in French, ‘Je veux le monde et le veux tel quel, le veux

166 167 168 169

EH, ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, §4, 146. | Z, II, On Self-Overcoming’, 90. EH, ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, §1, 134. EH, ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, §2, 145. | Z, II, ‘On the Blessed Isles’, 66. Nietzsche’s working title for the book had been The Origin and Purpose of ­Tragedy. – See Mary Ann Frese Witt, ‘Babies and Books: Birth as Metaphor in Nietzsche and Pirandello’, Comparative Critical Studies, vol. 6, no. 2 (2009), 183–200, 188. Foucault alludes to Nietzsche’s metaphor in his own title for The Birth of the Clinic (1963). 170 Z, II, ‘The Child with the Mirror’, 64. 171 GS, §72, 75–6. | GM, III, §8, 79–80.

152 Nietzsche ­ ublished éternellement, et je crie insatiablement: bis!’172 Gilles Deleuze p his highly influential Nietzsche and Philosophy in 1962. ­Academic conferences were held about Nietzsche at such elite scholarly locations as Royaumont in 1964 and Cerisy in 1972.173 In these years, all the major figures of French philosophy agreed in their devotion to Nietzsche and in their commitment to broadcasting his importance. Among these admirers, Foucault was perhaps the most ­committed to the task of putting Nietzsche’s insights to use and furthering his legacy. ­Foucault ‘discovered’ Nietzsche through the Untimely ­Meditations, in 1953. He had read Nietzsche as a student at the École Normale Supérieure, but it was on reacquaintance, when Foucault was ­t wenty-seven, that Nietzsche proved a ‘philosophical shock’ and ‘a revelation’: ‘I read him with a great passion and broke with my life….’174 In the preface to Madness and Civilization (1964), Foucault declared his ambition to conduct all future enquiries ‘under the sun of the great Nietzschean quest’.175 In the 1960s, Deleuze became ‘Foucault’s closest philosophical companion’, and from 1962, when Foucault read Deleuze’s Nietzsche et la philosophie, ‘each closely followed the other’s work’.176 In the same decade, attention to the textual fabric and rhetorical strategies of Nietzsche’s ‘unique’ prose came to dominate his reception in France.177 Where Heidegger and others had privileged the themes of Nietzsche’s work, French readers and critics became newly alert to the stylistic strangeness and diversity of his texts, and gradually extirpated him from the misreadings of earlier decades.178 This attention to form, and the emergence of new translations and reliable editions also made possible the kind of deconstructive, ‘microtextual’ analyses p ­ roduced by Kofman, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Derrida, amongst others.179

172 BGE, III, §56, 50–1, and Patrick ffrench, The Time of Theory: A History of ‘Tel Quel’ (1960–83) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 49 (italics mine). This choice of epigraph, which seems to affirm and call for the permanence of a current state of affairs, is a surprising choice given Tel Quel’s commitment to communist politics and literary avant-gardism. 173 Schrift, Nietzsche’s French Legacy, 2. 174 James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: Flamingo, 1994), 66–7. 175 Foucault, qtd in Miller, 67. 176 Miller, 194, 195. 177 Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, 5. 178 Such an exclusively thematic approach had deleterious effects: according to ­Nehamas, ‘Exclusive attention to the “mere” content of Nietzsche’s writing has produced the caricatures of the Übermensch, the master morality, and the eternal recurrence, of which the secondary literature about him is full.’ – Life as Literature, 39. 179 These publications include Kremer-Marietti’s bilingual German-French edition of six theoretical studies which Nietzsche wrote just after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy and simultaneously with the Untimely Meditations: Das Philosophenbuch: Theoretische Studien / Le Livre du philosophe: Etudes théoriques, trans. Angèle Kremer-­M arietti (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1969) [translated into English a

Nietzsche  153 In Homo Academicus, Pierre Bourdieu suggests that Nietzsche’s attractiveness in the 1950s and 1960s derived from his interdisciplinarity as a thinker – his achievement in straddling the divide between the arts and (social) sciences which Foucault, for example, was also intent on negotiating: Thus it is that Foucault finds in Nietzsche an acceptable philosophical sponsor for the socially improbable combination of artistic transgression and scientific invention that he achieves and for the screen-concepts which, like that of genealogy, help to provide a cover for an ambitious enterprise in social history or genetic sociology.180 Amid the ambient structuralism of the academy, Nietzsche offered a counterpoint to the schematic formalizations then so widely favoured in the fields of anthropology, sociology, linguistics, economics, and literary criticism: Unlike the rigid, scientistic, and constraining systems of structuralism, Nietzsche appeared to his new readers to be both philosophically inspired and philosophically inspiring.181 Rewriting Nietzsche The texts in which intertextual theory was first articulated are informed by this Nietzschean renaissance. The connections are apparent in the theory’s manifold emphases on relationality but also in the metaphorical and rhetorical strategies employed in these texts. Though strongly consonant in their language and theses, the writings in question were various in their sources. The following analysis will take as its focus relevant interventions by Barthes – ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), decade later as Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, trans. and ed. Daniel Brezeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979)]; the first volumes of the Colli-Montinari edition of Nietzsche’s complete works: Nietzsche Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967); and the appearance of ‘Rhétorique et langage’, trans. and ed. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Poétique, vol. 5 (1971), 99–142. | Large, xii. | Stylistically minded responses to Nietzsche in this decade include Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Le Détour (Nietzsche et la rhétorique)’, Poétique, vol. 5 (1971), 53–76; Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor (1972); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘La Dissimulation (Nietzsche, la question de l’art et de la “littérature”)’, in Nietzsche Aujourd’hui?, 2 vols, ed. Maurice de Gandillac et Bernard Pautrat (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1973), vol. 2, ‘Passions’, 9–58; Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles / Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche (1978), trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 180 Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, xxiv. 181 Schrift, Nietzsche’s French Legacy, 5.

154 Nietzsche S/Z (1970), ‘From Work to Text’ (1971), and The Pleasure of the Text (1973) – and Foucault – ‘What Is an Author?’ (1968–69) and ‘Fantasia of the Library’ (1967). ‘Text Means Tissue’: Text as Spider’s Web Barthes’ conception of the text as a tissue of woven threads constitutes a direct transposition to the literary domain of Nietzsche’s account of the world in language as text and spider’s web. This is most clearly the case towards the end of The Pleasure of the Text, when Barthes, in an initially etymological gesture of definition (which recalls Nietzsche’s ­frequent practice) defines the text as follows: Text means Tissue; but whereas hitherto we have always taken this tissue as a product, a ready-made veil, behind which lies, more or less hidden, meaning (truth), we are now emphasizing, in the tissue, the generative idea that the text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving; lost in this tissue – this texture – the subject unmakes himself, like a spider dissolving in the constructive secretions of its web. Were we fond of neologisms, we might define the theory of the text as an hyphology (hyphos is the tissue and the spider’s web).182 In a book which repeatedly quotes from Nietzsche, an allusion to the philosopher and to his view of text as texture – that is, as a generative process rather than a finished product, a ceaseless interlacing of strands in which the subject dissolves in the widening concentric circles of its web – seems indubitable. The association between text and tissue had already featured twice in ‘The Death of the Author’, one of the crucial sites of intertextuality’s inception. There, the text was described first, as ‘a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’, and, second – in an equivalence which clearly echoes Nietzsche’s habit of thinking of life and world as texts – as a stage in an infinite series of semiotic repetitions running across the (perceived) fault-line between life and art: ‘life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred’.183 The text’s infinite extension is repeatedly stressed: ‘[t]he text, in its mass, is comparable to a sky, at once flat and smooth, deep, without edges and without landmarks’.184 Images of the text as network, weave, thread, or braid abound in other Barthesian writings of this period. In S/Z, the realm of literature is extended indefinitely, with a text being defined as the ‘entrance into a network with a thousand entrances’.185 The infinite, matricial textual 182 183 184 185

P, 64. DOA, 147. S/Z, 14. S/Z, 12.

Nietzsche  155 domain to which every text gives access is ‘never anything but a single text’.186 Nietzsche’s description of history as ‘a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations’ is absolutely consonant with Roland Barthes’ description of the way in which signs, words, and names inexorably drift towards other signs, summoning new interpretations: To read is to find meanings, and to find meanings is to name them; but these named meanings are swept towards other names; names call each other, reassemble, and their groupings call for further naming: I name, I unnname, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a tireless approximation, a metonymic labor.187 The inter-text is that which is repeated – ‘the inter-text is subject to no law but the infinitude of its reprises’ – the link in an infinite chain of signifiers leading from text to text.188 In fact the image of a single, all-encompassing network is insufficient to convey Barthes’ conception of the ‘ideal text’ as a combination of unity and plurality: ‘[i]n this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest’.189 The text is a mesh of cables in which meaning is scrambled: like a telephone network gone haywire, the lines are simultaneously twisted and routed according to a whole new system of splicings, of which the reader is the ultimate beneficiary: over-all reception is never jammed, yet it is broken, refracted, caught up in a system of interferences.190 The intertextuality conjured here (the ‘system of interferences’ by which meanings are ‘refracted’ from text to text) makes writing a ‘­stereographic space’ of voices and codes in which acts of enunciation become mixed and unattributable: in their interweaving, these voices (whose origin is ‘lost’ in the vast perspective of the already-written) de-originate the utterance: the convergence of the voices (of the codes) becomes writing.191 186 187 188 189 190 191

S/Z, 12. GM, II, §12, 51. | S/Z, 11. S/Z, 211. S/Z, 5–6. S/Z, 132. S/Z, 132, 15, 21.

156 Nietzsche The text-in-progress is compared – in yet another development of the text-as-tissue motif – to the braiding involved in the making of a piece of fine lace: The text, while it is being produced, is like a piece of Valenciennes lace created before us under the lacemaker’s fingers: each sequence undertaken hangs like the temporarily inactive bobbin waiting while its neighbour works; then, when its turn comes, the hand takes up the thread again, brings it back to the frame; and as the pattern is filled out, the progress of each thread is marked with a pin which holds it and is gradually moved forward: thus the terms of the sequence: they are positions held and then left behind in the course of a gradual invasion of meaning. This process is valid for the entire text. The grouping of codes, as they enter into the work, into the movement of reading, constitute[s] a braid (text, fabric, braid: the same thing); each thread, each code, is a voice; these braided – or braiding – voices form the writing: when it is alone, the voice does not labor, transforms nothing: it expresses; but as soon as the hand intervenes to gather and intertwine the inert threads, there is labor, there is transformation.192 What produces the text is the reader’s awareness (and rewriting) of the transformative intertwining of the multiplicity of voices which are threaded in the labour of creation. As is clear from the mention of ‘the movement of reading’, this production is a collaboration, the outcome of the reader’s retracing of the movements of the lacemaker’s fingers: ­reading repeats writing, is as creative as writing – is writing, in fact. Barthes ironizes the idea of literature as the univocal expression of a single author or narrator: The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.193 By contrast, interpretation recognizes the text as a plurality of voices. This state of affairs makes the truly plural text – infinite, asymmetrical, ­unstructured – resistant to ordinary analysis and the (structuralist) dream of exhaustiveness: ‘for the plural text, there cannot be a narrative structure, a grammar, or a logic’.194 Likewise, Derrida, paraphrased by Schrift, holds that ‘the intertextual network can never be completely served’.195 192 193 194 195

S/Z, 160. DOA, 143. S/Z, 6. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 118.

Nietzsche  157 The Death of the Author Barthes’ aim, like Nietzsche’s before him, is to liberate interpretative activity. And this liberation, as for Nietzsche, involves destruction. In Barthes’ theory – which, like Nietzsche’s texts, is as much a manifesto as an account – the attentat perpetrated against the old system finds its focus in the demotion of the traditional figure of the author. In order to maximize the impact of the attack, Barthes sensationalizes the author’s disappearance. This – also Nietzschean – use of hyperbole is twofold. On the one hand, Barthes heightens the stakes by proffering reminders of the author’s supreme importance to literature and criticism to date; on the other, he magnifies his supposed vanishing by melodramatically proclaiming his ‘death’. THE ELEVATION

‘The Death of the Author’ is unambiguous in its elevation of the author to positions of power. Barthes’ method, like Nietzsche’s, is unabashedly metaphorical. The author is granted royal status: ‘the author’, we read, ‘still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines’; ‘the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic’; his removal, performed ‘in the interests of writing’, will, in equally ­political, monarchical terms, ‘restore the place of the reader’ (which is to say that the reader, as is also suggested in S/Z, will become a ­writer).196 In an even more dramatic and sustained analogy, which also more ­transparently transposes Nietzsche’s metaphorical ‘artist-god’, Barthes’ author is elevated to godliness.197 Typographical variations chart this sanctification. ‘The author’ becomes, first, an italicized ‘author’; next, a capitalized ‘Author’. Spelling subsequently oscillates between these two forms throughout the piece. Later, the same figure, in whom we are told we must ‘believe’, explicitly becomes ‘the Author-God’. This author/­Author/Author-God, whom Barthes also derides in S/Z as ‘that somewhat ­decrepit deity of the old criticism’, still ‘remains powerful’.198 196 DOA, 143, 147, 143 (all but the first italics above are mine). 197 BT, ‘An Attempt at Self-Criticism’, §5, 8. 198 S/Z, 211. | DOA, 143. The king and god analogies are already present in Barthes’ comic debunking of the widespread public reverence surrounding the figure of ‘The Writer on Holiday’, in Mythologies (1957); Nietzsche’s Übermensch is invoked for comparative purposes as well: ‘By having holidays, he displays the sign of his being human; but the god remains, one is a writer as Louis XIV was king, even on the ­commode. Thus the function of the man of letters is to human labour rather as ambrosia is to bread: a miraculous, eternal substance, which condescends to take a social form so that its prestigious difference is better grasped. All this prepares one for the same idea of the writer as superman, as a kind of intrinsically different being which society puts in the window so as to use to the best advantage the artificial singularity which it has granted him.’ – Mythologies (London: Vintage, 2009), 20–1.

158 Nietzsche In a further development of the motif, the Author-God is cast in an explicitly parental role: The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child.199 Splicing motherly and fatherly roles, Barthes’ male-gendered image ingeniously invokes both Nietzsche’s interest in Trinitarianism, especially the relationship between the Christian god and his son, and the age-old philosophical association, also developed and re-gendered at various points in Nietzsche’s works, between artistic and biological creation.200 Although Barthes resists capitalizing the word ‘father’ in ‘The Death of the Author’, the same relation is more overtly Christianized in ‘From Work to Text’, in which he claims that while ‘[t]he author is reputed the father and the owner of his work’, ‘the Text […] reads without the inscription of the Father’.201 The sacralizing implication of this capitalization chimes with Barthes’ mention, even in the earlier essay, of the Author’s ‘hypostases’, a theological term designating the Christian god’s three ‘persons’ (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). The ‘Author-God’’s writerly hypostases are listed as ‘society, history, psyché, liberty’, and (later in the same essay) ‘reason, science, law’.202 Barthes’ timeline – ‘book and author stand automatically on a same line divided into a before and an after’ – evokes the birth of Christ, marked by the calendar switch from one era (BC) to the next (AD).203 As such, it recalls the epochal upheaval predicted by the madman of the Gay Science as the consequence of the death of god: ‘There was never a greater deed – and whoever is born after us will on account of this deed belong to a higher history than all history up to now!’204 Likewise, Nietzsche, aspirant ‘Anti-Christ’ (‘I am, in Greek and not just Greek, the Anti-Christ…’) describes his own attentat on Christianity – a ‘lightning bolt of truth’ – as the occasion of just such a historical split: The uncovering of Christian morality is an event without equal, a real catastrophe. Anyone who knows about this is a force majeure, a 199 DOA, 145. 200 In the chapter of Zarathustra entitled ‘On the Tarantulas’, for example, the prophet notes of the spiders before him that ‘What is silent in the father learns to speak in the son; and often I found the son to be the father’s exposed secret.’– Z, II, ‘On the Tarantulas’, 77. | The analogy’s prevalence and meaning in intertextual theory is explored in Scarlett Baron, ‘Joyce, Genealogy, Intertextuality’, Dublin James Joyce Journal, vol. 4 (2011), 51–71. 201 WT, 160–1. 202 DOA, 147. The marked abstract generality of these listed terms seems intentionally to emphasize the co-extensiveness of the ‘Author-God’ with his created world. 203 DOA, 145. 204 GS, §125, 119–20.

Nietzsche  159 destiny, – he splits the history of humanity into two parts. Some live before him, some live after him…. 205 In Barthes’ ‘From Work to Text’, sincerity – the idea of an author as a person expressing a subjective, private, inner world – is referred to as a ‘veritable “cross” borne by literary morality’. 206 The reference, again, is to Christ’s cross – used here to debunk the myth of sincerity as the necessary seal of literary value. Against the Christian ideals which still underpin critical appraisals of literature, Barthes affirms a kind of literary atheism: We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a ­single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a ­multidimensional space, in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. 207 The plural ‘Text’ stands in radical opposition to the ‘monologism’ and ‘theological monism’ of the ‘Work’.208 The ‘Text’, by contrast with the ‘Work’, embraces ‘the plural of demoniacal texture’. 209 Indeed, writing is not merely passively but vigorously god-denying, liberat[ing] what may be called an antitheological activity, an ­activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law. 210 THE DEATH

Barthes’ destructive/deconstructive aims are obvious from the sensationalist title of ‘The Death of Author’ – a turn of phrase which immediately signals the importance of the Nietzschean precedent of the death of god. Clearly, Barthes heeds Nietzsche’s claims about the necessity of uprooting prevalent interpretations if new ones are to be erected in their stead. Writing, claims Barthes, in the essay’s first paragraph, is ‘the ­destruction of every voice, of every point of origin’; in the act of w ­ riting, ‘the ­author enters his own death’. 211 As the essay unfolds, Barthes bolsters his ­argument regarding the demise of that antiquated figure by noting the belittling treatment recent authors themselves have reserved for it: the author is said to be ‘suppressed’ by Mallarmé; ‘call[ed] into 205 206 207 208 209 210 211

EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, §2, 102. | EH, ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, §8, 150. WT, 161. DOA, 146. WT, 160. WT, 160. DOA, 147. DOA, 142.

160 Nietzsche question’ and ‘derid[ed]’ by Valery; ‘blurred’ and ‘subtilized’ by Proust; and generally ‘remov[ed]’, ‘distanc[ed]’, ‘diminish[ed]’, and ‘buried’ in the ‘modern text’. 212 Like Nietzsche before him, Barthes uses hyperbole and flamboyant figurative language to augment his essay’s iconoclastic impact. Like Nietzsche’s death of god, Barthes’ ‘death of the Author’ is a work of hermeneutic destruction undertaken with a view to the inauguration of a new perspective. If the beneficiary of Nietzsche’s new perspective is the individual, who ideally becomes a ‘free spirit’ enlightened and empowered to reinterpret the world, in Barthes’ new perspective, the beneficiary is the reader whose interpretations of texts are no longer constrained or oriented by the central figure of the author: ‘To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.’213 Texts are no longer repositories of single truths or ‘secrets’; like Nietzsche’s semiotic world, they are ineluctably plural and interconnected, ineluctably plural because infinitely connected by endless chains of signs.214 Meaning can no longer be isolated and extracted. Worlds and texts operate at the level of surface rather than of depth; they may be unravelled and unknotted in places, but they conceal no excerptable nugget of meaning, no buried treasure of significance: In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced. 215 TOPPLED SUBJECTS

For Barthes as for Nietzsche, this attack on authority is intertwined with an examination and demystification of subjecthood. The subject, claims Barthes, far from being an important signified – let alone a transcendental signified like the ‘Author-God’ – is only as tall and deep as the ink required to demarcate it on a printed page: ‘He becomes […] a paper-­ author […] the I which writes the text […] is never more than a paper-I.’216 212 DOA, 143–6. 213 GM, III, §24, 111. | DOA, 147. 214 DOA, 147. Barthes, like Nietzsche, embraces the infinity of semiotic flux. N ­ ietzsche in The Gay Science welcomes a godless world as ‘the horizon of the infinite’, ­asserting that ‘there is nothing more awesome than infinity’; Barthes, in more ­specifically ­linguistic terms, welcomes ‘the infinity of the signifier’ – a signifier ­perpetually ­renewed ‘according to a serial movement of disconnections, overlappings, ­variations’. – GS, §124, 119. | WT, 158. 215 DOA, 147. 216 DOA, 145.

Nietzsche  161 As in The Gay Science and other Nietzschean texts, the pronoun ‘I’ comes under special scrutiny: linguistics has recently provided the destruction of the Author with a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors. ­Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’, and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold ­together’, suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it. 217 The writer’s relationship to the text – like that of Nietzsche’s thinker to his thoughts in Beyond Good and Evil – is no longer conceived to be one of predication. 218 For this reason, the writer is no longer dubbed an author but renamed a ‘scriptor’: ‘the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as a predicate’. 219 Texts still have writers – which is what saves Barthes’ theory from its semblance of ‘astounding implausibility’ – but writers are not authors in the sense in which the intentionalist critical tradition had understood them to be.220 They are not aware of, let alone responsible for, every meaning which may be found in a text. Writers, as Nietzsche asserts in Human, All Too Human and in the Genealogy, are contingent (depending on the ‘collective spirit’), incidental. 221 They are not so much a womb (as Nietzsche proposed, with a similar kind of passivity in mind, in the Genealogy) as a hand mindlessly copying fragments of culture,

217 DOA, 145. Foucault makes a similar point in ‘What Is an Author?’:

218 219 220 221

a text always bears a number of signs that refer to the author. Well known to grammarians, these textual signs are personal pronouns, adverbs of time and place, the conjugation of verbs. […] It is well known that in a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first person pronoun, the present indicative tense, nor, for that matter, its signs of localization refer directly to the writer, either to the time when he wrote, or to the specific act of writing; rather, they stand for a “second self” whose similarity to the author is never fixed and undergoes considerable alteration within the course of a single book. It would be as false to seek the author in relation to the actual writer as to the fictional narrator; the “author function” arises out of their scission – in the division and distance of the two. – WA, 129 BGE, I, §17, 17. DOA, 145. Alexander Nehamas, ‘What an Author Is’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 83, no. 11 (November 1986), 685–91, 685. HAH, §180, 92.

162 Nietzsche à la Bouvard and Pécuchet.222 For Barthes, the author’s moving fingers, ‘cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription’, trace the codes of the text of culture. 223 Through the hand course ‘a ­variety of writings, none of them original’.224 The illusion of an author o ­ rganizing or containing tides of discourse is dissolved: the writer is textual b ­ efore pen is set to paper; the self or ‘inner “thing”’ which the act of writing ­‘translate[s]’ is in fact but ‘a ready-formed dictionary, its words only ­explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely’: Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him ­passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt. 225 The same unmasking of grammatical illusions is brought to bear on the subject of the act of interpretation: I read the text. This statement […] is not always true […] I do not make it undergo a predicative operation […] and I is not an innocent subject, anterior to the text, one which will subsequently deal with the text […] This ‘I’ which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost). 226 Barthes’ use of grammar and linguistics to undermine the traditional positions ascribed to reader and author in the text are spelt out in The Pleasure of the Text: On the stage of the text, no footlights: there is not, behind the text, someone active (the writer) and out front someone passive (the reader); there is not a subject and an object. The text supersedes grammatical attitudes. 227 To combat the prevailing conception of the literary work as the site of a meeting between the personalities of author and reader, Barthes ­describes the text by way of a scientific lexis of ‘composite’, ‘neutral’, ‘negative’, ‘non-isotropic’, acentric structures, infinite systems, spaces,

222 The artist stands to his work, claims Nietzsche, as ‘merely the precondition for the work, the womb, the soil, sometimes the manure and fertilizer on which it grows.’ – GM, III, §4, 71. 223 DOA, 146. 224 DOA, 146. 225 DOA, 146–7. 226 S/Z, 10. 227 P, 16.

Nietzsche  163 fields, traces, lines, codes, functions. 228 (Foucault likewise refers to authorship as a ‘function’, states that ‘the link between an author’s name and that which it names are not isomorphous’, writes of ‘the empty space left by the author’s disappearance’, and draws on the language of mathematics to refer to an author’s name as a ‘variable that accompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others’.)229 INFINITE CONNECTIVITY, REPETITION

It is amid this scientistic semantic landscape that Barthes makes one of his first uses of Kristeva’s coinage of ‘intertextuality’. The emphasis, as the Latinate prefix immediately declares, is on in-betweenness, connectivity: ‘[t]he intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text’.230 In fact, Barthes had already used the term in S/Z, where his purpose had been to emphasize both in-betweenness and infinite repetition: ‘by degrees, a text can come into contact with any other system: the inter-text is subject to no law but the infinitude of its reprises’.231 Just as for Nietzsche hyperconsciousness of interconnection and repetition lead to the circular vision of eternal recurrence, so for Barthes the perception of the intertextual ‘truth of writing’ leads to a sense of the synchronicity of the literary realm.232 The logic of chronology need not obtain in the associative realm of individual reader responses. The example given in The Pleasure of the Text is drawn from personal experience: Barthes’ intimate knowledge of Proust, as he reports, means that a textual encounter with fruit trees in one of Flaubert’s works rings with echoes of the chronologically later writer. Barthes savours the piquancy – the paradoxical reversal or suspension of time – involved in such intertextual experiences: in Flaubert, it is the blossoming of apple trees of Normandy which I read according to Proust. I savor the sway of formulas, the reversal of origins, the ease which brings the anterior text out of the subsequent one. 233 228 ‘[W]ood is not isotropic. Neither is the text: the edges, the seam, are unpredictable.’ – P, 36. | ‘[T]he Text […] is structured but off-centred’, just as language itself is ‘a system with neither close nor centre’. – WT, 159. 229 WA, 122, 121, 124. 230 WT, 160. 231 S/Z, 211. 232 DOA, 146. Foucault, too, invokes ‘an immanent rule’ of writing in ‘What Is an Author?’ – WA, 116. Both essays in fact evince an identical and problematic tension between the idea of intertextuality as a timeless ‘truth of writing’ on the one hand, and of intertextuality as a new development related to the impersonality cultivated by high modernist authors on the other. 233 P, 36.

164 Nietzsche Every reader’s intertextual matrix is unique: I recognize that Proust’s work, for myself at least, is the reference work, the general mathesis, the mandala of the entire literary ­cosmogony […] this does not mean that I am in any way a Proust ‘specialist’: Proust is what comes to me, not what I summon up; not an ‘authority’, simply a circular memory.234 But what every intertextual matrix confirms is ‘the total union of all being’ or ‘general intertwining of all that exists’ – the infinity of textuality and its seamless continuity with ‘life’: Which is what the inter-text is: the impossibility of living outside the infinite text – whether this text be Proust or the daily newspaper or the television screen: the book creates the meaning, the meaning creates life. 235 Such a claim aligns Barthes with Riffaterre’s later insistence on ­intertextuality’s role in the demise of the ‘referential fallacy’, but less by severing the ‘semantic ligatures’ between text and world than by d ­ rawing the (semiotically saturated) ‘real world’ into the textual realm. 236 ‘Words Spoken in the Past’: Intertextuality as Repetition If for Barthes the iconic text of intertextuality is Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, for Foucault it is his Temptation of Saint Anthony. 237 ­Foucault’s focus in ‘Fantasia of the Library’ is on Flaubert’s inauguration of ­repetition as a mode of writing and on the intertextual vision thereby enacted avant la lettre. Foucault sees The Temptation as ‘the first literary work’ to enter into an ­ ependent ‘essential relationship to books’: ‘it opens a literary space wholly d on the network formed by the books of the past’.238 The Temptation is ‘the book of books’ because it unites in a single ‘volume’ a series of linguistic elements that ­derive from existing books and that are, by virtue of their specific ­documentary character, the repetition of things said in the past. The

234 235 236 237 238

P, 36. HAH, §208, 97. See note 86 of this chapter. | P, 36. For a discussion of the ‘referential fallacy’, see Introduction, pp. 23–5. F, 92. F, 92, 91.

Nietzsche  165 library is opened, catalogued, sectioned, repeated, and rearranged in a new space. 239 If The Temptation is the first such text, and as such paves the way for the monuments of high modernism, Foucault admits that Bouvard and Pécuchet goes even further in foregrounding its own intertextuality – a more extensive intertextuality, too, because it ranges beyond the primarily religious and historical concerns of Flaubert’s earlier book. 240 In the interim, ‘[t]he Bible has become a bookstore’. 241 Foucault begins by highlighting both the intratextuality of Flaubert’s text – its numerous connections to the rest of his own oeuvre – and its ­i ntertextuality, showing it to be ‘a monument to meticulous erudition’. 242 In particular, he argues that Saint Anthony’s violent and libidinous ­hallucinations are fundamentally semiotic – rather than psychological – in provenance: ‘the visionary experience arises from the black and white surface of printed signs’. 243 His visions appear to him as figures situated in the interstices between signs, between texts. It is the emphasis on this generative combination of repetition and transformative fusion which gives rise to Foucault’s own use of intertextual nomenclature: The imaginary […] grows among [entre] signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books [l’entre-deux des textes]. 244 The signs from which Antoine’s haunting spectres take flight reach him after having travelled along a chain of countless artistic and scholarly iterations: ‘words spoken in the past’ [des mots déjà dits], ‘exact recensions’, ‘minute facts’. 245 They are made of ‘monuments reduced to infinitesimal fragments’; they are ‘reproductions of reproductions’. 246 ‘The Fantasia of the Library’ makes a coded allusion to Nietzsche’s ­notion of eternal recurrence. Noting that the end of The Temptation sees Antoine re-embrace the faith which his visions have so severely shaken and make ready for another identical day, Foucault, referring 239 F, 105. 240 ‘[F]ollowing Flaubert, Mallarmé is able to write Le Livre and modern literature is activated – Joyce, Roussel, Kafka, Pound, Borges’. – F, 92. | ‘Bouvard and Pécuchet are directly tempted by books, by their endless multiplicity, by the frothing of works in the grey expanse of the library.’ – F, 106. 241 F, 106. 242 F, 88, 89. 243 F, 90. 244 F, 91. 245 F, 91. 246 F, 91.

166 Nietzsche to the region of Switzerland to which Nietzsche made regular visits in the 1880s, comments that ‘The vision of Engadine approaches.’247 ­Nietzsche visited the village of Sils-Maria for the first time in July 1881; from 1883 to 1888, he returned every summer, at various times working on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of ­Morality, Twilight of the Idols, and The Anti-Christ. As Nietzsche recalls in Ecce Homo, the idea of eternal recurrence, set out in Part II of Zarathustra, was the fruit of a moment of inspiration on the shore of the Lake of Silvaplana in August 1881. 248 Foucault makes no explicit connection between his argument concerning The Temptation’s presentation of literature as the realm of the endlessly repeated ‘déjà dit’ and Anthony’s fantasy of eternal return. And yet, as Nietzsche’s comments on the ‘general intertwining of all that is’ seem related to his related emphases on art as a craft involving the balancing of novelty and repetition, so for Foucault the idea of intertextual writing, as he derives it from Flaubert, seems intuitively to combine multiple perspectives: diachronic (through Anthony’s travels backward through history to the beginning of time), cyclical (through the daily repetition of his journey), and synchronic (through the fact that a vast amount of literature spanning periods and continents seems to shape Anthony’s hallucinated experiences).249

Willing Distortion This third part of Chapter 2 outlines intertextual theory’s deviations from Nietzsche’s positions and ponders some of its significant distortions, omissions, and suppressions in light of the tension discernible in his works between philological monism and critical pluralism. In doing so, it draws on and engages with the analyses of Alan Schrift, Alexander Nehamas, and Ken Gemes. Nietzsche and the Stages of Revaluation The intertextualist reinterpretation of Nietzsche, and, more broadly, the post-structuralist appropriation of Nietzsche, is, according to the ­philosopher’s own pronouncements, necessarily a distortion. Insofar as no interpretation merely duplicates the text as it finds it, it ­unavoidably entails selection and transformation. Yet the degree of distortion ­effected by most interpretation extends much further than the minimal 247 ‘The night of La Tentation can greet the unchanged novelty of a new day’ – F, 102. | F, 101. 248 EH, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, §1, 123. For Nietzsche’s account of his return to the place in subsequent years, see EH, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, §4, 128. 249 HAH, §208, 97. See note 86 of this chapter.

Nietzsche  167 alterations involved in acts of translation and paraphrase. In the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche sets out his understanding of interpretation as a mode of violence. The ascetic ideal – which he deplores – prescribes the ‘renunciation of any interpretation (of forcing, adjusting, shortening, omitting, filling-out, inventing, falsifying, and everything else essential to interpretation)’. 250 This accords with Nietzsche’s conception of life itself as essentially a process of appropriation, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, exploiting. 251 Foucault invokes this valuation of interpretation as creative remoulding and inventive deviation in stating that ‘The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest.’252 Indeed, according to Nietzsche’s own views of life and interpretation as will to power, it should come as no surprise that ­interpretations of his writings should impose their own forms upon his thought, ‘deform[ing] it’, ‘mak[ing] it groan and protest’. And it should come as no surprise, either, that the intertextualist interpretation, which, like all interpretations, arises from particular circumstances and is ­formulated with a view to particular ends, should be partial. As was discussed above, Nietzsche’s texts are consistent in their emphasis on the importance of destruction as a forerunner to the task of creation. In his scheme for the overhaul of the established order, his own philosophical writings – imaged as detonating dynamite and revolutionary attentats – figure as the iconoclastic precondition for his revaluation of values. Liberation from the twin evils of dogma and doxa is a necessary step towards the creation of a new system of values. This explains his insistence on the need for humanity to recognize its own loss of faith  – the death of god. It is not enough for faith to quietly and slowly ebb away. The all-encompassing system of morality which revolves around the Christian god must be abandoned as well.253 Only then, with god having – in Nietzsche’s gruesome image in The Gay ­Science – ‘bled to death under our knives’, will his murderers be able to ‘become gods’ themselves, and, like the ‘cunning, lurking Cross-spider’ they have toppled, spin new values. 254

250 GM, III, §24, 112. 251 BGE, IX, §259, 153. 252 Michel Foucault, ‘Prison Talk’, Interview by J.J. Brochier, in Power/Knowledge: ­S elected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), 37–54, 53–4. 253 See note 135 of this chapter. 254 GS, §125, 119–20.

168 Nietzsche As was also mentioned above, the madman who prophesies the event in the Gay Science envisages the nihilistic consequences of such a realization as a complete catastrophe. It is to stem the despair which such a drastic loss of meaning would precipitate that new values are needed to fill the space which god so powerfully filled. In Nietzsche’s view, it was precisely to satisfy such a need for meaning that god had been imagined in the first place, as a panacea to the ‘suicidal nihilism’ of a pre-Christian era: something was missing, there was an immense lacuna around man, – he himself could think of no justification or explanation or ­affirmation, he suffered from the problem of what he meant. 255 Against the background of this ‘immense lacuna’, the ascetic ideal emerged and ‘suffering was interpreted’: ‘the door was shut on all ­suicidal nihilism’. 256 This need for meaning at the cost of self-­deception is ­humanity’s weakness (and yet adherence to such a fabricated lie may be a necessity for survival).257 Only the strong – free spirits, like Zarathustra and his followers – can withstand the absence of m ­ etaphysical ­meaning. Only they are resilient enough to welcome the death of god – to greet with exhilaration the tabula rasa of a temporarily valueless world, whose meaning is theirs to fashion anew. Nietzsche envisages revaluation as the outcome of a two-stage p ­ rocess: the first consisting in liberation from a fixed web of values into a m ­ ultiplicity of potential new values, and the second consisting in the formation, from this thronging plurality, of new unity, both at the level of the individual and of culture in general. The Nietzschean account of revaluation as a series of events which can be imaged as involving p ­ rogress along a spectrum – from unity through plurality to new unity – is truncated in the intertextualist transposition of his ideas. In the ­intertextualist account, the chaos of ­infinite possibility – Nietzsche’s temporary midpoint – is valued as an end in itself. Nietzsche and Flaubert Although speculation as to what Nietzsche might have made of a ­concept coined more than seven decades after he ceased writing is largely ­futile, there are insights to be gained from his assessment of Flaubert, the 255 GM, III, §28, 120. 256 GM, III, §28, 120. 257 As Nietzsche notes in The Gay Science, We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live – by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith no one could endure living! But that does not prove them. Life is not an argument; the conditions of life might include error. – GS, §121, 117

Nietzsche  169 author whom both Barthes and Foucault single out as a paradigmatic example of the intertextual ‘truth of writing’ they seek to theorize.258 Nietzsche’s own, chiefly negative evaluation of his eminent contemporary brings into focus the deviation involved intertextual theory’s alternative appraisal.259 The extent of Nietzsche’s first-hand acquaintance with Flaubert’s texts is unclear: his comments on the author are occasional and ­scattered. There are various channels by which Nietzsche’s impressions of Flaubert may have been shaped. While Jacques Le Rider identifies Flaubert’s letters to Sand as the only Flaubertian tome in Nietzsche’s library, Rainer J. Hanshe lists The Temptation of Saint Anthony as one of the books Nietzsche read in 1884. 260 If true, this would lend weight to Joachim Köhler’s claims concerning the influence of The Temptation on Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 261 Nietzsche himself names a possible source in stating, in a letter of 15 January 1888, that he has received an author’s copy of Georg Brandes’s Creative Spirits of the Nineteenth Century (1882) featuring chapters on Renan, Flaubert, de Goncourt, Turgenev, Ibsen, Stuart Mill. 262 Other such secondary sources are likely to have inflected Nietzsche’s sense of Flaubert. Le Rider, for instance, contends that ­Nietzsche’s views (especially his opinion of Flaubert as a nihilist and as a ‘typical case of contemporary decadence’) may have been mediated by Paul Bourget’s Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883). 263 Flaubert, Impersonality, and the Ascetic Ideal Nietzsche’s comments about Flaubert are driven by the attempt to determine whether art is fulfilling its role in culture by resisting the hegemony of the ascetic ideal – specifically, by combating its over-investment in truth. Specifically, Nietzsche had seen art – from as early as ‘On Truth 258 DOA, 146. See note 232 of this chapter. 259 Flaubert lived from 1822 to 1880. 260 The edition identified by Le Rider is Gustave Flaubert, Lettres à George Sand, précédées d’une étude par Guy de Maupassant (Paris: Charpentier, 1884). – Jacques le Rider, ‘Nietzsche et Flaubert’, in Nietzsche in Europa, ed. Volker Gerhardt and Renate Reschke (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), 237–51, 238. | ‘Nietzsche’s Library’, coll. Rainer J. Hansche, www.nietzschecircle.com/neitzsche_library.html [accessed 23 July 2019], 66. No evidence is given for this claim about Flaubert’s reading. 261 Joachim Köhler, Zarathustra’s Secret: The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2002). 262 Nietzsche to Köselitz, 15 January 1888, in Nietzsche Briefwechsel, Part III, vol. 5 (January 1887–89), 233. The edition in question (which does not in fact comprise a chapter on De Goncourt) is Georg Brandes, Creative Spirits of the Nineteenth Century (German original, 1882), trans. Rasmus B. Anderson (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924). – Le Rider, 243. 263 Le Rider, 241.

170 Nietzsche ­ umanity’s and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’ – as a potential antidote to h delusions. 264 This strand of Nietzsche’s thinking is explicitly developed in the Genealogy of Morality. There, Nietzsche criticizes artists for ­failing to scrutinize their own positions with philosophical rigour (‘their position in the world and against the world is far from sufficiently independent’), for always having been ‘the valets of a morality or philosophy or religion’. 265 Art, he opines, should assume an oppositional role in culture, one orthogonal to the received ideas of the day. Art, ‘in which lying sanctifies itself and the will to deception has good conscience on its side’, is in a good position to play such a part, being ‘much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than science is’. 266 It follows that ‘[a] rtistic servitude in the service of the ascetic ideal is […] the specific form of artistic corruption’. 267 Flaubert is not mentioned in the Genealogy, but such statements chime with Nietzsche’s characterizations of him as an artist caught in the trammels of an ascetic ideal which his atheism has proven powerless to overcome. ‘Now I have you, nihilist!’, writes Nietzsche, addressing Flaubert in one of the ‘Arrows and Epigrams’ which open Twilight of the Idols. 268 Nietzsche’s exclamation is a response to Flaubert’s preference – quoted in the original French – for the seated position for thinking and writing. 269 Nietzsche’s derision reflects his own refusal of passivity. For Nietzsche, the thinker must be active and fully attuned to his own embodied perspective. Nietzsche’s taunt may be flippant, but the dominant note of his comments about Flaubert agrees with the force of this barb. In remarks which more narrowly focus on Flaubert’s literary writing, the author’s principled cultivation of impersonality – an extension of the stale bodily inertia Nietzsche rails against in the Twilight aphorism – is condemned as a mode of self-loathing, and, as such, as the very epitome of contemporary decadence. Such self-concealment is the more repellent to Nietzsche because he recognizes in Flaubert a

264 In the enjoyment of art, states Nietzsche, The intellect, that master of deception, is free and released from its habitual ­slavery so long as it can deceive without causing harm; it is then that it celebrates its Saturnalia, and is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more adroit and more daring. – OTL, 263 265 266 267 268 269

GM, III, §5, 72. GM, III, §25, 114. GM, III, §25, 114. TI, ‘Arrows and Epigrams’, §34, 160. ‘On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis’ [‘One cannot think and write except while ­sitting down.’] – TI, ‘Arrows and Epigrams’, §34, 160. (The translation given here is ­provided in a footnote in TI.)

Nietzsche  171 powerful personality woefully exerting itself in the degenerate task of ascetic self-erasure: The expression of the most powerful personalities has been viewed as ‘impersonal’ […] these good sirs would like to hide and be rid of themselves, for example Flaubert (Letters). 270 For Nietzsche, Flaubert’s ‘hatred of life’ translates into a writing p ­ ractice equivalent to self-torture. 271 Using French in quotation marks to ventriloquize what he imagines to be the principle underpinning Flaubert’s writing, Nietzsche deems it the quintessence of decadence: ‘Flaubert est toujours haïssable, l’homme n’est rien, l’oeuvre est tout’… [Flaubert is always hateful, the man is nothing, the work is everything’…] He tortured himself when he wrote, just as Pascal tortured himself when he thought – they both felt unegoistic… ‘Selflessness’ – that principle of decadence, the will to the end in art as in morality.272 If Flaubert is portrayed as an author bent on perverse self-cancellation, Nietzsche’s own Zarathustra is ‘filled to the brim with the personality of its author, who again is entirely filled with himself’.273 That philosophy should be personal is one of the principles expressed by Nietzsche in Ecce Homo: I have gradually come to understand what every philosophy until now has been: the confession of its author and a kind of unconscious 270 KGW, NF, Part VII, vol. 2 (Spring 1884), 25 [117], 40. 271 ‘Did hatred of life gain control over him [Wagner], as with Flaubert?…’ – NCW, ‘Wagner as Apostle of Chastity’, §3, 276. 272 NCW, ‘We Antipodes’, 272. (The translation given here is provided in a footnote in NCW.) 273 Brandes, 43. | Nietzsche’s depiction of Flaubert’s art as an art of self-immolation is strikingly similar to T.S. Eliot’s later insistence on writing as an exercise in self-­ relinquishment: ‘What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ Likewise, Eliot’s insistence on the combination of impersonality and intertextuality in poetry as a process analogous to science (‘It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science’) seems to exemplify Nietzsche’s sense of impersonal art as an art contaminated by the same retrograde, ascetic withdrawal of the self as is prescribed in the practice of science. – T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 17. Foucault sets out similar ideas in ‘What Is an Author?’, averring that ‘Writing is now linked to sacrifice and to the sacrifice of life itself; it is a voluntary obliteration of the self that does not require representation in books because it takes place in the everyday existence of the writer. […] the quibbling and confrontations that a writer generates between himself and the text cancel out the signs of his particular individuality. If we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing.’ – WA, 117.

172 Nietzsche memoir. […] there is absolutely nothing impersonal about the philosopher; and in particular his morals bear decided and decisive witness to who he is – which means, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand with respect to each other. 274 The difference is stark, in Nietzsche’s eyes, between the ascetic, ­anti-personal seeking after objectivity characteristic of modern literature, as exemplified by Flaubert, and the ‘grand style’ which is the stamp of greatness: The greatness of an artist cannot be measured by the ‘beautiful things’ he arouses: leave that idea to females. But according to the degree to which he approaches the grand style, to which he is capable of the grand style. This style has this in common with great passion; that it disdains to please; that it forgets to persuade; that it commands; that it wills – To become master of the chaos one is; to compel one’s chaos to become form: to become logical, simple, unambiguous, mathematics, law – that is the grand ambition here.275 As Nietzsche had already asserted in The Gay Science, the ‘grand style’, rising wholly and spontaneously above private concerns, is ­authentically impersonal: One thing is needful. – To ‘give style’ to one’s character – a great and rare art! It is practised by all those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses that their nature has to offer and then fit them into an artistic plan until each appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. […] Near the end, when the work is complete, it becomes clear how it was the force of a single taste that ruled and shaped everything great and small – whether the taste was good or bad means less than one may think; it’s enough that it was one taste! It will be the strong and domineering natures who experience their most exquisite pleasure under such coercion, in being bound by but also perfected under their own law […] Conversely, it is the weak characters with no power over themselves who hate the constraint of style: they feel that if this bitterly evil compulsion were to be imposed on them, they would have to become commonplace under it – they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such minds – and they may be of the first rank – are always out to shape or ­interpret their environment as free nature – wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising – and they are well advised to do so, because only thus do

274 BGE, I, §6, 8–9. 275 WP, §842, 443–4 [March–June 1888].

Nietzsche  173 they please themselves! For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself – be it through this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold!276 On these definitions, Flaubert fails to ‘give style to his character’. ­Flaubertian ‘impersonality’ is not for Nietzsche a symptom of his ­liberation from the Christian ascetic ideal (under the sway of which ‘satisfaction is looked for and found in failure, decay, pain, misfortune, ugliness, voluntary deprivation, destruction of selfhood, self-flagellation and self-sacrifice’), but instead as its latest manifestation: This ‘wishing-to-be-objective’, for instance in Flaubert, is a ­modern misunderstanding. The great form, which forbids itself any ­individual charm, is the expression of the great character who has a vision of the world, who ‘cares little for individual charm’ – man of power. But this is self-contempt on the part of the Moderns, who, like Schopenhauer, wish to ‘be rid of themselves’ in art – fleeing into the object, ‘disowning’ themselves. But there is no ‘thing in i­tself’, good sirs! What they achieve is scientificity or photography, a kind of Chinese painting, all garish foreground and the whole thing chock-full.277 Far from ‘attain[ing] satisfaction with himself’, Flaubert is o ­ bsessively enthralled to Schopenhauerian self-disgust. And such irrepressible ­concern with self-erasure has consequences: ‘self-contempt’, and a retrograde investment in the object – that is, in the quest for truthful, ‘realistic’ depiction of the thing-in-itself: ‘But there is no ‘thing in itself’, good sirs!’, thunders Nietzsche. 278 It is to Flaubert’s supposed view of the world as such a realm of fixed essences, in which both subject and object are given and unchanging, 276 GS, §290, 163–4. Nietzsche’s comments in The Gay Science, though not explicitly aimed at style, seem a direct rejection of Flaubert’s famed valuation of the mot juste. The strong individual, he contends, creates an artwork out of himself by ‘giv[ing] style to his character’, working the whole into harmony through the treatment and ordering of its various components. Whether the material at stake be the style of a book or the style of a character or a life, the tight-knit integration of parts is an essential feature of a complete and successful process of creation. Flaubert’s insistence on the importance of the mot juste emphasizes the part to the detriment of the whole, and, as such, is an unequivocal sign of decadence: ‘For the moment I am only going to look at the question of style – What is the sign of every literary decadence? The fact that life does not reside in the totality any more. The word becomes sovereign and jumps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and blots out the meaning of the page, the page comes to life at the expense of the whole – the whole is not whole any more. But this is the image of every decadent style’. – CW, §7, 245. 277 GM, III, §11, 86. | KGW, NF, Part VII, vol. 2, Spring 1884, 53. 278 Elsewhere Nietzsche writes of ‘objectivity’ as ‘a modern means to be rid of oneself, out of self-contempt (as with Flaubert)’. – KGW, NF, Part VII, vol. 2 (Spring 1884), 66.

174 Nietzsche that Nietzsche ascribes the fact that his fictional protagonists themselves are such weaklings. In such characters, will – which has the power to alter the world and fashion the self – has shrivelled into mere desire: The psychology of these messieurs Flaubert is in sum false: they see only the workings of the outer world and the ego fully formed (just like Taine?) – they know only the weak of will, in whom désir [sic] stands in lieu of will. 279 Moreover, the valuation of objectivity leads, in Nietzsche’s assessment, to a scientific or photographic effect (‘What they achieve is a scientism or photography’) which studiously denies itself the right to interpret its materials. 280 Such passive reflexivity affronts Nietzsche’s ‘sense that ­philosophy should be striving not to describe the world but to shape it’.281 The elimination of perspective involved in the eradication of all traces of the self (Nietzsche likens the effect to that of a Chinese painting) amounts to a castration of the intellect: There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words 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, our ‘objectivity’. But to eliminate the will completely and turn off all the emotions without exception, assuming we could: well? would that not mean to castrate the intellect?282 Nietzsche’s view of Flaubert is itself a misinterpretation. Many of Flaubert’s statements about art – concerning, for instance, the absence of truth

279 KGW, NF, Part VII, vol. 2 (Spring 1884), 59. 280 In the summer of the following year, Nietzsche gives a more positive assessment of Flaubert’s position, portraying him as a strong personality, at the helm of a literary movement, writing excellent prose, and regrettably lacking the philosophical rigour to examine the presuppositions of his own predilection for the scientific approach: ‘Flaubert’s influence is far more beneficial, far clearer, far more solid in every sense; with an excess of personality which would enable him to withstand even solitude and failure – an extraordinary thing for a Frenchman – he currently reigns in the domain of the aesthetics of the novel and of style – he has brought French in all its sound and colour to its highest point. It is true that he, like Renan and Sainte-Beuve, lacks philosophical training, as well as a genuine knowledge of scientific procedures: but his deep need for analysis and learning, as well as his instinctive pessimism, have together forged a path, a strange one perhaps, but one strong enough to serve as an example to contemporary French novelists. It is in fact to Flaubert that the young school owes its new ambition to assume scientific and pessimistic attitudes.’ – KGW, NF, Part VII, vol. 3 (August 1884–August 1885), 328. 281 Ken Gemes, ‘Postmodernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 62, no. 2 (March 2001), 337–60, 353n. 282 GM, III, §12, 87.

Nietzsche  175 and the inevitability of perspectivism (‘There is no truth. There are only ways of seeing.’) – are in fact strikingly consonant with ­Nietzsche’s own.283 But Flaubert does, as Nietzsche surmised, absolutely forbid himself from proceeding from the depiction of multiple perspectives (notably through his inauguration of style indirect libre or free indirect style) to the formulation of his own interpretation, preferring to let the reader arrive at a personal view of the events and personalities depicted. This refusal to interpret his stories for the reader was a point of unshakable principle, as Nietzsche may have gathered from a perusal of Flaubert’s letters to George Sand.284 Flaubert, Repetition, and Bourgeois Stupidity The second strand of Nietzsche’s response to Flaubert – considered less in his uniqueness as a writer than as a representative of the kind of cultural asceticism the philosopher decries – concerns his famed a­ version to bourgeois stupidity. For Nietzsche, Flaubert’s self-disgust (and that indulged by like-minded realists) motivates not only his ­‘impersonality’ but also his attempt to kill the bourgeois within through pitiless ­derision: ‘their claim to impersonality springs from a sense of the ­pettiness of their own person, for example Flaubert, fed up with himself as “bourgeois”.’285 In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche’s description of Flaubert’s ­tormented pleasure in his own self-inflicted humiliation – even when his fundamentally bourgeois protagonists are ‘disguised’ as saints of late ­antiquity or Carthaginian heroes – impugns the pernicious ways in which asceticism succeeds in converting pain into pleasure: The French psychologists – and where else are there still psychologists today? – have never grown tired of their bitter and manifold delight in the bêtise bourgeoise, somewhat as if… enough, this reveals something about them. For instance, Flaubert, the good citizen of Rouen, ultimately stopped seeing, hearing, or tasting anything else: this was his brand of self-torture and subtle cruelty.286

283 ‘Il n’y a pas de vrai. Il n’y a que des manières de voir.’ – Flaubert to Léon Hennique, 3 February 1880, in Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau and Yvan Leclerc (Paris: Gallimard, 1973–2007), vol. 5 (2007), 811. 284 ‘[A] novelist hasn’t the right to express his opinion on anything whatsoever’. – Flaubert to George Sand, 5 December 1866, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1857–1880, trans. Francis Steegmuller (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 94. Nietzsche could have read this letter in his copy of Lettres à George Sand (Paris: Charpentier, 1884), 18. See note 260 of this chapter. 285 KGW, NF, Part VII, vol. 2 (Spring 1884), 59. 286 BGE, VII, §218, 110–11. | ‘How Flaubert makes me laugh, with his rage against the bourgeois, when he ­disguises himself as I know not what! – KGW, NF, Part VII, vol. 2 (Summer–­Autumn 1884), 270. A few months later, Nietzsche jots down: ‘The mascarade of the bourgeois, for example as Salambô [sic] and as saint Anthony’ – KGW, NF, Part VII, vol. 3 (April–June 1885), 148.

176 Nietzsche In Nietzsche’s view, the combined effect of Flaubert’s impersonality and obsessive, near-hysterical lampooning of all things bourgeois is, in both senses, laughable. Instead of rising above ‘individual charm’, Flaubert’s ‘impersonal’ writing is, in the end, all about Flaubert after all, each work evincing and confirming his inextricable embroilment in the culture he criticizes. 287 A version of this interpretation still broadly dominates current Flaubertian criticism. Flaubert is typically recognized as a writer who, through his practice of both style indirect libre and ‘quotation without inverted commas’ multiplies perspectives without it being clear who is speaking, thereby illustrating his own view of language as a net in which i­ndividuality is lost and subjectivity dissolved (an understanding absolutely consonant with Nietzsche’s in ‘On Truth and Lie’, as well as with Barthes’ view of the arachnoid subject dissolving in its own ­‘hyphological’ web).288 But while Flaubertian criticism and intertextual theory – m ­ utually reinforcing each other – applaud the author’s ­audacious mimesis of what is deemed a ‘truth of writing’, for Nietzsche Flaubert’s technical choices, however achieved and skilfully executed, betray only a lamentable failure to a­ ssume responsibility for a personal view, to shape a jumble of perspectives into a coherent interpretation.289 On his reading, the various perspectives Flaubert succeeds in conjuring segue into each other without any order being established among them. The ­promise of a higher ‘objectivity’ – the kind which would yield an organized ­synthesis – is squandered amid what Nietzsche (little knowing of Flaubert’s ambivalence about photography) takes to be an undifferentiated mass of unselfconscious, ­‘photographic’ writing.290 It is intriguing, given Nietzsche’s disapproval of Flaubert’s practice of ‘citation sans guillemets’, to use Barthes’ phrase, that Derrida should draw attention to precisely this aspect of the philosopher’s own style. 291 Extracting a sentence ‘found, isolated in quotation marks, among ­Nietzsche’s unpublished manuscripts’ – ‘I have forgotten my umbrella’ – Derrida muses that There is no infallible way of knowing the occasion of this sample or what it could have been later grafted onto. We never will know for

287 KGW, NF, Part VII, vol. 2 (Spring 1884), 53. For a fuller quotation, see p. 173 above. 288 P, 64. 289 DOA, 146. See note 232. 290 See Scarlett Baron, ‘Flaubert, Joyce –Vision, Photography, Cinema’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 54, no. 4 (Winter 2008), 689–714, and Anne Green, ‘Écriture et photographie chez Flaubert’, in Flaubert et la théorie littéraire, ed. Tanguy Logé and Marie-France Renard (Brussels: Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 2005), 197–205. 291 WT, 160. For a history of this phrase’s emergence in Flaubertian criticism and subsequent entry into general critical parlance, see Scarlett Baron, ‘Strandentwining Cable’: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality, Chapter 5, II.

Nietzsche  177 sure what Nietzsche wanted to say or do when he noted these words, nor even that he actually wanted anything. 292 This observation – which evidently has more to do with the difficulties involved in editing and interpreting private notebooks than with the question of Nietzsche’s style – dovetails with Derrida’s earlier reference to the ‘epochal regime of quotation marks’ inaugurated by Nietzsche’s philosophical deconstruction of truth: The question of the woman suspends the decidable opposition of true and non-true and inaugurates the epochal regime of quotation marks which is to be enforced for every concept belonging to the system of philosophical decidability. 293 Derrida’s description of the effect of Nietzsche’s corrosive questioning of established ‘truths’ (which are thereby shown up as mere linguistic conventions) chimes with Barthes’ comments on Flaubert’s own handling of quotation marks. 294 As Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet ‘indicate precisely the truth of writing’ – that ‘[t]he text is a tissue of quotations’ – so Nietzsche, according to Derrida, inaugurates an ‘epochal regime of quotation marks’ in philosophy.295 According to Schrift, the suspension of belief involved in reading Nietzsche follows not merely from the radical purport of his epistemological critiques but also from his deployment of a multiplicity of styles which impede any straightforward assumption regarding the agent of enunciation: The epoch of quotation marks points to the reader’s predicament of rarely knowing with certainty ‘who’ is writing in Nietzsche’s text. Utilizing a multiplicity of masks and metaphors, Nietzsche’s styles confront the reader with the undecidable question ‘Who is writing?’ Is it the free spirit? Dionysus? Apollo? Zarathustra? the Anti-Christ? the spirit of gravity? the Wagnerian? Nietzsche? Can we even ask ‘Who is Nietzsche?’ Are some masks identical with ‘Nietzsche’ and others sarcastic or parodic responses to ‘Nietzsche’?296 For all Nietzsche’s railing against Flaubert’s ascetic impersonality, the effect of their writing thus seems oddly convergent. No less than Flaubert, he raises the question which, according to Barthes in ‘The Death of the Author’, defines all writing: ‘Who is speaking thus?’297

292 293 294 295 296 297

Derrida, Spurs, 123. Derrida, Spurs, 107. WT, 160. DOA, 146. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 109. DOA, 142.

178 Nietzsche But for Alexander Nehamas, such an impression is one which ­Nietzsche hoped his oeuvre, taken as a whole, would dispel. As has been mentioned at various points in this chapter, Nehamas construes Nietzsche’s entire corpus as an attempt to construct a literary character fashioned by the moulding force of his own ‘grand style’. Conceiving of ‘every great philosophy’ as ‘a confession of faith on the part of its author, and a type of involuntary and unself-conscious memoir’, Nietzsche, he argues, aspired to impart to his own life ‘the perfect unity and freedom that are primarily possessed by perfect literary characters’.298 The means to forging such unity, as Nietzsche, according to Nehamas, came to realize, lay in the production of an integrated literary corpus: One way of achieving this perhaps impossible goal might be to write a great number of very good books that exhibit great apparent ­inconsistencies among them but that can be seen to be deeply continuous with one another when they are read carefully and well. Toward the end of this enterprise one can even write a book about these books that shows how they fit together, how a single figure emerges through them, how even the most damaging contradictions may have been necessary for that figure or character or person […] to emerge fully from them. 299 And indeed, in Ecce Homo Nietzsche credits himself for having had the wisdom ‘to have been many things and to many places so I can ­become one thing, – can come to one thing’.300 It is through the creation of such a character – to whom Nehamas ­refers in quotation marks as ‘Nietzsche’ – that Nietzsche sought to ­prolong the influence of his ideas beyond the span of his own mortal life: In his eyes, at least, it is only such a character who can influence history and thought and who, like the Socrates who emerges out of Plato’s dialogues, can manifest the will to power in fashioning ­values and modes of life.301 In the light of the numerous parallels between Nietzsche and Flaubert – such as their conception of language as a net, their belief in the value of perspectivism, their hatred of dogma and doxa and related contempt for ‘herd’ mentality – Nietzsche’s derogatory remarks about his French contemporary may seem surprising. But it should be remembered that Nietzsche’s sporadic and largely unpublished observations are less a response 298 299 300 301

BGE, I, §6, 8. | Nehamas, Life as Literature, 195. Nehamas, Life as Literature, 195. EH, ‘The Untimely Ones’, §3, 115. Nehamas, Life as Literature, 199.

Nietzsche  179 to a novelist qua novelist than a reaction stemming from the demands of his own writing project and founded on his own philosophical terms. Nonetheless, the discrepancy between the intertextualists’ identification of Flaubert as the figurehead of intertextual writing and Nietzsche’s dismissive assessment of him highlights the situatedness of their respective evaluations – or the difference of their starting premises – and begs the question: why do these theorists so highly value impersonality? Philosophical Responses to the Intertextualist Appropriation of Nietzsche Recent debates among Nietzschean philosophers bring into relief the obfuscations and partiality of post-structuralist accounts of Nietzsche, including the intertextualist transposition. Nietzsche and the Unity of Self and Culture An extensive body of academic literature has emerged in recent years in response to what are variously referred to as postmodern, deconstructive, or post-structuralist readings of Nietzsche (intertextualist readings are a subset of these other fluidly defined categories). Focusing on deconstruction’s espousal of Nietzsche’s conception of a decentred self, Ken Gemes shows that such readings are misleadingly incomplete. Gemes argues that most ‘postmodernist’ interpretations of Nietzsche’s project bracket off the final stage in the process of ‘grand’ fashioning he ­envisages – that in which unified selves emerge: On the descriptive side, Nietzsche and the postmodernists agree that the received notion of the unified Cartesian subject is a myth, however on the prescriptive side, where the postmodernists typically celebrate the death of the subject, Nietzsche rejects this valorization of disunity as a form of nihilism and prescribes the creation of a genuine unified subjectivity to those few capable, and hence worthy, of such a goal.302 Adherents of deconstruction emphasize Nietzsche’s hypothesis of the subject as multiplicity but ignore his insistence on the importance of unity as the ultimate product of the individual’s self-fashioning l­abour.303

302 Gemes, ‘Postmodernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche’, 339. Gemes uses the term ‘postmodernist’ to refer to deconstructive and post-structuralist theorists of postmodernism rather than specifically to postmodern artist and architects (though these are also occasionally invoked under the same rubric). 303 ‘My hypotheses: The subject as multiplicity’ – WP, §490, 270, qtd in Gemes, ‘Postmodernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche’, 340. | ‘[P]ostmodernists are wrong to take this rejection of the notion of an external, transcendent authority as a ­rejection of

180 Nietzsche Gemes explicitly disputes ‘the postmodern configuration of Nietzsche as a prophet of […] bricolage’.304 In the mid- to late twentieth century, he explains, interpreters of Nietzsche have been reluctant to adopt his ‘notion of a unified architectonic of the self’ because of the uncomfortable political resonances that might attach to such an emphasis in light of the philosopher’s appropriation by the Nazis earlier in the century.305 The notion presents several problems for post-war theorists. First, as Gemes emphasizes, Nietzsche’s conception of the self ‘carries with it the consequence that most mere humans do not count as having a self, of being persons’.306 To compound this difficulty, Nietzsche’s call for unity of personality is coterminous with his view of culture in general. As he advocates that the individual personality be brought together under ‘one taste’, and as he calls for unity of style in writing, so he maintains that a people should be ‘a single living unity and not fall wretchedly apart into inner and outer, content and form. He who wants to promote the culture of a people should strive for and promote this higher unity’.307 Some of Nietzsche’s most influential French readers (‘particularly’ Derrida and ‘perhaps also Foucault’), Gemes contends, ‘have chosen to deliberately ignore Nietzsche’s suggestions for the overcoming of Nihilism’, the undemocratic tenor of which would seem impossible to accommodate in any but a near-tyrannical regime.308 Nietzsche and the Problem of Interpretation While Gemes relates the post-structuralist account of Nietzsche to its proponents’ championing of ‘a fragmentary decentered world’, other contemporary philosophers, such as Alan Schrift and Alexander Nehamas, have traced this interpretative crux to Nietzsche’s own philosophy.309 Like Gemes, Schrift and Nehamas focus on a tension between

304

305

306 307

308 309

all authority. The postmodern rejection of all authority, all principle of order among the competing modes of representation, presents the very Nihilism that ­Nietzsche predicts, and warns against, as a natural result of the defeat of dogmatism. For ­Nietzsche there is still room for an immanent authority, an authority that comes from within’. – Gemes, ‘Postmodernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche’, 341–2. Gemes, ‘Postmodernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche’, 347. Gemes is specifically responding to the writings of postmodern architectural theorists. Nietzsche’s own architectural metaphors in, for example, the second ‘untimely meditation’, he contends, evince a distaste for ‘mere assemblage[s] of disparate materials’ which ‘lack a unifying plan’. ‘After the cataclysmic events of this century it is of little wonder that this is a side of Nietzsche that many would be [sic] disciples are not keen on emphasizing.’ – Gemes, ‘Postmodernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche’, 356. Gemes, ‘Postmodernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche’, 354. GS, §290, 163–4. | Friedrich Nietzsche, UM, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, 57–123, 80. | Nietzsche’s idea of a culture ‘fall[ing] wretchedly apart into inner and outer’ recalls his identification of ‘life not resid[ing] in the totality any more’ as ‘the sign of every literary decadence’. – CW, §7, 245. Gemes, ‘Postmodernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche’, 354. Gemes, ‘Postmodernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche’, 349.

Nietzsche  181 unity and multiplicity – a tension crystallized by post-structuralism’s predilection for ‘radical pluralism’, the idea that every text can give rise to an infinite number of equally valid interpretations: This problem in effect confronts any approach to interpretation with the following basic dilemma: if we are to avoid positing one interpretation as correct (which would ultimately involve a return to some sort of foundationalism), then how can we avoid lapsing into an unmitigated relativism in which all interpretations are regarded as equally legitimate?310 The seeds of this uncertainty lie in Nietzsche’s oscillation between advocacy of two kinds of reading: the slow, painstaking rigour of p ­ hilology on the one hand; the exalting freedom of interpretation or will to power on the other. This tension, according to Schrift, ‘anticipates the c­ urrent dilemma’ in literary criticism which pits ‘dogmatism and relativism’ against each other: the former produces discomfort by holding that any text has a single correct interpretation, the latter produces a matching discomfort by positing that all interpretations are equal.311 The aim of Schrift’s discussion is to find a way of reconciling these poles from within the Nietzschean corpus. The dichotomy between these two approaches to interpretation is analogous to that which Derrida outlines between Heideggerian hermeneutics and deconstructive play: By hermeneutics, I have designated the deciphering of meaning or of a truth shielded in a text. I have opposed this to the transforming activity of interpretation.312 Other synonymous pairs include the following: monism versus pluralism, overdetermination versus undertermination, reproduction versus transformation. Even Derrida, whose position is unequivocally pluralistic, admits that certain limits are desirable and necessary if interpretation is to have meaningful value: Reading is transformational […] but this transformation cannot be executed however one wishes. It requires protocols of reading. Why not say it bluntly: I have not yet found any that satisfy me.313

310 Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 1. The phrase ‘radical pluralism’ is used by Nehamas in ‘The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1981), 133–49, 136. 311 Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 8. 312 Jacques Derrida, ‘La question du style’, in Nietzsche aujourd’hui, 2 vols (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1973), vol. 1, ‘Intensités’, 235–99, 291, qtd in Schrift, 110. 313 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1981), 63, qtd in Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 118.

182 Nietzsche It is this lacuna which Schrift seeks to remedy, exploring Nietzsche’s own statements about interpretation to navigate between the Scylla of hermeneutic overdetermination and the Charybdis of interpretative ­underdetermination.314 He identifies genealogy as the intended and practicable middle ground between the limits of ‘philological a­ ttention’ on the one hand and ‘perspectival creativity’ on the other.315 Philology, originally hailed by Nietzsche as the ‘art of correct reading’ in H ­ uman, All Too Human, is subsequently abandoned on the grounds of its ­traditional dependence on authorial intention as the ultimate criterion of truth in interpretation.316 This arbitrary principle is forsaken, and in later texts Nietzsche advocates a different kind of philology, now conceived as the ‘art of reading’ not correctly, but ‘well’: this art […] teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers…317 For Schrift, ‘genealogy can be viewed as a methodological interstice between perspectivism and philology’.318 What makes genealogy a candidate for this middle position, apart from being the method privileged by Nietzsche himself in his mature period, is that it ‘retains a “standard” by which to judge between and rank the interpretations that do arise’.319 Schrift’s proposal relies on a distinction, intimated in this quotation, between ‘perspective’ and ‘interpretation’: ‘an interpretation’, he explains, ‘emerges in the act of organizing, in one way or another, a collection of diverse perspectives’.320 This is, in effect, an adaptation to the interpretative realm of ­Nietzsche’s conception of the ‘grand style’ by which individuals can shape their selves and lives into unified and meaningful form. Interpretation, according to Schrift, consists in the organization of all available perspectives into a pattern or hierarchy, an ‘order of rank’.321 It is this summative interpretative step which Nietzsche finds lacking in Flaubert, and it is this step which Christian morality, by positing a god at the centre of its interpretation of the world, so powerfully and successfully achieved (Christian morality, for instance, ranks kindness to others and commitment to truthfulness above sexual fulfilment and other instinctual satisfactions). In one of the final aphorisms of The Gay Science, Nietzsche expresses the 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321

Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 119. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 180. HAH, §270, 127. AC, §52, 51. | D, Preface, §5, 5. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 171. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 180. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 145. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 159.

Nietzsche  183 hope that mankind will not fall for yet another godly (or to Nietzsche, ‘ungodly’) interpretation of the world: the world has once again become infinite to us: insofar as we cannot reject the possibility that it includes infinite interpretations. Once again the great shudder seizes us – but who again would want immediately to deify in the old manner this monster of an unknown world? And to worship from this time on the unknown (das ­Unbekannte) as ‘the Unknown One’ (den Unbekannten)?322 Schrift’s answer to Derrida’s failure to establish effective protocols to adjudicate between the outcomes of the ‘unending, pluralistic play’ of reading is to propose as a meta-interpretive standard the Nietzschean concept of health.323 Affirming the infinity of the process of interpretation without wishing ‘to sanction all those interpretations which do arise as equally meritorious’, Nietzsche ‘replac[es] the criteria of truth and falsity of interpretation with the criteria of healthy and decadent styles of interpretations’.324 Healthy interpretations ‘enhance the creative and procreative impulse of life (the “will to power”)’; decadent interpretations, conversely, ‘impoverish the will to power’ by denigrating life and promoting ascesis. What saves this criterion from evincing the dogmatism it seeks to counteract is that ‘health’ itself an ineluctably ­perspectival criterion, prone to give rise to as many interpretations as there are interpreters: While we might all affirm health as a standard, what we each regard as healthy will be determined as a function of the perspectives from which we are operating. Nietzsche thus can affirm health as a standard without thereby specifying a universally applicable criterion for what is to count as healthy or life-enhancing.325 Health and ill-health are not absolutes (‘there is no health as such’, states Nietzsche in The Gay Science), but ‘the normative limits of an openended continuum’: ‘This will to power can be increased or d ­ ecreased, strengthened or weakened, but there is no binary opposition involved: there is only will to power.’326 In this way, Schrift suggests that 322 GS, §374, 239–40. 323 While Nietzsche ‘did not formally attend to the task of developing an interpretive method’, Schrift holds that ‘some of his comments, whether published or not, can help us in carrying out that task’. – Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 124. 324 Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 191. 325 Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 192. 326 GS, §120, 116. | Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 192–3. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche suggests that even truth and falsity are not dichotomous but points on a scale of gradations: ‘why do we even assume that “true”

184 Nietzsche perspectivism and philology be posited as the ‘limits’ between which all interpretation should ‘play’, and that a subjective – which is to say undogmatic – ­criterion be used for their evaluation. This avoids making truth the ultimate determinant of an interpretation’s validity or ‘good fit’, thus freeing interpretation from the grip of the ascetic ideal. For Gemes – to return to his statement of the crux – the account of the self and culture privileged by the ‘postmodernists’ strategically ignores the fact that Nietzsche’s works emphasize not only the necessity of abandoning life-negating ­totalizations but also of filling the vacuum that ensues with new values constellated into a new unity. The ‘postmodern appropriation of Nietzsche’, in ­Gemes’s view, is an ‘abuse’ of Nietzsche because it silently omits from its account half of the events he envisages. The ‘postmodern’ representation of Nietzsche as ‘a prophet of the postmodern’, ‘an agent of dissolution, of polyphony, a practitioner of the hermeneutics of suspicion’, ‘a model of deconstruction’, is only possible because it occludes the labour of reconstruction which must follow the explosion of unity into multiplicity.327 In ‘The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal’, Alexander Nehamas deals with another instance of the same problem, redescribed in terms of the clash between ‘critical monism’ and ‘critical pluralism’. Critical monism is the (currently highly unfashionable) view that a text has a single ‘correct’ interpretation, which is the account the author might give of the intention that produced it. The efforts of other readers can but approximate the truth of this ideal interpretation. ­Nehamas quotes as representative E.D. Hirsch’s view that ‘one of each text’s interpretations, the author’s own, must be taken as c­ anonical’ – which is precisely the intentionalist view Nietzsche himself wrote against. By contrast, critical pluralism, as defined by Nehamas, ‘is the view that literary texts […] can be given many equally acceptable, even though incompatible, interpretations’.328 Nehamas readily agrees with deconstruction’s (Nietzschean) i­nsistence on the importance of disengaging interpretation from speculation about authorial intention. In his pragmatic formulation, ‘what a writer takes a text to mean is relevant but not telling evidence in literary criticism’.329 Although this would seem to affiliate Nehamas to the deconstructive camp, the concession marks the limit of his alignment with critical pluralism. Like Schrift, Nehamas does not choose between the extremes

and “false” are intrinsically opposed? Isn’t it enough to assume that there are levels of appearance and, as it were, lighter and darker shades and tones of ­appearance – different valeurs, to use the language of painters?’ – BGE, II, §34, 35. 327 Gemes, ‘Postmodernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche’, 347, 337, 338. 328 Nehamas, ‘Postulated Author’, 137, 133. Between these two positions lie those which amount to a ‘limited pluralism’; but these, as Nehamas points out, are unsatisfactory. 329 Nehamas, ‘Postulated Author’, 147.

Nietzsche  185 of traditional monism and twentieth-century critical pluralism, seeking instead to forge a middle way between the two. Objecting to the pluralist relativism which has become the norm in critical studies, as well as (in an apparent paradox) to the enduring prioritization of authorial intention, Nehamas proposes a non-intentionalist monism as a ‘regulative ideal’. At the heart of this ideal sits the concept of an ‘ideal interpretation’: The critical monism which I advocate is a regulative ideal and identifies the meaning of a text with whatever is specified by that text’s ideal interpretation. Such an interpretation would account for all of the text’s features, though we can never reach it since it is unlikely that we can even understand what it is to speak of ‘all the features’ of anything. What we do have (and that is what we need) is the notion of one interpretation answering more questions about a text than another and thus being closer to that hypothetical ideal which would answer all questions. The direction in which this ideal lies may change as new interpretations reveal features of a text p ­ reviously unnoticed, rearrange the significance of those ­already ­accounted for, or even cause us to change some of our ­general ­critical canons.330 The figure around which such an ideal interpretation crystallizes is what Nehamas calls ‘the postulated author’: The author is postulated as the agent whose actions account for the text’s features; he is a character, a hypothesis which is accepted ­provisionally, guides interpretation, and is in turn modified in its light. The author, unlike the writer, is not a text’s efficient cause but, so to speak, its formal cause, manifested in though not identical with it. […] The regulative end is to construct, for each text, a complete historically plausible author.331 It is clear from this characterization that Nehamas has in mind the same distinction between historical writer and formal author as B ­ arthes delineates between historical ‘scriptor’ and ‘Author-God’, and as Foucault also draws between writer and author.332 Nehamas’s a­ uthor-as-character, in other words, is a version of the traditional ‘­Author’ depicted in Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ – the product of a readerly projection. But whereas Barthes’ essay is concerned with the projection of a generic ‘Author-God’ by an entire culture intent on the glorification of creative genius (as well as this projection’s connection with intentionalist criticism), Nehamas’s

330 Nehamas, ‘Postulated Author’, 144. 331 Nehamas, ‘Postulated Author’, 145, 147. 332 DOA; WA.

186 Nietzsche ‘postulated author’ arises from a particular reading of a particular work. The ideal postulated author is the projection which would result from ‘the ideal interpretation’ – a reading which would ‘answer more questions about a text than another’ (or indeed any other).333 Nehamas’s formulation implies that the postulation of an author – ­distinct from the actual writer – is the way in which readers spontaneously respond to texts, conjuring a figure which becomes the subject of predicative statements about the text. Joycean critics, for instance, routinely write about a ‘Joyce’ quite separate from the man whose life is documented in biographies. ‘Joyce’, in the context of such readings, is a hypothetical character whose posited creative acts guide interpretation and whose assumed attributes are adjusted in response to what interpretation finds. Thus, the ‘Joyce’ postulated by any individual reader at a particular time is liable to be revised in the light of contending or subsequent postulations.334 If this conception rings Foucauldian bells, the resemblance is not coincidental. In ‘What an Author Is?’, a paper delivered in the same year as ‘The Postulated Author’ was published (1981), Nehamas explicitly confronts Foucault’s discussion of authorship in ‘What Is an Author?’ He recapitulates Foucault’s distinction between writers – ‘actual individuals, firmly located in history, efficient causes of their text’ – and authors who, by contrast, ‘are not individuals but […] formal causes […] postulated to account for a text’s features and produced through an interaction between text and critic’.335 Nehamas’s ‘postulated author’ is a new designation for ‘the author function’ Foucault had outlined in 1968. ‘To say that a text is authored, therefore, is just to say that it can be given a literary interpretation.’336 Yet Nehamas is not merely reprising an earlier argument. The point of his articles is to ‘press more consistently […] than Foucault himself does the distinction between author and writer’.337 In Nehamas’s analysis, Foucault ‘falls prey to the wrong identification of author and writer against which he so elegantly argues’.338 Indeed, where Foucault, like Barthes before him, sees the author as a ‘repressive principle’, Nehamas sees the reader’s interest in such a figure as inevitable, useful, and unproblematic. The author projected onto the text as part of the process of reading is a psychological necessity: ‘No reading’, he claims, ‘can fail

333 Nehamas, ‘Postulated Author’, 144. 334 Nehamas’s thesis concerning ‘The Postulated Author’ seems closely related to the argument of Nietzsche: Life as Literature – namely, that Nietzsche’s oeuvre should be understood as the product of a deliberate strategy on the philosopher’s part to create a character. This character, ‘Nietzsche’, author of the Nietzschean corpus, is a ‘person’ quite different from the embodied, historical Nietzsche who set pen to paper: ‘As he thought Goethe had done, he too created himself.’ – Life as Literature, 233. 335 Nehamas, ‘What an Author Is’, 686. 336 Nehamas, ‘What an Author Is’, 686. 337 Nehamas, ‘What an Author Is’, 686. 338 Nehamas, ‘What an Author Is’, 690.

Nietzsche  187 to generate an author’.339 Barthes in fact himself acknowledges as much in his own depiction of the author in The Pleasure of the Text. There, six years after ‘The Death of the Author’, Barthes, whilst still insisting on the author’s death as ‘deus ex machina’, ‘institution’, and ‘father’, recants the emphatic terminological distinctions advanced in the earlier essay.340 The reader, he here asserts, needs – ‘desire[s]’, constructs – an author: ‘I need his figure (which is neither his representation nor his ­projection) as he needs mine’.341 Barthes’ statement continues the confusion between writer and author which Nehamas diagnoses in Foucault. The treatment of the historical writer as author is dead, but authorship as ‘function’, or ­‘figure’ is not defunct. Barthes’ use of the same term for a ‘desired’ author and a ‘dead’ author amalgamates the reader’s automatic, irrepressible postulation of an originating figure with authorial intention. Nehamas sees Foucault’s deconstruction of the ‘author’ as an extension of the latter’s (Nietzschean) objection to the dichotomy between surface and depth, or appearance and reality. According to Foucault, traditional acts of reading and interpretation laboured under a misconceived idea of writing as authorial ‘expression’ or ‘sincerity’ (this also accords with Barthes’ account).342 In Nehamas’s rehearsal of the argument, an author figure is attached to texts which are assumed to conceal a meaning requiring exegesis: such texts abide by what Foucault calls ‘the religious principle of hidden meanings’.343 Barthes likewise rejects the idea that writing ‘translate[s]’ some ‘inner “thing”’.344 As in Foucault, this d ­ enial of subjectivity as depth is intertwined with the rejection of religious transcendentalism in literature: the refusal ‘to assign a “secret”, an ­ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity’.345 In Nehamas’s summary, Interpretation must be separated from metaphors of depth; it must be conceived in terms of breadth and expansion. It will then be 339 340 341 342

Nehamas, ‘What an Author Is’, 690. P, 27; DOA, 145; WT, 161. P, 27. ‘The writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of “expression”; it only refers to itself, yet it is not restricted to the confines of interiority. On the contrary, we recognize it in its exterior deployment.’ – WA, 116. See p. 159. 343 WA, 120. 44 DOA, 146. 3 345 DOA, 147. In ‘Against Interpretation’, Susan Sontag anticipates Barthes’ and F ­ oucault’s rejection of metaphysical and capitalist approaches to literature, both of which mobilize conceptions of interpretation as extraction – ‘plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work’ – and translation – ‘The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really – or, really means – A?’ Interpretation, she affirms, being ‘based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.’– Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’ [1964], in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967), 3–14, 5, 10.

188 Nietzsche ­ rotected against attacks that, like Foucault’s, are motivated by a p rejection of the appearance/reality distinction.346 ‘Interpretation’, he continues, ‘places a text within a perpetually broadening context, not within a continually deepening one’.347 Such an approach eradicates the distinction between form and ­content, making it possible to think of texts as surfaces. That the intertextualists are invested in the promulgation of such a view is evident from the scientistic, geometrical language which they favour to describe the intertextual text: a language of spaces, systems, fields, lines, points, structures, isotropes, and ‘isomorphs’. 348 Likewise, Barthes’ metaphorical depictions of the text as telephone network, lace, braid, fabric, tissue, spider’s web – including his neologistic suggestion that the study of texts be renamed hyphology – reflect his attempt to ­collapse and flatten out the transcendental depths accrued by the text – or rather, in Barthesian terms, the ‘Work’ – as apprehended under the regime of intention. 349 According to Nehamas, the ways in which we postulate an author as we read a text are intertextual in a dual sense. They are so, first, in the sense that the text we are reading is consciously and unconsciously compared and related to other texts, and, second, in the sense that its evaluation takes account of existing interpretations of the same text: To interpret a text is to place it in a context which accounts for as many of its features as possible; but which features to account for, which are more significant than others, is itself a question conditioned by those interpretations which already exist.350 Yet Nehamas’s view of texts as the products of knowable actions and knowable agents assumes a more positivist view of subjecthood, agency, and action than Nietzsche’s writings suggest. In ‘What an A ­ uthor Is?’, he states that, To take the text as an action is to undertake to relate it to other ­actions, to account for its features by appealing to theirs, and for their features in turn by appealing to its own.351

346 Nehamas, ‘What an Author Is’, 687. 347 Nehamas, ‘What an Author Is’, 688. 348 See pp. 162–3 above. 3 49 The term ‘hyphology’ (or ‘hyphologie’) is used by Barthes in P (64) – see p. 154 above – and ‘Théorie du Texte’ [1973], Encyclopaedia Universalis, www.universalis. fr/encyclopedie/­theorie-du-texte/ [accessed 23 July 2019]. 350 Nehamas, ‘Postulated Author’, 144. 351 Nehamas, ‘What an Author Is’, 687.

Nietzsche  189 He goes further in ‘The Postulated Author’: In interpreting a text we must come to understand an action, and so we must understand an agent and therefore other actions and other agents as well and what they took for granted, what they meant, believed, and what they wanted. For this reason, each text is inexhaustible: its context is the world.352 For Nehamas, the field of interpretation is a realm characterized by incremental progress. In this scheme, interpreters profit from each other’s discoveries and insights, and interpretation as a whole advances towards greater understanding. In Nehamas’s chosen example, ‘We understand The Metamorphosis better today than it was understood in the past and we will come to understand it better in the future.’353 There are problems with this account. First, it seems utopian to suggest that interpretations do in fact regularly – let alone necessarily – take stock of each other. Second, it seems optimistic to suggest that knowledge of prior interpretations will lead to a gradual betterment of interpretation. The reverse seems as likely (if not more likely) to be true: the sensitivity of interpretants and interpretations to each other entails the vulnerability of any interpretation to the slightest ‘wrong turn’, as well as potential for ‘improvement’ (however that may be gauged). Nietzsche’s appropriation by the Nazis is a case in point. Nehamas conflates the passage of time and the quantitative accumulation of readings with a putative increase in the quality of interpretation, seemingly assuming that criticism is governed by some Lamarckian law of amelioration. But the ‘fittest’ interpretation according to certain ­criteria – that which pleases the greatest number, for instance – might not be the ‘best’ according to others – of, say, logical coherence. This, along with the teleology involved in even the mere postulation of an ideal interpretation, sits in tension with Nietzsche’s conception of interpretation as will to power. Nietzsche’s description of interpretation as an activity by which meanings can be inverted (by which ‘good’ and ‘bad’, to use the example developed in the Genealogy, can be revalued as, respectively, ‘evil’ and ‘good’) indicates his own sense of the drastic about-turns critical history may comprise: Every purpose and use is just a sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful, and has impressed upon it its own idea of a use function; and the whole history of a ‘thing’, an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain

352 Nehamas, ‘Postulated Author’, 149. 353 Nehamas, ‘Postulated Author’, 143.

190 Nietzsche of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one ­another at random.354 Nehamas’s regulative ideal offers a useful way of orienting hermeneutic approaches to texts. But this usefulness depends on whether the ‘art of interpretation’ is an end in itself – whether the text in question is being studied for its own sake, as the object of scholarly endeavour. His framework cannot accommodate cases in which interpretation is a means to an ulterior end. Such interpretations, acts in which the will to power is writ large, have little interest in ‘answering more questions about a text than another’.355 To read Barthes and Foucault and others who laboured to birth intertextuality in the late 1960s is to watch Nietzsche, newly extirpated from the egregious misappropriations of the Nazi era, being appropriated again and mobilized to quite different ends – less outrightly ­political ends, perhaps, but ends which are in some ways just as partial. In their treatment of language and subjecthood, in their textual view of the world, and in their revaluation of the roles of author and reader, Barthes and Foucault tread remarkably closely in Nietzsche’s footsteps. Furthermore, by deploying flamboyant, even sensationalist rhetorical strategies which align them with Nietzsche, Barthes and Foucault turn style into a powerful vector of their essays’ persuasive force. Yet as Nietzsche’s vituperative denunciations of Flaubert’s impersonality suggest, and as recent philosophical responses to ‘postmodernism’s abuse of ­Nietzsche’ throw into relief, Barthes and Foucault shroud half his story in silence. ­I ntertextuality parts way with Nietzsche in privileging relativism over hierarchy. While Nietzsche’s deconstructive labour is figured as a step on the road to reconstruction and decisive interpretation in the ‘grand style’, the intertexualists give birth to readers whose interpretations are all of equal value. 356 The critical pluralism which is the consequence of what Irwin sarcastically terms ‘reader liberation’ is one of the problematic features of a theory which in some lights forbids the discriminations between readings which are central to meaningful critical practice. 357 As well as enshrining a form of intellectual laissez-­faire which imperils the soundness of the discipline as a whole, such an outcome produces thorny pedagogical conundrums. If any ­interpretation 354 GM, II, §12, 51. 355 ‘[O]verpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which [a thing’s] former “meaning” and “purpose” must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated’. – GM, II, §12, 51. | Nehamas, ‘Postulated Author’, 144. 356 WP, §842, 443–4 [March–June 1888]. 357 Irwin, 234.

Nietzsche  191 goes, what do teachers of literature have to teach, and how can student work justifiably be marked? Conversely, if all interpretations are in fact not equal (as the day-to-day realities of academic life would seem to testify), why disseminate a theory which claims that they are? Contemporary Nietzschean philosophers shine a spotlight on such problems, and in so doing they offer solutions to the ‘astounding implausibility’ of some of intertextual theory’s best-known assertions. 358 Nehamas’s ‘postulated author’, for instance, constitutes a serviceable revision to Barthes’ sensationalist proclamation of the death of the author and a corrective to the inconsistencies of Foucault’s ‘author function’. In the writings of Freud, the next towering figure in intertextuality’s genealogy, similar questions arise in new guises. Is the present merely and ineluctably a repetition of the past? Does our material and psychological makeup allow for agency, the exertion of will, the overcoming of biological becoming?

358 Nehamas, ‘What an Author Is’, 685.

3 Freud and The Riddle of Creativity

This chapter is not about psychoanalytical criticism as it is commonly understood. Its aim, on the genealogical pattern established in previous chapters, is to establish the role played by Freud in the emergence of ­i ntertextual theory. Like Darwin, like Nietzsche, Freud revolutionized the way human life in general and creativity in ­particular are understood, bringing into focus and into common parlance the ­u nconscious. Moreover, Freud’s exploration of this newly theorized psychological realm is undertaken as an act of reading, on the grounds that, in Peter Brooks’s terms, ‘all that appears is a sign’, and ‘all signs are subject to interpretation’. Freud, in Brooks’s memorable Barthesian formulation, ‘extends […] the empire of signs and their significant decipherment’, now taken to ‘encompass all of human ­behavior and symbolic action’.1 Many aspects of Freud’s description of the mind percolate into intertextual theory. His fascination with ‘the riddle of the miraculous gift that makes an artist’, his attention to memory and the role of ­repetition in psychic life, and his reflections on the practice of ­interpretation all make him a rich source for the French theorists of the 1960s and 1970s. 2 Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Sarah Kofman, among others, respond to Freud’s representation of the mind as a textual space, drawing out the implications of his writings for subjecthood and ­culture in its manifold instantiations. Their differing but thematically ­cohesive musings marshal Freudian hypotheses in service of a ­demystified, ­naturalistic, deterministic view of texts as extensions of events ­taking place in the mind far below the threshold of consciousness. From such interpretations, literary creativity emerges as a set of physiological but also semiotic processes – an account strikingly compatible with the a­ lgorithmic, rhizomatic, memetic picture which forms 1 Peter Brooks, ‘The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 2, ‘The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis’ (Winter 1987), 334–48, 336. The reference is to Roland Barthes’ The Empire of Signs [1970], trans. Richard Howarth (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). 2 SE 21: 211.

Freud  193 ­ arwinian legacy considered in Chapter 1. Such understandpart of the D ings sharply contradict the commonplace conception of literature as an activity and a medium involving the representation of inner and outer worlds. By contrast, Harold Bloom’s virtually contemporary account of poetic creation as tumultuous, Oedipal struggle takes inspiration from more widely known and more narrative strands of psychoanalytic belief to counteract the deconstructive abstraction of intertextual theory. In lieu of the endless deferral of selfhood and meaning writ large in the Freudian ­theses of his fellow critics, Bloom outlines a vision in which creativity is the outcome of impassioned, intergenerational, male strife.

‘A Crusade of Revolution’3 Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, the discipline he founded, have had an unquantifiably large influence on culture in general, and literary ­criticism and theory in particular. Beginning with his earliest joint publications in the 1890s, Freud developed a system of thought whose reach into contemporary life remains, in Jerome Neu’s words, ‘enormous and pervasive’.4 Most of us are thoroughly post-Freudian – not in the sense that we have ‘got over’ Freud, or consigned his account of our lives to the past, but in the almost contrary sense that our everyday thoughts and conversations are saturated with the language of the worldview he inaugurated. Freighted though it is with a cargo of unproven and indeed ‘unfalsifiable’ theories, it is an idiom which remains largely unexamined in everyday exchanges.5 As Lionel Trilling remarks, such extensive ­dissemination comes at the cost of considerable distortion: The effect that psychoanalysis has had upon the life of the West is incalculable. […] Its concepts have established themselves in popular thought, though often in crude and sometimes in perverted form, making not merely a new vocabulary but a new mode of judgement.6

3 Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, ed. and abridged by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus [1961] (London: Penguin in association with the Hogarth Press, 1993), 222. 4 Jerome Neu, Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Freud, ed. Jerome Neu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1. 5 The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines the ‘criterion of falsifiability’ which Karl ­Popper (1902–94) proposed as ‘a foundational method of the empirical sciences’ and ‘a standard of evaluation of putatively scientific theories, according to which a theory is genuinely scientific only if it is possible in principle to establish that it is false.’ – www.britannica.com/topic/criterion-of-falsifiability [accessed 23 July 2019]. 6 Lionel Trilling, Introduction to Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 11–24, 11.

194 Freud Over an immensely prolific career spanning around seven decades, Freud carried out a thoroughgoing dismantling and critique of received ideas about the mind and its functions, dramatically reconfiguring the ways in which it is understood.7 By setting his analyses within the framework of the natural sciences, he echoed Darwin’s prediction that ‘Psychology [would] be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power by gradation.’8 More concertedly and more explicitly than Darwin and Nietzsche before him, Freud shook the dominant ‘Cartesian picture of a unitary consciousness’, causing ‘a revolution in the way we think’.9 As David Livingstone Smith observes, From 1895 onwards, Freud uncompromisingly rejected the philosophical orthodoxy of his day – the twin assumptions of body-mind dualism and the equation of mentality with consciousness. In place of the former, he argued that our mental processes are processes within a physical organ – the human brain – rather than a non-­ physical mind. This physicalist stance was, although not entirely unheard of at the time, certainly bold and unusual.10 Although overtly positioning his enquiries within the field of natural science, Freud’s ambition stretched to the solution of problems pertaining to other levels of explanation – problems whose ramifications extend beyond the microscopic events of the chemical and biological strata of our beings and which lend themselves to narration in the terms of lived human experience. Indeed, although he remained convinced of the irrefragable role of the bedrock of biology in the determination of all mental events, his aim was to contribute not only physiological but also psychological and indeed philosophical solutions to ‘the riddles of the world in 7 Freud’s earliest publications date from the 1870s, though his major academic break came with the Studies on Hysteria co-authored with Joseph Breuer and published in 1895. See ‘A Freud Bibliography’ – SE 24: 47–82. 8 O, 359. The first sentence of Freud’s ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ sets out its scientific ambition: ‘[t]he intention is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science’. – SE 1: 295. Even in his later and much more hypothetical work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud remains positive about the momentous revelations biology stands to provide: Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years to the questions we have put to it. They may be of the kind which will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses. – SE 18: 60 9 Neu, 5. 10 David Livingstone Smith, ‘Freud the Philosopher’, Aeon, 10 August 2017, https:// aeon.co/essays/from-philosophy-to-psychoanalysis-a-classic-freudian-move ­[accessed 23 July 2019].

Freud  195 which we live’.11 As Kofman points out, the stupendous interdisciplinarity of Freud’s bibliography bespeaks the reductionist aspirations which subtend most scientific endeavour.12 The quest for generalizable laws, he believed, would eventually lead to the discovery of ‘unsuspected unity’.13 The extent of Freud’s legacy is strikingly captured by the poem ­written by W.H. Auden on the occasion of his death in 1939. ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ evokes the penetration of his theories into every corner of culture – an infiltration which, from the first, seemed independent of the demonstrability of his hypotheses: if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives14 Auden’s lines aptly encapsulate the ambivalent regard in which Freud continues to be held, though ‘opinion’ is perhaps too strong a word to sum up the nebulousness of Freud’s pervasive presence in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Today, ‘Freudianism’ (a term which ­according to the OED has been in use since the 1920s) is less an opinion than a language – less evocative of genuine controversy than it is likely to elicit a flurry of clichéd and ironic remarks about cigars, the ­s exual meanings of dreams, Oedipus complexes, and slips of the tongue.15 Eighty years or so after Freud’s death in 11 The Question of Lay Analysis (1926) – SE 20: 253. In ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (1937), Freud states that ‘for the psychical field, the biological field does in fact play the part of the underlying bedrock’. – SE 23: 252. 12 The term ‘reductionist’ is used here in the scientific sense set out in Chapter 1 (see pp. 65–6), to refer to the endeavour ‘to unite and explain just about everything in one magnificent vision’ and not in the negative sense of excessive and inadequate simplification which it has misleadingly accrued. – DDI, 82. Whether seeking to bridge the gap between anthropologists, philologists, folklorists, and psychoanalysts (in Totem and ­Taboo [1913]), or to link medical science with philosophy and the arts (in ‘On the ­Teaching of Psycho-Analysis in Universities’ [1919]), Freud aspired to the unification of knowledge. 13 Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics [1985], trans. Winifred Woodhull (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 7. 14 W.H. Auden, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’, Complete Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 273. 15 There are exceptions, of course. Frederick Crews’ recent, vitriolic biography shows that to some detractors Freud’s position within culture remains scandalous. – ­Frederick Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (London: Profile Books, 2017). The title (‘Why Freud Survives’) and subtitle (‘He’s been debunked again and again – and yet we still can’t give him up’) of Louis Menand’s review of Crews’ book for the New Yorker suggest, however, that Freud’s stature is unlikely to be immediately affected even by such vehement denigration. – New Yorker, 28 August 2017,

196 Freud 1939, psychoanalysis is less a disputatious topic than a trigger to the mundane evocation of his notions regarding the mind’s unfathomable subconscious depths and its division into such ‘agencies’ as the ego, the id, and the super-ego (to name but a few among his best known neologisms).16 Freud and his international coterie of acolytes were initially met with considerable hostility – enough to make him feel at times as if he were ‘leading a crusade of revolution against the accepted conventions of medicine, or at all events his seniors in Vienna’.17 The Interpretation of Dreams bears testimony to the ‘embittered’ and ‘furious opposition’ his theories originally aroused.18 Freud’s ‘undaunted c­ ourage’ would be called upon many times over the following years when ­character assassinations were rained down upon the so-called ‘Viennese l­ibertine’ at the helm of the psychoanalytical movement.19 As Ernest Jones recalls, In those days [roughly the first two decades of the twentieth century] Freud and his followers were regarded not only as sexual perverts but also as either obsessional or paranoiac psychopaths, and the combination was felt to be a real danger to the community. Freud’s theories were interpreted as direct incitements to surrendering all restraint, to reverting to a state of primitive licence and savagery. No less than civilization itself was at stake. 20 www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/why-freud-survives [accessed 23 July 2019]. Likewise, Brian Appleyard’s review counters Crews’ ‘762-page charge sheet of lies, hypocrisy, falsified evidence, sexual creepery, “intellectual parasitism”, corruption, cruelty, botched physical and mental treatments, money-grabbing, “thick-­headedness”, bad science, wild, evidence-free speculation and autobiography shiftily disguised as clinical evidence’ with praise for Freud’s ‘great truths’ as ‘mighty mitigations’ for his shortcomings. – ‘Freud: The Making of an Illusion by Frederick Crews’, The Times, 27 August 2017, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ review-freud-­frederick-crews-6ftvplld8 [accessed 23 July 2019]. David Aaranovitch, too, deplores the excessive fury driving Crews’ ‘titanic act of negation’ and restates the value of Freud’s legacy. – ‘Freud: The Making of an ­Illusion by Frederick Crews’, The Times, 2 September 2018, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/­ review-freud-the-making-of-an-illusion-by-frederick-crews-q87bgvf8j [accessed 23 July 2019]. 16 ‘In my latest speculative works’, writes Freud in his Autobiographical Study (1925), ‘I have set about the task of dissecting our mental apparatus on the basis of the analytic view of pathological facts and have divided it into an ego, an id, and a ­super-ego.’ – SE 20: 59. 17 Jones, 222. 18 SE 4: 263n. 19 Jones, 479, 392. The phrase ‘Viennese libertine’ was used by the New York neurologist Allen Starr on 4 April 1912 at a meeting of the Neurological Section of the New York Academy of Medicine, as was subsequently reported in the New York Times. 20 Jones, 381.

Freud  197 Notwithstanding the viciousness of such early attacks, Freud’s reputation in his lifetime (1856–1939) went broadly from strength to strength, and the seriousness and significance of his work came gradually to be acknowledged even by those who remained sceptical of its validity as science or even as a body of knowledge to be judged by less stringent standards. In 1924, he appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, and subsequently the honours kept on coming. In later years, there were sporadic mutterings about the Nobel Prize.21 Freud came to be solicited and celebrated by some of the greatest minds of his day, for example exchanging letters with Albert Einstein and receiving the visit of ­Salvador Dalí.22 On the occasion of his eightieth birthday in 1936, Thomas Mann delivered to him an address signed by 197 distinguished writers and ­artists.23 ­Crucially, it was on the grounds of his international s­ tature that he was extricated from the clutches of the Gestapo in 1938 and allowed to live out his final year in the safety of London.24 On his arrival in Hampstead in the early days of June 1938, The Lancet mobilized the monumentalizing pomp of an obituary-like past tense to pay tribute to his impact: His teachings have in their time aroused controversy more acute and antagonism more bitter than any since the days of Darwin. Now, in his old age, there are few psychologists of any school who do not admit their debt to him. Some of the conceptions he formulated clearly for the first time have crept into current philosophy against the stream of wilful incredulity which he himself recognized as man’s natural reaction to unbearable truth. 25 On 23 June 1938, the Charter Book of the Royal Society was brought for him to sign, his name thereby assuming its place within its pages among those of such intellectual luminaries as Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. 26 After his death on 23 September 1939, Freud’s posthumous reputation was tended by devoted disciples such as Ernest Jones, who became the author of an important if idealizing biography. Nevertheless, in death as in life, Freud’s achievement has continued to be vigorously contested. The ‘Freud Wars’ of the latter half of the twentieth century saw his ­legacy repeatedly brought into question, notably by scientists impatient with the widespread credence accorded to a system they regarded as a

21 Time Magazine, vol. 4, no. 17 (27 October 1924). | Jones, 588, 648. 22 Jones, 628–9, 648–9. 23 The list of eminent signatories included Romain Rolland, Jules Romains, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, and Stefan Zweig, to name but a few. – Jones, 629. 24 Jones, 637–42. 25 The Lancet, vol. 231 (11 June 1938), 1341, qtd in Jones, 645. 26 Jones, 648.

198 Freud baseless invention. 27 In 1975, the Nobel-Prize-winning biologist Peter Medawar stated that Opinion is gaining ground that doctrinaire psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century: and a terminal product as well – something akin to a dinosaur or a zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity. 28 In 1993, Allen Esterson declared that the rise of psychoanalysis to a position of prominence in the twentieth century will come to be regarded as one of the most extraordinary aberrations in the history of Western thought.29 Taking stock of such scathing evaluations in 1996, R.C. Tallis reported with satisfaction that ‘The verdict has been uniformly negative: Freud as a scientist, metapsychologist, and diagnostician of society emerges as a quack.’30 Even the limpidity of Freud’s ‘marvellous prose, which gave the ideas a veneer of clarity and a feeling of inevitability’ was cited by such prosecuting parties as evidence of his deviousness in ‘sustain[ing] his scientific fairy tale’ and in the cultivation of the myth ‘of himself as a selfless searcher after truth, a man of granite-like integrity, utterly incapable of fraud or even self-deception’.31 ‘Conquistador’ – Freud’s Will to Truth Freud, as Lionel Trilling straightforwardly states, ‘[o]vertly and without apology […] hoped to be a genius’. 32 His ambition to shed light on the core questions of human experience was boundless; he had, as he himself admitted, ‘the feeling of a conqueror’. 33 Though born in Moravia (one of the countries of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 27 See John Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its ­Passions (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Lavinia Gomez, The Freud Wars: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Hove and New York: Routledge, 2005). 28 P.B. Med.awar, ‘Victims of psychiatry’, New York Review of Books, 23 January 1975, 17. 29 A. Esterson, Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud ­(Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court Books, 1993), 254. 30 R.C. Tallis, ‘Burying Freud’, The Lancet, 9 March 1996, vol. 347, 669–71, 669. 31 Tallis, ‘Burying Freud’, 670. Praise of Freud’s writing style is widespread. As Jones notes, ‘Freud has been rated a master of German prose, and his receiving the high honour of the Goethe prize for Literature at Frankfurt in 1930 speaks for itself.’ – Jones, 464. 32 Jones, 13. 33 Freud, qtd in Trilling, in Jones, 13.

Freud  199 1968, now one of the ‘lands’ of the Czech Republic) in 1856, Freud spent most of his life in Vienna. 34 From his early years as his mother’s firstborn, favoured child, Freud derived the confidence which would enable him to pursue his work in spite of many prevailing taboos and considerable opposition. By his own account, his mother’s love imbued him with the resolve to fulfil the promise she and others saw in him. 35 ‘I am nothing but by temperament a conquistador’, he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess in 1900, ‘with the curiosity, the boldness, and the tenacity that belong to that type of being.’36 A lifelong atheist who attributed the strengths and weaknesses of his character to ‘Nature’ (as well as to his mother’s nurture) and who counted himself among ‘the most dangerous’, if unsuspected, ‘enemies of religion’, Freud saw himself above all as a seeker after truth.37 According to Ernest Jones, Freud had ‘a veritable passion to understand’.38 Indeed, Jones refers to this will to truth (to coin a Nietzschean phrase) as ‘the deepest and strongest driving force in his life and the one that impelled him toward his pioneering achievements’.39 Along with this ‘overpowering need to come at the truth at all costs’, Freud was equipped with a ‘defiant rebelliousness’ which galvanized him in the face of myriad obstacles and persistent vilification.40 Freud’s aspiration to a place in history and his own sense of his claim to such a position is plainly stated in a paper published in 1917. In ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’, Freud identifies his discipline as the bearer of the last of three blows dealt by science to humanity’s self-regard.41 The first of these, ‘associated in our minds with the name and work of Copernicus’, was ‘cosmological’, consisting of the realization that man, as a species living in one of many planets in one of many galaxies, has no reason ‘to regard himself as lord of the world’.42 The second, ­primarily associated with Charles Darwin, was ‘biological’, 34 Freud, ‘An Autobiographical Study’ (1925) – SE 20: 7. 35 Trilling, in Jones, 13. 36 Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1 February 1900, in Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Moussaief Masson (Cambridge, MA, and London: Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 398. 37 ‘I perceive that Nature has denied me many talents’ – Freud in the Geheime Chronik (Sacred Record) co-authored with his future wife Martha Bernays at the time of their engagement, qtd in Jones, 123. | ‘Nature had not, in one of her gracious moods, ­imprinted on me the stamp of genius as she sometimes does.’ – qtd in Jones, 183. | Freud to Marie Bonaparte, 1926, qtd in Jones, 573. 38 Jones, 43. 39 Jones, 478. 40 Jones, 277, 226. 41 The three blows to human narcissism are also described at the end of Lecture XVIII of Introductory Lectures, completed at around the same time as ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’. – See SE 16: 284–5. 42 SE 17: 140.

200 Freud ushering in the realization of man’s ‘animal descent’.43 Freud positions himself in this lineage as the inflicter of a ‘third blow […] psychological in nature’ and ‘probably the most wounding’.44 Psychoanalysis is perceived as intensely threatening, he contends, because it debunks man’s impression of at least being ‘supreme within his own mind’.45 The mind, as Freud had begun to show, is no such ‘simple thing’ as to be coextensive with consciousness.46 On the contrary, his findings were revealing it to be a plural, intricate, decentralized system wholly devoid of the transparency supposed by Descartes’ cogito.47 Scientific Ambitions Freud was committed to the establishment of psychoanalysis on a ­scientific footing, an ambition in line with his background in medical psychiatry and his training in hospitals in Vienna, Paris, and Trieste. ‘The intention’, as the first sentence of his posthumously published ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ set out as early as 1895, is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles, thus making those processes perspicuous and free from contradiction.48 Affiliating psychoanalysis to science was at least in part strategic: a means of defending the emerging discipline from denigration by those who, on the one hand, sought to cast it as the pass-time of perverts, and those who, on the other, sought to relegate it to the realms of art, and thus by implication to those of imagination, unreason, and self-indulgent gratification. Freud was notably irked when Havelock Ellis described him as an artist rather than a scientist, rejecting the characterization as ‘the most refined and amiable form of resistance’, one specifically calculated to ‘injure the validity of our scientific claims’.49 In his Autobiographical

43 SE 17: 141. 44 SE 17: 141. 45 SE 17: 141. 46 SE 17: 141. 47 For Nietzsche’s critique of the cogito, most famously formulated by Descartes in his 1637 Discourse on Method, see Chapter 2, p. 137. 48 SE 1: 295. The ‘Project’ bore no title until its publication in 1950. It first appeared in an English translation in 1954. The translation featured in the Standard Edition is a revised version of the earlier text. 49 Freud encountered the offending essay in Havelock Ellis, The Philosophy of ­Conflict, and Other Essays in War-Time, 2nd series (London: Constable, 1919), as he ­reported to Jones in a letter of 12 February 1920. – Jones, 493.

Freud  201 Study, he records ‘hav[ing] always felt it a gross injustice that people have refused to treat psycho-analysis like any other science’.50 Jones suggests a more personal reason for Freud’s commitment to the idea of a psychoanalysis built on the scientific model – namely, that he invested in the rigorous framework of the natural sciences as an answer to his own ‘fear of being submerged in speculative inflation’. 51 Throughout his life, Freud felt his own partiality for philosophical abstraction to be a dangerous attraction – one prone to exacerbate his penchant for freewheeling conjecture. For one ‘whose bent t­ oward speculative abstractions [was] so powerful that he [was] afraid of b ­ eing mastered by it’, adherence to ‘scientific discipline’ was a way of holding in check his own tendency to ‘[p]hilosophic theorizing and speculation’. 52 After Darwin and Nietzsche Freud’s myriad connections to Darwin and Nietzsche make him an obvious protagonist for inclusion in this genealogy of intertextuality. While his aspiration to establish psychoanalysis as an extension of ­natural ­science affiliates him to Darwin – whose Origin looks forward to ­psychology establishing ‘the necessary achievement of each mental power and capacity by gradation’, his schematic partition and holistic imbrication of conscious and unconscious life recall Nietzsche’s erasure of the distinctions of traditional metaphysics through (inter alia) the dismissal of the Cartesian cogito and concomitant dissolution of the self.53 More broadly, Freud and Nietzsche have in common a determination to ‘unmask’ prevailing cultural conceptions as fallacies.54 Freud’s rooting of academic curiosity in the libido, and specifically in the ­infantile fascination with sexual difference, performs the same kind of revelatory disclosure as Nietzsche’s discussion of science as a manifestation of the ascetic ideal, and thus as ‘a hiding place for all kinds of ill-­ humour’ in the Genealogy of Morality.55 Science, for all its trumpeted ­commitment to truth, emerges in Nietzsche’s interpretation as a means for scholars to ‘conceal something from themselves’, as a harnessing and redirection of energies previously devoted to theistic belief in service of 50 SE 20: 58. See also SE 20: 57. 51 Paul-Laurent Asssoun, Freud and Nietzsche [1980], trans. Richard L. Collier, Jr. (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 11. 52 Jones, 55 (where Jones is summing up a suggestion attributed to Fritz Wittels), 255. See also 476 on which Jones refers to Freud’s mind as ‘one given to the freest speculations and open to new and even highly improbable ideas’. 53 O, 359. | See note 47 of this chapter. | This parallel is drawn by Kofman, Childhood of Art, 3–4. 54 Kofman, Childhood of Art, 55, 210. According to Kofman, Freud refers to his own method of solving riddles as one of ‘unmasking’ (entlarvten). 55 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) – SE 7: 194. | GM, III, §23, 110.

202 Freud ‘self-­anaesthesi[s]’.56 Both Freud and Nietzsche, in other words, make the will to truth itself a target of their suspicion, exposing it as ‘a cover story for rather diverse forms of satisfaction’.57 Moreover, like Nietzsche and Darwin, Freud looks to the past for ­answers as to what makes us what we are. All three adopt a genealogical approach, whether the object of their scrutiny be the evolution of mankind’s mental powers, the emergence of morality, art, and science, or the role of early life experiences in the shaping of personal desires and collective cultures. It is possible to add some specificity to the identification of such convergences. Darwin is frequently, and often admiringly, referred to in Freud’s work. His evolutionary theory formed part of the landscape of Freud’s medical training.58 As he would later recall of his formative years, ‘the theories of Darwin […] strongly attracted me, for they held out hopes of an extraordinary advance in our understanding of the world’.59 There are biographical parallels too. As well as admiring the revolution he had brought about, Freud shared Darwin’s desire for academic priority. As Darwin rushed to complete his ‘Abstract’ to pre-empt Wallace’s publication of his own evolutionary breakthrough, Freud – as even Jones’s hagiographic account acknowledges – cared enough about his standing in the academic world to become embroiled in an embarrassing dispute about priority with Otto Weininger.60 Indeed, his irrepressible craving for acclaim as a trail-blazing originator is a frequent theme in his Autobiographical Study.61 If Freud shared with Darwin a hunger for recognition as a pathbreaker, he had in common with Nietzsche what it is tempting to call (notwithstanding the anachronism) a related ‘anxiety of influence’.62 Within the broad umbrella of his qualms about psychoanalysis’s debt to philosophy, Freud’s concern about Nietzsche seems to have assumed the importance of a special case.63 Like Nietzsche, who took drastic

56 GM, III, §23, 110. 57 Adam Phillips, Darwin’s Worms (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 96. 58 In 1874, Freud followed a course on ‘Biology and Darwinism’ by the zoologist Carl Claus, and he was, states Jones, ‘deeply imbued with the principles of causality and determinism, so pronounced in the Helmholtz school that had dominated his early scientific discipline.’ – Jones 59, 218. 59 Jones, 54. 60 Jones, 272. The dispute regarded the hypothetical universality of bisexuality. 61 Consider, for example, Freud’s descriptions of his collaboration with Joseph Breuer on the Studies in Hysteria (‘As regards the theory put forward in the book, I was partly responsible, but to an extent which it is to-day no longer possible to ­determine’) and of his quarrel with Janet (‘historically psychoanalysis is completely independent of Janet’s discoveries’). – SE 20: 21, 31. 62 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry [1973], 2nd edn (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 63 ‘Even when I have moved away from observation, I have carefully avoided any ­contact with philosophy proper’. – SE 20: 59.

Freud  203 measures to prevent thoughts from making their insidious way ‘over the wall’ of the mind, Freud carefully abstained from reading authors whom he felt posed a threat to his originality.64 For Jones, this precautionary attitude was no less than ‘the secret of Freud’s genius’: side by side with Freud’s great independence of mind and skeptical criticism of ideas there was also a concealed vein of the very ­opposite – his resistiveness was a defence against the danger of being too readily influenced by others.65 Freud made a number of brief but significant statements about ­Nietzsche in the early years of the twentieth century. In a letter sent to his confidant and collaborator Wilhelm Fliess on 1 February 1900, he announces that he has purchased Nietzsche’s Complete Works and that in them he ‘hope[s] to find words for much that remains mute in me’. Yet at the same time he admits, in the first instance of what would become a pattern, that ‘I have not yet opened his books. Too lazy for the moment.’66 This oscillation between acknowledged fascination and denial of acquaintance recurs in the minutes of two early meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. On 1 April 1908, Freud declares not only that he ‘does not know Nietzsche’s work’ but also that his ‘occasional attempts’ to read him have been ‘smothered by an excess of interest’.67 This enforced ignorance enables Freud to assert (as the minutes relate) that ‘In spite of the similarities which many people have pointed out […] Nietzsche’s ideas have had no influence whatsoever on his own work.’68 At the next Psychoanalytic Society meeting held about Nietzsche, on 28 October 1908, Freud reiterates his ‘fear’, as Paul-­Laurent Asssoun puts it, ‘of short-­circuiting the delivery of analytical truth’ by leaving himself exposed to a potentially overpowering influence.69 Freud looks back again on his avoidance of Nietzsche in his Autobiographical Study, describing him as a ‘philosopher whose guesses and intuitions 64 EH, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, §3, 89. | Even Freud’s defensive assurance, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that ‘[p]riority and originality are not among the aims that psycho-analytic work sets itself’ seems, by excess of zeal in the disavowal of such aspirations, to betoken his ambition to be recognized as a pioneer. – SE 18: 7. 65 Jones, 476. 66 Freud to Fliess, 1 February 1900, in Complete Letters, 398. 67 Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, vol. 1: 1906–1908, trans. M. Nunberg, ed. Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn (New York: International Universities Press, 1962), 359. 68 Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, vol. 1: 1906–1908, 359–60. 69 Asssoun, 11. | ‘Prof. Freud would like to mention that he has never been able to study Nietzsche, partly because of the resemblance of Nietzsche’s intuitive insights to our laborious investigations, and partly because of the wealth of ideas, which has always prevented Freud from getting beyond the first half page whenever he has tried to read him.’ – Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, vol. 2: 1908–1910, trans. M. Nunberg, ed. Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn (New York: International Universities Press, 1967), 32.

204 Freud often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious findings of psycho-analysis’.70 Nietzsche’s and Freud’s postulation of a link between art and the sexual instincts constitutes an example of such congruence. As the following pages explore, Freud, like Nietzsche before him, deviates sharply from nineteenth-century aesthetics, notably in his sexualization of artistic creation and appreciation (the latter of which had been influentially defined by Kant as a strictly disinterested activity in his 1790 Critique of Judgement) and in his ‘economic’, or quantitative, approach to aesthetic pleasure.71 The continuities between the respectively biological, philosophical, and psychological theories of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud matter because they contribute to the consistency, and thus to the plausibility and persuasiveness of the altered, de-­essentialized worldview of which intertextuality is a later manifestation.

Roads to the Unconscious One of Freud’s most incontestable legacies is to have put an impressively strong case for the view that, as Nietzsche provocatively asserts, ‘We remain unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge.’72 From as early as 1895, Freud had begun to articulate the fact and causes of our self-­ignorance. One of psychoanalysis’s inaugural axioms is that ‘consciousness provide[s] neither complete nor trustworthy knowledge of the neuronal processes’: our mental functioning, physiologically and quantitatively understood, is distinct from our psychological experience of it.73 As a result, such knowledge as we can garner is, according to Freud, the apprehension of what we do not experientially know and why we do not 70 SE 20: 60. In ‘On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement’ (1914), Freud ­comments that I have denied myself the very great pleasure of reading the works of Nietzsche, with the deliberate object of not being hampered in working out the impressions received in psycho-analysis by any sort of anticipatory ideas. I had therefore to be prepared – and I am so, gladly – to forgo all claims to priority in the many instances in which laborious psychoanalytic investigation can merely confirm the truths which the philosopher recognized by intuition. – SE 14: 15–16 71 SE 18: 17. 72 This quotation is exceptionally drawn from the Oxford University Press edition of the Genealogy, whose translation of the text is in this instance more striking. – ­Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3. | In ‘A Difficulty on the Path of Psycho-Analysis’ (1917), Freud, in an uncharacteristic and singularly Nietzschean use of the vocative mode, urges his reader, to ‘Turn your eyes inward, look into your own depths, learn first to know yourself!’ – SE 17: 143. 73 SE 1: 308. | See also ‘A Difficulty on the Path of Psycho-Analysis’, in which Freud declares that ‘[w]hat is in your mind does not coincide with what you are conscious of; whether something is going on in your mind and whether you hear of it, are two different things’, and that in consequence, ‘the ego is not master in its own house’. – SE 17: 143.

Freud  205 know it. This initial, basic distinction between mind and consciousness points towards the psychological terra incognita which Freud, in what is perhaps his most famous act of naming, calls the ‘unconscious’.74 By ‘unconscious’, Freud means more than the everyday functions which preside over eating, walking, and other ‘automatic’ behaviours performed without conscious thought; rather than being merely ‘descriptive’ in this sense, the psychoanalytical unconscious is ‘dynamic’, a realm of drives which are ‘extremely flexible’, their objects being both ‘contingent and replaceable’.75 Self-Analysis and Dream-Analysis A major step forward in the exploration of the psychological components of the mind’s unconscious activities was taken in 1897, when Freud embarked upon his ‘self-analysis’ – a procedure much heroized in Jones’s biography as the first successful attempt in a long history of endeavours, ‘from Solon to Montaigne, from Juvenal to Schopenhauer’ – to act on the mythical Delphic oracle’s injunction to ‘Know t­ hyself’.76 In The ­L anguage of Psycho-Analysis, Jean Laplanche and Jean-­B ertrand Pontalis define self-analysis as the ‘[i]nvestigation of oneself by ­oneself, conducted in a more or less systematic fashion and utilising certain techniques of the psycho-analytic method, such as free association, dream-analysis, the interpretation of behaviour, etc.’.77 This reflects Freud’s own ­declared reliance on dreams as his principal source of ­material: ‘I soon saw the necessity of carrying out a self-analysis, and this I did with the help of a series of my own dreams which led me back through all the events of my childhood’.78 As this makes clear, the self-analysis and Freud’s elaboration of the practice of dream interpretation were closely interlinked (Freud had made the first allusion to a book on dreams earlier in the same year, and 74 As Laplanche and Pontalis state, ‘If Freud’s discovery had to be summed up in a single word, that word would without doubt have to be “unconscious”.’ – Jean Laplanche, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald ­Nicholson-Smith (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of P ­ sycho-Analysis, 1973), 474. Freud defines the term in The Interpretation of Dreams: The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely ­presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs. – SE 5: 613 In 1915, he published a paper entitled The Unconscious which is exclusively devoted to the topic. – SE 14: 159–215. 75 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 133. | The stages of Freud’s distinction between the ‘descriptive’ and ‘dynamic’ u ­ nconscious are rehearsed in the editorial preface to The Ego and the Id (1923). – SE 19: 4–7. 76 Jones, 276. 77 Laplanche and Pontalis, 412. 78 ‘On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’ (1914) – SE 14: 20.

206 Freud had been thinking about dream interpretation since at least 1894).79 The two are interwoven in The Interpretation of Dreams, which combines disclosures about Freud’s life with thoroughgoing analytical accounts of his dreams. The book is, in consequence, highly personal: not for nothing does the author appeal to his readers ‘to make my interests his own for quite a while, and to plunge, along with me, into the minutest details of my life’.80 The Interpretation was published on 4 November 1899 (though a publisher with a flair for historical symbolism had ‘1900’ printed on the title page).81 The book did not sell well, and, as Freud complained, was largely ignored at the time. Those reviews that did appear were fairly damning. One deplored its ‘complete mysticism and chaotic arbitrariness’; another opined that ‘the imaginative thoughts of an artist had triumphed over the scientific investigator’.82 But despite its inauspicious early reception, The Interpretation of Dreams has more recently tended to be singled out as ‘Freud’s most original work’.83 Richard Wollheim and Terry Eagleton dub it Freud’s ‘masterpiece’ while Frank Sulloway calls it the ‘greatest’ of the series of early works which ‘places Freud among the most creative scientific minds of all time’.84 In the preface to the text’s third edition (1931), Freud himself refers to dream-­interpretation as ‘the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make’. ‘Insight such as this’, he observes, ‘falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime’.85 In one of the book’s most famous statements, Freud describes the interpretation of dreams as ‘the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind’, comparing the practice to ‘a window through which we can get a glimpse of the interior of th[e] [mental] apparatus’.86 Making dreams the cornerstone of his approach, Freud ­anticipates and rejects the view that they are merely trivial events. In fact, they are, he maintains, neither ‘meaningless’ nor ‘absurd’.87 ­A lthough strange from the point of view of waking life, they are ‘at bottom […] nothing other 79 Jones, 265. The first complete analysis Freud made of one of his own dreams – that of ‘Irma’s injection’ – took place on Wednesday 24 July 1895. – Jones, 301. 80 SE 4: 106. 81 Jones, 306. 82 Wilhelm Stern and Prof Liepmann of Berlin, qtd in Jones, 307. 83 ‘By general consensus The Interpretation of Dreams is Freud’s major work, the one by which his name will probably be longest remembered.’ – Jones, 299. 84 Richard Wollheim, Sigmund Freud [1971] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 29. | Eagleton, 156. | Frank Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: B ­ eyond the Psychoanalytic Legend [1979] (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 320, 358. The other works in the series to which Sulloway refers are The ­Psychopathology of ­Everyday Life (1901), Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), ­Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905), and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). 85 SE 4: xxxii. 86 SE 5: 608. | SE 4: 219. 87 SE 4: 122.

Freud  207 than a particular form of thinking’.88 Freud’s aim, accordingly, is to insert dreams into ‘the chain of intelligible waking mental acts’, and prove that they ‘really have a meaning and that a scientific procedure for interpreting them is possible’.89 ‘The Solution of the Riddle of Dreams’90 Though Freud’s treatise constantly marries discussion of the genesis and interpretation of dreams (which are, in fact, inextricably linked), these are parsed under separate headings in the following exposition to highlight their analogical relevance to literary theories of writing and reading. The Genesis of Dreams The study of dreams, those carnival mirrors of our mental processes, promises not only psychological discoveries but insights into a universal form of creativity divorced from conscious volition, and whose modes of operation seem, to use the parlance inaugurated in the post-structuralist era, quintessentially intertextual. DREAMS AS REPETITION AND COLLAGE

The first thing to stress about the creativity in evidence in dreams is that it is, to borrow Antoine Compagnon’s phrase, a creativity of ‘the ­secondhand’ – one of reuse, repetition, and transformation rather than origination.91 Dreams, according to Freud, are constructed as if by ­collage, out of ready-made material that has been distorted by what he calls ‘the dream-work’.92 Dreams, in the first place, always make use of the experiences and impressions of the preceding day.93 Moreover, as a matter of ‘invariable rule’, spoken utterances in dreams originate in remembered speech: The text of the speech is either retained unaltered or expressed with some slight displacement. A speech in a dream is often put together from various recollected speeches.94

88 See SE 4: 117 (‘how strangely, I thought to myself, a dream like this is put together!’). | SE 5: 506n. 89 SE 4: 122, 100. 90 SE 5: 590. 91 Antoine Compagnon, La Seconde main ou le travail de la citation. 92 The phrase furnishes the title of the book’s sixth chapter – SE 4: 277. 93 SE 4: 180. 94 SE 4: 304. Other statements about the heterogenous, collage-like facture of dreams include Freud’s description of a case in which ‘the wishful purpose’ operative in dreams ‘has mixed up the material of which they are built, has rearranged it and

208 Freud Such dream-speech, selected for its associations, is often ‘no more than an allusion to an occasion on which the remark in question was made’.95 As well as depending on the kinds of allusiveness typically associated with literary texts, dreams also frequently deploy proverbs and idioms – forms of linguistic use which are themselves defined by repetition.96 Drawing on such memorized or ‘mnemic’ materials, the dream-work sets about the key task of transformation, which produces something ‘qualitatively’ ‘completely different’ from waking thought.97 CENSORSHIP

All dreams enact the fulfilment of a wish, but as most wishes are unconscious, having first surfaced and been repressed in infancy and childhood, alteration and masking are required to get them past ‘the censorship’ or ‘endopsychic defence’, that gatekeeper of our dreams.98 Unconscious childhood wishes – forgotten, repressed, ‘prehistoric’ – can only feature if the dream-work succeeds in ‘wholly or partly overpower[ing]’ the censorship.99 It does this by submitting the unconscious c­ ontent of our desires and the day’s mnemic residues to various kinds of distortion. Freud deploys a plethora of images – now complementary, now ­contradictory – to convey the multitude and complexity of these transformative processes. The accent is frequently placed on the inextricable interconnection of a dream’s components. The product of ceaseless activity, a dream, he contends, is a ‘factory of thoughts’ which generates a ‘mass’ or ‘tangle’ in which ‘train[s] of thought’ ‘join with’ or ‘proceed from’ others.100 A dream ‘combine[s] [experiences] into a unity’: it is a ‘chain of thoughts’, a ‘fus[ing] together’ of ‘elements’.101 Freud makes ­repeated reference to the ‘connecting paths’, ‘intermediate links’, and ‘verbal bridge[s]’ by which the elements of dreams are bound together.102 has formed it into a new whole’. Using an architectural analogy to emphasize their intertextual makeup, he suggests that They stand in much the same relation to the childhood memories from which they are derived as do some of the Baroque palaces of Rome to the ancient ruins whose pavements and columns have provided the material for the more recent structures. All components of the dream-thoughts, he adds, are ‘compressed, condensed, ­superimposed on one another, and so on’. – SE 5: 492–3. 95 SE 4: 304. 96 See SE 4: 195, where Freud explains one of his own dreams as a reference to the idiom that ‘all roads lead to Rome’. 97 SE 5: 507. 98 SE 4: 160 and SE 4: 308. 99 SE 4: 267. 100 SE 4: 282–4. 101 SE 4: 178, 317, and SE 5: 459. 102 SE 4: 282 and 311, 156 and 175, 206.

Freud  209 If such descriptions emphasize the syncretic mixture and amalgamation involved in dream formation, other images conjure a sense of dreams as ordered ‘composite structure[s]’, with Freud admiring an ‘exceptionally clever dream-production’ or marvelling at an instance of ‘specially ingenious interweaving’.103 The analytical urge to organize the dense profusion of dreams is apparent in Freud’s use of topographical terms. He writes of dreams which have nodal points at which ‘[n]umerous trains of thought converge’, and uses metaphors of depth – as when dream-elements are said to lead ‘deeper and deeper into the tangle of dream-thoughts’, or the discovery of a motive is said to lead ‘deep into an understanding of the dream’.104 Many of Freud’s depictions delineate a system of ‘superimposed layers’, the disposition of which may be chronologically significant – as when ‘the bottom one’ is deemed ‘the fulfilment of a wish dating from earliest ­childhood’.105 Analogously, the distinction between ‘the manifest and the latent content of dreams’ (or the ‘dream-content’ and the ‘dream-thoughts’) is put across through the unfurling of images of veiling and concealment.106 Freud refers, for instance, to ‘the weak spots in the dream’s disguise’, to ‘the care with which its cloak has been woven’, and to ‘the thoughts which are shown by the work of interpretation to lie behind dreams’.107 PROCESSES

Freud identifies a number of processes involved in the elaboration of the form of the representations experienced by the dreamer. Foremost among these are ‘the two governing factors’ of dream-condensation and dream-displacement.108 Condensation  In the production of most dreams, states Freud, condensation – a process especially apparent in the treatment of people and names – has taken place ‘on a large scale’.109 It is condensation, he claims, which accounts for the formation of ‘collective and composite portraits’.110 Thus, the character of ‘Irma’, in ‘the dream of Irma’s’ injection’, compresses a number of people known to Freud into a single ‘collective image’.111 Condensation may also produce not a collective but 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

SE 4: 324, 284. SE 4: 283, 282. | SE 5: 480. SE 4: 219n, 219. SE 4: 135. SE 5: 515. | SE 4: 135. SE 4: 308. SE 4: 279. SE 4: 293. SE 4: 292–3.

210 Freud ‘a composite person’ by ‘adopt[ing] the procedure by means of which Francis Galton produced family portraits: namely by projecting two images onto a single plate, so that certain features common to both are emphasized, while those which fail to fit in with one another cancel one another out and are indistinct in the picture.’112 However, condensation is seen at its clearest when it handles words and names […] words are frequently treated in dreams as though they were things, and for that reason they are apt to be combined in just the same way as are presentations of things.113 This, comments Freud, leads to ‘the most amusing and curious neologisms’.114 Freud’s example is drawn from a dream of his own in which the phrase ‘norekdal style’ appears in connection with an article of which he disapproves. He recognizes the neologistic ‘monstrosity’ as ‘a parody of the [German] superlatives “kolossal” and “pyramidal”’, and as having its roots in the names of the characters of two Ibsen plays – Nora and Ekdal.115 The author of the article in question, as Freud had been reminded on the previous day, had also penned an article about Ibsen.116 This specimen of dream-writing, featuring what Freud calls ‘syllabic chemistry’, is a demonstration of the wider phenomenon of linguistic wit acting in service of the representational shorthand of dreams.117 Displacement  The second key process involved in dream-distortion is displacement. The dream, according to Freud, carries out ‘a transference and displacement of the psychical intensities’ of its individual elements.118 112 SE 4: 293. | See also SE 5: 494 and http://galton.org/composite.htm [accessed 23 July 2019]. 113 SE 4: 295–6. 114 SE 4: 296. 115 Nora is the protagonist of A Doll’s House (1879); Ekdal is a central character in The Wild Duck (1884). 116 SE 4: 296. Other examples include Freud’s interpretation of the idea of ‘dysentery’ in ‘the dream of Irma’s injection’ in light of ‘its phonetic similarity to “diphtheria”’, and his explanation of the appearance of ‘propyls’ in the same dream as a stand-in for ‘amyls’ and an instance of a ‘displacement which served the purposes of condensation’. – SE 4: 292, 293, 294. Regarding the treatment of words as things in dreams, Freud adds later in the book that ‘The linguistic tricks performed by children, who sometimes actually treat words as though they were objects and moreover invent new languages and artificial syntactic forms, are the common source of these things in dreams and psychoneuroses alike’. – SE 4: 303. 117 SE 4: 297n. ‘Dreams become ingenious and amusing because the direct and easiest pathway to the expression of their thoughts is barred’. – SE 4: 298. The phenomenon is one Freud would explore in relation to waking life in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). 118 SE 4: 307.

Freud  211 Using an arrestingly Nietzschean phrase, Freud writes of the ‘complete “transvaluation of all psychic values” [that] takes place between the material of the dream-thoughts and the dream’ – a transvaluation through which what is important comes to seem subordinate and what is subordinate comes to seem important.119 Likewise, affects in dreams seem to arise where one does not expect them and vice-versa.120 Furthermore, notes Freud, it often happens that ‘the dream-work brings about a suppression of the affects’, with emotional events generating no affective response whatsoever in the dreamer.121 As an example of such affective inversions and suppressions, Freud invokes the case of an old man laughing in his sleep about his inability to switch on a light. His incapacity to summon illumination is a symbolic substitution, Freud argues, for his powerlessness before his own approaching demise: The unrestrained laughter took the place of sobbing and weeping at the idea that he must die. It was the light of life that he could no longer turn on. […] The dream-work succeeded in transforming the gloomy idea of impotence and death into a comic scene, and his sobs into laughter.122 The freedom Freud grants the interpreter by attributing to the dreamwork the power to perform such drastic inversions (inversions demanding ingenious, not to say acrobatic, decipherment) is arresting and bears analogy to the leeway arrogated to literary readers operating under the aegis of critical pluralism. Syntactical Arrangement  Analogies to the syntax of sentences assume a prominent place in Freud’s discussion of the form of dreams. The fulfilment of wishes performed by dreams is referred to as a transformation from the optative to the indicative mood (‘Would that I could ascend Mount Everest’, for example, would thus in a dream become ‘I ascend Mount Everest’).123 But as a rule Freud’s repeated comparisons between the structure of dreams and the grammar of language emphasize the fact of dearth, of limitation – that dreams ‘ha[ve] at [their] disposal no means of representing […] logical relations’: When the whole mass of these dream-thoughts is brought under the pressure of the dream-work, and its elements are turned about, broken into fragments and jammed together – almost like pack-ice – the

119 120 121 122 123

Nietzsche’s phrase is used by Freud in SE 4: 33 and SE 5: 507. SE 5: 460. SE 5: 467. SE 5: 473. SE 5: 534, 535.

212 Freud question arises of what happens to the logical connections which have hitherto formed its framework. What representation do dreams provide for ‘if’, ‘because’, ‘just as’, ‘although’, ‘either – or’, and all of the other conjunctions without which we cannot understand sentences or speeches?124 Freud’s answer is that dreams convey these relations in much blunter and more ambiguous ways. Temporal simultaneity and spatial proximity in the dream are both liable to indicate the existence of a logical connection between the represented dream-thoughts.125 Sequentiality, meanwhile, often indicates causality or mounting intensity.126 Finally, causality may also be expressed by ‘one image in the dream, whether a person or thing, being transformed into another’.127 More than any other kind of logical relation, dreams love analogy, frequently intimating that things are ‘just like’ other things.128 ­Indeed, in dreams, the category of contradiction, so important a tenet of ­A ristotelian logic, is simply disregarded. ‘No’ seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. They show a particular preference for combining ­contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing. Dreams feel themselves at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary.129 A blossom may thus represent either sexual innocence or its opposite.130 The latitude which such flexible ‘rules’ affords the interpreter (a latitude which has, in turn, given free rein to a certain caricaturable ‘poetic licence’ in the practice of psychoanalytic criticism), though presented as a necessary reflection of the nature of dreams, has proved an easy target for critics intent on deriding psychoanalysis’s vaunted aspirations to scientific systematicity. Secondary Revision  Once the dream-work has presented unconscious wishes in its own ­syntax, the form is gone over again by what Freud calls

124 SE 4: 312. 125 SE 4: 314. 126 SE 4: 315. Freud’s admission of the potential reversibility of this interpretation (‘If I have interpreted aright, the temporal sequence may be reversed’) illustrates the problematic looseness of the analytical guidelines set out in the book. 127 SE 4: 316. 128 SE 4: 319–20. 129 SE 4: 318. 130 SE 4: 319.

Freud  213 ‘the ­secondary revision’.131 This psychic function, which Freud likens to ‘waking thought’, acts like a logical suturing service: it fills up the gaps in the dream-structure with shreds and patches. As a result of its efforts, the dream loses its appearance of absurdity and disconnectedness and approximates to the model of an intelligible experience.132 The ‘art of interpretation’, as Freud calls it in his Autobiographical Study, involves reading against the grain of the secondary elaboration, which creates a plausible dream ‘façade’ calculated to foster ‘complete misunderstanding’.133 Thus, For the purposes of our interpretation it remains an essential rule invariably to leave out of account the ostensible continuity of a dream as being of suspect origin, and to follow the same path back to the material of the dream-thoughts, no matter whether the dream itself is clear or confused.134 This ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ – this commitment to unmasking what lies behind façades – is one of Freud’s signature moves – one which, as was mentioned above, he shared with Nietzsche, and one which, as well as providing a model for the excavations of sub-texts by literary critics, suffuses the post-structuralist and deconstructive moment which presides over the emergence of intertextuality.135 Dreams as Language, Dreams as Text  Many of the analogies deployed by Freud in his account of dreams are textual or linguistic, involving a wide range of alphabetic, pictogrammatic, ideogrammatic, syllabic, and scribal equivalences – a fact that would prove central to post-structuralist responses to his work. The ­motifs of decipherment and translation make frequent appearances: The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages. 131 132 133 134 135

SE 5: 488. SE 5: 499, 490. SE 20: 43. | SE 5: 491, 500. SE 5: 500. The phrase ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ was first coined by Paul Ricoeur in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation [1970], trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 30. Eagleton describes psychoanalytical reading as the construction of ‘what may be called a “sub-text” for the work – a text which runs within it, visible at certain “symptomatic” points of ambiguity, evasion or emphasis, and which we as readers are able to “write” even if the novel itself does not. All literary works contain one or more such sub-texts, and there is a sense in which they may be spoken of as the “unconscious” of the work itself.’ – 155.

214 Freud Or, more properly, the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation.136 The dream-content is also said to be ‘expressed as it were in a ­pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed i­ndividually into the language of the dream-thoughts’.137 It presents as ‘a picture-puzzle’, the elements of which are to be deciphered ‘according to their symbolic relation’ rather than their ‘their pictorial value’.138 In each case, the dream-content, like all translations, ‘depart[s] sometimes more or less widely from the text that is at [its] disposal for manipulation’, so that the psychoanalyst is faced with the task of unscrambling what the dreamwork has deliberately scrambled.139 A note added to the text in 1914 further adds to this gamut of analogies by quoting a­ pprovingly from an essay of 1893 entitled ‘The Dream as a Revelation’, in which the English psychologist James Sully mobilizes images of cyphers and palimpsests to convey the cryptic character of oneiric experience: Like some letter in cypher, the dream-inscription when scrutinized closely loses its first look of balderdash and takes on the aspect of a ­serious, intelligible message. Or, to vary the figure slightly, we may say that, like some palimpsest, the dream discloses beneath its worthless surface-characters traces of an old and precious communication.140 The palimpsest, as the title of Gérard Genette’s Palimpsests (1982) and Sarah Dillon’s The Palimpsest (2007) make clear, would emerge an image of textual layering much favoured by late twentieth- and early twenty-­ first-century theorists as a material correlative for intertextuality.141 136 SE 4: 277. It should be noted that Freud’s argumentation, here and elsewhere, falls prey to a certain troublesome circularity, for the prescribed comparison between the dream text’s original and its translation can only be carried out once the meanings of the manifest content and its relation to the latent content have already been posited. 137 SE 4: 277. 138 SE 4: 277. 139 SE 4: 314. 140 SE 4: 135n. | The analogy between dreams and an imperfect medium of inscription requiring decipherment is reprised in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, in which Freud refers to the manifest content of a dream as ‘a mutilated and altered transcript’. – SE 8: 160. 141 Gérard Genette invokes the image as a figure for all literature of the ‘second ­degree’ in Palimpsestes: La Littérature du second degré; Sarah Dillon states that ‘The palimpsest is not a metaphor of origin, influence, or filiation: it is not a synonym for intertextuality as that term has come to be used and abused in contemporary discourse. There is, however, a productive relationship between the concept of the palimpsest and the concept of intertextuality as coined by Julia Kristeva and as it

Freud  215 The Art of Interpretation The Interpretation of Dreams is as much a guide to the practice of interpretation as it is a treatise on the mental processes by which dreams are created.142 Yet even as he seeks to develop reliable methods of discovering meaning, Freud repeatedly emphasizes the impossibility of achieving complete elucidation. In the course of a dream’s analysis, he admits, the interpreter eventually and inevitably arrives at a point where there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown.143 But even leaving aside this vanishing point, Freud is forthright about the ineluctable incompletion and provisionality of any possible conclusion: it is in fact never possible to be sure that a dream has been c­ ompletely interpreted. Even if the solution seems satisfactory and without gaps, the possibility always remains that the dream may have yet another meaning.144 In other words, the ‘text’ – to use one of Freud’s favoured analogies – is inexhaustible. The task of the investigator is characterized as interminable because no interpretation, however convincing, precludes another. It is unending because every dream-element ‘is determined many times over in relation to the dream-thoughts’.145 This plurality of underpinning motivations, and the inextricable figurative ‘tangle’ it produces in the dream, mean that dreams resist any singular, definitive solution.146 Dreams, like works of art, ‘frequently seem to have more than one meaning’: not only ‘are [they] capable of being “over-interpreted”’, but they ‘need to be’.147 In an explicit analogy between dreams and ­literature,

142 143 144 145 146

147

functions in post-structuralist theory.’ – The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (London: Continuum, 2007), 85. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud states at the outset that ‘Psycho-analysis was then first and foremost an art of interpreting.’ – SE 18: 18. SE 5: 525. SE 4: 279. SE 4: 284. This multiple determination is frequently referred to by Freud as ‘overdetermination’ – see for example SE 4: 283. SE 5: 525 (‘The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought.’). SE 4: 219, 266.

216 Freud Freud states that ‘all genuinely creative writings’, like all dreams, ‘are open to more than one interpretation’.148 Such a view, which chimes with Nietzsche’s sense of the endless play of the will to power, and Bakhtin’s sense of the unfinalizability of works of art (to be explored in Chapter 5), is one with evident ramifications – both in intertextual theory and in the critical pluralism currently in favour in the literary academy.

The Mental Apparatus: Memory and Repetition Freud’s self-analysis and study of dream interpretation form part of his wider project ‘to gain an insight into the whole of mental activity’, or, as he puts it in his Autobiographical Study, ‘dissect our mental ­apparatus’.149 Though Freud’s division of this apparatus into ‘an ego, an id, and a ­super-ego’ would come only in 1923, his aspiration to ­delineate a topography of the mind is apparent in even his earliest w ­ ritings: the letters to Fliess, the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, and The Interpretation all include diagrams indicating a quest for systematic structure.150 From the outset, Freud identified memory as one of the most important, because one of the most originary, psychological processes, and therefore one whose understanding would shed light on the constitution of the mental apparatus. By memory, Freud means the formation, at an unconscious, organic, and quantitative level, of mnemic traces. The formation of such traces, he avers, is one of the ‘main characteristic[s] of nervous tissue’.151 The fundamental place accorded to memory is ­reflected in Freud’s conviction, expressed as early as 1895, that ‘[a] ­psychological theory deserving any consideration must furnish an explanation of “memory”’.152 Memory and the Unconscious The study of memory is for Freud closely connected to that of the unconscious, which, he suspects, is an arena of total retention: ‘it is a prominent feature of unconscious processes that they are indestructible. In the unconscious nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten’.153 ‘The unconscious’, he affirms, ‘is quite timeless’, and the wishes which originate there consequently inextinguishable: ‘They share this character of indestructability with all other mental acts which are 148 SE 4: 266. 149 Freud to Fliess, 23 October 1898, Complete Letters, 332. | SE 20: 58–9. 150 SE 20: 58–9. | See ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923) – SE 19: 1–66. | For diagrams, see, for ­example, SE 1: 313–4 and SE 5: 537–8. 151 SE 1: 299. 152 SE 1: 299. 153 SE 5: 577.

Freud  217 not truly conscious, i.e. which belong to the system Ucs. only.’154 Indeed, for Freud, memory and consciousness appear to be inversely related, if not mutually exclusive, phenomena: Such memory-traces, then, have nothing to do with the fact of ­becoming conscious; indeed they are often most powerful and most enduring when the process which left them behind was one which never entered consciousness […] this consideration […] leads us to suspect that becoming conscious and leaving behind a memory-trace are processes incompatible with each other within one and the same system.155 Memories, then, are unconscious, but can become conscious (­indeed, ‘not everything is forgotten that we believe to be’), being wont to r­ eturn to us in recurrent dreams, in the production of art, and in other i­nstances of the return of the repressed.156 Even when they do remain wholly unconscious, mnemic traces produce significant effects, generating patterns of behaviour beyond awareness or control. Memory and Dreams Dreams, as the earlier section of this chapter began to suggest, are ­intimately connected to memory. For one thing, ‘dreams are derived from the past in every sense’, being thoughts ‘reproduced exclusively or predominantly in the material of visual and acoustic memory-traces’.157 They are, as Freud puts it, ‘hypermnesic’, taking us back to the wishes of our childhood.158 Freud agrees with Sully’s assertion that ‘our dreams are a means of conserving these successive personalities’.159 Drawing on the repertory of our past stored in our unconscious, dreams allow a wholly personalized kind of time travel, shining a roving spotlight on the palimpsestic layers of our own character. Moreover, it is a common ­experience that dreams ‘first dreamt in childhood […] constantly ­reappear from time to time during adult sleep’, forming a mnemic bridge between childhood and adulthood.160 In fact, not only do dreams enable the restoration to consciousness of foregone instantiations of our own

154 SE 6: 275n. | SE 5: 553n. 155 SE 18: 25. 156 SE 6: 274–5. | As Freud remarks in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ‘consciousness may be, not the most universal attribute of mental processes, but only a particular function of them’. – SE 18: 24. | The link between the return of the repressed and art is discussed in ‘The Uncanny’ (1919). – SE 17: 241, 245. 157 SE 5: 621, 507. 158 SE 5: 589. 159 SE 5: 591. 160 SE 4: 190.

218 Freud character but they also take us back to ‘an embryonic point of view’, ­returning us – Freud here quotes approvingly from Havelock Ellis – to ‘an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect thoughts’.161 As well as providing the material of dreams, memory is itself governed by the very same processes of distortion as they are, as Freud remarks in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious: Unique impressions offer difficulties to forgetting; those that are analogous in any way are forgotten by being condensed in regard to their points of resemblance. Confusion between analogous impressions is one of the preliminary stages of forgetting.162 Contrary to a widespread misconception, the operation of these processes, rather than the passage of time, is to blame for the fading and only seeming loss of our memories.163 The corollary of this observation is that memory, as we experience it, is as little reliable as dreams. Conscious memories, works of art, and such psychological disturbances as hysteria are all phantasmal constructions of memory traces. None of these are pure invention, but all are products of displacement and condensation. Childhood memories are invariably falsified memories, the displaced ‘substitutes […] for other impressions which are really ­significant’.164 They are, in fact, ‘screen memories’, ‘revision[s]’ of an ­irrecoverable ­memory-trace, and thus as good as fictions.165 Moreover, the patterns of our forgetting ‘conform to laws’: what we remember is determined by ‘tendentious factor[s]’, ‘purpose[s] which favour one memory while striving to work against another’.166 ‘The tendency to forget what is disagreeable’, he notes, ‘seems to me to be quite a universal one’.167

161 Havelock Ellis, qtd in SE 5: 591. This is one of Freud’s numerous intimations of his espousal (shared with Darwin and Nietzsche) of nineteenth-century ‘recapitulation theory’, which held that embryonic development is a miniature version of the development of the species. See also SE 5: 548–9. For an account of ‘recapitulation theory’, see Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 99. 162 SE 8: 168n. 163 ‘As these processes of condensation and distortion continue for long periods, during which every fresh experience acts in the direction of transforming the mnemic content, it is generally thought that it is time which makes memory uncertain and indistinct. It is highly probable that there is no question at all of there being any direct function of time in forgetting.’ – SE 6: 274n. 164 SE 6: 43. 165 SE 6: 48. | Kofman, Childhood of Art, 60 (Kofman cites SE 3: 315 in support of her characterization). 166 SE 6: 2, 45. 167 SE 6: 144. Freud gives the example of Darwin, who having observed that he was more prone to forget facts which contradicted his own theories, took especial care to make note of such instances. – SE 6: 148 and 148n.

Freud  219 Analogies for Memory As Freud sought to put across his understanding of dreams by resorting to analogy, so he does also in conveying his conception of memory. ‘A Note upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad”’ (1925) marks a major ­breakthrough in Freud’s efforts in this respect. Here, the quest for a fitting parallel takes wing from consideration of such traditional supplements to memory as chalk slate or sheet of paper: If I distrust my memory […] I am able to supplement and guarantee its working by making a note in writing. In that case the ­surface upon which the note is preserved, the pocket-book or sheet of p ­ aper, is as it were a materialized portion of my mnemic apparatus […] I can then ‘reproduce’ it at any time I like, with the certainty that it will have remained unaltered and so have escaped the possible distortions to which it might have been subjected in my actual memory.168 Such commonly used external aids to mnemic function are inadequate analogies, however, because they allow either the permanent retention of a very limited number of memory-traces (as in the case of a sheet of paper), or the very short-term retention of an unlimited number of traces (as in the case of a chalk slate).169 Our mental apparatus, by contrast, combines the capacity for storing indelible traces with an infinite receptive capacity.170 As such, it resembles a ‘mystic writing-pad’, a phrase which, far from denoting any supernatural turn on Freud’s part, was the name under which a popular new writing gadget was being marketed at the time of the essay’s writing. Christopher Johnson summarizes the contraption’s mechanism as follows: In conjunction with a layer of thin, translucent waxed paper, and an upper surface of translucent celluloid, the slab allows for infinite inscription and erasure, itself retaining every inscription, whilst the upper layers of the Pad remain free of any permanent mark.171 While conceding that ‘[t]here must come a point at which the analogy ­between an auxiliary apparatus of this kind and the organ which is its prototype will cease to apply’, Freud nonetheless suggests that the ­‘mystic ­writing-pad’, recalling ‘the ancient method of writing on tablets of clay or wax’, offers ‘an approximation to the structure of the perceptual apparatus of the mind’.172 Freud’s recourse to so strikingly concrete, 168 169 170 171

SE 19: 227. SE 19: 227. SE 19: 228. Christopher M. Johnson, ‘Intertextuality and the Psychical Model’, Paragraph, vol. 11, no. 1 (March 1988), 71–89, 87. 172 SE 19: 230, 229.

220 Freud textual an image for mind and memory – like Nietzsche’s use of textual analogies for world, history, and interpretation and Darwin’s reference to the geological record as a ‘history of the world imperfectly kept’ – would play a major part in facilitating the adoption and adaptation of his theories by literary theorists in the 1960s and 1970s.173 Memory, Repetition, and Pleasure Memory, as both a function and a species of experience, is intrinsically linked to repetition. One of the most pertinent strands of Freud’s many-pronged discussion of these matters unfolds in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, in which he declares that ‘recognition is pleasurable in itself’, and that ‘[i]n view of the close connection between recognizing and remembering, it is not rash to suppose that there may also be a pleasure in remembering’.174 The hypothesis leads to an enumeration of the kinds of repetition characteristic of verse poetry – ‘rhymes, alliterations, refrains, and other forms of repeating similar ­verbal sounds’ – and the assertion that these ‘make use of the same source of pleasure – the r­ ediscovery of something familiar’.175 These kinds of formal pleasure are crucial, argues Freud, to the success of works of art and jokes, fostering through this ‘incentive bonus’ or ‘fore-pleasure’ the kind of audience engagement which dissolves the boundaries between individual egos: ‘the essential ars poetica’, he writes, ‘lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others’.176 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud returns to the connections between repetition and pleasure. In his famous interpretation of the Fort-Da game (in which a child’s play is viewed as a form of private ritualistic reenactment by which the mother’s departure is accepted or ‘mastered’), he ascribes to repetition the power to wrest pleasure from even painful experiences: At the outset he was in a passive situation – he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not.177

173 174 175 176 177

O, 229. SE 8: 122. SE 8: 122. SE 8: 137. | SE 9: 153. SE 18: 16.

Freud  221 In art, too, Freud subsequently observes, ‘the most painful experiences […] can yet be felt by [the audience] as highly enjoyable’.178 It is also in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that Freud draws attention to the patterns of repetition which sometimes seem to govern a life in ways quite beyond a person’s volition or an observer’s rational ­comprehension.179 People enthralled to such cycles suffer from the powerful connection between memory and repetition, enduring what Freud, alluding to Nietzsche, terms the ‘perpetual recurrence of the same thing’.180 Freud gives as examples the generic cases of ‘the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his protégés’, and of ‘the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend’.181 But Freud goes further than to merely posit the existence of ‘a compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle’, contending that ­‘repetition, the re-experiencing of something identical, is clearly in itself a source of pleasure’.182 The connection between repetition and pleasure – even when the material subjected to repetition may be painful – recalls Freud’s earlier essay on ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in which uncanniness, a sensation of repetition associated with the return of the repressed, is said to constitute a work of art’s essential quality.183 It is easy to see how such a theory regarding the role of repetition – its tendency to shape present and future as well as encode the past – might be extended to readings of repetition in the literary sphere (in the form of quotation, allusion, echo, generalized intertextuality). The ramifications of such an extrapolation for authorship are significant. Just as the 178 SE 18: 17. It is this strand of Freud’s reflections, along with his account of the ­Oedipus complex, which would give rise to the theory of poetic misprision ­developed by ­Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading – one in which writing is cast as an act of repetition enabling the overcoming of a passively suffered influence (of which more on pp. 236–9 of this chapter). 179 SE 18: 22. 180 SE 18: 22. The expression is in quotation marks in Freud’s text. 181 SE 18: 22. 182 SE 18: 22, 36. | Famously, Freud posits that even in death we are seeking to repeat, enacting ‘an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things’. The death instinct, he contends, shows organic matter ‘striving to return’ to its earlier forms.  – SE 18: 36, 38. | Freud once again invokes the (now discredited) nineteenth-century theory of ‘recapitulation’ as proof of his hypothesis: ‘the most impressive proofs of there being an organic compulsion to repeat lie in the phenomena of heredity and the facts of embryology. We see how the germ of a living animal is obliged in the course of its development to recapitulate (even if only in a transient and abbreviated fashion) the structures of all the forms from which it sprung, ­instead of proceeding quickly by the shortest path to its final shape.’ – SE 18: 37. | Anticipating the disbelief of many of his readers, Freud acknowledges that he himself is not sure that he believes his own thesis, conceding that he may have overestimated importance of compulsion to repeat. – SE 18: 59. 183 Freud defines the uncanny as ‘something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it’. – SE 17: 245. See also SE 17: 241.

222 Freud author, in the wake of Darwin, becomes the conduit for algorithmic forces which determine writing (as they do the course of all organic life), so the author after Freud, likewise apprehended as a figure subject to biological laws, is re-envisioned as a vector for psychological currents of which he or she remains largely unconscious.

Art and the Riddle of Creativity Freud’s discussions of the unconscious, memory, and repetition have close bearing on his enduring fascination with ‘that strange being, the creative writer’ and ‘the riddle of the miraculous gift that makes an artist’.184 What Freud most admires about the artist is his capacity for ‘endopsychic perception’ – his exquisite attunement to his own psychic workings.185 It is also, incidentally, a talent he considered Nietzsche to have in exceptional abundance, marvelling at the philosopher’s ability to explore ‘the strata of his self’ ‘with great perspicacity’ and even stating that ‘The degree of introspection achieved by Nietzsche had never been achieved by anyone, nor is it likely ever to be reached again.’186 Freud’s interpretation of Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva imagines the author as analyst of his own psyche – ‘direct[ing] his attention to the unconscious in his own mind […] listen[ing] to its possible developments and lend[ing] them artistic expression instead of suppressing them from conscious criticism’.187 Through such visionaries as Nietzsche, Jensen and Goethe, humanity, he suggests, is afforded a gaze into its own nature.188 Art, Dreams, and Psychoanalysis From an early stage, Freud was convinced that ‘the connections between our typical dreams and fairy tales and the material of other kinds of c­ reative writing are neither few nor accidental’.189 Moreover, dreams may become the source of art. Like dreams, art works are overdetermined and invite – indeed, require – the same plurality

184 ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908) – SE 9: 143. | ‘Address Delivered in the Goethe House at Frankfurt’ (1930) – SE 21: 211. 185 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life – SE 6: 258. 186 Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, vol. 2: 1908–1910, 31–2. | As Asssoun points out, Nietzsche refers to himself as the ‘first ­psychologist’ in Human, All Too Human. – Asssoun, 10. 187 SE 9: 92. 188 ‘[I]t is nevertheless vouchsafed to a few to salvage without effort from the whirlpool of their own feelings the deepest truths, towards which the rest of us have to find our way through tormenting uncertainty and with restless groping’. – SE 21: 133. 189 SE 4: 246.

Freud  223 of ­interpretation.190 Having said this, Freud’s conviction of the continuities between dreaming and creative writing leads him to commit certain argumentative sleights of hand. Indeed, as Kofman points out, his analysis of Jensen’s Gradiva displays a troublesome logical circularity in which the premises – that dreams invented by authors may shed light on spontaneous dreaming, and that both may answer to the same laws – double as conclusions.191 If art is like dreams, it is also like the state of free association in which ‘involuntary thoughts’ come to light, and, more broadly, like the ­psychoanalytical process itself.192 An early review of Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria (1895) first mooted the idea of such a correspondence: We dimly conceive the idea that it may one day become possible to approach the innermost secret of human personality… The theory itself is in fact nothing but the kind of psychology used by poets.193 In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud makes this parallel his own, likening the revelations staged in Oedipus Rex, ‘approached step by step and artistically delayed’, to ‘the work of psychoanalysis’.194 Sophocles’s play, he proposes, performs a kind of psychoanalysis upon the ­audience.195 Produced through the seer-like introspective talent of its creator, the art work becomes a channel of ‘endopsychic perception’ for the audience as well, bringing into consciousness matters usually ­rendered inaccessible by repression; in this resides its potential to afford a curative or ‘cathartic’ experience.196 Determinism and the Dream of a Metapsychology The multifariousness of the analogies Freud establishes between art and a range of conscious and unconscious phenomena bespeaks the capaciousness (or, less positively, troublesome looseness) of his conception. It also reflects his ‘belief in the universal application of determinism to mental events’.197 Indeed, as early as The Psychopathology of Everyday 190 191 192 193 194 195

SE 4: 266. Kofman, Childhood of Art, 49–50. | SE 20: 65. SE 4: 102. Qtd in Jones, 224. SE 4: 261–2. ‘While the poet […] brings to light the guilt of Oedipus, he is at the same time ­compelling us to recognize our own inner minds, in which those same impulses, though suppressed, are still to be found.’ – SE 4: 263. 196 SE 20: 22, 27. 197 SE 6: xiii–xiv.

224 Freud Life (1901), he held that ‘it should be possible in theory to discover the psychical determinants of every smallest detail of the processes of the mind’.198 Where Freud had previously maintained in The Interpretation of Dreams that ‘the most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness’, the end of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life sees him extend this insight specifically to the realm of word choice: We are probably inclined greatly to over-estimate the conscious chara­ cter of intellectual and artistic production […] Accounts given us by some of the most highly productive men, such as Goethe and Helmholtz, show rather that what is essential and new in their creations came to them without premeditation and as an almost ready-made whole. […] it is the much-abused privilege of conscious activity, wherever it plays a part, to conceal every other activity from our eyes.199 In writing about the fundamental illusion which surrounds even our lexi­ cal and syntactic choices, Freud radically demystifies creation.200 When the veil of ignorance is lifted, he forecasts, style as well as subject matter will be revealed as the thoroughly determined outcomes of ‘psychical determinants’.201 As Kofman extrapolates, artists are ‘played with by [their] processes’ – ‘plaything[s] of knowledge […] more than [its] possessor[s]’.202 The insight is rich in consequences for aesthetics: on Freud’s theory, both creation and its artistic appraisal lose their culturally imparted status – a status founded on two shibboleths: the possibility of merit on the one hand, and of disinterested judgement on the other. Within the new theoretical dispensation, which captures Freud’s demotion of consciousness and free will, both poetics and aesthetics – like all other elements of human culture – arise from unconscious sources. They are accordingly shaped by the vagaries of chance, and demand to be divested of their traditional association with notions of individual desert and objective appraisal.203

198 SE 6: xiii–xiv. 199 SE 5: 593, 613–4. 200 As Freud states in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, ‘[w]e believe that in general we are free to choose what words we shall use for clothing our thoughts or what images for disguising them’. – SE 6: 215–6. 201 SE 6: xiii–xiv. 202 Kofman, Childhood of Art, 40, 46–7. 203 As Freud notes in ‘Leonardo and a Memory of his Childhood’, we are all too ready to forget that in fact everything to do with our life is chance […] chance which nevertheless has a share in the law and necessity of nature, and which merely lacks any connection with our wishes and illusions. – SE 11: 137

Freud  225 Freud’s numerous reiterations of such positions are consistent with his long-standing ambition to elaborate what he first refers to, as early as 1896, as his ‘ideal and woebegone child, metapsychology’. 204 In his Autobiographical Study, Freud explains that the term denotes a method of approach according to which every mental process is considered in relation to three co-ordinates, which I described as dynamic, topographical, and economic respectively. 205 ‘Metapsychology’ is thus – in keeping with the programme set out in the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ – about the grounding of psychological theory in material, quantitative, biological realities. Freud’s choice of neologism is significant: it is ‘impossible’, as Laplanche and Pontalis point out in The Language of Psycho-Analysis, ‘to overlook the similarity of the terms “metapsychology” and “metaphysics”’. 206 And indeed it was through metapsychology that Freud hoped to bridge the gap between his scientific and his philosophical aims: ‘I most secretly nourish the hope of arriving, via these same paths, at my initial goal of philosophy.’207 The pursuit of metapsychological understanding would entail a renovation of traditional aesthetic theory and its cargo of ­nebulous terms (‘beauty’, ‘pleasure’, ‘imagination’) and the elucidation of both artistic genesis and interpretation in the light of reason and science. Freud’s deidealization of these realms prepared the way for the even more thoroughgoing deconstruction of literature performed by the post-­structuralists – one in which intertextuality emerges as a key component.

Freud-Work: The Theory of Intertextuality Freud, like Darwin and Nietzsche, proved an immensely suggestive springboard for structuralist and post-structuralist theory, whose problematizing energies found a galvanizing starting point in his ­anti-Cartesian reconfiguration of subjecthood and his positing – his performative creation, some might even say – of the unconscious. Moreover, Freud’s reductionist aspiration to produce a unified picture of psychological processes and the sustained metaphoricity of his language augmented his theories’ ­exportability to other domains of knowledge. His reiterated description of dreams as compositions requiring interpretation makes his work eminently relevant to the field of literary criticism. This section explores the

204 205 206 207

Freud to Fliess, 17 December 1896, Complete Letters, 216. SE 20: 58–9. ‘Metapsychology’, in Laplanche and Pontalis, 248. Freud to Fliess, 1 January 1896, Complete Letters, 159.

226 Freud condensations and displacements wrought upon his theses by Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, Kofman, and Bloom. Lacan One of the names most closely associated with Freud is that of Jacques Lacan, alternately seen (even by the same commentators) as a ‘notoriously, wilfully difficult writer’ and as the author of ‘dazzling, wayward, teasing discourse’.208 Responding with verve to Freud’s treatment of the unconscious as a semiotic domain of inscription and transcription, L ­ acan attributes to Freud a radical decentering of the subject. ‘[T]he truth discovered by Freud’, he avers, is that of ‘the self’s radical ex-­centricity to itself’, a ‘radical heteronomy […] gaping within man’, the unconscious as an ‘Other’ within.209 Lacan’s best known response to Freud – perhaps indeed the best known of all literary-theoretical responses to Freud – is his much-repeated maxim that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’.210 The tenet, though not formulated in precisely these terms, features in ‘The Insistence of the Letter’, the published version of a lecture given at the Sorbonne in 1957.211 As the occasionally combative tone of the piece makes clear, Lacan was at this time committed to the defence of psychoanalysis from its less intellectual contemporary practitioners, whose antipathy to theoretical complexity he saw as treasonous to the Freudian cause. Bemoaning ‘the vulgarity of the concepts’ deployed in their pronouncements, railing against ‘the embroidery of Freudery’ which in their writings functions as no more than ‘decoration’, Lacan deems such failed Freudians to be perpetrators of a ‘fundamental denial of [the discipline’s] founder’.212 He himself pays fulsome tribute to Freud, praising him for inaugurating ­‘procedures of exegesis [which] change[d] the whole course of history by modifying the lines which anchor [man’s] being’.213 In so doing, Freud ‘founded an intangible but radical revolution’ which leaves no aspect of human life and knowledge untouched:

208 David Lodge, Introduction to Lacan, ‘The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious’, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 2nd edn, ed. David Lodge with Nigel Wood (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), 61–2. 209 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious’, Yale French Studies, trans. Jan Miel, vol. 36/37, Structuralism (1966), 112–47, 142, 143. 210 See, for example, Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Book XX: Encore 1972–3, ed. Bruce Fink (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1999), 15, 21, 48, 51, 55, 56, 67, 135, 138, 139. 211 The lecture was first published as ‘L’Instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud’, in La Psychanalyse 3 (1957), ‘Psychanalyse et sciences de l’homme’, 47–81, and then in Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966). 212 Lacan, ‘Insistence’, 146. 213 Lacan, ‘Insistence’, 146.

Freud  227 everything involving not just the human sciences, but the destiny of man, politics, metaphysics, literature, art, advertising, propaganda, and through these even the economy, everything has been affected.214 Contemporary psychoanalysts, laments Lacan, fail to grasp that Freud’s body of work demands no less than the abandonment of established epistemological categories. The influence of structuralist linguistics on Lacan is evident. From the outset, he opines that ‘what the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language’.215 Taking wing from Freud’s own predilection for linguistic analysis, Lacan’s aim is to uncover a Freud whose preoccupation, ‘beyond what we call “the word”’, is with the letter or the phoneme, that is, with the smallest material units of written or spoken language.216 His key point is that Freud views dreamwork as involving the articulation of semantically meaningful, permutable particles. Even Freud’s invocations of patently non-literal (that is, non-letteral, non-alphabetical) modes of ­representation – the r­ ebus, pictographic or hieroglyphic scripts – are taken as exempli­fication of the fact that dreams abide by the same signifying rules as language and display the ‘same literal (or phonematic) structure through which the signifier in ordinary discourse is articulated and analyzed’.217 ­Likening the processes of dream-work to those of language as sketched out in the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, Lacan calls dream-work a ‘writing ­system’ which ‘follows the laws of the signifier’.218 More than merely noting an accidental congruity between the structures studied by linguistics and psychoanalysis, Lacan proposes that Freud’s writings, having appeared ‘ahead of the formalizations of ­linguistics’, ‘paved the way’ for the insights of Saussure, Jakobson, and other structural linguists. 219 Writing at the intersection of both fields, Lacan himself freely mixes psychoanalytic and linguistic ­terminologies – for example calling symptoms metaphors and claiming that the figures of speech studied by rhetoricians and linguists correspond directly to unconscious processes (of which they are but 214 Lacan, ‘Insistence’, 146. 215 Lacan, ‘Insistence’, 113. 216 Lacan, ‘Insistence’, 113. | In Freud’s complete works, he notes, ‘the proportion of linguistic analysis increas[es] just insofar as the unconscious is directly concerned’. – Lacan, ‘Insistence’, 127. 217 Lacan, ‘Insistence’, 128. For example, Freud’s references to the Egyptian writing system’s use of ­determinatives ‘show us’, claims Lacan, ‘that even in this script, the so-called “ideogram” is a ­letter’. – Lacan, ‘Insistence’, 123. 218 Lacan, ‘Insistence’, 130. Saussure is explicitly invoked on 115, 121, 122, 129; ­homage is paid to Jakobson’s harnessing of ‘metonymy’ and ‘metaphor’ for the ­purposes of linguistics in a note on 124. 219 Lacan, ‘Insistence’, 131.

228 Freud a deferred manifestation), and advocating that they should, as such, be adopted as ‘the most proper labelling of these mechanisms’. 220 Though he calls this ‘one of the fundamental truths which Freud rediscovered through psychoanalysis’, Lacan’s view of the unconscious and its tropaic ‘thinking’ is explicitly indebted to both Saussure and to Jakobson’s study of aphasia (specifically, to Jakobson’s demonstration that aphasic subjects tend to lose linguistic abilities relating to either the metaphoric or the metonymic pole). 221 Derrida Lacan’s argument regarding the linguistic structure of the unconscious was picked up a decade later on by Jacques Derrida, then a thirty-sixyear-old ‘maître-assistant’ (or assistant professor) at the École Normale Supérieure.222 Derrida’s ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ began as a lecture given at the Parisian Institute of Psychoanalysis in 1966, and was subsequently published in Tel Quel and then as the seventh chapter of Writing and Difference. 223 Like the rest of Writing and Difference, Derrida’s chapter on Freud tracks ‘the metaphor of writing which haunts European discourse’ by virtue of its suppression.224 Indeed, he begins by impugning Freud for his complicity in the ‘logocentric’ bias against the written and the writerly which, he contends, detrimentally suffuses European philosophical thinking. 225 The ‘immense labor’ Derrida sets himself, however, is that of deconstructing ‘the metaphysical concepts and phrases that are condensed and sedimented’ in Freud’s writings in order to unearth their resistance to logocentric closure. 226 Derrida’s interest is in Freud’s use, at ‘decisive moments’, of ‘metaphorical models which are borrowed not from spoken language or from verbal forms, nor even from phonetic writing, but from a script which is never subject to, never exterior to, the spoken word’.227 Freud,

220 Lacan, ‘Insistence’, 147, 140. 221 Lacan, ‘Insistence’, 140. | Roman Jakobson, ‘The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles’ [1956], in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 2nd edn, ed. David Lodge with Nigel Wood (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), 56–60, 58. 222 Jason Powell, Jacques Derrida: A Biography (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 66. 223 Powell, 60. | Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’, Tel Quel, vol. 26 (1966). | WD. 224 WD, 197. 225 ‘[A]ll these [Freudian] concepts, without exception’, writes Derrida, ‘belong to the history of metaphysics, that is, to the system of logocentric repression which was organized in order to exclude or to lower (to put aside or below), the body of the written trace as a didactic and technical metaphor’. – WD, 197. 226 WD, 198. 227 WD, 199.

Freud  229 he ­asserts, conjures a species of exclusively writerly sign – signs which do not exist merely to transcribe speech. 228 While ‘writing’ functions as a stable notion in a philosophical tradition stretching back to Plato and Aristotle, Freud’s metaphors for writing disrupt the familiarity of the concept, ‘mak[ing] what we believe we know under the name of writing enigmatic’. 229 Where Lacan had noted the frequency of Freud’s references to language, Derrida observes that in his texts, metaphors of writing are in fact given pride of place, to the point that they ‘eventually invade the entirety of the psyche’. 230 ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ painstakingly charts a shift from the representation of the psyche as a system of natural traces in the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (1895) to its representation as a ‘writing machine’ in the ‘Note on the Mystic Writing-Pad’ (1925).231 Attending to Freud’s gradual development and refinement of ‘this structural model of writing’, Derrida rehearses his identification of memory as ‘the very essence of the psyche’.232 Scrutinizing Freud’s discussion of perception as the effect of ‘path-breaking’ stimuli on the brain and elaborating on his distinction between resistant and permeable neurones, Derrida states – in a formulation which recalls Saussure’s definition of language as a system in which there are ‘only differences, and no positive terms’ – that ‘[i]t is the difference between breaches which is the true origin of memory, and thus of the psyche’. 233 At the origin of memory and therefore of psychic life itself lies difference rather than any retrievable single ­origin. Moreover, Freud’s ‘incessant and increasingly radical invocation of the principle of difference’ is connected to Freud’s textualization of the mind. Indeed, his ambition in studying mental processes is in effect to produce ‘a topography of traces […] [a] map of breaches’, to treat dreams, in particular, as ‘a path back into a landscape of writing’ or ‘forest of script’. 234 Freud’s reconfiguration of the mental apparatus as a realm of writing begins, according to Derrida, with a letter sent to Fliess in 1896 in which he first evokes the ‘re-transcription’ of ‘memory-traces’. 235 Freud’s ‘graphic conception’ portrays psychical ‘writing’ (the circulation of psychical energy along mnemic pathways) as more originary than any kind 228 WD, 199. 229 WD, 199. 230 Lacan, ‘Insistence’, 127. | WD, 199. 231 WD, 199. 232 WD, 200–1. 233 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris ­(London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 140–1. | WD, 201. The conclusion is allowed by Freud’s own ­assertion (cited by Derrida) that ‘Memory is represented by the differences in the facilitations of the ψ-neurones.’ – SE 1: 300. 234 WD, 205, 207. 235 Freud to Fliess, Letter 52, 6 December 1896, SE 1: 233, cited in WD, 206.

230 Freud of handwriting. Instead of psychical writing being defined as a variant, metaphorical form of physical handwriting, such ‘ordinary’ writing (the kind involving pen or keyboard) requires definition as a variant form of psychical writing. ‘It is here’, writes Derrida – in the inversion of vehicle and tenor in the writing metaphor – ‘that the Freudian break occurs’.236 Freud’s account of dreams as a system of writing, he suggests, points the way to ‘a graphematics still to come’, a turn away from ‘an ancient phonologism’.237 Derrida’s reading focuses on Freud’s use of the analogy of translation, and, specifically, on translation as a spatial image for what happens within the mental apparatus as psychic material travels between its unconscious, preconscious, and conscious strata. Dreams make us conscious of unconscious wishes by ‘translating’ them into a new ‘language’, but they might also be said to ‘translate’ (that is, physically displace) psychic ‘content’ from one area of the apparatus to another. Yet it is important to note, as Derrida does, that The Interpretation revises Freud’s initial portrayal of the various agencies of the mental apparatus as separate, stratified ‘localities’. ‘What we have in mind here’, writes Freud, is not the forming of a second thought situated in a new place, like a transcription which continues to exist alongside the original […] the notion of forcing a way through into consciousness must be kept carefully free from any idea of a change of locality. […] What we regard as mobile is not the psychical structure itself but its innervation.238 Psychic writing is thus ‘a single energetic system […] cover[ing] the entirety of the psychical apparatus’. 239 This notion of the psyche as an energetic system whose ‘groupings’ are subject to innervation (or ‘­cathexis’), gives rise to Derrida’s notion of ‘nontranscriptive writing’. 240 On this conception, consciousness does not duplicate the psychic chain reactions which produce it: ‘it occurs in an original manner and, in its very secondariness, is originary and irreducible’ (a turn of phrase which coincidentally sums up the connection between originality and secondariness implied by intertextual theory). 241 Consciousness itself may be viewed as a kind of non-transcriptive writing – a form of writing which, in turn, can be inferred to shape any literary writing the subject produces. 242

236 WD, 209. 237 WD, 220. 238 SE 5: 610–11, cited in WD, 211–3. See also Freud to Fliess, Letter 52, 6 December 1896, SE 1: 233. 239 WD, 213. 240 WD, 212. 241 WD, 212. 242 WD, 212.

Freud  231 Towards the end of his discussion of the ‘Note on the Mystic ­ riting-Pad’, Derrida elucidates the ramifications of Freud’s account for W creativity and authorship: The ‘subject’ of writing does not exist if we mean by that some ­sovereign solitude of the author. The subject of writing is a system of relations between strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyche, society, the world. Within that scene, on that stage, the punctual simplicity of the classical subject is not to be found. 243 In other words, every author is a reader of the text of his or her own psyche. Kristeva Psychoanalysis comes nearer the province of intertextuality proper in the writings of the term’s coiner, Julia Kristeva. Although Freud is only fleetingly mentioned in ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’, he receives more sustained attention in ‘Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or a Critique of Science’ (1968). Subjectivity, for Kristeva (writing in a mode of high abstraction reminiscent of Writing and Difference), is ‘the setting-off of semantic, logical, phantasmatic and indeterminable sequences’. 244 In ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’ (1973), she credits ‘the Freudian revolution’ with having wrought ‘the definitive displacement of the Western épistémé’ ‘[i]n respect of the ­subject and of signifying’.245 Rejecting the outdated idea of ‘a transcendental ego, cut off from its body, its unconscious and also its history’ as incompatible with the reality of ‘the subject in language’, she also distances herself from the formalistic, ‘logico-mathematical’ approach to language and meaning she had previously espoused.246 ­‘Semanalysis’, the new approach to criticism Kristeva now advocates, is introduced as a practice attuned to ‘the theory of the speaking ­subject as a divided subject (conscious/unconscious)’, one in thrall to ­‘bio-­physiological ­processes’ as well as to ‘social constraints (family structures, modes of production, etc.)’. 247 As Kristeva goes on to explain in Revolution in ­Poetic ­L anguage (1974), ‘semanalysis’

243 WD, 226–7. 244 Julia Kristeva, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Polis’ [1982], in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 301–21, 306. 245 Julia Kristeva, ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’ [1973], in The Kristeva Reader, 24–33, 28. 246 Kristeva, ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’, 28. See also Julia Kristeva, The Revolution in Poetic Language [1974], trans. Margaret Waller with an introduction by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 30. 247 Kristeva, ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’, 28.

232 Freud ­ rdinary grammar, which she attriscrutinizes a text’s deviations from o butes to the effect of ­unconscious drives, operating in writing, as they do in dreams, by condensation and displacement. Kristeva terms the process by which unconscious drives are translated across psychic levels and ‘from one sign-system to ­another’ ‘intertextuality’: The term inter-textuality denotes this transposition of one (or several) sign-system(s) into another; but since this term has often been understood in the banal sense of ‘study of sources’, we prefer the term transposition.248 In this sharp deviation from her Formalist-sounding definition of the text as a ‘mosaic of quotations’ in ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’, intertextuality is recast as a process of transformation by which pulsional ‘writing’ is transposed from what Kristeva calls the ‘genotext’ (the realm of preverbal drives) to the ‘phenotext’ (the text as materially produced artefact). Kristeva’s dyad of geno- and phenotext plays an important part in this redefinition of intertextuality as a psychological as well as semiotic process. 249 While Chapter 4 will explore the notions’ roots in generative grammar, the nomenclature was also clearly intended to evoke the ­biological notions of geno- and phenotype, thereby implying that texts are organic extensions of the body. Situated at the intersection of generative grammar, evolutionary biology, and psychoanalytically inflected literary theory, the dyad denotes a relation not only of manifestation (with surface structure reflecting deep structure, and texts being conceived as organic, natural ‘outgrowths’ of their author) but also of transformation (with elements of the genotext undergoing alteration and articulation in the phenotext). The conversion from geno- to phenotext accordingly involves ‘a transition from one type of logic to another’.250 ­I ntertextuality emerges from this redefinition as a dynamic hinge – a kind of transformer between genotext and phenotext. The critic’s task is to read and spot the signs of a text’s ‘unconscious’ or genotext in ‘minimal surface indices which are the result of distortions and displacements of that ­dimension’ in the phenotext. 251

248 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 59–60. 249 See Revolution in Poetic Language, 86–9. Kristeva had previously discussed the dyad in ‘L’engendrement de la formule’, in Semiotike (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969), 217– 310 and ‘À propos de l’idéologie scientifique’, Promesse, vol. 27 (1969), 53–77. 250 Johnson, ‘Intertextuality and the psychical model’, Paragraph, vol. 11, no. 1 (March 1988), 71–89, 74. Johnson uses the phrase in summarizing Freud’s account of the transformation of dream-thoughts into dream-content in The Interpretation of Dreams. 251 Johnson, 72–3.

Freud  233 Kofman Sarah Kofman’s 1985 The Childhood of Art clarifies Freud’s position as a father figure to intertextual theory. Though the fact is not explicitly stated, the book offers a post-structuralist reading of Freud’s theory of art, as set out in The Interpretation of Dreams, ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva’ (1907), ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’ (1914), and ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), amongst other texts. 252 Kofman’s analysis brings to light many of the ways in which Freudian insights shaped 1960s theory. However, her account, persuasive though it is, adopts a language of symptoms, traces, and supplements which insufficiently distinguishes between Freud’s own arguments and their adaptation at the hands of the literary theorists – primarily Barthes, Lacan, and Derrida – with whom she engages. 253 However, Kofman’s use of the term intertextuality is an exception in this regard: Kofman unfurls it only twice, and then only in a very non-theoretically-loaded sense, to refer to Freud’s ‘intertextual’ habit of comparing works of art in quest of universal structures. The fact is the more incongruous because The Childhood of Art devotes considerable attention to the examination of four ideas which sit at the heart of intertextual theory: the demystification of authorship, the idea of creativity as combination, the role of unconscious determinants in a­ rtistic production, and the redefinition of art as a non-mimetic activity. 254 Demystifying the Author-God Kofman’s central tenet is that Freud deconstructs traditional ideas of authorship and inspiration by ‘demystifying’ the illusion of godlike ­origination. 255 The effect of psychoanalysis is ‘to commit murder […] to do away with the artist as genius’. 256 On Kofman’s account, Freud anticipates Barthes’ pronouncements in ‘The Death of the Author’ and ‘From Work to Text’, positing that it is more accurate to see texts as ‘engendering’ their authors than authors as ‘engendering’ their texts. 257 252 Most of Freud’s writings on art are collected in Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). The principal ­antecedents to Kofman’s study are Jack J. Spector, The Aesthetics of Freud: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Art (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1972), which explores Freud’s understandings of art in light of his biography and cultural c­ ontext, and Anthony Storr, The Dynamics of Creation (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), which focuses on Freud’s handling of motive and the question of ‘[w]hat drives an artist or scientist to engage in creative activity’. – xi. 253 Kofman, Childhood of Art, 13, 9. 254 Kofman evokes Freud’s ‘method of generalized intertextuality’ and his ‘intertextual and circular method’. – Childhood of Art, 10, 26. 255 Kofman, Childhood of Art, 16, 49. 256 Kofman, Childhood of Art, 15. 257 Kofman, Childhood of Art, 10, 40, 127.

234 Freud Freud’s psychoanalytical debunking of authorship and the man of letters, explains Kristeva, relies in part on his analysis of the reception of art. The public’s idealization of the ‘genius’ replicates an infantile Oedipal pattern and brings with it a deeply ingrained ‘need to admire an authority’. 258 The public’s childish tendency to veneration is evident in most artist biographies.259 It is this adulation for ‘the great man’, notes Freud, which leads to the artist being ‘esteemed like a God’. 260 For Kofman, Freud portrays this theological conception of art as ‘the last refuge of theism’, a manifestation of the human urge to believe and heroize. 261 In so doing, he plays a part, alongside Nietzsche and Darwin, in the toppling of the author-god trumpeted by the theorists of the 1960s and 1970s. With the impulse to revere, however, also come the ­negative sentiments which make up the other half of ‘the child’s ambivalence ­towards his parents’.262 An attack on a public figure metaphorically enacts the murder of a father, perpetrates the death of a ‘god’. For this reason, Freud treads carefully in his analysis of the art nexus and in the suggestion that ‘the artist is no more a great man than we are’. 263 Creativity as Combination The second relevant strand of Kofman’s reading of Freud emphasizes his reframing of creativity as a combinatory function. Taking note of his refe­ rences to dreams as ‘archaeological writing’, ‘transformers of ­affects’, and ‘combinator[ies] of representations,’ and extrapolating from his discussion of poets’ borrowings from the treasure-houses of myth and fairy-tale in ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’ (1908), she observes that for him the ‘creative’ imagination does not invent: instead, it combines or permutes.264

258 259 260 261

Kofman, Childhood of Art, 17. Kofman, Childhood of Art, 19. Kofman, Childhood of Art, 18. Kofman, Childhood of Art, 127, 146. The allusion to Nietzsche and the murder of god is clear: The demystification of the theological conception of art goes hand in hand with the demystification of a certain finalistic conception of paternity, and with the murder of God: the theological conception of art is the last refuge of theism in a society that considers itself atheistic. – Childhood of Art, 127

Kofman seems, in fact, to follow a Nietzchean pattern in another respect as well: her emphasis on what Freud implies about the elevation of the artist as a redirection of theistic energy bears the hallmark of Nietzsche’s argument, in On the Genealogy of Morality, about science as an unrecognized manifestation of the ascetic ideal (associated with the priestly caste). 262 Kofman, Childhood of Art, 19–20. 263 Kofman, Childhood of Art, 20. 264 Kofman, Childhood of Art, 37, 34, 46.

Freud  235 The Unconscious Determinations of Art By emphasizing the degree to which artists (like everyone else) are ‘played’ by their own unconscious processes, Kofman aptly captures Freud’s deterministic view of creativity as a set of processes in which consciousness plays but a small part.265 The poet, she explains, is the patient rather than the agent of his or her own inspiration. 266 Moreover, the unconscious determinations of what we write extend to all aspects of art, including style and form.267 Thus, as Freud discusses in relation to Leonardo da Vinci, what is commonly regarded as ‘giftedness’ or ‘genius’, is less a mystical than a quantitative matter – one which obeys psychic laws involving the fortuitous interaction of particular mnemic pathways (themselves arising from unique personal histories of exposure to stimuli), particular patterns of energetic distribution, particular capacities for sublimation. 268 To invoke ‘genius’ is merely to entrench an illusion and to spare oneself the quest for truth. 269 The theology of art amounts to a collective refusal to accept the parts played by unconscious processes in the cultural realm. Furthermore, the entire mythology of art, on Kofman’s argument, springs from the sense of our own lack of agency in the face of life’s arbitrariness, our need to repress ‘the absence of foundation of all life’. 270 ‘Life’ itself, which knows no reason, is the ‘artist’, writes Kofman. 271 Freud’s Non-Mimetic View of Art and the Referential Fallacy Kofman’s emphasis on Freud’s non-mimetic view of art chimes with the dismissal of referentiality articulated by prominent intertextual theorists such as Michael Riffaterre. 272 For Freud, a work of art does not stand in a mirroring relationship either to the world or to the artist’s personality. It is not ‘expressive’ ‘in the sense that the term has in the traditional logic of the sign’: it is not, that is, ‘caught up in the closure of classical representation’. 273 The work of art emerges as the outcome of the harnessing (or, in Freudian terms, sublimation) of psychic forces; it is shaped by

265 266 267 268

269 270 271 272 273

Kofman, Childhood of Art, 40. Kofman, Childhood of Art, 40, 47. Kofman, Childhood of Art, 89. Kofman, Childhood of Art, 158–9. Laplanche and Pontalis define ‘sublimation’ as a ‘[p]rocess postulated by Freud to account for human activities which have no apparent connection with sexuality but which are assumed to be motivated by the force of the sexual instinct’. – 430. Kofman, Childhood of Art, 155. Kofman, Childhood of Art, 170. Kofman, Childhood of Art, 171. For discussion of the ‘referential fallacy’, see Introduction, pp. 23–5. Kofman, Childhood of Art, 78.

236 Freud the mutual interactions of these inner forces and the outer world. ‘The fantasy that it “expresses”’, concludes Kofman, ‘is a construction after the fact.’274 Kofman’s reading of Freud highlights a number of ways in which his metapsychological poetics and aesthetics pave the way for the more textually minded post-structuralists. Though ‘intertextuality’ is given a merely cameo role in Kristeva’s book, it is nonetheless, through the attention paid to its defining tenets, an all-pervasive concern.

Alongside and After Post-Structuralism: Harold Bloom and Extended Mind Theory There remains to consider, first, a prominent counterpoint, and second, a significant extension, of the uses made of Freud by the literary theorists of the 1960s and 1970s. The first of these returns us to post-­structuralism’s heyday; the second involves consideration of the contemporary philosophy of cognition. Harold Bloom Against the backdrop of the Freud-inflected theoretical developments chronicled in this chapter, enter Harold Bloom and The Anxiety of ­Influence. Largely written in 1967, but published in 1973, the book’s reception, as Bloom notes in the preface of 1997, ‘remains ambivalent’ even as its title has acquired the resonant familiarity of an academic touchstone and a well-worn cliché. 275 Bloom belongs in this genealogy as an antagonist by virtue of his signal decision to retain ‘influence’ as his key term for literary relations at a time when the rival post-structuralist notion of ‘intertextuality’ was gaining traction. The Anxiety’s opening promises to ‘offer a theory of poetry’ derived from the model of Freud’s Oedipus complex. 276 The book is highly idiosyncratic, not only in its severing of poetry from other genres but also in its exclusive concern with male poets, 274 Kofman, Childhood of Art, 100. 275 ‘Most of the first draft of what became The Anxiety of Influence was written in the summer of 1967. Revised during the next five years, the little book was published in January 1973. For more than twenty years, I have been bemused by the book’s reception, which remains ambivalent.’ – Bloom, Preface, The Anxiety of Influence, n.p. In A Map of Misreading, Bloom also refers to the fact that the theory expounded in The Anxiety ‘has encountered considerable resistance during my presentation of it in a number of lectures at various universities’, including from ‘many poets’ – Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 9–10. 276 Bloom, Anxiety, 5. Bloom does not, like his European counterparts, take ‘poetry’ as a synonym for literature in general: his focus in The Anxiety of Influence is strictly on poetry as a specific genre.

Freud  237 and with those whom Bloom describes as ‘strong poets’, ‘major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to ­ isreading the death’. 277 In The Anxiety and its sequel, A Map of M (1975), this nebulous criterion of ‘strength’ remains unelucidated, so that the repeated evocation of that mysterious quality ultimately seems to betoken nothing more than Bloom’s approval of this or that poet’s work. The trope of intergenerational Oedipal struggle, of poets as ­heroic warring titans ‘triumphant[ly] wrestling with the greatest of the dead’, also remains centre-stage in A Map of Misreading. 278 Such predilections for overtly personality-driven myth-making and stylistic hyperbole position Bloom’s work in opposition to the deconstructive energies of many of his contemporaries. Moreover, the systematic emphasis on binary pairings (poet with poet, poem with poem) is sharply at odds with the plurality which the intertextualists posit behind every seeming unity. Bloom’s Freudian vision and eccentric ‘ratios’ for the classification of poetic relationships are not set out in ignorance of the alternative terminology around which much academic discourse revolved at the time.279 In fact, he several times acknowledges the modes of thinking then favoured by theoretically inclined French and American intellectuals. Indeed, both The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading evince a certain ambiguity as to Bloom’s own position in relation to such approaches. Although Bloom does not, like such admired colleagues as Derrida, de Man, and Hillis Miller, consider himself to be a practitioner of deconstruction, he is forthright about his commitment to Freud and Nietzsche, themselves radical deconstructors and cardinal precursors to the post-structuralists whom he identifies as ‘the prime influences upon the theory of influence presented in this book’.280 The theory set forth in both The Anxiety and A Map presents itself as an attempt to ‘de-idealize our accepted accounts of how one poet helps to form another’; but while Bloom laments that ‘[c]riticism is in danger of being over-spiritualized by the heirs of Auerbach and by Northrop Frye’ on the one hand, he also warns that it is at risk ‘of being excessively despiritualized by the followers of the school of Deconstruction, the heirs of Nietzsche’ on the other.281 Other contradictions abound. Some of Bloom’s statements about ­influence, for example, are strikingly similar to those made by Kristeva about intertextuality. As she does for intertextuality, Bloom rejects any equation of influence with the study of sources: ‘[t]he profundities of 277 278 279 280 281

Bloom, Anxiety, 5. Bloom, Map, 9. Bloom, Anxiety, 14–16. Bloom, Map, 79. | Bloom, Anxiety, 8. Bloom, Anxiety, 5 and Bloom, Map, 9 (Map refers to Anxiety as ‘an attempt at de-idealizing’). | Bloom, Map 79.

238 Freud poetic influence cannot be reduced to source-study, to the history of ideas, to the patterning of images’.282 And, like Kristeva, Bloom seems to allow, in formulations redolent with a post-structuralist outlook, that ‘[w]e need to stop thinking of any poet as an autonomous ego’. 283 ‘Influence’, he asseverates, much as Kristeva might have stated of intertextuality, ‘means that there are no texts, only relationships between texts.’284 Dismissing those invested in the study of sources as ‘carrion-eaters of scholarship’, Bloom uses the ideal poet’s supposed fixation on the origins of his own talent to justify what he calls his ‘psychopoetic’ approach – an application to poetry of a Freudian schematics which casts poets as sons locked in Oedipal struggles with their ‘Poetic Fathers’. 285 Bloom places the strong poet’s wilful ‘revisionism’ – his desire to ‘war against’ an all-important literary precursor – at the heart of his vision of poetic history: ‘To live, the poet must misinterpret the father, by the crucial act of misprision, which is the re-writing of the father.’286 ‘Every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem’, and, in an obvious adaptation of Freud’s template of the family romance, True poetic history is the story of how poets as poets have suffered other poets, just as any true biography is the story of how anyone suffered his own family – or his own displacement of family into lovers and friends. 287 Other aspects of the Freudian corpus are unfurled as suits Bloom’s analogical purposes – for example regarding repetition, ‘the central problem for the latecomer’. 288 The ‘repetition compulsion’, the uncanny return of something which has been repressed, and the poet’s ‘horror of finding himself to be only a copy or replica’ – all form part of his characterization of literary relations. 289 Whatever his evident admiration for Freud and Nietzsche, Bloom ­regards the deconstruction of poetry perpetrated in light of their writings as a regrettable (and to a degree, irreparable) ‘reduction’ of literature: After Nietzsche and Freud, it is not possible to return wholly to a mode of interpretation that seeks to restore meanings to texts. […] meaning, whether of poems or of dreams, or of any text, is

282 Bloom, Anxiety, 7. See also Anxiety, 71, and Bloom, Map, 3. 283 Bloom, Anxiety, 91. 284 Bloom, Map, 3. 285 Bloom, Map, 17, 79, 19. | Bloom, Anxiety, 44. 286 Bloom, Map, 4, 80, 5, 19. 287 Bloom, Anxiety, 94. 288 Bloom, Anxiety, 80. 289 Bloom, Anxiety 77, 80.

Freud  239 impoverished by a Nietzsche-inspired deconstruction, however scrupulous.290 Some adherence to undeconstructed ideas of subjecthood – some ­suspension of disbelief – is needed, claims Bloom, for the reading of ­poetry to be worthwhile. The enjoyment of poetry and its creation ­cannot sustain the ‘deconstructi[on] [of] the thinking subject itself, [the] dissipat[ion] [of] the ego into a “rendezvous of persons”’. 291 Bloom proposes, in other words, to preserve creative subjects and their egos by ringfencing them from the full implications of Nietzschean, Freudian, and post-structuralist deconstruction (he also rejects the ‘antimimetic theory’ espoused by critics of the referential fallacy as both uncongenial and unproductive). 292 The solution is an artificial one – a choice to affix intellectual blinkers, to safeguard an illusion – but it is one which holds in check the relativistic chaos deconstruction leaves in its wake. The notoriety achieved by The Anxiety and A Map is not synonymous with acceptance of Bloom’s assertions. Their sweeping generalizations, emphatic capitalizations (‘the True Subject and their own True Selves’), unabashedly patriarchal outlook, esoteric ‘ratios’, and melodramatic psychoanalytical scenarios rile as many readers as they seduce. 293 Yet these texts, for all their caricatural features, usefully illustrate the limitations of the post-structuralist readings they seek to counterpoint and complement. Bloom’s ‘Poetic Influence’ brings into focus the shortcomings of intertextuality and other abstruse post-structuralist notions. His preference for a more narratively rewarding response to poetry, for a mode of critical writing which acknowledges and indeed amplifies the interplay of passions and personalities – struggling egos, flaming ids, subliming super-egos – captures something of what is lost in the stringent espousal of an intertextual outlook. And while Bloom’s ‘corrective’, ­‘antithetical’ criticism goes much further than it needs to in re-­mythologizing creativity as a ‘triumphant wrestling’, his ‘revisionism’ should perhaps be taken as an indication of even the most academic readers’ yearning for character and human story, of their appetite for patterns of relation amounting to more than the infinite and impersonal play of trace and referral. 294

290 Bloom, Map, 85. 291 Bloom, Map, 86. 292 Bloom, Map 79–80. Bloom goes on to write of the antithetical reader’s own ­experience of entering into ‘combat’ with a poetic text as a form of ‘supermimesis’, the struggles of readerly misprision echoing the preceding clash of the poet with his poetic father: ‘The burden of representation thus becomes supermimetic rather than antimimetic, which means that interpretation too must assume the experiential sorrows of a supermimesis.’ – Bloom, Map, 80. 293 Bloom, Anxiety, 116. | Bloom, Map 19. 294 Bloom, Anxiety, 5, 8. | Bloom, Map, 9, 4.

240 Freud Extended Mind Theory and the Cognitive Case against Mimesis Barring Bloom’s, all the theoretical responses to Freud considered in this chapter point towards a reconfiguration of art as an ‘antimimetic’ ­medium.295 Jakobson and Lacan, as discussed above, speculate that the figures of speech enshrined in rhetoric are direct extensions of ­cognitive operations which precede speech and a fortiori occur prior to consciousness. Derrida depicts literary creation as the outcome of sequences of ­organic events which establish a seamless continuity between the ­inner and outer worlds of ‘writing’ – one not necessarily mediated by ­consciousness. Kristeva, too, seems inspired by Freud in redefining intertextuality as a process of ‘transposition’ involving the modification of elements of the geno- in the phenotext. In conjuring a picture of ‘writing’ as a set of phenomena which, far from abiding by the ‘closure of classical representation’, straddle the supposed boundary between self and world, these theorists delineate a form of psychographic rhizome avant la lettre.296 Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, it will be remembered from Chapter 1, similarly elides the difference between writer and book. Against older understandings of literature as reflective mirror, such interpretations present writing as a material extension of the organisms which produce them.297 These extremely abstract views of literature as an unbounded sphere more or less coextensive with the world sharply contradict commonplace conceptions which equate art with expression – with the mimesis, or representation, of interior self or exterior world. Indeed, the validity of such terms as ‘expression’, ‘mimesis’, and ‘representation’ depends on the concept of the Cartesian self as an accessible and bounded entity, one capable, moreover, of apprehending and reflecting ‘reality’ with minimum distortion. By contrast, the post-Freudian views of the text examined in this chapter situate its origins in psychic phenomena unfolding far beyond or below the threshold of an artist’s ken or control, reframing it ‘not as a reflection but as a form of production’.298 Such musings align remarkably with recent and current work within ‘the new interdisciplinary matrix called cognitive science’, which, ­according to Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, ‘includes not only neuroscience but cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and, in many centers, philosophy’.299 In particular, non-­mimetic views of art chime with what has emerged as a

295 296 297 298 299

Bloom, Map, 79–80. Kofman, Childhood of Art, 78. Kofman, Childhood of Art, 100. Eagleton, 157. Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), ix.

Freud  241 ‘post-­cognitive paradigm’, which frees cognition from the confines of the skull and emphasizes the ‘inextricable tangles of feedback, feedforward, and feedaround loops that continually criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world’.300 As Dirk Van Hulle explains, This ‘post-cognitivist’ model opposes the Cartesian dualism underlying the ‘cognitivist’ approach to cognition, which works with representational models to explain the workings of the mind, notably the human mind.301 The Cartesianism which dominated the earlier philosophical dispensation received one of a succession of major blows in 1983, when Benjamin ­Libet published the results of a now famous experiment on the unconscious initiation of conscious acts. Libet’s research went substantially further than preceding discoveries – for example by Kornhuber and Deecke (1964) – establishing the presence in the brain of an electric ‘readiness potential’ well before a subject reports a decision to flex a finger.302 ­Libet concluded that the ‘cerebral initiation of a spontaneous, freely voluntary act can begin unconsciously, that is, before there is any (at least recallable) subjective awareness that a “decision” to act has already been initiated cerebrally’.303 A ‘heated debate’ ensued, spurred by one of the possible inferences of Libet’s research, namely that ‘the conscious decision was not the cause of the action’, and that, therefore, ‘we do not have conscious free will’.304 Moreover, as Banks and Pockett elaborate, 300 Andy Clark, ‘Embodied, Embedded, and Extended Cognition’, in The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science, ed. Keith Frankish and William M. Ramsey ­(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 275–91, 277. 301 Dirk Van Hulle, James Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’: Pre-Book Publications of ­‘ Finnegans Wake’ Fragments (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 3. While Edwin Hutchins evokes ‘distributed cognition’, Mark Rowlands refers to ‘4e ­cognition’, grouping together four related but subtly different versions (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) of the new paradigm. – Edwin Hutchins, ­‘Cognition Distributed’, International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil Smelser and Paul Baltes (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2000), 2068–72. | Mark Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: From the Extended Mind to ­E mbodied Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2010), 67. 302 H.H. Kornhuber, and L. Deecke, ‘Hirnpotentialänderungen bei Willkürbewegungen und passiven Bewegungen des Menschen: Bereitschaftspotential und reafferente ­Potentiale’, Pflügers Arch, vol. 284 (1965), 1–17. | B. Libet, C.A. Gleason, E.W. Wright, and D.K. Pearl, ‘Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act’, Brain, vol. 106, no. 3 (September 1983), 623–42. 303 B. Libet, C.A. Gleason, E.W. Wright, D.K. Pearl, 623. 304 William P. Banks, and Susan Pockett, Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, ed. Max Velmans and Susan Schneider (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 657.

242 Freud because the ability consciously to initiate actions is an essential property of self, the denial of conscious, personal origination of action is a challenge to our sense of selfhood. The implication is that we, our conscious selves, are not free actors with control over our choices in life. We are only conduits for unconsciously made decisions. Libet’s one simple experiment has slipped our entire self-concept from its moorings.305 Or, as Daniel Wegner puts it in The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002), the ‘experience of will’ might be no more than an epiphenomenon, ‘a loose end – one of those things, like the action, that is caused by prior brain and mental events’.306 The ‘experience of will’ might even, Wegner continues – echoing ideas of the self as narrative explored in Chapter 1 – arise in order to ‘alert the conscious mind when actions occur that are likely to be the result of one’s own agency’: the experience of consciously willing action occurs as the result of an interpretive system, a course-sensing mechanism that examines the relations between our thoughts and actions and responds with ‘I willed this’ when the two correspond appropriately.307 If Libet’s landmark experiment of 1983 appeared to begin to confirm previously unverifiable post-structuralist theories regarding the illusory character of conscious agency, recent scientific work has continued to chip away at the foundations of Cartesian thinking by probing the limitations of any simple equation of mind and brain. In The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, noting that science has finally developed an interest in investigating the self as ‘fundamentally fragmented, divided, or nonunified’ (an insight shared, as they observe, by ‘[m]any philosophers, psychiatrists, and social theorists since Nietzsche’), set about to query the assumption – prevalent throughout cognitive science – that ­cognition consists of the representation of a world that is i­ndependent of our perceptual and cognitive abilities by a cognitive system that is independent of the world.308

305 Banks and Pockett, 657. 306 David Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press and Bradford Books, 2002), 55. 307 Wegner, 317. 308 Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, xx.

Freud  243 To the contrary, they argue that cognition is ‘not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven a mind’.309 What the authors propose ­instead is ‘a view of cognition as embodied action’ which goes against the grain of ‘one of the more entrenched assumptions of our scientific heritage – that the world is independent of the knower’.310 Through careful discussion of the example of colour perception, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch propose to negotiate a middle path between the Scylla of cognition as the recovery of a pregiven outer world (realism) and the Charybdis of cognition as the projection of a pregiven inner world (idealism). These two extremes both take representation as their central notion: in the first case representation is used to recover what is outer; in the second case it is used to project what is inner. [Their] intention is to bypass entirely this logical geography of inner versus outer by studying cognition not as recovery or projection but as embodied action.311 In 1998, Alan Clark and David Chalmers articulated one response to this call for less ‘representationist’ and more ‘context-dependent’ approaches. In ‘The Extended Mind’, they propose ‘an active externalism based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes’.312 Taking as their starting point examples of human dependence on ‘environmental supports’ – evidenced by ‘the use of pen and paper to perform long multiplication, the use of physical re-arrangements of letter tiles to prompt word recall in Scrabble, the use of instruments such as the nautical slide rule, and the general paraphernalia of language, books, diagrams, and culture’– their thesis is that ‘[c]ognitive processes ain’t (all) in the head.’313 The pen and paper, the Scrabble tiles, the ­nautical slide rule interact with the mind as ‘coupled systems’ – they are ‘in the loop, not dangling at the other end of a long causal chain’.314 Like Derrida’s psychographic writing and Deleuze and Guattari’s r­ hizomatic writing, the hypothesis of the extended mind demands the alteration of conceptions of the human self and our species’ capacity for full agency.315 309 310 311 312

Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 9. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, xx, 150. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 157 and 172. Andy Clark and David Chalmers, ‘The Extended Mind’, Analysis, vol. 58, no. 1 (January 1998), 7–19, 7. 313 Clark and Chalmers, 8. 314 Clark and Chalmers, 8. 315 ‘Does the extended mind imply an extended self? It seems so’. The self ‘is best regarded as an extended system, a coupling of biological organism and external resources’. – Clark and Chalmers, 18. | Thinking along evolutionary lines, Clark and Chalmers remark that ‘language […] appears to be a central means by which

244 Freud In 2007, Richard Menary pondered the significance of such thinking for conceptions of writing, arguing that ‘the creation and manipulation of written vehicles is part of our cognitive processing’ and that ‘writing transforms our cognitive abilities’.316 His contention is that ‘writing is thinking in action’; otherwise put, that ‘the act of writing is itself a process of thinking’.317 Compared to what Menary, following Merlin Donald, calls ‘engrams’ (that is, ‘neural memories’), ‘exograms’ (or ‘external vehicles’) ‘allow for storage, different representational formats, and a variety of novel manipulations and transformations’.318 The linking of these engrams and exograms in coupled systems ‘leads us to understand cognition and the mind as [h]ybrid […] and integrated’.319 For Menary as for Clark and Chalmers, ‘cognitive processes are not exclusively ­located in the body’.320 Van Hulle’s application of the ‘post-cognitivist’ paradigm to the study of Joyce’s manuscripts and pre-book publications of Finnegans Wake ­illustrates the relevance of neuroscientific and philosophical ­developments to literary criticism, especially genetic criticism. For Van Hulle, ‘extended mind theory’ or the ‘paradigm of cognitive interaction’ provides a useful model for the way authors handle their mental and physical material, literally ‘thinking on paper’, with all that proposition implies regarding the boundaries of the self and its capacity to ‘originate’ thought.321 Considering authorial manuscripts as extensions or outposts of the ‘mental apparatus’ makes it possible to describe operations carried out in writing – a long division, a diagrammatic sketch, the composition of a sonnet – as mental operations (rather than as mere traces of them) differing from others only by virtue of the substrate (neurones or paper) involved. Van Hulle’s analyses of the ways in which Joyce ­assembled the Wake also bring into focus these developments’ relevance to intertextuality in its better known sense, as shorthand for the way texts ­incorporate snippets derived from other sources. Treating manuscripts as extensions of the mind allows them to function as windows into the

316 317 318 319 320 321

cognitive processes are extended into the world’, even speculating that ‘language evolved, in part, to enable such extensions of our cognitive resources within actively coupled systems’. ‘Language, thus construed’, they continue, ‘is not a mirror of our inner states, but a complement to them. It serves as a tool whose role is to extend cognition in ways that on-board devices cannot.’ – Clark and Chalmers, 11, 11–12, 18. Richard Menary, ‘Writing as thinking’, Language Sciences, vol. 29 (2007), 621–32, 623. Menary, 622. Menary, 625–6. Menary, 627. Menary, 627. ‘Any writer who makes use of notes and drafts is an example of the extended mind according to the paradigm of cognitive interaction […] Joyce clearly was a writer who “thought on paper”.’ – Van Hulle, 7.

Freud  245 dynamics of text reuse, the ways in which an author’s mind ‘borrows’ from the minds of other authors, as encountered through the medium of their own published ‘exograms’.

Being Reborn Posthumously Freud many times expressed the hope that he had ‘opened up a p ­ athway for an important advance in our knowledge’.322 Like Nietzsche and ­Darwin before him, he craved recognition, retaining an irrepressible ­investment in originality and personal merit even as his theories brought the validity of such concepts into question. Though much more of an established figure in his own lifetime than Nietzsche ever was, Freud was, in a sense, ‘reborn posthumously’ at the hands of literary theorists.323 Taking in their stride unfalsifiable hypotheses and inductive leaps which have by and large proved unacceptable to scientists, the Parisian structuralists and post-structuralists of the post-war period richly rewarded Freud’s efforts by the seriousness of their engagement and elaborations.324 Lacan called Freud ‘an encyclopedia of the arts and muses’.325 Kristeva extolled ‘the Freudian discovery of the unconscious as the cautious start of an epistemological and existential revolution’.326 Foucault, writing about the ‘author function’ in 1969, named Freud as one of a select group of ‘initiators of discursive practices’. ‘The distinctive contribution of these authors’, he explains, ‘is that they produced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts’.327 Intertextuality’s early formulations mobilize Freud’s models and terminologies in service of a reconceptualization of the literary field. Picking up on his account of writing as an activity governed by forces beyond conscious control, it abrogates all boundaries – between 22 Freud in his Autobiographical Study, qtd in Jones, 463–4. 3 323 ‘Some people are born posthumously’, states Nietzsche in Ecce Homo. – EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, §1, 100. 324 Ernest Jones concedes, while hailing the individuality of Freud’s genius, that his propensity to untrammelled inductive reasoning jeopardizes the soundness of some of his theories: ‘That is the way Freud’s mind worked. When he got hold of a simple but significant fact he would feel, and know, that it was an example of something general and universal, and the idea of collecting statistics on the matter was quite alien to him. It was one of the things for which other, more humdrum, workers have ­reproached him, but nevertheless that is the way the mind of a genius works.’ – Jones, 106. | As Joseph Breuer, Freud’s earliest collaborator, noted in a more critical vein: ‘Freud is a man given to absolute and excessive formulations: this is a psychical need which, in my opinion, leads to excessive generalization.’ – qtd in Anthony Storr, Freud: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 153. 325 Lacan, ‘Insistence’, 81. 326 Julia Kristeva, ‘The True-Real’, in The Kristeva Reader, 214–37, 217. 327 WA, 131. Foucault refers to Marx and Freud as ‘the first and the most important’ examples of the category. – WA, 132.

246 Freud mind and body, unconscious and conscious phenomena, self and world – recasting writing as a conjunction of deterministic, mental, and material processes. The forms of theoretical appropriation surveyed in this chapter present little overlap with the author-, reader-, contents-, and form-driven readings most commonly associated with psychoanalytical criticism.328 In 1987, Peter Brooks bemoaned the fact that ‘psychoanalysis in literary study has over and over again mistaken the object of analysis, with the result that whatever insights it has produced tell us precious little about the structure and rhetoric of literary texts’, focusing erroneously and unproductively on ‘the author, the reader, or the fictive persons of the text’.329 In keeping with his dismissal of such applications Brooks, following in the footsteps of Jakobson, Lacan, Kristeva, and Derrida, prefers to cast Freud as a semiotician avant la lettre. Yet Brooks’s Freud is a semiotician of a structuralist turn of mind, who ‘works from the premise that all that appears is a sign, that all signs are subject to interpretation, and that they ultimately tell stories that contain the same dramatis personae and the same narrative functions for all of us’.330 The persistent popularity of psychoanalytical approaches, Brooks contends, rests on a sense of the universal applicability of Freud’s findings and of the correspondence between individual mind and collective culture – a ‘conviction’ that ‘the structure of literature is in some sense the structure of mind’.331 Though Brooks does not go as far as Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, and Kofman in his dismissal of referentiality and mimesis, he does advocate ‘a convergence of psychoanalysis and literary criticism because […] there must be […] some correspondence between literary and psychic process’.332 Psychoanalysis and literature will be brought into dialogue most illuminatingly when the disciplinary fault-line between them is elided in favour of a mutually interrogating, ‘intertextual’ relationship: Psychoanalysis is not an arbitrarily chosen intertext for literary analysis, but rather a particularly insistent and demanding intertext, in that crossing the boundaries from one territory to the other both

328 Eagleton describes the first and third of these as ‘the most limited and problematical’: ‘[p]sychoanalysing the author is a speculative business’ and the ‘psychoanalysis of “content” […] has a limited value, but […] is too often reductive.’ – 155. 329 Brooks, 334. 330 Brooks, 336. 331 Brooks, 337. 332 Brooks, 337.

Freud  247 confirms and complicates our understanding of how mind reformulates the real.333 Shoshana Felman agrees about the need to avoid perpetuating ‘the ­master-slave dynamic’ at work in psychoanalytic criticism – ‘a structure of rival claims to authority and to priority’ which all too often sees ­literature relegated to inferior status as an object rather than a subject of knowledge.334 This is an endeavour in which all the theorists discussed in this chapter participate, seeking not only to act as ‘go-between[s]’ between the two domains, but to integrate them in a single vision of mind as text and text as mind.335 Intertextuality is one of the products of their quest for a holistic understanding of the genesis of minds and texts. Other intellectual endeavours combined with Freud’s legacy to bring intertextuality into being. The next chapter uncovers another important strand of the notion’s prehistory – that which saw linguistics remoulded in service of another ‘dream of scientificity’.336

333 Brooks, 348. 334 Shoshana Felman, ‘To Open the Question’, Yale French Studies, vols 55–6, ‘Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise’ (1977), 5–10, 6, 8. 335 Felman, 9. | Brooks, 348. 336 Roland Barthes, ‘Réponses’, Tel Quel, vol. 47 (1971), 89–107, 97, qtd in Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 44.

4 Literary Criticism and the Dream of a ‘Science of Culture’ Saussurean Linguistics, Russian Formalism, Structuralism This chapter is the first of three devoted to the examination of ­t wentieth-century linguistic and literary theories which, even more ­immediately even than the Darwinian, Nietzschean, and Freudian ­revolutions, paved the way for the coining of intertextuality by Julia Kristeva in 1966. In the following pages, the genealogical spotlight is aimed at the early twentieth century. Specifically, it is shone on the model of science which literary study sought to derive from linguistics.

Saussure and Structuralist Linguistics From Philology to Linguistics via Natural Science When Darwin introduced his genealogical approach to the realm of the natural sciences in the nineteenth century, he was, at certain points explicitly, emulating the historical bent of much contemporary ­philology. The discipline was then almost exclusively historical and ­comparative, with research focusing on the discovery of ­etymological roots and the ­reconstitution of ur-languages. This approach infiltrated the work of ­natural historians and abetted the passion for origins which ­characterized many of the century’s scholarly energies. As Gillian Beer has shown, ­ articularly that ‘much important nineteenth-century scientific work, p of Lyell in geology and Darwin in evolutionary theory, drew upon the new models of language development’.1 Likewise, S­ tephen Alter traces the ‘colourful metaphoric thread’ connecting philology and natural ­science in this period, observing that ‘the concept of genealogy’ ­became ‘a ­central integrative idea in both the biological and the human sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’.2 The acts 1 Gillian Beer, ‘Darwin and the Growth of Language Theory’, in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 95–114, 97. 2 Stephen G. Alter, Darwin and the Linguistic Image: Language, Race and N ­ atural ­Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns ­Hopkins University Press, 1999), xii.

Literary Criticism as Science  249 of ‘conscious appropriation and re-appropriation’ which took place between the two disciplines extended even to that most emblematic symbol of evolutionary science, that of the family tree.3 The philologist August Schleicher gave visual prominence to the disciplinary convergence by printing a Stammbau, or linguistic family tree, in two articles of 1853 and again in his 1860 study of the German language (Die Deutsche Sprache).4 However, the very currency of such parallels, Beer suggests, eventually became problematic: over time, ‘shared discourse’ began to make for ‘self-proving argument’, and ‘the degree of interpenetration of language theory and evolutionary theory’ led to ‘major methodological problems’.5 Gradually, the scientific fervour surrounding the quest for origins – the epoch’s pandisciplinary ‘mystery of mysteries’ – became more circular, and therefore less productive, and the oscillating pendulum of epistemological fashion began to move away from historical pursuits and back towards synchronic approaches.6 Saussure and the Synchronic Turn Friedrich Nietzsche, who was in the 1880s to become so incisive a critic of the shibboleth of historical origins as ascertainable empirical truth, was himself a philologist by training, and, for a while, by profession, having been elected to the Chair of Classical Philology at Basel in 1869. At around the same time, in another part of Switzerland, Ferdinand de Saussure, the son of an eminent natural scientist, was showing signs of unusual linguistic and philological talent. By the age of 11, he knew French, German, English, and Latin (and was soon to add Greek and Sanskrit to the list). Having spent a frustrating year at the University of Geneva studying physics and chemistry in accordance with family tradition, Saussure moved to Leipzig in 1876 to pursue the study of Indo-­ European languages. In 1879, aged 21, he completed and published his Dissertation on the Primitive Vowel System in Indo-European Languages, a historical investigation which immediately earned him a place at the forefront of contemporary philological research.7 The impeccably rigorous predictive hypotheses Saussure set out in that work – hailed by 3 Beer, ‘Darwin and the Growth of Language Theory’, 95. 4 Alter, 110. 5 Beer, ‘Darwin and the Growth of Language Theory’, 110, 109. In The Art of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Devin Griffiths explores the ‘literary modes and historical procedures’ which enacted a ‘comparative turn’, making analogy central to the scientific and cultural research of the nineteenth century. The book sets itself the task of delineating ‘a genealogy for the emergence of comparative historicism’. – 2, 3, 7. 6 The phrase is Darwin’s in the second sentence of On the Origin of Species. – O, 5. 7 Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, revd edn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 21–3.

250  Literary Criticism as Science the eminent phoneticist Henry Sweet (1845–1912) as ‘perhaps […] the most important event that has happened in the history of comparative philology since its foundation’ – would be confirmed in the 1930s by discoveries ­concerning Hittite script.8 In spite of his success as a historical and ­comparative ­philologist, Saussure would, like Nietzsche, abandon the approach which had proved so fruitful to him. In 1916, the lectures he gave as a professor at the University of Geneva in 1906–1907, 1908–1909, and 1910–1911, were posthumously published on the basis of student notes as Course in General Linguistics. In these pages, Saussure calls for a new science of linguistics (conceived in opposition to the old discipline of philology) which would study language from a strictly ahistorical perspective. For Derek Attridge, these lectures amounted to a ‘conceptual revolution’, one which, beyond its impact on ‘the fledgling discipline of linguistics itself’, led to ‘the birth of one of the new century’s most potent intellectual movements’, that ‘wider study of cultural practices and concepts’ which was to become known as ‘structuralism’.9 In the ‘Brief Survey of the History of Linguistics’ with which the Course opens, the discipline’s recent past is divided into three stages: first, the phase of ‘grammar’ (under which heading Saussure chiefly refers to eighteenth-century grammarians of Port-Royal); second, the phase of ‘philology’, the central aim of which was ‘to establish, interpret and comment upon texts’; and third, the phase of ‘comparative philology’ or ‘comparative grammar’, which trained its sights on the links between languages as ‘the data for an autonomous science’ (Saussure particularly praises the work of such nineteenth-century ‘comparativists’ as Franz Bopp, Max Müller, Georg Curtius, and August Schleicher).10 Notwithstanding the achievements of these precursors, Saussure deems them to have failed ‘to found a true science of linguistics’. The comparativists, in particular, were misled by their partiality for the kind of freewheeling analogical thinking analysed by Beer and Alter, ‘look[ing] upon the development of two languages much as a naturalist might look upon the growth of two plants’ – regarding Greek and Sanskrit, for example, as ‘plants of the same species passing through the same stages of growth’.11 The failure of Saussure’s forerunners was at root methodological: they ‘never took very great care to define exactly what it was they 8 Alter, 131, 144. 9 Derek Attridge, ‘The Linguistic Model and Its Applications’, in The Cambridge ­History of Literary Criticism: From Formalism to Poststructuralism, vol. 8 (of 9 vols), ed. Raman Selden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 58–84, 66, 58. 10 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Roy Harris (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 2–3. 11 Saussure, Course, §17, 4. While aligning himself with the Neogrammarians against the use of ‘illogical metaphors’ in linguistics, Saussure does not condemn illustrative analogy altogether: in fact, he asserts that ‘certain figurative ways of speaking […] are indispensable’. – Saussure, Course, §19, 6n.

Literary Criticism as Science  251 were studying’.12 At the heart of his ‘revolt against the linguistics of his own century’ was his insistence on the importance for the ­discipline of ­defining its object and bracketing it out of history.13 Saussure’s Course ­advocates a strict separation between ‘evolutionary’ or ‘static’ approaches, which he renames as ‘synchronic’ and ‘diachronic’ ­respectively. While ‘synchronic’ linguistics studies language along an ‘axis of simultaneity’, ‘diachronic’ linguistics studies language along an ‘axis of succession’.14 ‘Facts of evolution’, Saussure grants, ‘are more concrete, and stir the ­imagination more readily’, but only by scrutinizing language as a simultaneous system could linguistics hope to break new ground.15 As Attridge remarks, however, ‘this opposition is […] ­considerably ­complicated in practical application’ and has itself, in consequence, ­‘frequently been challenged’.16 Langue and Parole Saussure’s insistence on the need for linguistics to identify a clearly bounded object of study entails another key opposition – that between langue, Saussure’s term for the linguistic system as a whole, and parole, by which he designates individual acts of speech. Langue refers to all existing words and comprises all possible linguistic combinations – the ‘totality of word patterns stored up’ in all users of a language.17 It ­represents the sum of a group’s linguistic knowledge, ‘a fund accumulated by the members of the community through the practice of speech, a grammatical system existing potentially in every brain, or more exactly in the brains of a group of individuals’.18 Each member of the community possesses only a fraction of this set: ‘the language is never complete in any single individual but exists perfectly only in the collectivity’.19 Speech or parole is an ‘executive’ skill by which elements of langue are combined through a series of mental and muscular operations realized in 12 Saussure, Course, §17, 4. 13 Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, 66. 14 Saussure, Course, §115–7, 93–5. 15 Saussure, Course, §141–2, 119. As Culler explains, it was precisely because he recognized, more profoundly than his critics, the radical historicity of language that he asserted the importance of distinguishing between facts about the linguistic system and facts about linguistic evolution, even in cases where the two kinds of facts seem extraordinarily intertwined […] Since the sign has no necessary core that must persist, it must be defined as a relational entity, in its relations to other signs. And the relevant relations are those which obtain at a particular time. – Ferdinand de Saussure, 45–6 16 Attridge, ‘The Linguistic Model’, 66, 71. 17 Saussure, Course, §30, 15. 18 Saussure, Course, §30, 15. 19 Saussure, Course, §30, 15.

252  Literary Criticism as Science the act of vocalization. 20 For Saussure, langue is ‘social’ and ‘essential’, while parole is ‘individual’, ‘ancillary’, and ‘more or less accidental’.21 Saussure declares langue to be the object of modern linguistics. It is through this delimitation of the field of study that the establishment of a systematic – scientific – classification of the structures of langue becomes possible. But the prioritization of the general system over the individual, the abstract network over the concrete person, effects a drastic narrowing of scope. The speaking subject, under this new theoretical dispensation, is no longer considered to be the source or centre of meaning, being relegated instead to the status of vector of the linguistic conventions of a culture. Arbitrary Signs Saussure defines language as a system of signs, and defines a sign as the combination of a signifier (the mental representation of a sound ­pattern) and a signified (its signification). He also restates a fact that, as he acknowledges, ‘[n]o one disputes’: that is, that ‘linguistic signs are arbitrary’, that ‘[t]here is no natural or inevitable link between the signifier and the signified’, no reason (but convention) why ‘tree’ should be favoured over ‘jit’, or ‘horse’ over ‘grut’. 22 For all its uncontroversial ­familiarity, however, there is more to Saussure’s assertion than is often realized. Saussure’s point is not just that labels are arbitrary, but that they divide the world in arbitrary ways. Words, that is, are not labels ­affixed upon pre-existing entities; they create the entities they name: ‘Each ­language articulates and organizes the world differently. Languages do not simply name existing categories; they articulate their own.’23 In the absence of any ‘fixed universal concepts or fixed universal ­signifiers’, signs within each language system are ‘purely relational or differential entities’, defined only by their difference from all other signs within the same system: ‘The content of a word is determined in the final analysis not by what it contains but by what exists outside it.’24 ‘In the language itself’, writes Saussure, ‘there are only differences.’25 Signs have neither ‘natural basis’ nor ‘inherent limits’: ‘language itself is a form, not a substance.’26 This redefinition of the linguistic system as a realm of units whose value is wholly contingent and relational resonates

0 Saussure, Course, §30, 15. 2 21 Saussure, Course, §30, 16. 22 Saussure, Course, §100, 78. | Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, 29. 23 Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, 31. 24 Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, 33. | Saussure, Course, §160, 135. 25 Saussure, Course, §166, 140. 26 Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, 51. | Saussure, Course, §169, 143.

Literary Criticism as Science  253 with Darwin’s rejection of any essentialist understanding of the word ‘species’ and with Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the irrefragable metaphoricity of language in ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’. 27 Synchrony and Causation Saussure’s redescription of the linguistic system has consequences for causal explanation, which is a central objective of most academic endeavour and one usually involving the connection of events unfolding in chronological sequence. Excluding history and the individual subject, Saussurean linguistics depends on a different explanatory logic: ‘what is being offered is a structural rather than a causal explanation’. 28 In this scheme, individual utterances derive meaning from their relationship to the system out of which they arise. According to Culler, Saussurean linguistics’ drive to ‘specify the place and function of phenomena in a system’ amounts to an ‘internalizing of causation’. 29 Semiology Like Darwin, Saussure anticipated the extrapolation of his methodology to other domains of culture. As language is but one of many sign systems (Saussure names ‘the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, symbolic rites, forms of politeness, military signals’ as other examples), linguistics, he suggests, can be seen as one of the components of a larger science devoted to the study of ‘the role of signs as part of social life’: ‘We shall call it semiology (from the Greek sēmeîon, ‘sign’). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them.’30 As the Russian Formalists and the structuralists would subsequently come to argue, literature, too, being made of the same materials as ­language – words, phonemes, grammatical structures – begs for inclusion within the sphere of such a science. Roman Jakobson, for example, would assert in 1958 that ‘poetics may be regarded as an integral part of linguistics’.31 Tzvetan Todorov, in 1966, would chart some of the ways in which – in a quotation borrowed from Paul Valery – ‘Literature is, and 27 The term ‘species’, Darwin observes in the Origin, like the term ‘variety’, will soon be recognized for what it is: a designation ‘arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other’. When that moment comes, it will mark the end of ‘the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species’. – O, 43, 357. 28 Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, 88. 29 Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, 88. 30 Saussure, Course, §33, 18. 31 Roman Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’ [originally presented at a conference on style held at Indiana University in the spring of 1958], in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 350–77, 350.

254  Literary Criticism as Science can be nothing other than, a kind of extension and application of certain properties of Language.’32 Thus, literary criticism, like linguistics, should be regarded as contributing to the larger project of semiotics.33

Russian Formalism Russian Formalism is an umbrella term for a geographically scattered and heteroclite group of projects carried out in Moscow and St Petersburg over a period spanning the 1910s to the 1930s. The Formalists shared Saussure’s commitment to a scientific approach (his Course on General Linguistics having been introduced to the Soviet Union by Sergej Karcevskij in 1917).34 While Saussure lectured on language, the Formalists’ preoccupation was with literature. Their aim, ­according to Peter Steiner, was ‘to change the scholarly practice of their discipline’, expelling from it the metaphysical and humanist conceptions which had so far undermined its exactitude, and transforming it into an ­analytic practice dealing, like other sciences, with facts.35 Before the New C ­ ritics, and before Barthes and Foucault’s proclamation of ‘the death of the ­author’, the Formalists ‘assailed the view of literature as an ­emanation of the author’s soul, as a socio-historical document, or as a manifestation of a philosophical system’.36 The Russian Formalists – like many of the figures discussed in this genealogy – nurtured a dream of criticism as science. It is, as Culler points out, an aspiration which it is easy to understand: What critic does not in his moments dream of a scientifically ­rigorous way of characterizing the meaning of a text, of demonstrating with tools of proven appropriateness that certain meanings are possible and others impossible?37 The dream of such a science, galvanizingly brought into view by Saussurean linguistics, promised an escape from the idiosyncrasies of personal taste: an objective approach held the potential to ‘sweep away c­ enturies

32 Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Language and Literature’, in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 125–33, 125. 33 Todorov, ‘Language and Literature’, 126. 34 Michael Peters, ‘(Posts-) Modernism and Structuralism: Affinities and Theoretical Innovations’, Sociological Research Online, vol. 4, no. 3 (1999), www.socresonline. org.uk/4/3/peters.html, §3.4 [accessed 23 July 2019]. 35 Peter Steiner, ‘Russian Formalism’, in The Cambridge History of Literary ­C riticism: From Formalism to Poststructuralism, vol. 8 (of 9 vols), ed. Raman Selden ­(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11–30, 25. 36 Steiner, 11. 37 Culler, Structuralist Poetics.

Literary Criticism as Science  255 of muddled and impressionistic thinking’.38 As nineteenth-­century comparative philology had sought validation from natural ­science, and as evolutionary theory, reciprocally, had gained in ­plausibility from its ­affinities to philology, so twentieth-century scholars of ­literature glimpsed in the emulation of linguistics’ newly scientific footing the ­possibility of substantial disciplinary advances. Though united as to the need for the adoption of a scientific approach, the Formalists differed as to how this resolve might be realized in practice. ‘[I]n a seeming paradox’, notes Peter Steiner, they found themselves resorting to analogy in their endeavours to understand what defines literature: the proponents of a ‘pure science of literature’ indiscriminately ­borrowed their explanatory models from other disciplines and moulded their data according to a variety of pre-existent matrices.39 Amongst the analogical correspondences so explored – which saw the literary work cast as machine, system, organism, language – two ­models – the organic and the linguistic – played a predominant role in the Formalists’ dream of a scientific criticism. The Organic Model The organic analogy, when applied to a single work, was intended to reveal how it is ‘comprised of correlated parts integrated hierarchically’.40 When applied to literature in toto, the analogy conjures an integrated ecosystem which it is the critic’s task to taxonomize: Just as each individual organism shares certain features with other organisms of its type, and species that resemble each other belong to the same genus, the individual work is similar to other works of its form and homologous literary forms belong to the same genre.41 The best-known development of this biological analogy is to be found in Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, which was completed in 1928 but not translated into English until 1958. The aim, as Propp states in the Foreword, is to show that ‘it is possible to make an examination of the forms of the tale which will be as exact as the morphology

38 Attridge, ‘The Linguistic Model’, 77. 39 Steiner, 16. 40 Steiner, 20. 41 Steiner, 19.

256  Literary Criticism as Science of organic formations’.42 Amid ‘the labyrinth of the tale’s multiformity’, Propp proposes to discover the ‘rules’ governing ‘an amazing uniformity’.43 Literary studies, he observes, have so far lacked the ‘well-ordered classification’, ‘unified terminology’, and refined methodology central to ‘the physical and mathematical sciences’.44 Propp proposes to uncover the ‘morphological kinship’ between the types, genera, and varieties of tale.45 Although the scope of his Morphology is relatively narrow – ­focusing as it does on folk tales alone – Propp’s conclusion gestures towards a future in which the ‘total expanse’ of literature will have been charted.46 In keeping with the synchronic approach advocated for linguistics, Propp’s study disregards the folk tale’s evolution over time, deeming the ‘laws of origin and development’ which have led it to its present form to be irrelevant.47 For Propp, the establishment of a sound morphology is prerequisite to historical or ‘genetic’ research into ‘the origin of the tale’.48 This preference for a synchronic approach is signalled by Propp’s choice of Linnaeus – the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist and z­ oologist who inaugurated the systematic use of binomial n ­ omenclature – rather than Darwin, as the precursor to his approach in the field of biology.49 The Linguistic Model The linguistic model is primarily associated with Roman Jakobson, who played a central part in the establishment of both the Moscow Linguistic Circle and the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOIAZ) in St. Petersburg, and who held first, that linguistics provides an algorithm for exhaustive and ­unbiased description of a text and, second, that this algorithm of linguistic description constitutes a discovery procedure for poetic

42 V. Propp, Foreword, Morphology of the Folk-Tale, trans. Laurence Scott, 2nd and revd edn (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2009), xxvi. Propp defines ‘morphology’ by reference to botany: The word ‘morphology’ means the study of forms. In botany, the term ‘morphology’ means the study of the component parts of a plant, of their relationship to each other and to the whole – in other words, the study of a plant’s structure. – xxvi 43 Propp, xxvi. 4 4 Propp, 4. 45 Propp, 114–15, 25. 46 Propp, 116. 47 Propp, 15. 48 Propp, 13 and 15. 49 ‘[C]lassification is one of the first and most important steps of study’. ‘Our studies’, notes Propp, ‘are still in their “pre-Linnaen” stage’. – Propp, 11.

Literary Criticism as Science  257 patterns in that if followed correctly it will yield an account of the patterns which are objectively present in the text.50 This conception of literature as a field responsive to algorithmic analysis would prove instrumental to the birth of structuralism. But structuralism also defined itself in part against Formalism’s proudly trumpeted dedication to positivism. For Tzvetan Todorov, for example, Formalism’s much vaunted freedom from any overarching theory or restrictive ‘philosophical or methodological premise’ fostered a lack of critical self-scrutiny among its members concerning the means and ultimate purpose of their project. Hampered by their self-imposed narrowness of focus, the ­Formalists failed to draw any conclusions that might assist in the establishment of a general methodology for the human sciences.51

Structuralism: ‘Culture, in all its Aspects, Is a Language’52 Jakobson left the Soviet Union to settle in Czechoslovakia in 1920. In 1926, he set up the Prague Linguistic Circle. 53 According to Peters, the term ‘structuralism’ can be traced to a statement made by Jakobson in 1929: ‘Were we to comprise the leading idea of present-day science in its most various manifestations’, he then opined, ‘we could hardly find a more appropriate designation than structuralism’. 54 However, for Attridge, the ‘generative moment in the history of structuralism’ occurred in 1942, when Claude Lévi-Strauss, then Professor of Anthropology at the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York, and preparing to conduct a study of the language of central Brazil, attended lectures given by Jakobson in New York (the two of them then being colleagues at the same institution). 55 These lectures (published as Six Lectures) afforded Lévi-Strauss ‘the revelation of structural linguistics’, suggesting to him how the discipline’s insights might be applied to anthropology. 56 The stimulus led directly to the famous investigation of kinship patterns published in Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians (1948). 57 To Lévi-Strauss, the linguistic method seemed to promise the 50 Peters, §3.4. | Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 66. 51 Todorov, ‘Présentation’, in Théorie de la littérature, ed. and trans. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Collection Tel Quel’ (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965), 19. 52 Roland Barthes, ‘To Write: An Intransitive Verb’, 11–21, 13. 53 Peters, §3.4, §3.5. 54 Peters, §3.5. 55 Attridge, ‘The Linguistic Model’, 78. 56 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Preface to Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and ­Meaning [1976], trans. John Mepham (Hassocks: Sussex, 1978), xi. 57 Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara (Paris: ­Société des américanistes, 1948).

258  Literary Criticism as Science possibility that anthropology, ‘using a method analogous in form (if not in content) to the method used in structural linguistics’ might ‘achieve the same kind of progress’. 58 For Attridge, Lévi-Strauss’s emphasis on the idea of structure is the gesture which ‘opens the door to the spread of Saussurean principles beyond linguistics’. 59 And indeed when structuralism entered the province of literary theory, it came to be defined as ‘a methodological movement which specifically avows its direct link with linguistics’.60 It was this ‘methodological movement’ which, according to Culler, ‘unifie[d] the otherwise diverse projects of structuralists’.61 Born of the meeting between a Russian Formalist and a French anthropologist in New York, structuralism began its journey into the centre of French literary thought through ‘the application of a Lévi-Straussian notion of myth to contemporary culture’ in the writings of Roland Barthes.62 Roland Barthes and ‘the Constitution of a Unique Science of Culture’63 In 1957, Roland Barthes, ‘perhaps the most influential promoter of the linguistic model in the wider cultural field’, published Mythologies, a collection of occasional pieces (originally issued as stand-alone newspaper articles), followed by a longer theoretical essay entitled ‘Myth Today’.64 The book presents myth as a semiological system to be deciphered – as Claude Lévi-Strauss had begun to do in ‘The Structural Study of Myth’ (1955) – and does so by reference to a model adopted from linguistics.65 Although Barthes refers to a number of other linguists and theorists in the course of his closing discussion, the concept of ‘mythology’ is explicitly related to Saussure’s predictions concerning the emergence of a science of semiology. ‘[M]yth’, avers Barthes, ‘is a type of speech’ and as such ‘belongs to the province of a general science, coextensive with linguistics, which is semiology’: it is, he contends, ‘a second-order semiological system’.66

58 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology [1958], trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 34, qtd in Attridge, ‘The Linguistic Model’, 79. 59 Attridge, ‘The Linguistic Model’, 79. 60 Barthes, ‘Une problématique du sens’, Cahiers Média, vol. 1 (1967–8), 9–22, 10, qtd in Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 297. 61 Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 4. 62 Attridge, ‘The Linguistic Model’, 79. 63 Barthes, ‘To Write: An Intransitive Verb’, 13. 64 Attridge, ‘The Linguistic Model’, 79–80. 65 Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 68, no. 270, Myth: A Symposium (October–December 1955), 428–44. 66 Roland Barthes, Mythologies [1957], ed. and trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 2009), 131, 133, 137.

Literary Criticism as Science  259 Barthes subsequently extended this logic to narrative in general: his ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’ of 1966 recalls Propp in its interest in identifying ‘species’ of text and assessing their ‘conformities and departures’ from each other.67 Naming Aristotle, the Russian Formalists, Propp, and Lévi-Strauss as precursors, Barthes l­ikens the literary structuralist’s task to that of the linguist; where the latter seeks to master ‘the infinity of utterances’, the structuralist critic seeks to master ‘the infinity of narratives’.68 The adoption of the linguistic model in literary analysis ‘implies an identity between language and literature’.69 As Barthes notes in ‘From Science to Literature’ (1967), ‘itself resulting from a linguistic model, structuralism finds in literature, the work of language, an object much more than affinitary: homogeneous to itself’.70 Barthes’ promotion of the value of a structuralist analysis of narrative involves a syncretic array of references to recent and ongoing work; his exposition includes nods to Greimas’s ‘actantial typology’, Benveniste’s ‘theory of levels’, Lévi-Strauss’s ‘analysis of the structure of myth’, Todorov and the Russian Formalists’ distinction between ‘story’ and ‘discourse’; Propp and Bremond’s ‘functions’; and other contributions to the field by Tomachevski, Jakobson, and Bally, amongst others.71 The profusion of neologistic terminologies makes for dense and often disorienting reading: nuclei, catalysers, isotopies, functions, indices, sequences, horizontal and vertical axes, codes, stemmas, matrices, all jostle for position, with Barthes explicitly refusing to choose between contending jargons and ‘working hypotheses’.72 Barthes’ continued investment in the idea of a general science of ­culture is writ large in the talk he gave at a famous colloquium on ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’ held at Johns Hopkins University in October 1966. This time, the extrapolation of the linguistic model to culture in general is advocated as the foundation for what Barthes, in another neologism, calls ‘semio-criticism’ [‘sémio-critique’]: Culture increasingly appears to us as a general system of symbols, governed by the same operations: there is a unity in the symbolic field, and culture, in all its aspects, is a language. Hence, it is possible today to foresee the constitution of a unique science of culture.73 67 Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’ [1966], in Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, 79–124, 81. 68 Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’, 85. 69 Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’, 4. 70 Roland Barthes, ‘From Science to Literature’ [1967], 3–10, 5; first published in the Times Literary Supplement, subsequently trans. in Le Bruissement de la langue, ed. François Wahl (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984), 11–19. 71 Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’, 84, 86, 87, 92, ­99–100, 117–18. 72 Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’, 100 and 92n. 73 Barthes, ‘To Write: An Intransitive Verb’, 12–3.

260  Literary Criticism as Science This central structuralist tenet is, however, immediately followed by a qualification – namely, that the postulated ‘homology’ between the structures of sentences and literary works on the one hand, and language and literature on the other, ‘remains’, ‘for the moment’, ‘essentially metaphorical’.74 Nonetheless, though the correspondence may not turn out to be perfect, it might still – as Saussure himself conceded in connection with analogy – prove heuristically useful.75 A Shifting Target Just as Russian Formalism had found itself essaying various analogies in its bid for scientificity and struggling to apply them consistently, so structuralism found its target difficult to pin down. As Culler comments in response to Barthes’ ‘From Science to Literature’: there is a definite hesitation about which is the pertinent and fruitful analogy: is the individual literary work like a language or is literature as a whole like a language?76 Barthes himself uses the linguistic model in very different ways in ­Mythologies (1957) than he does in On Racine (1963), the study of an author’s entire corpus, The Fashion System (1967), a study of a sociological phenomenon, and S/Z (1970), a close reading of a single novella by Balzac.77 For Culler, this inconsistency reflects literary structuralism’s blindness to its own assumptions and ‘neglect of the basic problem of determining precisely what is to be explained’.78 ‘Both Barthes and LéviStrauss’, he remarks, ‘seem to formulate relations and patterns without ­sufficient consideration of their explanatory value, and for that reason neither offers a model of what structuralist analysis ought to be’.79 From Structuralism to Post-Structuralism and from Science to Literature Though the colloquium held at Johns Hopkins University on ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’ saw Barthes re-state his faith in the prospect of a general science of culture, the conference has retrospectively come to be regarded as a landmark in the history of literary theory – the moment when structuralism began to undergo its revision 74 Barthes, ‘To Write: An Intransitive Verb’, 13–14. 75 Barthes, ‘To Write: An Intransitive Verb’, 14. 76 Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 112–3. 77 Attridge makes a similar point in ‘The Linguistic Model’, 79–80. 78 Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 58. 79 Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 63.

Literary Criticism as Science  261 into post-structuralism. The responsibility for this incipient shift is widely attributed to Jacques Derrida and to the purport and ­repercussions of his talk on ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’.80 Far from espousing the then dominant view of ‘structure’ as the key to the understanding of any cultural system, Derrida’s address brought into question the Saussurean and Lévi-Straussean concepts which underpinned that belief, sowing the seeds of a sceptical reassessment which would soon, especially in America, become known as deconstruction.81 Derrida’s intervention reportedly ‘shocked’ an a­ udience which had expected to witness a confirmation of, rather than an attack on, the structuralist approach which had seemed primed for crowning.82 Published the following year, ‘From Science to Literature’ (1967) marks the beginning of a shift in Barthes’ conception of the s­ tructuralist project. Here, instead of promoting criticism’s adoption of scientific methods, Barthes suggests that as ‘writing’ (‘écriture’), criticism is inextricably intertwined with the object it aims to probe, and that it may, therefore, need to abandon the red herring of scientific truth.83 ­Criticism’s task, instead, is to confront science with its own ­irredeemably linguistic facture, to shatter ‘the theological image imposed by science’ so that science itself ‘will become literature’.84 Criticism, in turn, will come to be recognized as a source of ‘science’ as Wissenschaft (or systematic thought) and ­appreciated as a mode of knowledge no less valuable for being discursive.85 ­Structuralism’s

0 Tiphaine Samoyault, Roland Barthes: biographie (Paris: Seuil, 2015), 413–14. 8 81 According to David Lodge, Derrida’s paper at Johns Hopkins ‘marks the moment at which “post-structuralism” as a movement begins, opposing itself to classical structuralism as well as to traditional humanism and empiricism: the moment, as Derrida himself puts it, when “the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought”’. – David Lodge, Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 2nd edn, ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood (Harlow: Pearson, 2000), 88. 82 ‘Although the conference was the first to be explicitly devoted to structuralism in North America, Derrida set out the reasons for the necessity of its overcoming. By deconstructing certain assumptions in the work of Levi-Strauss and the Western essentialisms upon which linguistics was founded and which structuralism had adopted without question (especially the fundamentally theological nature of the ‘sign’), he appeared to North American academics (notably Paul de Man and Hillis Miller, who would rapidly radicalize the process under the name of deconstruction) as a critic of structuralism.’ – Samoyault, Roland Barthes, 413–4. 83 Barthes, ‘From Science to Literature’, 6. 84 Barthes, ‘From Science to Literature’, 9–10. 85 Culler explains that structuralism ‘set itself up for a fall in adopting in its programmatic statements the goal of a science [….] so that critiques of the possibility of a real science of literary and cultural matters seemed to discredit structuralism’. But the kinds of dismissal of structural poetics which seemed to some to follow from the abrogation of a dream of scientific study depended, Culler contends, upon a misunderstanding […] because science in French (like the German Wissenschaft) means systematic thought, not, as in English, an empirical and experimental

262  Literary Criticism as Science superiority, in this new reciprocal disposition of the ‘two cultures’, will stem from its (Nietzschean) lucidity about the delusions involved in the pursuit of truth. The Demise of a Dream If such a change of tack retrospectively places Barthes on the cusp of a dawning post-structuralism, subsequent statements are more forthright in their abrogation of what had, for a decade or so, been ‘a euphoric dream of scientificity’.86 Whatever the ultimate failure of a ‘dream’ mired by its own versatility and concomitant inconsistency of application, the linguistic model derived from Saussure constitutes an important and chronologically immediate context to the birth of ‘intertextuality’, a term coined at the temporal hinge between the two movements. ­Saussure’s depiction of language as a ‘system of purely differential relations’ and a ‘network without a fixed limit or centre’ within which ‘every change has a repercussion on the system’ clearly lays the foundation for Kristeva’s linguistically informed descriptions both of literary texts and of the textual universe in its fullest extension.87 Intertextuality, when it makes its appearance in her essays of 1966 and 1967, bears the traces of the structuralist matrix out of which it emerges. Indeed, Kristeva’s writing manifests the same problematic syncretism of approach, the same clash of contending terminologies, the same simultaneous investment in, and ambivalence about, the possibility of a science of literary criticism. It is a notion on the threshold, a theory of the in-betweenness of all texts which is itself a product of intersecting theoretical currents. Enter, as a further catalyst in this story of tussling, interrelated ­theories, Mikhail Bakhtin, whose writings play a crucial role in the ­genesis of Kristeva’s coinage.

enterprise, and British and American skepticism about a science of literature (the phrase still seems an oxymoron) relied on the current English sense of science. – Structuralist Poetics, viii–ix 86 Barthes, ‘Réponses’, 97, qtd in Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 44. 87 Attridge, ‘The Linguistic Model’, 67, 72, 100.

5 Bakhtin ‘The Word in Language Is Half Someone Else’s’1

From the Shadows to the Limelight: Praise and Confusion in the Bakhtinian Renaissance Bakhtin is difficult to situate in the annals of twentieth-century literary theory. The ample span of his career, the foreignness of the political and cultural backdrop against which he worked, the delays in the publication and translation of his works into languages other than the original ­Russian, the enduring uncertainty surrounding his possible authorship of texts initially published under the names of other members of his ­‘Circle’, conspire to make his contribution and its significance hard to place.2 The keynotes of Bakhtin’s life (about which relatively little is known) appear to have been intellectual work, dire illness (bone disease led to the

1 ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 259–422, 293. 2 Gary Morson and Caryl Emerson give a detailed account of the controversies ­surrounding Bakhtin’s alleged authorship of three ‘disputed’ books which originally appeared under the names of members of his Circle in Prosaics, 101–19. The three books in question are Voloshinov’s Freudianism: A Critical Sketch (1927) and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), and Pavel Medvedev’s The Formal Method in Li­ terary Scholarship (1928). Morson and Emerson convincingly rebut the arguments – especially those influentially mounted by Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist in their hagiographical biography, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1984) – according to which these texts should be ascribed to Bakhtin. They do, however, emphatically espouse the view that ‘Bakhtin’s ideas exercised a profound influence on his friends’ books’ – a position which, as they state, ‘no one contests’. Voloshinov’s and Medvedev’s ‘excellent books’, they conclude, were written ‘using Bakhtin’s ideas’, ‘but they are not Bakhtin’s.’ – Prosaics, 102, 104, 118. This chapter is written in alignment with this position. However, to foreground Bakhtin’s role in the making of the ‘disputed texts’ I have referred to their authors as Voloshinov/Bakhtin and Medvedev/Bakhtin. In this, I follow the practice adopted on the cover of the English translation of The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics (trans. Albert J. Wehrle ­(Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)) – though this gives ­Bakhtin’s name first on the cover and title page – as well as many anthologies and works of critical commentary, such as, for example, The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, ed. Pam Morris (London: Edward Arnold, 1994).

264 Bakhtin amputation of a leg in 1938), and oppression at the hands of the Soviet Union.3 For decades, political turmoil made Bakhtin’s existence one of enforced obscurity. From the 1960s, however, Bakhtin’s near-­anonymity as an academic teaching at the University of Saransk in Mordovia was gradually superseded by the rewards of growing local, national, and international acclaim. This journey from the shadows to the limelight continued after Bakhtin’s death in 1975, as the progressive discovery of his works led to considerable excitement and indeed ‘virtual adulation’ in some quarters of the literary academy.4 Born in 1895, Bakhtin grew up in Vilnius and Odessa, cosmopolitan cities lying near the borders of the Russian Empire. When he moved to Petrograd to study classics and philology in 1913, his arrival c­ oincided with a period of animated literary-critical debate: in ‘the very year ­Bakhtin came to the city’, notes Michael Holquist, ‘Shklovsky published the article that was to be the first salvo in the battles that raged around the Formalists’.5 Having returned, in the spring of 1918, to the outer provinces of what was by then the Soviet Union, Bakhtin and some of his university friends resumed their habit of meeting for literary and ­philosophical discussions.6 It was amid a generalized ‘atmosphere of immense intellectual and political intensity’ that these young people – later to become known as the ‘Bakhtin Circle’ – embarked upon the first of many ‘magnificent philosophical nights of strong tea and talk until morning’ (as one member recalled).7

3 Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA, and ­L ondon: Harvard University Press, 1984). 4 Karine Zbinden, Bakhtin between East and West: Cross-Cultural Transmission ­(London: Legenda, 2006), 11. 5 Prosaics, xiii. | Michael Holquist, Introduction to DI, xxii. Clark and Holquist spell out this context more fully in their book-length study of Bakhtin: Most of the leading Formalists from Petrograd, such as Tyanyanov, Eikhenbaum, Shklovsky, Polivanov, and Yakubinsky, were either studying or teaching at the university while Bakhtin was there. Formalism had come into existence more or less on the eve of Bakhtin’s arrival at the university, at an avant-garde cabaret in December 1913 when Shklovsky read a paper arguing that Futurist poetry, by calling attention to the sounds of words, had emancipated words from their traditional significance and made it possible to perceive them afresh. The function of art in general should be to force such new perceptions of the word and the world. In 1914 Shklovsky published this paper under the title Resurrection of the Word. His work excited the Futurists, whom he joined, and also some graduate students in linguistics. – Clark and Holquist, 28–9 6 Clark and Holquist note that Bakhtin, like many intellectuals, ‘fled Moscow and Petrograd to the provinces, where supplies were better and dangers fewer’. – 37. 7 Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, 2nd edn (Routledge: ­L ondon and New York, 2002), 2. | Clark and Holquist, 55. For details of the history of this circle of friends, see Clark and Holquist, 38–55.

Bakhtin  265 Even at such a distance from the country’s centres of power and the chaos of the unfolding revolution, life was not free from political surveillance. The risk of such zealous intrusions considerably increased when Bakhtin returned to Leningrad (as Petrograd had been recently renamed in commemoration of Lenin’s death) in the spring of 1924. As Morson and Emerson remark, ‘[i]n the mass raids on intellectuals in the early Stalinist years, almost any political eccentricity could serve as a pretext’, and Bakhtin, in Holquist’s assessment, was a ‘supreme eccentric’.8 1929, the very year in which he published his ‘masterwork’, ‘the magisterial Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Art’, was also the year of his ­arrest for alleged ‘activity in the underground Russian Orthodox Church’. Bakhtin was condemned to ten years on the Solovestky Islands death camp; appeals to friends in high places and for extenuation on grounds of ill-health led to a commuted sentence of six years’ internal exile in ­Kazakhstan.9 It was during this period of banishment that Bakhtin would write the essays on discourse and the novel – published in Russian in the late 1960s and 1970s, collected in 1975, and partially translated into English as The Dialogic Imagination in 1981 – on which much of his reputation in the West has come to rest.10 It was also in Kazakhstan that Bakhtin began work on the doctoral thesis which would, after decades of postponement and controversy, finally be published as Rabelais and his World in 1965. By that time, a revised version of the Dostoevsky book had appeared as Problems of Dostoevky’s Poetics (1963). The ‘surge of enthusiasm’ for Bakhtin and his works had begun.11 Bakhtin was first introduced to a Western readership in the mid-1960s by Roman Jakobson, Tzvetan Todorov, and Julia Kristeva, the latter two both being Russian-speaking Bulgarian émigrés living in Paris and moving

8 Holquist, Introduction to DI, xvi. 9 Prosaics, xiv. 10 The four essays published in DI originally appeared in a Russian collection ­comprising six of Bakhtin’s essays: Voprosy literatury i estetiki: Issledovaniia ­raznykh let (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1975). 11 David Shepherd, ‘“Communicating with Other Worlds”: Contrasting Views of ­Carnival in Recent and Russian and Western Work on Bakhtin’, in BW, 143–60, 143. As Michael Holquist points out, recent research has brought into question many of what were previously regarded as the ‘facts’ of Bakhtin’s life and work. Not only has it emerged that ‘whole pages of the Rabelais book (…) are copied word for word from Ernst Cassirer’, but Examination of Bakhtin’s personal papers further obscures the outline of what many had assumed was Bakhtin’s biography: it is not clear precisely on what day he was born, what the true circumstances of his family actually were, or even whether he actually ever received a degree, as he claimed, from Petersburg U ­ niversity. And the more memoirs have emerged from people who know Bakhtin, the harder it has become to see a face beneath the many masks that are claimed for him. – Holquist, Dialogism, 188

266 Bakhtin in structuralist academic circles.12 Jakobson mentioned the name in passing in his foreword to Théorie de la ­littérature, a ­collection of Russian Formalist criticism edited and translated by Todorov.13 Todorov made a similarly cursory reference to Bakhtin in his talk at the epoch-making conference on ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’ which took place at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in October 1966.14 Kristeva’s more extensive discussion of Bakhtin in the second half of the 1960s is considered in detail in Chapter 6. Though the tenor of these initial presentations was certainly positive, ‘the astonishing success of Bakhtin from the 1980s onward’ seems mainly to have been catalysed by Bakhtin’s death in 1975, and the subsequent appearance of some of his texts in European languages.15 In a book-length study devoted to the notion of dialogism published in 1981, Todorov hailed Bakhtin as ‘the most important Soviet thinker in the realm of the human sciences, and the greatest literary theorist of the twentieth century’.16 In the same year, Michael Holquist, praising Bakhtin’s ‘preternatural erudition’, likewise wrote of his gradual emergence as ‘one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century’.17 The ‘Bakhtin boom’ was underway.18

12 Michael Holquist, a speaker of Russian not dependent on such intermediaries, ­remembers becoming aware of Bakhtin somewhat earlier: I first heard his name pronounced in a smoky basement room of the Hall of Graduate Studies at Yale in 1963. […] Roman Jakobson, on a visit from Cambridge, mentioned Bakhtin’s name as one of the few intelligent critics of Formalism. – Dialogism, 183 13 Jakobson, ‘Vers une Science de l’art poétique’, in Théorie de la littérature, ed. and trans. Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965), 9–13, 11. 14 The proceedings of the conference, which took place at the Johns Hopkins ­Humanities Center between 18 and 21 October 1966, are published in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970). Todorov’s talk, entitled ‘Language and Literature’, forces Bakhtin’s ideas into a quintessentially structuralist conceptual grid, perhaps under the influence of his attendance at Barthes’ seminar on rhetoric at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE). – The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, 125–33, 128. | For other mentions of this colloquium, see Chapter 4, pp. 259–61 and Chapter 6, p. 323. 15 Zbinden, 3. | For details of these translations, see The Annotated Bakhtin ­Bibliography, ed. Carol Adlam and David Shepherd (Leeds: Maney for the Modern Humanities Research Association, 2000) and BW. For analysis of the consequences of the multitudinous and differing translations made of Bakhtin’s works, as well for reflections on Bakhtin’s ‘implicit theory of translation’, see Karine Zbinden, ‘The Bakhtin Circle and Translation’, The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, ‘Translation’ (2006), 157–67, 166, and Karine Zbinden, Bakhtin Between East and West: Cross-Cultural Transmission. 16 Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhaïl Bakhtine: le principe dialogique suivi de: Écrits du Cercle de Bakhtine (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981), 7. 17 Holquist, Introduction to DI, xvii, xv. 18 Shepherd, 144.

Bakhtin  267 The cultish element in this blossoming popularity was identified even as it grew. In 1983, Paul de Man tactfully evoked without impugning ‘the blindness that is part of any dedication and of the admiration it inspires’. Bakhtin, he ventures, is one of those ‘heroes’ that ‘[l]iterary theory, and especially theory of narrative’ ‘rather desperately needs’, standing out as it does as ‘a rather barren area of endeavour’. ­Granting that the high regard recently expressed by Todorov and Holquist is ­‘entirely justified’, de Man nonetheless intimates a certain curiosity as to the deeper causes of Bakhtin’s appeal to ‘theoreticians of very diverse persuasion’.19 ­David Lodge, writing three years later, was more forthright both in his appreciation and in his identification of shortcomings within the still emerging Bakhtinian corpus. While lauding Bakhtin’s ‘extraordinarily original work’, and sympathetically confessing his own susceptibility to the ‘temptation to ­regard Bakhtin as some kind of prophet providentially sent to deliver us from our critical discontents’, Lodge noted ‘the growth of a somewhat uncritical cult around his name’, and counselled in favour of a measured approach fully cognizant of ‘the problems, contradictions and loose ends in Bakhtin’s thought’. 20 The confusion resulting from such contradictions and loose ends was considerably exacerbated by the unusual circumstances attendant upon any encounter with Bakhtin in these years. The relatively sudden arrival, more or less in bulk, of the oeuvre of a lifetime, made the sequence and mutual relations of positions expressed over the span of nearly sixty years difficult to discern: ‘[r]evisions of earlier work, genuinely new insights, and lapsed, outmoded concepts were assimilated and translated in any order’.21 In the chronological flattening so produced, salient contexts and traces of evolution were erased, ‘imparting a sort of synchronic patina to his legacy’. 22 This state of affairs was compounded by the West’s reliance on translations which were ‘both piecemeal and non-chronological’ even when they were not simply inaccurate.23 Todorov’s stated aim at the beginning of Mikhaïl Bakhtine: le principe dialogique – ‘simply to make Bakhtin legible in French’ – was motivated in part by the weakness of existing translations. 24 Moreover, the sheer number of different ­translations 19 Paul de Man, ‘Dialogue and Dialogism’, Poetics Today, vol. 4, no. 1 (1983), 99–107, 99–100. 20 David Lodge, ‘After Bakhtin’, in After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and ­C riticism (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 87–99, 88–9. Like Lodge, David ­Shepherd cautions against ‘the temptation to transform Bakhtin himself into a ­saviour-like figure.’ – Shepherd, 154. 21 Prosaics, 96. 22 Prosaics, 96. 23 Ruth Ginsburg, ‘Bakhtin Criticism in Israel: A Short Story of Non-Reception’, BW, 179–88, 180. 24 Todorov, Mikhaïl Bakhtine, 13, 11.

268 Bakhtin required to make Bakhtin accessible to the many-languaged ‘West’ produced its own problems: the more Bakhtin’s reception broadened and gained momentum, the more splintered it became. Bakhtin, as Malcolm Jones observes, ‘exists in a polyglot and heteroglot world’, and scattered international efforts rapidly engendered not one but many different Bakhtins (or ‘Bakhtins’, as cautious commentators sometimes choose to frame these proliferating interpretations): In various cultures, translators and reviewers have imposed ­radically different grids upon him. He has been described as structuralist and post-structuralist, Marxist and post-Marxist, speech act t­ heorist, sociolinguist, liberal, pluralist, mystic, vitalist, Christian, and materialist.25 If such centrifugal dispersion has continued to characterize the ‘­scholarly explosion’ associated with the name of Bakhtin, centripetal forces within the ‘torrents of learned commentary’ have also, conversely, contrived to reduce his thought to a catalogue of modish commonplaces: Polyphony, the double-voiced word, carnival and carnivalization, the chronotope, heteroglossia, metalinguistics, the surplus, the loophole, and a host of others now circulate in sometimes creative, sometimes merely curious, and at other times flatly mechanical paraphrases and applications. 26 Insofar as both the irreconcilably various labels and the misleading rush of clichés are the side effects of dissemination and coexist with more probing exegeses, such listings need not in and of themselves be cause for scepticism. After all, it would be difficult to name a field of knowledge which has not developed its own particular jargon, and neologisms are as much a feature of disciplinary advances as they are of pedantic scholarly affectations. Moreover, although Bakhtin’s work has proven ‘assimilable by a number of different – and mutually opposed – critical ideologies’, the fact stands as testimony to his writings’ rich suggestiveness. 27 ‘Bakhtin’s thought’, as Lodge notes, ‘is so many-sided and fertile that he is inevitably open to colonization by others.’28 And as Morson and Emerson remark, ‘Any thinker with original and challenging views 25 Malcolm V. Jones, review of Le Bulletin Bakhtine, vol. 5 (1996), Special Issue: ‘Bakhtin Around the World’, The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 75, no. 4 (October 1997), 719–21, 720. | For examples of such cautious approaches, see Peter Hitchcock (ed.), ‘Bakhtin/“Bakhtin”: Studies in the Archive and Beyond’, Special Issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 97, no. 3/4 (1998); Anthony Wall, ‘On the Look-Out for Bachtin in German’, BW, 117–41, 118; Ginsburg, 180. | Prosaics, 4. 26 Holquist, Dialogism, 185, 184. | Prosaics, 10. 27 Lodge, 88. 28 Lodge, 89.

Bakhtin  269 is subject to degrees of misunderstanding, superficial readings, and careless appropriations of terminology.’29 As further consolation for those who understandably lament the egregious ‘trivialization of his ideas’, there are strong grounds for thinking that Bakhtin would have regarded his works’ reception with serenity.30 Like Nietzsche, Bakhtin seems to have considered a work’s capacity to arouse interpretative energies as a sign of its power (or, as Nietzsche would put it, its health). In 1970 – that is, at a time when his reputation was already soaring – Bakhtin wrote of the new meanings works acquire as time releases them from ‘enclosure within the epoch’ of their conception: ‘In the process of their posthumous life they are enriched with new meanings, new significance: it is as though these works outgrow what they were in the epoch of their creation.’31 In fact, Bakhtin goes so far as to describe interpretation as an act of liberation: ‘The author is a captive of his epoch, of his own ­present. ­Subsequent times liberate him from this captivity, and literary ­scholarship is called upon to assist this liberation.’32 Although Bakhtin’s chosen example  – Shakespeare’s ‘immense treasures of potential meaning’ – is quintessentially literary, it is clear from other statements that his valuation of interpretation, like Nietzsche’s, extends to all aspects of cultural life involving meaning, even to entire cultures: ‘In each culture of the past lie immense semantic possibilities that have remained undisclosed, unrecognized, and unutilized throughout the entire historical life of a given culture.’33 This commitment to interpretative openness is encapsulated in ­Bakhtin’s notion of ‘unfinalizability’ or ‘unfinishedness’, which according to Morson and Emerson ‘designates a complex of values central to his thinking: innovation, “surprisingness”, the genuinely new, openness, potentiality, freedom, and creativity.’34 Much of the frustration experienced by Bakhtin’s most sophisticated advocates arises from the jarring mismatch between Bakhtin’s own ‘­distrust of final answers’ and his appropriation in support of precisely such systematic schools of thought.35

29 Prosaics, 116. 30 Prosaics, 117. Morson and Emerson deplore the fact that ‘large numbers of readers’ still labour under misapprehensions – representations of ‘Bakhtin as a Marxist or a semiotician’, for example – that have endured as a result of the long-lasting ‘disputed texts’ controversy. – Prosaics, 116. For a discussion of the related matter of the ‘disputed texts’, see note 2 to this chapter. 31 M.M. Bakhtin, ‘Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff’, in SG, 1–9, 4. For who has read Nietzsche, Bakhtin’s statement resonates strongly with the philosopher’s assertion that ‘Some people are born posthumously.’ – EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, §1, 100. 32 ‘Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff’, SG, 5. 33 ‘Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff’, SG, 5, 6. 34 Prosaics, 36–7. 35 Prosaics, 94.

270 Bakhtin How then, amid so dense a web of contexts, mediations, and misprisions, and in the face of Bakhtin’s own belief in the promise of the ‘posthumous life’ of texts, to place him in the genealogy of intertextuality?36 This chapter will set out those of Bakhtin’s pronouncements which have direct bearing on the notion of intertextuality as Kristeva was to coin it, in association with his name, in 1966. In order to bring out what changes are involved in this act of cultural translation, it will situate his ideas within their formative context, highlighting their connections to Saussurean linguistics, Russian Formalism, and structuralism. The next section, focusing primarily but not exclusively on Kristeva and Todorov, will analyse the appropriations and distortions by which Bakhtin was sprung from ‘enclosure within [his] epoch’ and his theories transformed and injected into French literary thought.

Intertextuality Avant la Lettre: Bakhtin’s Theories of Language and Literature Against Saussurean Linguistics Bakhtin’s concept of unfinalizability is emblematic of his antipathy to the kind of epistemological closure upon which systematic modes of thinking (whether in the cultural or the scientific realm) rely. This lifelong hos­tility to over-systematic thinking crystallized in the rejection of the artificial boundedness posited by Saussure in his call for the study of language (langue) ‘as a structured system’.37 In Marxism and the ­Philosophy of Language (one of the ‘disputed texts’ originally ­published under Volo­ shinov’s name in 1929), Voloshinov/Bakhtin mount a s­ ustained critique of modern linguistics in general and Saussurean linguistics in particular. Granting Saussure’s ‘fundamental importance’ and acknowledging the ‘amazing clarity and precision’ of his treatment of linguistic ideas, they nonetheless expose a number of questionable methodological choices.38 It was primarily to the ‘abstract objectivism’ of Saussure’s postulation of language as a system in which all acts of parole are regarded as mere instantiations of a notional superstructure that Voloshinov/Bakhtin were opposed.39 In their view, the ambition to analyse language scientifically

36 ‘Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff’, SG, 4. 37 Saussure, Course, §31, 16. 38 V.N. Vološinov [Voloshinov/Bakhtin], Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Tutunik (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1973), 58; see note 2 of this chapter. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin refers to modern linguistics’ identification of language (i.e. langue) as its ‘specific object’ as ‘a completely legitimate and necessary a­ bstraction’. – PDP, 181. 39 Voloshinov/Bakhtin, Marxism, 48.

Bakhtin  271 formed part of a Leibnizian tradition of rationalist thinking intent on the translation of language into logical, even algebraic, relations: The idea of the conventionality, the arbitrariness of language, is a typical one for rationalism as a whole, and no less typical is the comparison of language to the system of mathematical signs. What interests mathe­ matically minded rationalists is not the relationship of the sign to the actual reality it reflects nor the individual who is its originator, but the relationship of sign to sign within a closed system already accepted and authorized. In other words, they are interested only in the inner logic of the system of signs itself, taken, as in algebra, completely independently of the ideological meanings that give the signs their content.40 Evacuating referential content from the realm of its concerns, m ­ odern linguistics, according to Voloshinov/Bakhtin, pursues a systematic ­understanding of language at the cost of any sense of its place in ­communicative exchanges, and, by extension, in the wider, concrete, historical, ‘ideological’ life of culture. Linguistics thus represents an obvious instance of the limitations of systematicity: ‘the problem with system’ in general, in Morson and Emerson’ words, is that it does not necessarily contain any human beings’.41 As well as forming part of a rationalist dream of language-as-­ mathematics, the abstraction of linguistics is the product of the ­discipline’s roots in philology. As Voloshinov/Bakhtin point out, European linguistic thought formed and matured over concern with the cadavers of written languages; almost all its basic categories, basic approaches and techniques were worked out in the process of reviving these cadavers.42 Voloshinov/Bakhtin, by contrast, call for attention to language as a ‘­living social process’.43 Even when living speakers are permitted to feature in linguistic theories, notes Bakhtin in ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, a much later essay written in 1952–53, it is still typical to underestimate, if not altogether ignore, the c­ ommunicative function of language. Language is regarded from the speaker’s standpoint as if there were only one speaker who does not have any necessary relation to other participants in speech communication.44

40 Voloshinov/Bakhtin, Marxism, 57–8. 41 Prosaics, 70. 42 Voloshinov/Bakhtin, Marxism, 71. 43 Voloshinov/Bakhtin, Marxism, 105. 44 M.M. Bakhtin, ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, SG, 60–102, 67.

272 Bakhtin

Figure 5.1  Saussure’s Diagram of the ‘Speech Circuit’. Source: Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, ed. Charles Bally et ­A lbert Sechehaye with Albert Reidlinger (Paris: Payot, 1916), 28.

Modern diagrammatic representations of speech, ‘even serious ones like Saussure’s’, represent an active speaker and a passive listener as though such models exhausted the reality of language use.45 Such pictures, emphasizes Bakhtin, are accurate only in their own extremely limited terms: ‘when they are put forth as the actual whole of speech communication, they become a scientific fiction’.46 The ‘great complexity’ of speech communication is lost in such pictures, ‘its essential aspects’ – parole and history – silently excised.47 Language as Discourse For Voloshinov/Bakhtin, Saussure’s founding assumption – that parole as ‘a heterogeneous composite’ ‘lack[ing] inner unity and validity as an autonomous entity’ had to be excluded – was the first of a n ­ umber of steps by which the discipline sabotaged the fulfilment of its own ­ambition to understand language.48 Bakhtin’s statements regarding the central importance of speech were driven in part by his belief in the need for science to accommodate unrepeatable events; but they were also, and crucially, driven by his conviction that ‘the act of speaking’ is ‘the most privileged human act’.49

45 ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, SG, 68. 46 ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, SG, 68. 47 ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, SG, 70. Saussure, in his defence, was perfectly explicit in his decision to exclude parole from linguistics, and fully acknowledged its importance as an object of study in phonetics and psychology. Likewise, his analysis of the ‘speech circuit’ ‘makes no claim to be complete’. – Saussure, Course, §28, 14. 48 Voloshinov/Bakhtin, Marxism, 59. 49 Prosaics, 65.

Bakhtin  273 THE UTTERANCE

For Bakhtin, one important consequence of the occlusion of parole in Saussurean and post-Saussurean linguistics is its inability to seize what is most significant about acts of verbal communication. This ­failure is writ large in linguistics’ division of language into abstract units. ­Human beings, contends Bakhtin, do not speak in sentences, words, and ­phonemes.50 Linguistic parsings of this kind, therefore, cannot shed light on real acts of speech: the sort of relations that exist among rejoinders of dialogue – ­relations between question and answer, assertion and objection, assertion and agreement, suggestion and acceptance, order and execution, and so forth – are impossible among units of language (words and sentences).51 For this reason, Bakhtin emphasizes the distinction between ‘the ­sentence as a unit of language’ and ‘the utterance as a unit of speech communication’. 52 While the construction of sentences abides by general rules (thus seemingly lending itself to formalization and reproducibility), utterances are ineluctably individual: ‘Sentences are repeatable. […] But each utterance is by its very nature unrepeatable. […] Context is never the same. […] Each is unique’. 53 Identical words of greeting, congratulation, and enquiry, will, for e­ xample, be uttered countless times a day. The sentences used in each case will be indistinguishable from each other, but no single u ­ tterance will be the same as any other. Each will be imbued with valences ­contingent upon context – the speaker’s and listener’s positions in time and place, their relationship to each other, upon intonation, even upon such physiological facts as the state of the speaker’s vocal chords. Bakhtin places the utterance at the heart of his own approach to ­language and literature. Utterances, apprehended together, are the stuff of what he calls ‘the word’ (or slovo). This term, as Bakhtin uses it, has a wide referential ambit, at times denoting an individual act of parole, at others denoting a mode of discourse (whether of a ­person, a ­community, a nation, an author, a genre). What matters most about this nebulous Bakhtinian ‘word’ is that it exceeds what linguistics ­understands by a ‘word’. For Bakhtin, slovo refers to more than such parts of speech as nouns, verbs, prepositions, articles, or adjectives. In Problems of ­Dostoevsky’s Poetics, he explains that his concern, in a­ nalysing Dostoevksy’s works, is not with ‘language as the specific object of linguistics’,

50 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 85. 51 ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, SG, 72. 52 ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, SG, 73. 53 Prosaics, 126.

274 Bakhtin but with ‘discourse, that is, language in its concrete living totality’. In other words, his primary interest is in ‘precisely those aspects in the life of the word that linguistics makes abstract’. 54 Whilst conceding that linguistics has its uses, Bakhtin suggests that his own readings form part of a wider disciplinary field. The analyses which ­constitute his response to Dostoevsky’s novels are not linguistic in the strict sense of the term. They belong rather to metalinguistics, if we understand by that term the study of those aspects in the life of the word, not yet shaped into separate and specific disciplines, that exceed – and completely legitimately – the boundaries of linguistics. Of course, metalinguistic research cannot ignore linguistics and must make use of its results. Linguistics and metalinguistics study one and the same concrete, highly complex, and multi-faceted phenomenon, namely, the word – but they study it from various sides and various points of view. They must complement one another, but they must not be confused.55 DIALOGISM

Bakhtin’s emphasis on language as embodied and performed in the act of utterance – in voices – explains and subtends his notion of dialogism. For Bakhtin, dialogue does not merely designate a series of utterances between speakers. Dialogue is inherent in all language use, whether ­spoken or written: every utterance is shaped from within by the context of its emergence. This context, as well as including the circumstances of the present moment, also comprises the past (individual and shared) of both parties involved, and the future – specifically, the future as it will materialize in the listener’s rejoinder. For Bakhtin, a speaker’s words, syntax, intonation, and accompanying gestures are all shaped, in the very instant of their materialization, by expectations regarding the ­addressee’s reaction. Thus, the dialogue which is ongoing between two parties is reflected in the internal makeup of their individual utterances. Bakhtin gives the example of ‘internally polemical discourse’ – words laced with irony, acid remarks which anticipate an aggressive repartee: Internally polemical discourse – the word with a sideward glance at someone else’s hostile word – is extremely widespread in practical everyday speech as well as in literary speech, and has enormous style-shaping significance. Here belong, in everyday speech, all words that ‘make digs at others’ and all ‘barbed’ words. But here also belongs all self-deprecating overblown speech that repudiates 54 PDP, 181. 55 PDP, 181.

Bakhtin  275 itself in advance, speech with a thousand reservations, concessions, loopholes, and the like. Such speech literally cringes in the presence or the anticipation of someone else’s word, reply, objection. The individual manner in which a person structures his own speech is determined to a significant degree by his peculiar awareness of another’s words, and by his means for reacting to them.56 In this scheme, the listener – so passive in Saussurean and J­ akobsonian diagrams of linguistic communication – becomes as active as the speaker: ‘[a]ny understanding of live speech, a live utterance, is inherently responsive’.57 In consequence, utterances can only in the most superficial sense be said to be ‘by’ their speakers: in reality, utterances are always ‘half someone else’s’.58 In turn, this conception of speech as involving co-ownership, intersecting responsibilities, overlapping agencies, and shared origins, has repercussions for Bakhtin’s ideas of authorship and subjecthood. Dialogue or dialogism, like discourse, falls outwith the scope of linguistics: ‘Dialogical relationships’ – the ways in which words bear meanings far exceeding their dictionary definitions – ‘are extralinguistic’, notes Bakhtin.59 But by ignoring the dialogic resonances utterances accrue from their situatedness in time and place, linguistics renders itself blind to what is ‘the entire life of language’: Language lives only in the dialogic interaction of those who make use of it. Dialogic interaction is indeed the authentic sphere where language lives. The entire life of language, in any area of its use (in everyday life, in business, scholarship, art, and so forth), is permeated with dialogic relationships. […] These relationships lie in the realm of discourse, for discourse is by its very nature dialogic; they must therefore be studied by metalinguistics, which exceeds the limits of linguistics and has its own independent subject matter and tasks.60 Amid pages which render the notions of ‘word’, ‘dialogue’, and ‘discourse’ inextricable (indeed near-interchangeable), Bakhtin sketches out a view of language bearing a striking likeness to Kristeva’s later theory of intertextuality: the word is not a material thing but rather the eternally mobile, eternally fickle medium of dialogic interaction. It never gravitates 56 PDP, 196. 57 ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, SG, 68. 58 ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 293. 59 PDP, 183. 60 PDP, 183.

276 Bakhtin toward a single consciousness or a single voice. The life of the word is contained in its transfer from one mouth to another, from one context to another, from one social collective to another, from one generation to another generation. In this process, the word does not forget its own path and cannot completely free itself from the power of these concrete contexts into which it has entered.61 This dialogic view of communication is writ large, according to B ­ akhtin, in the novels of Dostoevsky. In these works, the reality of dialogue’s all-pervasiveness in language and in life in general is exquisitely captured. Dostoevsky, claims Bakhtin, ‘could hear dialogic relationships every­where, in all manifestations of conscious and intelligent human life’. His novels reveal him to be exceptionally attuned to the fact that dialogic relationships are a much broader phenomenon than mere rejoinders in a dialogue, laid out compositionally in the text; they are an almost universal phenomenon, permeating all human speech and all relationships and manifestations of human life – in general, everything that has meaning and significance.62 Dostoevsky’s novels, states Bakhtin, are saturated with dialogue: ‘Dialogic relationships exist among all elements of novelistic structure; that is, they are juxtaposed contrapuntally.’ His texts as a whole are structured as a ‘great dialogue’. Not only are spoken exchanges perfectly rendered as a series of internally dialogized rejoinders, but every word is the site of a ‘microdialogue’: ‘dialogue penetrates within, into every word of the novel, making it double-voiced’.63 ‘The element of address is essential to every discourse in Dostoevsky’: every word of Dostoevsky’s novelistic discourse is characterized by its addressivity more than by its referentiality.64 Whether the thoughts or speech represented be those of the narrator or his characters, in Dostoevsky’s books ‘there is only the word as address, the word dialogically contacting another word, a word about a word addressed to a word’.65 Bakhtin’s term for the kind of thoroughgoing dialogism in evidence in Dostoevsky’s works is ‘polyphony’, a metaphorical appellation ­intended to foreground the author’s determination to ‘think in voices’.66 In ­Dostoevsky’s hands, opines Bakhtin, ‘[t]he polyphonic novel is dialogic through and through’ – its every word, written, spoken, or thought,

61 PDP, 202. 62 PDP, 40. 63 PDP, 40. 64 PDP, 237. 65 PDP, 237. 66 PDP, 93.

Bakhtin  277 echoing with voices. An exceptionally developed capacity to endow his characters with their own discourse – with a language of their own which ensures that they are subjects rather than the mere objects of the author’s discourse – makes Dostoevsky ‘one of the greatest innovators in the realm of artistic form’ and his works the site and medium of ‘a completely new type of artistic thinking’.67 Whereas other writers typically subsume their characters’ speech into their own narrative, Dostoevsky enables his readers to inhabit the minds of heroes whose autonomous ‘consciousness of self lives by its unfinalizability, by its unclosedness and its indeterminacy’.68 Dostoevsky’s ‘great dialogue’ depicts life as ‘an ­unclosed whole […] life poised on the threshold’: the ‘reification’ perpetrated by the incorporation of a character’s discourse into the narrator’s or the author’s own is resisted.69 In mounting this resistance, in staging a ‘“great dialogue” in which characters and author might participate with equal rights’, Dostoevsky explores consciousness and freedom in progress, and in so doing ‘penetrat[es] into the unfinalizable depths of man’.70 Bakhtin’s focus in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics is on the way in which the author captures his characters’ ‘intense anticipation of another’s words’. This he sees as a feature of all utterance, with literary works here being assimilable to single utterances addressed by an author to a reader: ‘Every literary discourse more or less sharply senses its own listener, reader, critic, and reflects in itself their anticipated objections, evaluations, points of view.’71 Moreover, literary works betray their author’s awareness of their position within the existing body of literary discourse. Each is a response to existing, and an anticipation of forthcoming, styles: literary discourse senses alongside itself another literary discourse, another style. An element of so-called reaction to a preceding literary style, present in every new style, is an example of that same internal polemic; it is, so to speak, a hidden anti-stylization of someone else’s style, often combining with a clear parodying of that style.72 Thus does Bakhtin’s theory of discourse bridge the gap between oral and written utterances, and between the linguistic and literary realms. HETEROGLOSSIA

As well as arguing that individual utterances are dialogical rather than merely logical (or syntactical), Bakhtin holds that natural languages are 67 PDP, 3. 68 PDP, 53. 69 PDP, 62–3. 70 PDP, 71, 68. The variations in the italicisation of ‘great dialogue’ on pp. 276–7 are Bakhtin’s own. 71 PDP, 196. 72 PDP, 196.

278 Bakhtin themselves unfathomably heterogeneous.73 Every natural language, he contends, is in fact a teeming ecosystem made up of many languages: All words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word.74 We are all fluent in several of these languages, and so partake, often unconsciously, in the worldviews they vehiculate. This diversity, which Bakhtin calls ‘heteroglossia’, is constantly evolving, with languages perpetually engaging in dialogue with each other. As Morson and Emerson point out, Bakhtin uses a biological term to capture the process by which these interlocking languages evolve and form an ‘open unity’: ‘The term srastat’sia, meaning to knit together – to inosculate, or to grow together in the way bones grow together – suggests an organic process of blending separate entities.’75 The handling of these inosculated languages – requiring the adoption of first one and then another as appropriate – entails continuous (if largely automatic) acts of psychological and philosophical evaluation. Thus, languages are always, in a sense, eliciting fresh appraisals of the world, demanding, for the most part without our noticing it, that we register the contingency of the particular perspectives we temporarily espouse in using them. Language in History Bakhtin’s second major opposition to structural linguistics arises from its exclusion of history. For Bakhtin, ‘history’ refers both to ‘real life’ in all its concrete, past-infused, present-tense situatedness, and to the freight of meanings borne by languages as they are deployed, accented, and re-accented over time. Linguistics’ disregard of history (viewed ‘as an irrational force distorting the logical purity of the language system’) is manifest in Saussure’s insistence on the vital importance of a strictly synchronic approach to langue and necessary relegation of parole to the

73 As Bakhtin notes in PDP: ‘Dialogic relationships are reducible neither to logical ­relationships nor to relationships oriented semantically toward their referential ­object, relationships in and of themselves devoid of any dialogic element.’ – 183. 74 ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 293. 75 Prosaics, 141. Bakhtin refers to cultural entities as ‘unities’ to emphasize that they are ‘meaningful wholes’ but not ‘fully integrated systems’. ‘[P]roper wholes’, explain Morson and Emerson, are ‘not described as static, nor [are] they seen as developing in a predetermined way, but [are] understood as open-ended, productive, full of potential and “event-potential”’. – Prosaics, 228.

Bakhtin  279 extralinguistic realm.76 But as strongly as they contest the rejection of parole, Voloshinov/Bakhtin debunk the very possibility of ‘objective’ synchronic analysis in service of which it is perpetrated: From a truly objective viewpoint […] language presents the picture of a ceaseless flow of becoming […] there is no real moment in time when a synchronic system of language could be constructed. Thus a synchronic system, from the objective point of view, does not correspond to any real moment in the historical process of becoming.77 As this excerpt indicates, Voloshinov/Bakhtin dismiss the linguistic notion of an analysable, fixed state of language as a merely convenient axiom. If this attack on the programmatic blindness of a scientific practice dependent on the occlusion of becoming in favour of a myth of being sounds Bergsonian, it is because it probably is. As Larissa Rudova points out, ‘[t]he response to Bergson’s philosophy in the intellectual circles of Russia was enthusiastic’ around the turn of the twentieth century, with the Frenchman standing as ‘a symbol of a truly unorthodox philosophy that opposed determinism, positivism, and mechanistic s­ cience’.78 Holquist refers to Bakhtin as a ‘great reader of Bergson’, and direct ­references to Bergson in Bakhtin’s essays seem to confirm this.79 Morson and Emerson, noting that Bakhtin cites the Russian p ­ hilosopher ­Nicholas Lossky’s work on The Intuitive Philosophy of Bergson in ‘Toward a Philosophy of the Act’ (posthumously published in 1986), suggest that the book may have played a significant mediating role.80 Lossky’s study quotes at length from Creative Evolution – a B ­ ergsonian title which, as the following pages will show, strikingly encapsulate Bakhtin’s own understanding of the literary field.81

76 Voloshinov/Bakhtin, Marxism, 61. 77 Voloshinov/Bakhtin, Marxism, 66. 78 Larissa Rudova, ‘Bergsonism in Russia: The Case of Bakhtin’, Neophilologus, vol. 80 (1996), 175–188, 175. 79 Holquist, Dialogism, 153. | The references appear in Bakhtin’s ‘Toward a Philosophy of the Act’ and ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ – Rudova, 177. 80 Prosaics, 177. 81 Hilary L. Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism, 1900–1930 (Evanston, IL: ­Northwestern University Press, 1999), 34. According to Morson and Emerson, Bakhtin recognized an ‘overall compatibility’ between his own views and those of Bergson as ‘the celebrator of open-ended flow, champion of intuition against the disembodied workings of “spatialized” intellect, and proponent of the creative ­capacities of time.’ ‘Bakhtin’, they continue, seems to take this overall compatibility for granted […] He focuses instead on his differences from Bergson, whom he appears to view as someone who repeats the errors of theoretism by inverting them – that is, someone who accepts the

280 Bakhtin Although Bakhtin agrees with Bergson as regards the distortions brought about by over-investment in systematicity, he does not for all that hold culture to be wholly without pattern. Literary genres, for instance, are in Bakhtin’s view extremely important forms of patterned meaning – despite, or indeed because of, their adaptability. What he does doubt is ‘that any aspect of culture, from the self to a language, from daily life to all of history, is organized tightly enough to exhibit an all-encompassing, formalizable, pattern’.82 Bakhtin referred to the belief in such systems as ‘theoretism’ or ‘monologism’.83 Morson and Emerson propose ‘semiotic totalitarianism’ as a phrase better suited to express the nature of such epistemological fallacies: This kind of thinking is totalitarian in its assumption that it can, in principle, explain the totality of things; it is semiotic (or cryptographic) in its approach to all apparent accidents as signs of an underlying order to which the given system has the key.84 By contrast, Bakhtin, as discussed above, preferred to think of selves and cultures as ‘meaningful wholes’ or ‘open unities’, viewing reality as a space of creative evolution characterized not by timeless, systematic laws but by the constant forming, unforming, and reforming of mutually calibrated assemblages. For Bakhtin, ‘the world’, as Morson and Emerson put it, ‘clusters and unclusters’, and within it languages and genres, dialogic hybrids each and all, inosculate or anastomose (to use another organic image encountered in Chapter 1).85 Against Russian Formalism If Saussurean linguistics spurred Bakhtin and his Circle to formulate a contending, ‘metalinguistic’ theory of language, Russian Formalism, hypostasizing division of acts into abstractions and instantiations even if he ­privileges the instantiation. – Prosaics, 177 Adding to this picture of Bergson as a philosopher whose influence Bakhtin ‘soon outgrew’, Rudova notes that he was, to Bakhtin’s eyes, not only ‘trapped by ­“theoretism”’ – ‘his philosophy was too abstract, divorced from life, too contemplative and “aesthetic”’ – but also too ‘trapped in phenomenology’, oblivious to ‘the world of true historical becoming’. – Prosaics, 7. | Rudova, 178, 186. 82 Prosaics, 27–8. 83 Prosaics, 28. 84 Prosaics, 28. 85 Prosaics, 45. See also Prosaics, 38, 76, 228; Bakhtin’s early essay, ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. Vadim Lupanov, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Lupanov (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990), 4–256, 14; and ‘Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff’, SG, 6.

Bakhtin  281 whose approach to literature owed much, as discussed in Chapter 4, to Saussurean linguistics, proved an equally galvanizing stimulus.86 In The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, a ‘disputed text’ first published in 1928, Medvedev/Bakhtin articulate a detailed rebuttal of the Formalists’ presuppositions and assertions. According to Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formalism, like modern linguistics before it, faltered at the very first step, taking a wrong turn even as it ­attempted to define its purpose. As is reflected in the name of the ‘­Society for the Study of Poetic Language’ they founded (OPOIAZ, or Obshchestvo izucheniia poeticheskogo iazyka in Russian), the F ­ ormalists defined their ‘primary object’ of study as ‘poetic language’.87 But for Medvedev/Bakhtin, the concept of ‘poetic language’ is ‘methodologically extremely complex, confused and controversial’.88 Indeed, the very idea of a ‘poetic language’ which might be described and analysed in the same way as a natural language, is, they argue, gravely flawed. In positing such a language, the Formalists effect an a priori telescoping of language (understood in Saussurean terms) and poetry. This ‘incorrect orientation of poetics toward linguistics’ is founded on nothing but a ‘vague and naive confidence that linguistic definitions and poetic qualities can coincide’: The breakdown of language into phonetic, morphological, etc. ­elements is important and essential from the point of view of linguistics. As a system, language is really made of these elements. But it does not follow from this that morphemes, phonemes, and other ­linguistic categories are independent constructive elements of the ­poetic work, that poetic works are also made of grammatical forms.89 One of the effects of this conflation of language and poetry is to set up a false dichotomy between poetry and prose: within such a scheme, p ­ oetic language becomes ‘the converse and parasite of practical ­language’.90 This is a strongly worded but not inaccurate response to Shklovsky’s definition of prose as ‘usual speech: economical, easy, correct’ and of

86 In 1928, Tynjanov and Jakobson stated, for example, that ‘The assertion of two ­differing concepts – la langue and la parole – and the analysis of the relationship ­between them (the Geneva school) has been exceedingly fruitful for linguistic ­science.’ – Jurij Tynjanov and Roman Jakobson, ‘Problems in the Study of Literature and Language’, trans. H. Eagle, Poetics Today, vol. 2, no. 1a, ‘Roman Jakobson: Language and Poetry’, (Autumn 1980), 29–31, 30; first published as ‘Problemy ­izzučenija literatury I jazyka’, Novyj Lef, vol. 12 (1928), 36–7. 87 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 80. 88 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 80. 89 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 85, 81, 85. 90 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 88.

282 Bakhtin poetry as ‘speech that is braked, distorted’.91 Medvedev/Bakhtin balk at both claims: first, that poetic language is a merely parasitical derivative of prose; and second, and concomitantly, that poetry alone is literary. Such a conception divorces poetry from genuine creation. Poetic language, deplore Medvedev/Bakhtin, is condemned to wait for ‘normal’ language to create new material for it to seize and jumble: Poetic language only forces the perception of the already created, but imperceptible and automatized, construction. Poetic language must wait while practical language, governed by its own goals and intentions, deigns to create some new speech construction and then wait until it becomes ordinary, automatized.92 For Medvedev/Bakhtin, the view of art entailed by such an equation of poetry with distortion, ‘deautomatization’, and recombination is ­unacceptably debased: The only plus of art is disruption. […] Art is reduced to empty ­combinations of forms whose purpose is purely psychotechnical: to make something perceptible, no matter what it is or how.93 As well as turning art into a mere mechanical reshuffling of existing parts of speech, such an outlook evinces ‘a profound indifference to all meaningfulness’.94 Just as Medvedev/Bakhtin had found the Saussurean view of language reductive in its exclusion of all that is individual and creative in human utterance, so they lament the Formalists’ ‘narrowly technical’ approach to poetic practice.95 Both linguistics and Formalism are found wanting for promulgating views of language and literature in which ‘[t]he creation of the really new is at a dead end’.96 91 Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, an essay dated 1917, first published in Russian in 1925 and republished in Théorie de la littérature, ed. and trans. Tzvetan Todorov, 76–97, 94, 6, qtd in Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 89. 92 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 89–90. Roman Jakobson subsequently continued this amalgamation of literature with poetry, and the confusion is still in evidence in the works of Bakhtin’s first P ­ arisian proselytizers: Kristeva published La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil) in 1974 and Todorov’s paradoxically titled Poétique de la Prose (Paris: Seuil) appeared in 1971. As Morson and Emerson point out in explanation of Bakhtin’s position, ‘Critics have become so accustomed to using the term poetics as a virtual synonym for “theory of literature” that they often overlook or underestimate the implications of the word poetics for an understanding of prose. For if literature is defined primarily with verse genres (or dramas) in mind, then prose necessarily emerges as something less than fully literary, as literary only by association, or, perhaps, as not really literary at all.’ – Prosaics, 15. 93 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 89–90. 94 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 90. 95 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 125. 96 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 97.

Bakhtin  283 One of Medvedev/Bakhtin’s prime exemplary targets in The Formal Method is ‘Art as Device’, Shklovsky’s renowned essay of 1917. For ­Shklovsky, they observe, ‘art is only a device’; likewise, in Formalist readings, ‘A poet is only a craftsman.’97 For these reasons, Formalism is depicted as ‘a purely reactive formation’ intent on ‘negation and depreciation’, a nihilistic enterprise in which all ‘living meaning’ is drained from the work of art.98 Echoing the mathematical (Leibnizian) language in which Shklovsky asserts that ‘[t]he content (the very soul) of the literary work is equal to the sum of its devices’, Medvedev/Bakhtin repudiate a mode of reading which proceeds by ‘purely negative acts of subtraction and elimination’.99 The most such responses can aspire to be is descriptive; questions of authentic interpretation, involving more than the rehearsal of syntactic and generic ‘laws’, do not arise in such a framework: ‘Why are two particular words next to each other? Linguistics only explains how this is possible.’100 If the Formalists seemingly value poetry solely as a means of defamiliarizing and thus illuminating the categories of Saussurean langue, for Medvedev/Bakhtin poetry is valuable because of the ways in which it performs, and invites the performance of, certain kinds of ‘social evaluation’.101 Poetry, they contend, is more than a truth table or elegant equation. As Voloshinov/Bakhtin highlight the simplifications involved in ­leaving history out of the linguistic picture, so Medvedev/Bakhtin question the Formalist reduction of history to a matter of quantifiable, algorithmic flux. In the hermetically sealed system of poetic language envisaged by the Formalists, new literary forms are held to emerge merely as a systemic correction to the boredom induced by more familiar ones. In 1928, Jakobson and Jurij Tynjanov, a Russian Formalist then on a visit to Prague, wrote of the study of ‘[t]he evolution of literature’ as a branch of ‘systematic science’: ‘the principles of diachrony’, just as much as those of synchrony, they assert, abide by ‘structural laws’.102 In other words, even the pattern of literary-historical change is deemed to be governed by the logic of a higher-level system: ‘evolution is inescapably of a systemic nature’.103 The authors’ algorithmic ambition is clearly stated: ‘the ­immanent laws of literary (linguistic) evolution’, they state in ‘Problems in the Study of Literature and Language’, ‘form an indeterminate equation’, which can, however, be refined through ‘an analysis of

97 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 61, 63. 98 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 62, 63, 125. 99 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 111, 61. 100 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 123. 101 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 122–8. 102 Tynjanov and Jakobson, ‘Problems’, 29, 30. 103 Tynjanov and Jakobson, ‘Problems’, 30.

284 Bakhtin the correlation between the literary series and other historical series’.104 In the ‘system of systems’ they imagine, the lived reality of human beings (a matter of ‘historical series’) has neither relevance nor explanatory force.105 Art is envisioned as an autonomous sphere bearing only the most superficial connection to embodied experience. For the Formalists, there is nothing that is not recuperable as the mark of a system.106 Literature and Evolution Bakhtin’s view of history stands in sharp contradistinction to those of structural linguistics and Formalism. History, for him, means more than flux, more than diachrony (which often amounts to no more than ‘a series of synchronic slices, with no intelligible historical links’ between them).107 Bakhtin’s theories accord great importance to time and reflect a belief in the existence of real connections between the realms (and not merely the ‘series’) of life and literature. It is in his commitment to the illumination of history’s role that ­Bakhtin reintroduces evolution into intertextuality’s genealogy. With Bakhtin, the synchronic emphasis dominant in structural linguistics and Formalism is overturned in favour of renewed attention to time, process, evolution. Moreover, Bakhtin evinces a strong predilection for the kinds of analogy between literature and the natural world which underpinned so much of the critical thinking considered in earlier chapters of this book. The organicism of Bakhtin’s view of language is everywhere ­apparent in the four essays collected in The Dialogic Imagination.108 One of Bakhtin’s refrains in these pages is that ‘[d]iscourse lives’.109 Literature is described as an ‘organic unity’, languages and genres as ‘organisms’.110 Literature as a whole is said to have a ‘generic skeleton’; genres themselves are also endowed with ‘skeletons’, whether these be ‘ossified’ around a canon or, on the contrary, characterized by their ‘plastic possibilities’.111 Moreover, in the ‘elastic environment’ of language, the life of genres is marked by the same cyclicality as biological organisms.112 While some genres are imaged

104 105 106 107 108

109 110

111 112

Tynjanov and Jakobson, ‘Problems’, 30, 29. Tynjanov and Jakobson, ‘Problems’, 31, 29. Prosaics, 144. Prosaics, 44. These four essays are: ‘Epic and the Novel’, ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic ­Discourse’, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, ‘Discourse in the Novel’. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 292. ‘Epic and the Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel’, DI, 3–40, 4. | ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, DI, 77. | ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 288. ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 5, 8, 3. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 276.

Bakhtin  285 in their ‘embryonic beginnings’, ‘older genres’ are ­pictured ‘go[ing] into decline’.113 While the epic is singled out as ‘a ­congealed and half-moribund genre’; the novel, ‘born and nourished in a new era of world history’, has assumed its pre-eminent position as the ‘only developing genre’.114 Bakhtin’s organic analogies are not confined to the realm of animal biology: recalling John Addington Symonds, he also writes of the novel’s ‘germination’, of ‘the rich’ and ‘fertile soil’ by which its ‘roots’ were initially nourished, and, more broadly, of the ways in which epochs can ‘create optimal conditions for the final ripening and realization of a new form’.115 The tenor of Bakhtin’s analogies is at times overtly evolutionary in ­emphasis. The novel’s supersession of other genres, for instance, is ­depicted in terms of competition, ‘inheritance’, and adaptation to ‘the new conditions of […] existence’.116 The idea of universal conflict and of a continual linguistic survival of the fittest (a theory harking back to the beliefs of Max Müller and other nineteenth-century philologists) appears in many iterations. Bakhtin evokes ‘the intense struggle that goes on between languages and within languages’ as ‘a complex trial-­ at-arms’.117 That Bakhtin is interested in the evolution of language and ­literature over ‘great time’ rather than in the short-lived rivalrous ‘struggle of ­literary tendencies and schools’ is signalled by his references not only to the ‘historical struggle of genres’ but also to ‘the prehistory of novelistic discourse’.118 Indeed, this linguistic strife is depicted as stretching back even to the ‘paleontological past of languages’, with Bakhtin conjuring a ‘primordial struggle between tribes, peoples, cultures and languages’.119 When the accent is not on the ‘battle’ or ‘fight’ for hegemony, it falls on cross-breeding and hybridization.120 Images of branching evoke Darwin’s Tree of Life as well as the stemmatic trees drawn up by nineteenth-­century comparative philologists: We may even say that language and languages change historically primarily by means of hybridization, by means of a mixing of ­various ‘languages’ co-existing within the boundaries of a single dialect, a single national language, a single branch, a single group of different branches or different groups of such branches.121 113 ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 350. | ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 4. 114 ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 14, 4. 115 ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, DI, 50. | ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 325, 348, 325. | DPD, 36. 116 ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 4. 117 ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, DI, 66. 118 ‘Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff’, SG, 4. | ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 5, 41. 119 ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 359. | ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, DI, 50. 120 ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 4, 39. 121 ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 358–9.

286 Bakhtin The word ‘evolution’ itself features frequently in these essays, with Bakhtin referring not only to the general ‘processes of evolution’ at work in language but also to ‘the evolution of an individual consciousness’, ‘the verbal-ideological evolution of specific social groups’, and ‘the living evolution of the novel as a genre’.122 Bakhtin’s long view of a dynamic literary realm harks back to the evolutionary musings of the post-­ Darwinian nineteenth-century and twentieth-century thinkers considered in ­Chapter 1. While the emphasis on change recalls the evolutionary literary theories of Spencer, Taine, Lewes, Stephen, and Symonds, the description of language and literature as realms of extreme porousness and ceaseless interpenetration strikingly echoes Bergson’s Creative Evolution and the philosopher’s rhetorically powerful depiction of a world in which ‘everything interpenetrates’.123 Genre These evolutionary inflections form part of an explicit project to overhaul contemporary literary theory. Bakhtin sees ‘genre theory’ in particular, as in need of ‘a radical re-structuring’.124 ‘[T]he great organic poetics of the past – those of Aristotle, Horace, Boileau’, he approvingly notes, were ‘permeated with a deep sense of the wholeness of literature and of the harmonious interaction of all genres contained within this whole’.125 This interactive picture of ‘living and organic fullness’ contrasts markedly with the exhaustive but frozen tabulations set out in ‘[s]cholarly poetics of the nineteenth century’, intent as they were on the achievement of ‘an abstract and encyclopedic comprehensiveness’.126 It was of course precisely this kind of ‘maximally complete anthology’ that Propp had sought to provide, on the Linnaean model, in his Morphology of the Folktale.127 For Bakhtin, genres are organically connected to history. Speech genres are described as ‘the drive belts from the history of society to the history of language’. Literary genres function as what Morson and Emerson call ‘a key organ of memory and an important vehicle of historicity’.128 In other words, genres, for Bakhtin, are not formulae: far from being fixed forms consisting in clearly delineated, itemizable features such as rhyme and metre, they are ways of seeing the world, modes of

122 ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, DI, 68 | ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 345, 270. | ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 9. 123 CE, 290. 124 ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 8. 125 ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 5. 126 ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 5. 127 Propp, Morphology of the Folk-Tale, 5. For a discussion of Propp’s Morphology, see pp. 255–6. 128 ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, SG, 65. | Prosaics, 280.

Bakhtin  287 ‘artistic visualization’.129 Because genres vehiculate complexes of v­ alues, to read works written in ‘old genres’ is to travel in time: to read an epic, for example, is to inhabit a world defined by the values of epic. In a seeming paradox, genres are the more able to preserve the past by ­adapting to the conditions of new epochs: A literary genre, by its very nature, reflects the most stable, ‘eternal’ tendencies in literature’s development. Always preserved in a genre are undying elements of the archaic. True, these archaic elements are preserved in it only thanks to their constant renewal, which is to say, their contemporization. A genre is always the same and yet not the same, always old and new simultaneously. Genre is reborn and renewed at every stage in the development of literature and in every individual work of a given genre. This constitutes the life of the genre.130 By formally retaining a flavour of the past even as it adapts to a changed world, genre is the medium through which literature evolves, the adaptable pattern ‘guaranteeing the unity and uninterrupted continuity’ of literary adaptation: ‘A genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning. Genre is a representative of creative memory in the process of literary development.’131 Because genres carry the past even as they are moulded into new forms, because genre permeates all of the works within a particular tradition, ‘a writer need not know all [its] links and branchings’ ‘to master [its] language’: ‘A genre ­possesses its own organic logic which can to a certain extent be understood and creatively assimilated on the basis of a few generic models, even ­fragments.’132 Literary creation is the fruit of interplay between the particular vision embodied in works belonging to the same generic tradition and the world as it stands: The artist must learn to see reality with the eyes of genre. A ­particular aspect of reality can only be understood in connection with the ­particular means of representing it.133 The emergence of new genres fosters cultural vitality. The complex ­‘process of seeing and conceptualizing reality’ which takes place during artistic creation is also experienced by the audience of the newly created work: ‘New means of representation force us to see new aspects of visible 129 130 131 132 133

PDP, 36. PDP, 106. PDP, 106. PDP, 157. Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 134.

288 Bakhtin reality’.134 Within the literary realm, Bakhtin sees such developments in wholly positive terms: ‘Each new variety, each new work of a given genre always enriches it in some way, aids in perfecting the language of the genre.’135 New forms do not supplant but supplement existing genres: ‘every genre has its own predominant sphere of existence, in which it is irreplaceable’. For example, ‘the appearance of the polyphonic novel does not nullify or in any way restrict the further productive development of monologic forms of the novel’.136 For Bakhtin, the significance of genre exceeds that of more specific forms of literary connection. ‘It is certainly possible to study […] the influence of one individual writer on another’, he grants, but his own (Bergsonian, Eliotic) interest is less in ‘the influence of separate individual authors, individual works, individual themes, ideas, images’ than in ‘the influence of the generic tradition itself’: The more complete and concrete our knowledge of an artist’s g­ eneric contacts, the deeper can we penetrate the peculiar features of his generic form and the more correctly can we understand the interrelationship, within it, of tradition and innovation.137 As this makes clear, Bakhtin’s sense of the importance of a work’s generic genealogy is intertwined with a desire to evaluate the balance of old and new within it – in other words, to assess its originality. Indeed, for Bakhtin, awareness of the moulding force of generic frameworks in no way erodes belief in the possibility of originality (or in validity of the notion): Having linked Dostoevsky with a specific tradition, it goes without saying that we have not in the slightest degree limited the profound originality and individual uniqueness of his work.138 The Novel The need for ‘a radical revision of the fundamental p ­ hilosophical ­conception of poetic discourse’ – for what Morson and Emerson term a ‘prosaics’ – is the more pressing, argues Bakhtin, because the ­cataloguing favoured by nineteenth-century poetics, though it may seem to ­accommodate ‘finished and already formed object[s]’ well enough, cannot do justice to the novel or to the literature of an age in which 134 135 136 137 138

Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 134. PDP, 157. PDP, 271. PDP, 159, 157. PDP, 178.

Bakhtin  289 the novel enjoys ascendancy.139 The novel, as the era’s ‘most fluid of genres’, is not so ‘definite and clear’ as its predecessors.140 Unique in its responsiveness to extra-literary contexts, the novel ‘reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of unfolding’.141 Attuned to ‘process’, registering ‘the tiniest shifts and oscillations of the social atmosphere’, the novel alone ‘comes into contact with the spontaneity of the inconclusive present’.142 Where the epic was the genre of the ‘absolute past’, the novel, genre of the present par excellence, marks the advent in literature of a truly historical consciousness.143 Because it is ceaselessly adjusting to capture the ‘process of a world-in-the-making’, the novel, quintessential ‘genre-in-the-making’, is inherently resistant to the old-fashioned generic pigeon-holing involved in the compilation of nineteenth-century taxonomies.144 The novel, according to Bakhtin, emerges in response to ‘a new world’.145 Bakhtin provides no detail to clarify what this nebulous phrase might mean, but the surrounding context suggests a reference to an altered geopolitical state of connectedness and communication across borders – a condition rather like that denoted (and just as nebulously) by the word ‘globalization’ today. Bakhtin writes of ‘an actively polyglot world’.146 The ‘active polyglossia’ which is the hallmark of this ‘new world’ is eminently propitious to the ‘interillumination of languages’ which takes place when the value system vehiculated by one language comes into contact with another.147 This polyglossia and ‘the cultural interanimation’ to which it acts as a conduit is the defining context for the novel genre.148 The novel’s exquisite sensitivity to ‘heteroglossia’ (‘the internal stratification of any single national language’) is matched by its responsiveness to

139 ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 267. | ‘Epic and the Novel, DI, 8. | ‘Prosaics’, in Morson and Emerson’s definition,

140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148

encompasses two related, but distinct, concepts. First, as opposed to ‘poetics’, prosaics designates a theory of literature that privileges prose in general and the novel in particular over the poetic genres. Prosaics in the second sense is far broader than theory of literature: it is a form of thinking that presumes the importance of the everyday, the ordinary, the ‘prosaic’. – Prosaics, 15 ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 11, 8. ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 7. ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 7. | ’Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 300. | ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 27. ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 30. ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 30, 11. ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 7, 12. ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 12. ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 17. ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 29.

290 Bakhtin the polyglossia of the world.149 For Bakhtin, ‘the profound stylistic originality of the novel’ derives from ‘its connection with polyglossia’, and ‘the living heteroglossia of language’ is the ‘linguistic ground of prose style’.150 The novel is ‘a system of languages […] interanimat[ing] each other’.151 It is a genre rife with intonational quotation marks. In one of several spatial images evocative of topography or geometry, Bakhtin describes it as a ‘system of intersecting planes’; in another, derived from geology, he refers to it as a system of ‘strata’.152 Knowing ‘no unitary style’, bristling with the voices and words of others, the novel, rather than having a style, is ‘a combination of […] styles’ – or as Morson and Emerson phrase it, a ‘style of styles’.153 Even ‘beneath that smooth single-languaged surface’ of a narrative voice that may at first seem ‘to be unitary and consistent, direct and unmediatedly intentional’, affirms Bakhtin, ‘we can nevertheless uncover prose’s three-dimensionality, its profound speech diversity’.154 ‘[T]he idea of a singular language (a ­sacrosanct unconditional language) is foreign to prose’. The novel, in this respect, differs sharply from what Bakhtin calls ‘the monologic steadfastness’ of poetry.155 The novel’s emergence, Bakhtin suggests – in an echo of Freud’s use of the same comparison to illustrate the importance of psychoanalysis – has the significance of a Copernican revolution, ‘helping to win for literature new worlds of verbal perception’ and ‘free[ing] the consciousness from the tyranny of its own language’.156 Criticism has so far been deaf to the novel’s originality, ignoring its facture as an ‘artistically organized’ polyphonic system, and ‘transpos[ing] a symphonic (orchestrated) theme on to the piano keyboard’.157 Bakhtin’s organic metaphors bolster his emphasis on the novel’s ­hospitality to ‘life’ in all its pullulating linguistic diversity and its viral influence on other genres. In analogical terms, the novel, far from being an isolated clump of cells, is a contagious bundle of communicable stylistic 149 ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 262. The two categories tend to overlap in Bakhtin’s writing, as when, for example, he states that

150 151 152

153 154 155 156 157

The national literary language of a people with a highly developed art of prose, especially if it is novelistic prose with a rich and tension-filled verbal-ideological history, is in fact an organized microcosm that reflects the macrocosm not only of national heteroglossia, but of European heteroglossia as well. – ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 295 ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 13. | ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 326, 327. ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, DI, 47. ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, DI, 48. | ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 33. | ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, 49. | ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 301. ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, DI, 48. | ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 262. | Prosaics, 17. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 315. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 324, 286. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 323. | ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, 61. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 262, 263.

Bakhtin  291 and ideological tendencies. It is, to tweak William Burroughs’s expression, a ‘word virus’.158 Its swiftly achieved dominance within the literary landscape precipitates the ‘novelization of other genres’.159 ­Under the novel’s ‘hybridizing’ influence, these become more permeable and malleable: the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a ­certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality.160 In other words, the novel ‘infects [other genres] with the spirit of p ­ rocess and inconclusiveness’ which is its hallmark.161 By bringing about such adjustments in ‘the entire circle of genres’, the novel instils in them a new self-consciousness regarding their own ‘possibilities and boundaries’, enabling them to ‘overcome their naiveté’.162 The Already Bakhtin’s analysis of the novel’s orchestration of languages and styles involves close attention to the ‘alreadyness’ or ‘givenness’ which inheres in all words as we encounter them as well as to the technical modalities of speech transmission (or reported speech).163 Every word we speak, he avers, comes to us bearing ‘accents’ and meanings accumulated over its long history: there are no ‘neutral’ words and forms – words and forms that can belong to ‘no one’; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents.164 For Bakhtin, the omnipresence of ‘the already’ is a fact of even the most mundane communication: every extra-artistic prose discourse – in any of its forms, quotidian, rhetorical, scholarly – cannot fail to be oriented toward the ‘already uttered’, ‘the already known’, the ‘common opinion’ and so forth.165

158 ‘[T]he word is now a virus.’ – William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded [1962] (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 49. See p. 34. 159 ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 6. 160 ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, DI, 66; ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 344, 358–9. | ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 7. 161 ‘Epic and the Novel’, DI, 7. 162 PDP, 271. 163 Morson and Emerson explain Bakhtin’s conception of the ‘given’ as follows: ‘The given, which is all the theoretists see, is the “material”, the resources, with which we speak and act. It includes our language, cultural norms, personal history – in short, everything already finalized for us.’ – Prosaics, 170. 164 ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 293. 165 ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 279.

292 Bakhtin The objects we evoke have always ‘already been articulated, disputed, elucidated, and evaluated in various ways’ countless times before: no living word relates to its object in a singular way […] any c­ oncrete discourse […] is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgements and accents.166 Clichés and shared cultural references make up a large portion of this ‘already-bespokenness’, but Bakhtin has more than these forms of ­repetition in mind.167 First, he invokes the lexical nuances words accrue over ‘great time’ and which they are liable to bear irrespective of context.168 Such r­ esonances mean words are characterized by a degree of plurality – or polysemy – even before they are appropriated by a particular speaker. Other ­layers of ‘alreadyness’ are nested in words used in speech: When we select words in the process of constructing an utterance, we by no means take them from the system of language in their neutral, dictionary form. We usually taken them from other utterances, and mainly from utterances that are kindred to ours in genre, that is, in theme, composition, or style.169 In choosing their words, speakers are guided not by some dictionary date chart but by the requirements of each particular occasion, responding to the ‘stylistic aura’ attached to them within the ‘speech genres’ (the lecture, the wedding speech, the radio announcement, etc.) in which they are routinely used.170 These semantic (linguistic) and intonational (metalinguistic) layers of meaning are inescapable. Bakhtin also has in mind another aspect of day-to-day utterance, namely, the transmission of other people’s words through various kinds of reported speech. In ‘Discourse in the Novel’, he stresses that in the everyday speech of any person living in society, no less than half (on the average) of all the words uttered by him will be someone

166 ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, SG, 93. | ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 276. 167 Prosaics, 338. The word is Morson and Emerson’s but reflects some very close Bakhtinian cognates, such as those he uses in stating that ‘In the novel, the “already bespoke quality” of the world is woven together with the “already uttered” quality of language’. – ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 331. 168 DPD, 186. 169 ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, SG, 87. As Bakhtin remarks on the preceding page, each word of a language itself has or can have an ‘emotional tone’, ‘emotional coloring’, an ‘evaluative aspect’, a ‘stylistic aura’, and so forth, and, consequently, also an expressive intonation that is inherent in the word as such. – SG, 86 170 ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, SG, 87–8.

Bakhtin  293 else’s words (consciously someone else’s), transmitted with varying degrees of precision and impartiality (or more precisely, partiality).171 The topic of reported speech runs as a concern throughout Bakhtin’s writing. In Chapter 2 of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, entitled an ‘Exposition of the Problem of Reported Speech’, Voloshinov/Bakhtin formulate one of the leitmotivs of their analysis. The transmission of another’s language, they posit, is an act suffused with comment: ‘Reported speech is speech within speech, utterance within ­utterance and at the same time also speech about speech, utterance about u ­ tterance.’172 The ‘syntactic, stylistic, and compositional’ process by which alien words are incorporated into a ‘receiving’ utterance is not neutral: ‘We are dealing here with words reacting on words’, with ‘an active ­relation of one message to another’.173 Voloshinov/Bakhtin, and e­ lsewhere Bakthin alone, consider the gamut of procedures by which such foreign words are assimilated, whether directly, in dialogue or ­quotation, or indirectly, as unmarked quotation or in works devoted to imitation, parody, or other modes of deliberately ‘second-hand’ writing.174 Verbatim quotation holds less interest for Bakhtin than hybrid forms, for reasons both formal and ideological. Indeed, for Bakhtin, the kinds of ‘authoritative word’ which warrant the careful respect of their ­boundaries – through the use of quotation marks or italicization, for example – preclude what is most valuable about the hybrid forms typical of the novel: ‘a play with distances, with fusion and dissolution, with approach and retreat’.175 The ‘authoritative word’, according Bakhtin, demands not ‘appropriation and assimilation’, but ‘unconditional allegiance’; ‘its semantic structure is static and dead’; ‘it permits no play with the ­context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions’.176 Because ‘authoritative discourse […] cannot be double-voiced or hybridized’, it ‘always remains, in the novel, a dead quotation’.177 It is thus, in Bakhtinian terminology, monologic, resistant to dialogization. Bakhtin is far more interested in hybrid forms – forms in which ‘the speech of another is introduced into the author’s discourse (the story) in concealed form, that is, without any of the formal markers ­usually ­accompanying such speech, whether direct or indirect’.178 Bakhtin

171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178

‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 339. Voloshinov/Bakhtin, Marxism, 115. Voloshinov/Bakhtin, Marxism, 116. To coin the title of Antoine Compagnon’s La seconde main ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979). ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 343–4. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 343. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 344. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 303.

294 Bakhtin sometimes refers to such forms as ‘double-accented, double-styled ­hybrid construction[s]’, and defines them as follows: What we are calling a hybrid construction is an utterance that ­belongs, by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed with it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two ‘languages’, two semantic and axiological belief systems.179 Though some ‘typical hybrid constructions’, such as free indirect ­discourse, can be delimited and described with relative ease, others fall outwith the template of ‘stabilized and age-old crystallizations’.180 One example is that of ‘pseudo-objective motivation’, wherein the ­language of an author or narrator ‘take[s] on the flavor of someone else’s ­language’.181 In pseudo-objective narration, words attributable to the consciousness or idiolect of one of the characters appear in the context of third-person narration. This is a hybrid form frequently used in the writing of such modernist writers as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Indeed, Joycean critics have their own phrase – ‘the Uncle Charles Principle’ – to designate the technique. Coined by Hugh Kenner, the expression refers to the use, in seemingly impersonal narrative sentences, of words or phrases chosen specifically to capture the particular tenor of a character’s worldview. In Kenner’s example, chosen from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the old-fashioned ring of the word ‘repaired’, in the seemingly anodyne statement that ‘Uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse’, deftly encapsulates Uncle Charles’s antiquated outlook.182 One of Bakhtin’s own examples of polyphony is Dickens’s Little Dorrit, a text ‘everywhere dotted with quotation marks’, in which many different kinds of hybrid construction coexist and overlap.183 In Turgenev’s works too (Bakhtin’s examples are from Fathers and Sons and Virgin Soil), hybrid forms generate double-voicing, ‘permit[ting] another’s inner speech to merge, in an organic and structured way, with a context belonging to the author’.184 As a result, what Bakhtin calls ‘character zones’ emerge within third-person narration, ‘encroaching in one way or another upon the author’s voice’.185 As Voloshinov/Bakhtin point

179 180 181 182

‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 304. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 306. | Voloshinov/Bakhtin, Marxism, 118. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 305. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 50. | As defined by Hugh Kenner, ‘The Uncle Charles Principle entails writing about someone much as that someone would choose to be written about.’ – Joyce’s Voices (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 21. 183 ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 307–8. 184 ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 319. 185 ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 316.

Bakhtin  295 out, such hybrid forms allow for the production of highly subtle effects, for example enabling a narrator to intimate without stating a position regarding his characters. By contrast, the effect of such double-voicing might be to neutralize or counteract the author’s supposed judgements about his characters, fostering interpretative indeterminacy – the kind of unresolvable uncertainty the modernist novel particularly prizes – as ­ oloshinov/ to where the author’s sympathies lie. Such is the case, as V Bakhtin rightly aver (and as Nietzshe also noted), in ­Flaubert’s works: Quasi-direct discourse, with its capacity for conveying simultaneously identification with and independence, distance from one’s creations, was an extremely suitable means for embodying this ­love-hate relation Flaubert maintained toward his characters.186 This comment on Flaubert is indicative of the closeness of the connection between language and identity for Bakhtin. Language, he maintains, ‘lies on the borderline between oneself and the other’ and that borderline is the site of ‘a difficult and complicated process’ of assimilation: The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own ­semantic and expressive intention.187 The challenge is to take the word, and make it one’s own. And not all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property.188 The task is a demanding one, with Bakhtin’s depiction of the labour involved reminiscent of Nietzsche’s view of interpretation as appropriative struggle: Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.189

186 187 188 189

Voloshinov/Bakhtin, Marxism, 152. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 293. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 294. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 294.

296 Bakhtin This sense of the work required to perform such assimilations, in leading a life as well as in creating literary works, is entirely consonant with what Bakhtin has to say about ‘[t]he importance of struggling with another’s discourse’: ‘its influence in the history of an individual’s coming to ideological consciousness is enormous’.190 Identity is forged in the act of recognizing and adjudicating between the discourses of others as they enter into our ‘inner monologues [as] developing human beings’. It resides in the self-consciousness with which we register and attend to the sources of ‘the monologue that lasts a whole life’.191 As Bakhtin remarks, in the course of language acquisition, ‘the process of distinguishing between one’s own and another’s discourse, between one’s own and another’s thought, is activated rather late in development’.192 We begin our linguistic lives – we learn to speak – by taking on other people’s language without discrimination. Only gradually do we learn to become critical of the languages available to us: ‘the ideological becoming of a human being […] is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others’.193 When a foreign word enters into our thoughts and speech without quotations marks, the assimilation marks an alteration in our identity. If the novel and the self are aligned as processes of linguistic, ideological becoming, they are also conditioned by the larger historical pano­ rama to which they belong. Indeed, Bakhtin hypothesizes that entire epochs can be defined by their propensity to quote with or without quotation marks – that is, by the degree of self-consciousness they bring to the handling of the words of others. In terms that recall Nietzsche’s evocation of the desirability but also the difficulty of honing a ‘grand style’, Bakhtin observes that Direct authorial discourse is not possible in every epoch, nor can every epoch command a style –for style presupposes the presence of authoritative points of view and authoritative, stabilized ideological value judgements.194 Periods of high cultural anxiety and uncertainty coincide with the preponderance of quoted discourse as a means of deferring judgement and responsibility and taking shelter behind the words of others. As Morson and Emerson remark, the postmodern epoch would seem to fit such a description: Sometimes skepticism may be so central to a group’s sense of the world that direct unmediated discourse, in which language is ­presumed to be fully adequate to its object, may seem impossibly 190 191 192 193 194

‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 348. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 345. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 345. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 341. PDP, 192.

Bakhtin  297 naive. To avoid naivete, authors may cultivate various styles with ‘quotation marks’, and use various forms of stylization in preference to direct unmediated discourse. For intellectuals, the present may be such a period, and historically there have been others.195 In the diagnosis of this condition, Bakhtin seems, again, as Nietzsche did before him, and in spite of his approval of dialogism, polyphony, and the novel’s heteroglossia, to intimate the need for selves and authors to assume responsibility for the languages they orchestrate. Speech and writing are, or at least can and should be, more than the mere transmission of others’ words. It is in their handling, in their arrangement and treatment, that true authorship and self-authorship – the creation of the genuinely new through the appropriation and modification of the ‘given’ – reside. There are, as the foregoing pages have suggested, myriad ways in which the ‘dialogic reverberations’ central to Bakhtin’s understanding of language and literature pave the way for the theory of intertextuality.196 Holding that ‘[d]ialogue moves into the deepest molecular, and ultimately, subatomic levels’, and asserting that hybrid forms of reported speech foster not ‘a mechanical bond but a chemical union’, he conjures a view of language and literature as layered but porous semiotic formations, in which everything, from the most granular level to the most global level, is intertwined.197 Yet if this vision of infinite interconnection recalls Bergson’s Creative Evolution, it does so only at the cost of the effacement of an important strand of Bakhtinian thinking which remains committed to the usefulness of conceptual boundaries. Indeed, Bakhtin’s notion of ‘dialogism’ implies boundaries: it is at the border where ‘[w]ord comes into contact with word’ that the most productive forms of living and writing thrive.198 Preserving Creativity For all its originality and compelling argumentative thrust, Bakhtin’s thought is not without its blind spots and contradictions. Chief among the inconsistencies relevant to this study is the question of Bakhtin’s parti pris regarding creativity. One of Bakhtin’s constant objectives, in writing about the uses of ­language in everyday life as well as in literature, is to preserve the possibility of authentic creation. Even as he dismisses the idea of the existence of ‘virgin’ or ‘neutral’ words in culture, his writings react against understandings of life and art in which the new is reduced to the mere 195 196 197 198

Prosaics, 152. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 284. ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 300, 340. Voloshinov/Bakhtin, Marxism, 118.

298 Bakhtin permutation of the old.199 Voloshinov/Bakhtin’s attack on Formalism, as discussed above, was driven by the strongly worded repudiation of just such a demeaning conception – one in which art is viewed as a set devices by which currently conventional forms of language are reshuffled. Against this impoverished notion of novelty as defamiliarization (one which aligns closely aligned with intertextuality in its structuralist formulations), Voloshinov/Bakhtin oppose a view of art as a medium charged with its own reading of the world – a fully engaged axiological commentary on reality. Yet as well as mounting an emphatic rebuttal of Formalist a prioris, Voloshinov/Bakhtin’s position, chiming with opinions expressed by Bakhtin elsewhere, appears to reflect an axiomatic conviction – or at least desideratum – of his own. For what emerges from a number of his pronouncements is that Bakhtin wants creativity to be possible, in life and in literature. He writes, as Morson and Emerson show, in defence of the idea that ‘an utterance or an action is never just the “product” of what is given’.200 As Bakhtin puts it in ‘The Problem of the Text’ (posthumously published in 1979): It always creates something that never existed before, something absolutely new and unrepeatable […] What is given is completely transformed in what is created. 201 It is for this reason that he reacts against ‘theoretism’ and the armature of causal laws governing such schools of thought as modern linguistics, Formalism, and structuralism. Beyond the reasonable delineation of the logical flaws and limitations of such closed systems, Bakhtin’s critique seems driven by a dread of the implications of tight consequential frameworks. In Morson and Emerson’s analysis, Bakhtin intuits that the discovery of the universal applicability of certain systematic causal rules would ‘eliminate the possibility of freedom, choice, and the genuinely new’. 202 ‘For Bakhtin’, they continue, causality per se […] is troubling, because causality pertains only to the given and leaves no conceptual room for the created. Exhaustive 199 ‘Only the mythical Adam, who approached a virginal and as yet verbally unqualified world with the first word, could really have escaped from start to finish this dialogic inter-orientation with the alien word’. – ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 279. 200 Prosaics, 170. 201 ‘The Problem of the Text’, SG, 103–31, 119–20. The essay’s full title, chosen by Bakhtin’s ­editors, is ‘The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis’. 202 Prosaics, 38. In a book entitled In the Writer’s Laboratory, Medvedev, for his part, objects to ideas of R ­ omantic inspiration and cognate notions of creativity on the grounds that these describe passively experienced phenomena which ill explain the role of contextual triggers and the labour involved in literary creation. – Prosaics, 41.

Bakhtin  299 causal explanations of whatever sort ultimately deny unfinalizability and responsibility. 203 Like many Russian writers (so Morson and Emerson contend), Bakhtin writes against determinism, against a conception of creation as a wholly determined phenomenon. In fact, Bakhtin ascribes to Dostoevsky just such a rejection of inadequate, mechanistic, deterministic laws: Dostoevsky could hear dialogic relationships everywhere, in all manifestations of conscious and intelligent human life; where consciousness began, there dialogue began for him as well. Only purely mechanistic relationships are not dialogic, and Dostoevsky categorically denied their importance for understanding and interpreting life and the acts of man (his struggle against mechanistic materialism, fashionable ‘physiologism’, Claude Bernard, the theory of environmental causality, etc.)204 In ‘Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences’, a late ‘essay’ compiled on the basis of surviving notes by one of his students, ­Bakhtin restates his sense of the failure of Formalism, whose disregard of ­content ‘leads to “materialist aesthetics”’. 205 He, by contrast, wants ‘not ­“making” but creativity’.206 The same piece articulates a view of structuralism in terms which cast his subsequent appropriation by Kristeva and Todorov in an awkward light: My attitude towards structuralism: I am against enclosure in a text. Mechanical categories: ‘opposition’, ‘change of codes’ […] [s]equential formalization and depersonalization: all relations are logical (in the broad sense of the word). But I hear voices in everything and dialogic relations among them. 207 From all this, it seems clear that, as Morson and Emerson aver, ‘an ­important objective of Bakhtin’s work was to show that creativity is real, ongoing, and immanent in the process of daily living’.208 This purpose orients all of Bakhtin’s writing: it becomes, in other words, not merely a guiding telos (in itself a threat to argumentative soundness) but a starting

203 Prosaics, 208. 204 PDP, 40. 205 Zbinden, 2. | ‘Toward a Methodology of the Human Sciences’, SG, 159–72, 169. Holquist refers to this essay as ‘probably the last thing [Bakhtin] wrote before his death in 1975’. – Introduction, SG, xi. 206 ‘Toward a Methodology of the Human Sciences’, SG, 169. 207 ‘Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences’, SG, 169. 208 Prosaics, 298.

300 Bakhtin premise. Morson and Emerson’s choice of verb tense and emphasis are telling when they state that, for Bakhtin, ‘[f]reedom, openness, real innovation, and creativity had to be possible in the phenomenal world’.209 By letting this conviction shape his case, Bakhtin falls prey to the very apriorism with which he finds fault when it manifests in other people’s theories. In writing to preserve creation for human agency, Bakhtin po­ sits as much as do Saussure and the Formalists. In displaying this investment, Bakhtin registers a position, as it were in advance, about one of the issues that sits at the core of intertextual theory. The issue is that of the possibility, for human beings, of claiming responsibility, or taking credit, for the genesis of the new – the ability to play a conscious, fully intentional part in acts of creation. And as Bakhtin defends creativity from those systematic, structuralist accounts which would seem to encroach upon this capacity, so others have rejected intertextual theory because it seems to signal the death knell of belief in the controlling artist – the ‘death’ of the very idea of the author. The next chapter, turning finally to Kristeva’s coining of ‘intertextuality’ in 1966, deals with the mobilization of Bakhtin’s writings in service of the theory – first in its structuralist, and then its post-structuralist, instantiations.

209 Prosaics, 38 (italics mine).

6 Kristeva and the Birth of Intertextuality

General Contexts From Sofia to Paris Born in Sofia in 1941, Julia Kristeva grew up in the heart of what ­Catherine Bouthors-Paillart calls the ‘immense crossroads of the ­Balkans’.1 Like Bakhtin, whose formative years were spent in the polyglot, cosmopolitan cities of Vilnius and Odessa, the context of Kristeva’s early years was characterized by cultural, intellectual, spiritual and linguistic horizons as various as prevailing communism, Greek orthodox religion, Bulgarian, ­Russian, English, and subsequently French literature, German and Enlightenment philosophy, and the arts.2 Enrolled in a French, Dominican-run kindergarten and subsequently at the Alliance Française, Kristeva’s education was, from the outset, ­‘francophile and francophone’.3 Her impressions on arrival in Paris at the end of 1965 – funded, as Todorov had been two years previously, by a doctoral scholarship awarded by the French state – were thus a ­paradoxical mixture of familiarity and estrangement.4 In academic terms, her new environment suited her perfectly: as she recalls in ‘Mémoire’, an autobiographical essay published in 1983 in the first issue of L’Infini (the journal which replaced Tel Quel), ‘the intellectual climate of Paris was not in the least disorienting’.5 The École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), then housed in a staircase of the Sorbonne, seemed to 1 Catherine Bouthors-Paillart, Julia Kristeva (Paris: Association pour la Diffusion de la Pensée Française, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, n.d.), 15. 2 Bouthors-Paillard, 15. 3 Bouthors-Paillard, 15. See also Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 42. 4 Kristeva in interview with Tiphaine Samoyault, 25 September 2013, qtd in Samoyault, Roland Barthes, 410. See also Niilo Kauppi, The Making of an AvantGarde: Tel Quel (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), 129. 5 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 42.

302  Kristeva her an ‘ideal’ institution, redolent of the spirit of establishments which offered hospitality to travelling scholars in the Middle Ages. Even her awareness that some saw her as ‘a more or less monstrous anomaly’ did not dampen the excitement of her enchanted Parisian beginnings. And indeed, looking back, Kristeva deems even the degree of ‘resistance’ she occasionally experienced in France to have been ‘propitious to the ­production of new thinking’.6 That Kristeva in fact came to identify with her perceived status as a ‘monstrous anomaly’, ‘in perpetual transit between two countries, two cultures, two languages’, is suggested by the frequency of her ­references to her immigrant personal history in later years.7 As she would state in 1998, ‘I am a monster at the crossroads’.8 This self-­conscious ­espousal and even mythologization (in the allusion to the ­fantastical, ­riddle-­bearing Sphinx at the crossing) of her own position as an o ­ utsider probably played a part in her decision to follow the example set by Todorov in Théorie de la littérature, and bring Bakhtin – another ­foreigner, another Eastern enigma – into the light. Similarly, Kristeva’s strong sense of her own hybridity may explain her role in the coining of ‘intertextuality’. As she herself would declare in an interview of 1985, ‘I am an intertextual personality.’9

6 ‘Mémoire’, 42. See also Julia Kristeva, Les Samouraïs (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 29. 7 Bouthors-Paillard, 14. 8 Julia Kristeva, L’Avenir d’une révolte (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1998), 67, qtd in Bouthors-Paillart, 14. Kristeva’s partiality for picturing herself as a figure at a ­crossroads, hypothesizes Bouthors-Paillart, may have roots in the suggestive ­etymology of her own name: ‘Kristev’, she notes, means ‘of the cross’. – Bouthors-­ Paillart, 14. | Roland Barthes, one of her first champions in Paris, validates this claim to outsider status in ‘L’Étrangère’ (literally, ‘The Stranger’), his review of her first book. Here, as in many of Kristeva’s own statements, Barthes intimates a connection between Kristeva’s role as a bridge between East and West (‘It is to her that we owe a new kind of knowledge, derived from the East and the Far East’) and the style of her thought and contributions to literary theory: ‘Julia Kristeva changes the place of things’. – Barthes, ‘Kristeva’s Semiotike’, in The Rustle of Language, 168–71, 168; first ­published as ‘L’Étrangère’ in La Quinzaine Littéraire in 1970, and then in Le Bruissement de la langue, 211–14, 211. 9 Kristeva in interview with Margaret Waller in 1985, in Julia Kristeva: Interviews, ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 188–203, 203. That monstrousness and foreignness remain fully acknowledged and indeed flaunted aspects of her personality is clear from a recent interview given to promote a book co-authored with Philippe Sollers on the subject their marriage: ‘An intellectual woman is a monster. What was needed was a man who would be able to put up with a visible, foreign, ambitious, and thinking woman.’ – Kristeva in interview with Philippe Lançon, ‘La vie à deux Julia Kristeva et Philippe Sollers. Tête-à-tête’, Libération, 5 August 1996, www.liberation.fr/portrait/1996/08/05/la-vie-a-deuxjulia-kristeva-et-philippe-sollers-tete-a-tete_179720 [accessed 23 July 2019].

Kristeva  303 As well as reflecting her personal, geographical, and cultural trajectory from East to West, the emergence of intertextuality is intimately connected with the context of 1960s Paris. The intellectual climate at that time, Kristeva recalls, was ‘universalist and cosmopolitan’.10 Even the rivalries between the EPHE and the Sorbonne, and between Tel Quel, the Nouvelle Revue Française, and Les Temps Modernes, fostered an exalting ‘freedom of thought’ which made it possible to seek inspiration in sources as disparate as ‘Marx, Saint Augustin, Hegel, ­Saussure, and Freud’.11 In Paris, Kristeva rapidly became acquainted with many of the ­period’s cultural luminaries. She seems to have met her compatriot ­Tzvetan Todorov, who had preceded her in joining the EPHE, more or less ­immediately upon arrival.12 From him, she heard high praise of the seminars of Roland Barthes and of the influential Romanian Marxist Lucien Goldmann. Goldmann’s popularity and influence were then at their zenith, and Todorov advised Kristeva to enlist him as the supervisor of her proposed thesis on the nouveau roman.13 In this petition, she was successful: as she remarks in both ‘Mémoire’ and her later autobiographical roman à clef, Les Samouraïs, she was more warmly welcomed into Goldmann’s circle because of his conviction that, ‘coming from the East, she was congenitally Marxist’.14 In February 1966, Kristeva ­began ­attending Roland Barthes’ seminar on rhetoric, thereby joining the ranks of Todorov and Gérard Genette, among others.15 Schooled as she had been in Sofia in the works of the Russian Formalists, Kristeva was disposed to consider such work, and its extensions in Parisian structuralism, to be rather passé, but Barthes’ inspirational teaching breathed new life into ‘a formalism [she had] considered reductive’.16 If Barthes made an impression on Kristeva, Kristeva seems to have made an equally positive impression on Barthes. In March 1966, Kristeva solicited an appointment with him to discuss the nouveau roman (to

10 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 42. 11 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 42. 12 It was to Todorov’s work that Kristeva was to devote her first published piece of work: ‘Les Recherches sémantiques de Tzvetan Todorov’, La Pensée, vol. 130 ­(December 1966), 36–43. 13 ‘Tzvetan Todorov […] steered her to Lucien Goldmann’s seminar’. – Leon S. ­Roudiez, Introduction to Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Art and Literature, 2. | Samoyault, Roland Barthes, 410. | These initial plans were swiftly altered: Kristeva’s doctoral work would in fact be devoted to the genesis of novelistic form and centre on a fifteenth-century text by Antoine de la Sale, Jehain de Saintré. 14 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 43. 15 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 43. | Barthes’ seminar ran in 1964–65 and 1965–66. – ­Samoyault, ­Roland Barthes, 408. 16 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 43.

304  Kristeva which she at that point still intended to devote her PhD). As Samoyault recounts, On this first meeting, Barthes is fascinated not only by the intelligence of this young woman of twenty-four, but also by her energy to move mountains (he would subsequently regularly refer to her as a ‘bulldozer’) and by all that her knowledge of linguistics and Marxism, once combined, could bring to the structuralist method.17 This first academic tête-à-tête soon blossomed into further mutual admiration and collaboration. In 1969, Kristeva joined the Department of the Sciences of Texts and Documents which Barthes had founded, where she was entrusted in 1972 with the teaching of classes in linguistics and semiology.18 In 1973, Barthes chaired the committee which awarded Kristeva her doctorat d’état (a second doctorate requisite for the assumption of a tenured teaching post in French universities).19 In 1974, she obtained a professorship at Paris VII, and the two travelled to China together as part of a Tel Quel ‘delegation’ which also included Philippe Sollers, Marcelin Pleynet, and François Wahl. 20 Philippe Sollers, Tel Quel, Communism The suggestibility and adaptability Kristeva evinced in revising her i­nitial view of Formalistic structuralism under Barthes’ influence is echoed in other changes of position. A similar volte-face occurred in the course of her early acquaintance with Philippe Sollers, the twenty-nine-year-old ­novelist and founding editor of Tel Quel. Kristeva had first come to know of Sollers’ existence in 1965, when Clarté, a communist student newspaper, published a piece accompanied by a ‘large photo’ of the author. In the ­article in question, Sollers argued that ‘only the socialist Revolution could provide social conditions propitious to avant-garde writing’.21 Kristeva writes of this encounter in print as ‘the first seduction’, but stresses that it was by Sollers’ impassioned argumentative brio, and not for what then seemed to her a naive Marxist idealism, that she was charmed.22 17 Samoyault, Roland Barthes, 411. 18 Kauppi, 133. | Bouthors-Paillart, ‘Chronologie’, 98. | As Kristeva recalls in Les Samouraïs, ‘she owed him her first job in Paris’. – Kristeva, Les Samouraïs (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 405 (all translations from Les Samouraïs are my own). 19 Samoyault, Roland Barthes, 495–6. 20 Samoyault, Roland Barthes, 499. | Kristeva’s semi-fictionalized rendering of her encounter (as ‘Olga Morena’) with Barthes (as ‘Armand Bréhal’) as he lay on his deathbed gives an idea of the closeness of their friendship: ‘Olga loved Armand too much […] she told him that she adored him, that she owed him her first job in Paris, that he had taught her to read, that they would go travelling again together.’– Les Samouraïs, 405. 21 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 48. | The piece is described as an interview in Les Samouraïs, 35. 22 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 48.

Kristeva  305 In Bulgaria, she had seen at first hand the reality of a Marxist regime’s rejection of ‘formalist esthetics’ as ‘individualistic and antisocial’, and witnessed its opposition to ‘any individual stylistic experimentation’ which might be deemed to run counter to the ideological status quo.23 Yet the scepticism instilled by such experience was overcome by Sollers’ irresistible ‘logical firmness and existential assurance’ and by the galvanizing ‘revolutionary aesthetics of Tel Quel which seemed, after all, to promise the success of the futurist utopia’.24 Through her amorous (and, from 1967, conjugal) relationship with the man known in the 1960s as ‘the pope of Saint-Germain’, through her concomitant involvement with Tel Quel (which published no fewer than six articles by her between 1967 and 1969, including three in 1968 alone), and through her academic connection to Lucien Goldmann, Kristeva became embedded in intellectual circles intimately wedded to the communist cause.25 The political convictions she embraced in those days retrospectively came to seem to her ‘illusory’, but there was much at the time to cast alliance with the French communist party (P.C.F.) in a favourable light: ‘The Communist Party was […] the only French party to have any kind of cultural policy.’26 It had already proven key to the dissemination of Russian culture (Kristeva names the publication of ­Futurist and Formalist texts as prime examples) and, by extension, to the revival of interest in French experimental writing and literary ­theory.27 Indeed, the success of structuralism and even of ­psychoanalytical ­approaches to culture within the French academy, Kristeva suggests, was only achieved thanks to the party’s extensive publishing apparatus.28 Whilst comprising elements of genuine ideological fervour (most ­obviously embodied in ‘the anarchic blaze of May 68 in which we took part twenty-four hours a day’), the Tel Quel group’s ‘temporary ­sympathy’ with the communist party was, according to Kristeva, largely self-interested and ­pragmatic.29 An ‘astounding network’ endowed with exceptional propagandistic reach and efficiency, was not the P.C.F. the best loudspeaker for what was essentially ­literary or theoretical laboratory work? […] it was, in sum, a ­question of using the P.C.; not of serving it.30

23 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 48 24 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 48 25 Bouthors-Paillart, ‘Chronologie’, 98. | Kristeva, Les Samouraïs, 34. Many of the intimate details of this relationship are set out under thin semi-fictional veiling in Les Samouraïs. | For full bibliographical details of these publications, see Hélène Volat, ‘Julia Kristeva: A Bibliography’, www.hvolat.com/Kristeva/kristeva.htm [accessed 23 July September 2019]. 26 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 48. 27 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 48–9. 28 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 49. 29 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 50, 59. 30 Kristeva, Les Samouraïs, 118. | Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 50.

306  Kristeva Collaboration with the Communist Party promised to help fulfil Sollers’ dream of addressing an audience situated outwith the narrow precincts of the academy, of writing and speaking directly to the masses (‘no more ivory tower for literary experiences, what we need are channels of communication with the masses’, declares the character based on him in Les Samouraïs).31 Through her husband, Kristeva came into the orbit of another r­ ising star of the Parisian intelligentsia: Jacques Derrida, then in his mid-­ thirties, and for a period one of Sollers’ closest friends. 32 But Kristeva’s connection to Derrida would gradually peter out along with Sollers’, worn down by political disagreements and personal rivalries.33 ‘The Structuralist Epoch’: ‘Everything Is Illuminated by Reference to Structure’34 As well as arriving in France whilst the Communist Party was in the ascendant and in time to be fully involved in the ‘explosion’ and ­‘effervescent atmosphere’ of ‘Mai ’68’, Kristeva embarked upon her ­doctoral studies at a time when structuralism, ‘discours très french’, was at its highest ebb, fashionable both within and outwith the seminar room.35 This was, in her own words, ‘the structuralist epoch’, a period when Barthes felt able to state that ‘everything is illuminated by reference to structure’.36 Kristeva, from the first, took part in its gatherings and events, making the wider project of turning literary theory into science her own, and taking pride in her ‘laboratory work’ and in her identity as a ‘literary scientist’.37 In parallel to her studies at the EPHE, where a number of structuralism’s most influential proponents were employed (Braudel, Derrida, Ducrot, Genette, Greimas, Levy-Bruhl, V ­ ernant,

31 Kristeva, Les Samouraïs, 119. 32 ‘Derrida’s closest intellectual comrade in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the writer and editor Philippe Sollers, who published a number of Derrida’s early essays in Tel Quel.’ – Adam Shatz, ‘Not in the Mood’ [review of Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography], vol. 34, no. 22 (22 November 2012), 11–14, www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n22/adam-shatz/ not-in-the-mood [accessed 23 July 2019]. | Kristeva may also have come into contact with Derrida through Roland Barthes; the two men had known each other as members of the editorial board of Critique since 1964. – Samoyault, Roland Barthes, 413–14. 33 Adam Shatz, ‘Not in the Mood’. 34 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 44. | Barthes, ‘Why I love Benveniste (1)’ in The Rustle of Language, 162–4, 163; first published as ‘Pourquoi j’aime Benveniste’ in La Quinzaine Littéraire in 1966, and then in Le Bruissement de la langue, 205–7, 206. 35 Catherine Calvet and Cécile Daumas, ‘Julia Kristeva et Philippe Sollers: “Le vrai personnage du couple, c’est le temps”’. | Kristeva, Les Samouraïs, 190. | As Roudiez notes, ‘Kristeva arrived in Paris when literary “structuralism” was most fashionable in avant-garde circles and also (as Jean Piaget remarked) at cocktail parties.’ – Desire, 3. 36 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 44. 37 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 46, 50. | The description is attributed to Philippe Sollers (as ‘Hervé ­Sinteuil’) in Kristeva, Les Samouraïs, 71.

Kristeva  307 Todorov), she held a job as a research assistant at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, founded and directed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was by then (and since 1959) also Chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France.38 Kristeva paints an ambivalent portrait of the laboratory’s tyrannical director as ‘Sa Majesté Strich-Meyer’ in Les Samouraïs, ­recalling his ‘rabbinical rigour’, and distancing herself from the ‘insidious’ universalism which governed the institute’s investment in logic, laws, and structures.39 Contemporary Linguistics and the Human Sciences If Kristeva was working closely with respected representatives of anthropological structuralism (Lévi-Strauss), Marxist structuralism (Goldmann), and literary structuralism (Barthes), she was also, via her affiliation to the EPHE, moving in circles closely connected to the ­latest developments in structural linguistics, which was, within this ­umbrella of neighbouring disciplines, recognized as the ‘pilot s­ cience’, a ­‘methodological catalyst’, and ‘the trailblazer among the human ­sciences’.40 The 1960s were a decade in which linguistics not only ­flourished – as it had been doing for some time – but also entered its triumph in the public consciousness. 1963 had seen the publication in French of Roman Jakobson’s Essays in General Linguistics.41 1965 brought the publication of André Martinet’s Elements of General Linguistics (which François Dosse terms ‘the international best-seller of the sixties’) and Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.42 1966, Kristeva’s first full year in Paris, saw the publication of both Émile Benveniste’s Problems of General Linguistics and A.J. Greimas’s Structural Semantics. Louis Hjelmslev’s Prologomena to a Theory of Language, originally published in Danish in 1943, appeared in French for the first time in 1968.43 In 1967, Derrida registered awareness

38 Kristeva held the position from 1967. – Kauppi, 133. | Roudiez, 3. See also Kristeva, Les Samouraïs, 55, in which the Laboratory features as the ‘Institut d’Analyses ­Culturelles’ or ‘I.A.C’. 39 Kristeva, Les Samouraïs, 56, 57, 55. 40 Dosse I, xx. | A.J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method [1966], trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 3–4. 41 Roman Jakobson, Essais de linguistique générale, trans. Nicolas Ruwet (Paris: ­É ditions de Minuit, 1963). 42 Dosse I, 65. | André Martinet, Éléments de linguistique générale (Paris: Armand Colin, 1960). | Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965). 43 Émile Benveniste, Problems of General Linguistics [1966], trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971). | See note 40 above for the details of Greimas’s book. | Louis Hjelmslev, Prologomènes à une théorie du langage, trans. Una Canger with Annick Wewer (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968).

308  Kristeva of this boom, prefacing his own engagement with Saussurean linguistics in Of Grammatology with a reference to contemporary scholarship’s obsession with ‘the problem of language’: ‘never as much as at present has it invaded, as such, the global horizon of the most diverse researches and the most heterogeneous discourses’.44 Though his own work fully parti­cipated in the period’s passion for linguistics and the extrapolation of its ramifications to other human sciences, Derrida conveys ­disapproval of those whose superficial treatment and ‘loose vocabulary’ reflect a ‘passive yielding to fashion’ and ‘self-conscious avant-­gardism’.45 ­Roland Barthes, meanwhile, struck a more optimistic note: his glowing review of the first volume of Benveniste’s Problems of General Linguistics ­acknowledges the exasperation experienced by those suspicious of the ‘excessive fashion’ surrounding linguistic problems but also comments with patent excitement on the promise of a field ‘entering into the dawn of its history’.46 Four decades after ‘structure’ had assumed its place at the heart of the enquiries of the Prague Linguistic Circle in 1929, ‘structure’ thus remained ‘one of the essential terms in modern linguistics, one of those which still ha[d] a programmatic value’.47 Likewise, almost two decades after ­Lévi-Strauss incorporated the model of structural linguistics into anthropology under the influence of his encounter with Jakobson in New York in 1942, the project to carry over linguistic concepts and ­procedures into other disciplines retained its currency. Both Benveniste and ­Greimas, for example, formulate intellectual ambitions for their field which ­extended beyond the provinces of language and literature, envisaging the human sciences as an expanding and increasingly ­unified ­domain governed by the application of the linguistic model.48 As ­Benveniste noted, the reach of such centrifugal extrapolations seemed to augur the realization of the ‘universal semiology’ Saussure had envisioned.49 The self-appointed missions of the two linguistic journals founded in France in 1966 reflect these two strands of endeavour within the subject. While La Linguistique targeted an audience of professional linguists, 44 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology [1967], trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected edn (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 6. 45 Of Grammatology, 6; De la Grammatologie, 15. My translation (above) differs slightly from Spivak’s. 46 Barthes, ‘Why I Love Benveniste (1)’, 162. 47 Dosse I, 55. | Benveniste, 8. | For an account of the emergence of ‘structure’ as a key term in post-Saussurean linguistics, see Chapter 8 (‘“Structure” in Linguistics’) of Benveniste’s Problems of General Linguistics, 79–83. 48 Greimas, practising as he preaches, devotes the two final chapters of his S­ tructural Semantics to ‘a sample description’ of the ‘semantic microuniverse’ of George B ­ ernanos, and in so doing straddles the boundaries between linguistics, psychoanalysis, and literature. – Structural Semantics, 257–95. 49 Benveniste, 6.

Kristeva  309 the aims of Langages were explicitly interdisciplinary, with the inaugural issue proclaiming that ‘[t]he study of language is fundamental for the humanities, for philosophers, psychoanalysts, and people in literature […] this study encompasses all signifyings’.50 The counterpart of this epistemological expansionism (and one only superficially in tension with it) was an emphasis on the necessity for the ‘rigorous formalization’ of linguistic knowledge.51 If Saussure’s Course had marked ‘the beginning of linguistics conceived of as a science’, the discipline’s immediate future, according to Benveniste, lay in its gradual convergence with mathematical language.52 Pathways for progress, he prophesied, would increasingly be sought ‘in the mathematical or deductive sciences’; linguistics would become ‘more and more “formalistic”’.53 Having once equipped itself with its own symbols and ‘metalanguage’ (that is, a language for dealing with language), the developing science would be empowered to become ‘the theory of possible combinations’ between linguistic elements, and to outline ­‘universal laws that govern them’.54 In the same vein, Greimas stressed the need for ‘the aid of mathematical logic and logic itself’ even whilst acknowledging that scientistic neologisms may be off-putting to readers whose original footing lies in literature or history.55 The same investment in the productive combination of reductionist formalization and interdisciplinary extension is clear in the work of Noam Chomsky, whose positions in other respects stand at a sharp ­angle to those of his French contemporaries.56 Born in Pennsylvania to Russian Jewish immigrants in 1928, Chomsky achieved prominence in the 1950s and 1960s through such publications as Syntactic Structures (1957) and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965).57 In France, Nicolas Ruwet – a Belgian structuralist who, though schooled in the Parisian seminars of Benveniste, Martinet, Lévi-Strauss, and Lacan, thirsted for even greater scientificity – fell under the spell of generativism as a falsifiable theory of language which might work ‘like an algorithm’. He brought Chomsky’s theories to widespread attention, first, through his Introduction to Generative Grammar (1967), and second, through his role as editor of the fourth issue of Langages, which was devoted exclusively to generative 50 Dosse I, 274–5. 51 Benveniste, 14. 52 Benveniste, 5. 53 Benveniste, 7. 54 Benveniste, 14. 55 Greimas, 6. 56 The term ‘reductionist’ is used here in the scientific sense set out in Chapter 1 (pp. 65–6), to refer to the endeavour ‘to unite and explain just about everything in one magnificent vision’ and not in the negative sense of excessive and inadequate simplification it has misleadingly accrued. – DDI, 82. 57 Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957). | Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).

310  Kristeva grammar and featured two of Chomsky’s articles in translation.58 Chomsky was in alignment with Greimas and Benveniste concerning the ‘great potential’ of the ‘mathematical study of the formal properties of grammars’, even stating that solutions to many current problems in linguistics depended upon the ‘feasibility of mathematical study’.59 One of Chomsky’s most notable moves was to replace Saussure’s langue-parole dichotomy with his own competence-performance dyad, thereby situating language not in the public domain (as langue, an ­abstract, impersonal, social system temporarily materialized in acts of parole) but in the individual mind. For Chomsky, the place to look for a theory of language is ‘inside the head, not in communities of speakers or in linguistic actions and behaviors’.60 The aim of linguistic theory, in Chomsky’s view, is the discovery of the ‘mental reality underlying actual behaviour’, with the notion of ‘competence’ referring to a biologically evolved system of abilities. The linguist’s task is to search for the ‘generative rules’ which enable the speaker-hearer to produce and understand an ‘infinite range of sentences’.61 Traditional grammars have not risen to the challenge of exploring how language can, in the words of the Prussian philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘make infinite use of finite means’.62 Such conventional ‘structuralist grammars’ focus their taxonomical energies on the classification of the elements of individual natural languages, leaving consideration of what ‘all languages have in common’ to scholars working in the field of what the eighteenth century called ‘Universal or Philosophical grammar’.63 ­A lthough such compartmentalization amounts to a major blind spot, ‘traditional linguistic theory’, contends Chomsky, was at least clear-sighted about the complementarity of these two spheres of endeavour.64 Modern linguistic theory, by contrast, ‘reject[s] the study of universal grammar as misguided’, making no attempt to ‘deal with the creative ­aspect of language use’ and to formalize the ‘regular processes of sentence formation and sentence

58 Dosse II, 3–5. | Nicolas Ruwet, Introduction à la grammaire générative (Paris: Plon, 1967), trans. as An Introduction to Generative Grammar by Norval Smith (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1973). | Langages, no. 4, ‘La grammaire générative’, 1966, ed. Nicolas Ruwet. The issue features an introduction and a technical article by Ruwet himself, along with translations of two pieces by Chomsky (‘Une conception transformationnelle de la syntaxe’, 39–80, and ‘La notion de “règle de grammaire”’, 81–104). 59 Chomsky, Aspects, 62. 60 James McGilvray, Chomsky: Language, Mind, Politics, 2nd edn (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity, 2014), 11. 61 Chomsky, Aspects, 4. 62 Chomsky, Aspects, 8. 63 Chomsky, Aspects, x, 5. | James Beattie (1788), qtd in Chomsky, Aspects, 5. 64 Chomsky, Aspects, 6.

Kristeva  311 interpretation’.65 However, concedes Chomsky, only with recent developments in m ­ athematics have the ‘­technical ­devices for ­expressing a system of recursive processes’ become available.66 Such a­ dvances (Chomsky names ‘Post’s theory of ­combinatorial systems’ as an example) open up the possibility of a truly generative grammar, in other words of ‘a system of rules that can iterate to generate an i­ndefinitely large number of structures’.67 Work on such a project will, as Chomsky acknowledges, involve studying processes which are ‘far beyond the level of actual or even potential consciousness’.68 One of the best-known – because most controversial – aspects of Chomsky’s writing concerns his conviction regarding the innateness of linguistic ability in human beings and the consequent heralding of a rapprochement between linguistics and biology. The fact that children manifest the ability to acquire whichever language they are exposed to implies that ‘all languages are cut to the same pattern’ – a fact which, in turn, bespeaks the existence in the mind of ‘deep-seated u ­ niversals’.69 The observation justifies belief in the possibility of a ‘universal ­grammar’ – which Chomsky variously calls a ‘generative’ or ‘transformational’ grammar – whose features will be a description of the mental ­processes by which thoughts are ‘translated’ into words. It is to enable precise description of such translational processes that Chomsky posits a ­distinction between a sentence’s ‘deep structure’, which ‘determines its semantic interpretation’, and its ‘surface structure’, which ‘determines its phonetic interpretation’.70 The study of grammar, understood in this light as a set of mental translation procedures, is an investigation into ‘the nature of mind’ and the ‘intellectual capacity’.71 This mentalistic position, which aligns Chomsky with Humboldt and Plato and places him in opposition to views of language as an ‘adventitious construct’ or set of skills obtained by mere exposure (views Chomsky ascribes to Skinner, Quine, and Wittgenstein), entails the use by the linguist of ‘the methods of the natural scientist, not the social scientist’.72 That Chomsky’s view of language is ultimately biological is clear from his explicit mention of the role of evolution in the emergence of language: there is surely no reason today for taking seriously a position that attributes a complex human achievement entirely to months (or at most

65 Chomsky, Aspects Syntax, 6. 66 Chomsky, Aspects, 8. 67 Chomsky, Aspects, 9, 15–16. 68 Chomsky, Aspects, 8. 69 Chomsky, Aspects, 27. 70 Chomsky, Aspects, 15. 71 Chomsky, Aspects, 46, 48. 72 Chomsky, Aspects, 51. | McGilvray, 10.

312  Kristeva years) of experience, rather than to millions of years of ­evolution or to principles of neural organization that may be even more deeply grounded in physical law […] the structure of particular languages may very well be largely determined by factors over which the individual has no conscious control and concerning which society may have little choice or freedom. On the basis of the best information now available, it seems reasonable to suppose that a child cannot help constructing a particular sort of transformational grammar to account for the data presented to him, any more than he can control his perception of solid objects or his attention to line and angle.73 While language is produced by the organic matter nested in human brains, the fact that ‘sentences and phrases are products of derivational or computational procedures that evolved and so are innate’ means that the cognitive processes involved can in theory (pending full technological realization) be ‘duplicated by a machine’.74 Thus, although Chomsky sees in language the key distinction between humans and other animals, he also frankly posits ‘a form of functional equivalence between men and machines’.75 In this regard, he seems to replace the ambition to unify the human sciences around linguistics with that of relocating linguistics within the natural sciences. The determinism this implies for the individual and for society, and the perspectives it opens up concerning artificial intelligence – and ­specifically artificial creativity – recall the theories and anxieties to which evolution gave rise in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Insofar as this outlook and its reception (explored in Chapter 1) inform intertextuality – a notion coined in the year after Chomsky’s Aspects was published and sitting at the cornerstone of a project to discover a generative grammar of literature – it has the potential to illuminate its depiction of creativity as an unconscious phenomenon governed by an ultimately formalizable system of laws. Indeed, the language, if not the technical minutiae, of Chomsky’s theory of syntax, plays an important part in Kristeva’s attempt to elaborate her own ‘science of the text’.76 Her resort to terms drawn from generative grammar, some of which bear the tincture of their prior derivation from the natural sciences – ‘deep’ and ‘surface structure’, ‘phenotext’ and ‘genotext’ – reflects her own interest in biologizing literature. Like Benveniste and Greimas, Kristeva positioned her work within the project of a Saussurean ‘universal semiology’.77 Like Todorov, whose 73 Chomsky, Aspects, 59. 74 McGilvray, 20. 75 Joëlle Proust, qtd in Dosse II, 14. 76 The opening essay of Kristeva’s first book is entitled ‘Le texte et sa science’ – ­S emiotike, 9–28. 77 Benveniste, 6. | Saussure, Course, §33, 18.

Kristeva  313 ­interest in 1968 was in a ‘universal grammar’ of narrative, Kristeva’s stated ambition was to situate literature within the wider sphere of ­semiology and to ascertain the nature of its relations to other ­signifying systems (such as those of painting, music, fashion, etc.).78 Her early ­contributions to structuralist theory have a marked air of scientificity. The opening chapter of Semiotike, ‘The Text and its Science’, a­ pprovingly invokes the ‘vast Leibnizian project’ of mathematical formalization – the very dream Medvedev/Bakhtin had impugned as representative of the worst excesses of the Formalists’ linguistic approach.79 The names of illustrious logicians – ‘Boole, de Morgan, Peirce, Peano, Zermelo, Frege, Russel, Hilbert, etc.’ – are listed in exemplification of the promise of what Kristeva terms ‘the axiomatic method’.80 ‘Doing Something Else’ As well as aligning her work with that of Benveniste and Greimas by proclaiming her quest for ‘a formalism that corresponds isomorphically to literary productivity’s thinking itself’, Kristeva, from the outset, also wished to ‘go beyond’ the kinds of structuralism which already ­commanded widespread assent.81 The challenge, to her mind, was to ‘do something else’.82 She was not quite alone in this impatience with the status quo. Kristeva’s ‘Mémoire’ identifies two new directions taken by theory at this time. The first is associated with Derrida’s ‘deconstructive’ approach. Derided as ‘condestruction’ in Les Samouraïs, ‘deconstruction’ stands in Kristeva’s more academic writing for a ­‘post-­analytical vigilance’ which uncovered and repudiated the ‘transcendentalist ­stupidity’ in evidence in even the most sophisticated examples of ­structuralist thought.83 Kristeva sees herself as having spearheaded a second strand of n ­ ascent post-structuralism – one defined less by its deconstructive energies than by its incorporation of subject matter which had previously been ­excluded from the ambit of structuralist enquiries: history, society, the speaking subject, unconscious experience. The aim of this widening of scope, according to Kristeva, was to ‘dynamise the idea of structure’.84 78 Todorov, ‘La Grammaire du récit’, Langages, vol. 3, no. 12 (1968), ‘Linguistique et littérature’, ed. Roland Barthes, 94–102, 94–5. | Kristeva, ‘Le texte et sa science’, 10. 79 Kristeva, ‘Le texte et sa science’, 19. | See Chapter 5, pp. 270–1 and 283. 80 Kristeva, ‘Le texte et sa science’, 19. 81 Julia Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, in The Tel Quel Reader, 25–49, 25; first published as ‘Pour une sémiologie des paragrammes’, Tel Quel, vol. 29 (Spring 1967), 53–75, and then in Semiotike, 113–46. 82 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 44. 83 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 47. | Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 44. | Kristeva, Les Samouraïs, 144–5. | Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 47. | Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 44. 84 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 44.

314  Kristeva Kristeva’s reading of Chomsky played a part in motivating this quest. As she recalls in interview with Dosse, I read Chomsky with great interest because his model was more dynamic than the phonological model. I felt that this could correspond to the vision of meaning in progress that I was beginning to envisage.85 Kristeva’s partiality for Chomsky coincided with his increasing prominence in France in these years. The mounting interest in his works at this time is attributable in part to terminological misapprehensions – those arising, in particular, from the highly positive associations accruing to anything described as ‘generative’. Instead of being understood in the technical sense in which it was intended, the epithet came, by metaphorical projection, to stand for the fertility of renewal.86 To those encountering it without substantial prior knowledge of linguistics, the term seemed to bear the promise of a revitalized, dynamic structuralism. For Dosse, such superficial readings – readings, that is, in which connotation took precedence over denotation – did much to promote generative grammar’s appeal to France’s ‘generation of protest’.87

Two Major Influences: Saussure, Bakhtin Before looking in detail at this dynamization of structure, two further major influences on Kristeva must be considered. The first is Saussure’s work on anagrams; the second, the writings of Bakhtin. Saussure The ‘Second Saussurean Revolution’88 The Saussure who spurred Kristeva’s theoretical imagination in the 1960s was not the linguist whose theory of the sign had subtended the ­Formalist and structuralist enterprises of the past five decades, but 85 Dosse II, 13. 86 The term was not in fact a new one in linguistics, and Chomsky defends its retention in the following terms: I think that the term ‘generative grammar’ is completely appropriate, and have therefore continued to use it. The term ‘generate’ is familiar in the sense intended here in logic, particularly Post’s theory of combinatorial systems. Furthermore, ‘generate’ seems to be the most appropriate translation for Humboldt’s term erzeugen, which he frequently uses, it seems, in essentially the sense here intended. Since this use of the term ‘generate’ is well established both in logic and in the tradition of linguistic theory, I can see no reason for a revision of terminology. – Chomsky, Aspects, 9 87 Dosse II, 5. 88 Dosse attributes the saying to Roman Jakobson. – Dosse I, 50.

Kristeva  315 the quite different, ‘second Saussure’ revealed by the publication of his freshly discovered work on anagrams.89 In 1964, the Swiss critic Jean Starobinski published previously unknown fragments from the ­notebooks Saussure had devoted to this research, along with his own accompanying commentary, in the Mercure de France. Further extracts, also ­transcribed and presented by Starobinski, followed in 1967 and 1969. The text of all four articles was published as Les Mots sous les mots in 1971 (translated as Words upon Words in 1979).90 Sidelining the unit of the sign which so centrally features in his Course, Saussure’s private study of Latin poetry, conducted more or less in the same years as his teaching on general linguistics at the University of Geneva, f­ ocused on phenomena he variously referred to as ‘anaphony’, ‘­anagrams’, ­‘hypograms’, or ‘paragrams’ (among other less common variants).91 In Culler’s summary, Saussure became convinced that Latin poets deliberately concealed anagrams of proper names in their verses. He believed that he had discovered a supplementary sign system, a special set of conventions for the production of meaning.92 The Latin poet, according to Saussure, paid ‘acute attention to the phonetic substance of words’, driven by ‘superstitious fixation on a letter’.93 Anagrams or paragrams spelling out a particular keyword in whole or in part functioned as a form of supplementary emphasis, whether the term in question be the proper name of a protagonist or designate one of the

89 Dosse attributes the saying to Louis-Jean Calvet in Pour et contre Saussure (Paris: Payot, 1975). – Dosse I, 50. | Roman Jakobson saw in the writings about anagrams ‘the most obvious manifestation of Saussure’s genius’. – ‘Quelques souvenirs’, Cahier Ferdinand de Saussure, vol. 35 (1981), 153–5, 155. 90 Jean Starobinski, ‘Les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure: textes inédits’, ­Mercure de France (February 1964), 243–62; ‘Les mots sous les mots’, in To ­Honour Roman Jakobson (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1967), 906–17; ‘Le texte dans le texte: Extraits inédits des cahiers d’anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure’, Tel Quel, vol. 37 (1969), 3–33; Jean Starobinski, ‘Le nom caché: textes inédits extraits des cahiers d’anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure’, in L’Analyse du langage théologique: le nom de Dieu, ed. Enrico Castelli (Paris: Aubier, 1969), 55–70. Most of the text of these four articles is incorporated in Starobinski’s book-length work of transcription and commentary, Les Mots sous les mots: les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). The text appeared in English as Words upon Words: The Anagrams of Ferdinand de Saussure, trans. Olivia Emmet (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1979). 91 Saussure’s work on anagrams took place in the private space of his notebook between 1906 and 1909, before and during the period (1907–11) in which he gave the lectures which went into his Course. – Words upon Words, vii, viii. 92 Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, 123. 93 Starobinski, Words upon Words, 26, 24.

316  Kristeva poem’s governing themes.94 As well as abiding by constraints of rhyme and metre, the poet, averred Saussure, sought to disseminate this emblematic word in disguised alphabetical or phonemic form throughout the text. At the core of Saussure’s hypothesis lies the idea of imitation – more specifically, of a ‘word to imitate’ (‘mot à imiter’).95 Although this interest in individual letters may seem to contradict or stand in tension with the Course in General Linguistics, for Saussure himself such enquiries did not amount to ‘a critique of the sign’.96 As Culler points out, he ‘was inclined to consider the repetition of letters important only when they could be seen as a dispersal or concealment of regular signs relevant to the text’s explicit statement’.97 The permutation of alphabetical or phonemic units, in other words, was carried out within the context of the more familiar arrangements and constraints applying to poetry’s larger signifying units. Starobinski’s editorial commentary draws out the implications and difficulties of Saussure’s obsessive but ultimately unproven (and, for d ­ ecades, unpublished) conviction concerning the anagrammatic or ­paragrammatic facture of Latin poetry. One of the issues raised by this belief concerns the reduced degree of intentionality involved in the ­genesis of poetry produced under such constraints. Indeed, ‘implicit in all the research of Ferdinand de Saussure’ is the suspicion that poetry is not written by a ‘formative consciousness’ but generated by ‘other, antecedent words’; not ‘by the creative subject but the inductive word’.98 The sine qua non condition for the emergence of texts is the existence of a ‘pre-text’.99 To understand how poems are written is not to excavate ‘psychological intention’ but to attend to ‘a verbal latency beneath the words of a poem’.100 Although Saussure does not explicitly reject the role of authorial control or ‘artistic subjectivity’, Starobinsky surmises that ‘the theory demonstrates a deliberate desire to evade all problems arising from a creative consciousness’ and observes that Saussure (in what seems an insufficiently examined paradox) at the very least retains for the poet ‘the choice of this verbal foundation [i.e. the choice of the ‘word to imitate’] and the power of variation’.101 Saussure’s conception of the relations binding the letters, p ­ honemes, and lines of a poem to a presiding keyword brings to the fore his 94 According to the OED, while the word ‘anagram’ designates ‘a transposition of the letters of a word, name, or phrase, whereby a new word or phrase is formed’, a paragam is ‘a play on words in which a letter or group of letters in a word is altered so as to produce or suggest another word’. 95 Starobinski, Words upon Words, 15. 96 Culler, Ferdinand the Saussure, 124. 97 Culler, Ferdinand the Saussure, 127. 98 Starobinski, Words upon Words, 121. 99 Starobinski, Words upon Words, 121. 100 Starobinski, Words upon Words, 121. 101 Starobinski, Words upon Words, 121–2.

Kristeva  317 ­conception of classical verse as, in Starobinski’s phrase, ‘an art of combination’.102 Yet this view, juxtaposed with the basic fact that ‘all language is combination, even without the intervention of an explicit intention to practice combination as art’, poses an insuperable problem for poetic interpretation. For as Starobinski makes clear, the patterns Saussure found so fascinating are inextricably intertwined with the combinatory nature of alphabetical language itself, making it impossible for him to prove that what had seemed to him an intentional compositional process was not the merely accidental, probabilistically unremarkable, and by and large semantically trivial, side effect of the alphabetical and phonetic permutations involved in all language use. The difficulty of distinguishing between readerly discovery and readerly projection in fact extends to all acts of interpretation: Decipherers, whether they be cabalists or phoneticists, have a free range: a reading which is symbolic or numeric or systematically a­ ttentive to a partial aspect can always bring to light a latent depth, a hidden secret, a language within the language [un langage sous le langage].103 In trying to adjudicate on the validity of Saussure’s theory without ­simply concluding that he became ‘fascinated by a mirage’ or trapped within a ‘vertigo of error’, Starobinski suggests that the linguist’s ­mistake may have lain less in his fevered quest for anagrammatic systematicity than in his assumption of a strict dichotomy between ‘chance’ and ­‘conscious deliberation’.104 Anagrams, notes Starobinski, may be a regular o ­ ccurrence without being either ‘haphazard’ or ‘fully conscious’.105 To accept as much is to accept ‘the possibility that the poet has neither consciously nor unconsciously willed what the analyst has only assumed’.106 It is in part because such a view of literature – as a twilight zone in which conscious procedures and unconscious, systemic effects are inextricably linked – remains so unpalatable in some quarters that intertextuality – which is, to a degree, a generalization of the same principle – has proved so divisive an addition to the literary-critical lexicon. ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’ Kristeva’s interest in Saussure’s anagrammatic theory and her investment in the development of a formal semiology are conjugated in ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, a piece published in Tel Quel in the spring 102 103 104 105 106

Starobinski, Words upon Words, 129. Starobinski, Words upon Words, 129. Starobinski, Words upon Words, 122. Starobinski, Words upon Words, 122. Starobinski, Words upon Words, 123.

318  Kristeva of 1967. The article is a dense, syncretic essay, in which Saussure’s theory of anagrams is simply taken as a given (which it never was, even by Saussure himself).107 In a long series of lists, Kristeva unfurls mathematical equations in a bid to supply ‘models’ for literature, with ‘the text’ being conceived in the abstract as ‘a structure of paragrammatic networks’.108 Perhaps to signal the liberties she takes with Saussure’s notion, or to stamp her substantially reworked version of the idea with her own imprint, Kristeva makes the ‘paragram’ rather than the ‘anagram’ her central term. The extent of her departure from Saussure is patent from the rather showy sensationalism of her definition of the term: ‘Since the paragram is the destruction of another writing, writing becomes an act of destruction and self-destruction.’109 The assertion corresponds neither to the tenets hazarded by Saussure nor to Starobinski’s comments upon them. Indeed, the more likely reference here is to Derrida, who had, in his own virtually contemporary discussion of Saussure, named the ‘gram’ as the unit of his own ‘grammatology’ or science of writing.110 Kristeva’s 107 ‘We accept the principles stated by Saussure in his “Anagrams”’. – Julia Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, in The Tel Quel Reader, 25–49, 25; first published as ‘Pour une sémiologie des paragrammes’, Tel Quel, vol. 29 (Spring 1967), 53–75, and then in Semiotike, 113–46. 108 Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 32. 109 Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 38. 110 In the opening paragraph of ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’, published in 1967, Kristeva defines ‘writing’ itself as ‘that particular literary practice in which the elaboration of poetic meaning emerges as a tangible, dynamic gram’. – WDN, 64. | In an interview conducted with Derrida in 1968, Kristeva solicits elaborations of the ideas articulated in Writing and Difference (1967), Of Grammatology (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967). Specifically, she asks for a definition of the ‘gram’ (as also of ‘writing’, ‘difference’, ‘sign’, ‘structure’, ‘text’, and ‘utterance’): What is the gram as a ‘new structure of nonpresence’? What is writing as différance? What rupture do these concepts introduce in relation to the key concepts of ­semiology – the (phonetic) sign and structure? How does the notion of text replace, in grammatology, the linguistic and semiological notion of what is enounced? His answer includes the following sentences: This interweaving, this textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text. Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces. The gram, then, is the most general concept of semiology – which thus becomes grammatology – and it covers not only the field of writing in the restricted sense, but also the field of linguistics. […] The gram as différance, then, is a structure and a movement no longer conceivable on the basis of the ­opposition presence/absence. – Jacques Derrida, ‘Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva’, in Positions, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Athlone Press, 1981), 15–36, 24 and 26–7; previously published in Essays in Semiotics/Essais de ­S émiotique, ed. Julia Kristeva, Josette Tey-Debove, Donna Jean Umiker (The Hague and Paris: Mouton: 1971), 11–27, and Derrida, Positions (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 25–50

Kristeva  319 article makes extensive use of this terminology, defining the paragram as a ‘moving “gram”’, and invoking ‘[p]honetic writing-grams’, ‘[s]emic writing-grams’, ‘[s]yntagmatic writing-grams’, ‘reading-grams’.111 For Kristeva as for Derrida, Saussure’s ‘grams’ appear to have offered a way to ‘explode the notion of the sign as a dual unit’, to situate permutation – the great leitmotiv of her writing in these years – at the granular level of individual letters and phonemes.112 In Structural Semantics, Greimas had cautioned about the risk that linguistic formalization might come across as ‘both pedantic and ­superfluous to the reader whose system of cultural references is ­literary or historical’.113 ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, published the f­ ollowing year, exposes Kristeva to just such a complaint. Whilst she o ­ stensibly follows Greimas in asserting the advantages of formalized over discursive abstraction, the opacity of her writing in this piece sharply brings into question the value of such an approach.114 The ­abstruseness and boundless syncretism of Kristeva’s allusions to generative grammar, quantum charges, set theory, choice theory, and Gödel’s ­existence ­theorem – to name but a few examples – seem bound to, if not calculated to, produce alienation in an audience unversed in advanced modern mathematics.115 The essay’s use of mathematical symbolism is the more suspicious for being wholly unnecessary: the pointless abbreviation of ‘langage poétique’ to ‘lp’ – abandoned in the English translation – is a case in point.116 Moreover, the text is rich in obfuscating q ­ ualifications, confusing oxymorons (‘[a]ffirmation as the negation of a text’), and reliant on unaccountably shifting definitions, frequently seeming more invested in the cultivation of paradox than in lucid presentation.117 Kristeva’s puzzling call for formalization itself to emulate paragrammatic form – a call perhaps intended to license her own ­obscurity – is a striking instance of this mode of wilful indecipherability.118 That the mathematics Kristeva deploys in the essay are unsound is the claim made by Jacques Roubaud and Pierre Lusson in two articles published in action poétique in 1967 and 1970 respectively.119 In their 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38. Samoyault, Roland Barthes, 411. Greimas, 6. Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 46. | See Greimas, 16. Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 29, 35, 31, 35, 35. Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 28. Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 39. | For example, ‘dialogic’, a word nowhere attached to Bakhtin’s name in this piece, is said to be synonymous with ‘paragrammatic’. – ­K risteva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 40. 118 ‘[A] formalization that has the prospect, as it tries to constitute itself as a paragram (as destruction and as maxim), of corresponding isomorphically to the paragrams of poetry’. – Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 47. 119 AP1 and AP2.

320  Kristeva succinct, light-footed, scientifically expert attacks, Roubaud and Lusson take aim both at the mathematical content and the mystifying style of Kristeva’s article. The goal of such impenetrable writing, they sarcastically suggest, must surely be to garner the prestige attendant upon the mastery of so seemingly intractable material.120 For Roubaud and Lusson, Kristeva’s recourse to mathematical symbols results in formulae and propositions which are ‘meaningless’ at best, and, at worst, ‘absurd’.121 Passages built around equations derived from mathematical sources are so vague and error-strewn as to evoke the transcription efforts of ‘generations of perverted typists’.122 Among the essay’s myriad other problems, Roubaud and Lusson list mathematical lacunae, confusion resulting from the use of identical symbols to designate different entities, and the use of phrases ambiguously poised between metaphorical and mathematical signification.123 At the close of their acerbic lampoon, Roubaud and ­Lusson ask what benefit Kristeva can possibly hope to gain from the kinds of formalization they have so comprehensively debunked.124 The second instalment of Roubaud and Lusson’s critique, published three years later, chronicles how Kristeva responded to their attack. First, Kristeva issued a swift and angry rebuttal of their claims in the journal Promesse (one of ‘Tel Quel’s epigones’, according to Kauppi), standing by the accuracy of her essay’s mathematical content and deriding the nai­vety of the ideological and philosophical positions underlying Roubaud and Lusson’s remarks.125 Second, Kristeva revised ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’ for republication in Semiotike, silently amending the text in precisely such ways as to correct the mistakes Roubaud and Lusson had identified. Exposing the inconsistency of her twofold reaction, and mimicking Kristeva’s penchant for abbreviations, Roubaud and Lusson posit the existence of ‘J.K.(a)’, ‘a second semiotician, in disagreement with the first, but living at the same time and bearing the same name’.126 Moreover, with the same terse and witty efficiency as was displayed in their earlier piece, the authors detail the inadequacy of the few changes made to Kristeva’s essay in Semiotike. Roubaud and Lusson’s ultimate target, however, remains the blend of incoherence and banality

120 AP1, 57. Even Roudiez concedes the clunkiness of Kristeva’s ‘surface displays of mathematical knowledge’: ‘they do tend to complicate or even obscure matters for those readers who do not share her intellectual background’. – Roudiez, 5. 121 AP1, 60, 58. 122 AP1, 61. 123 AP1, 58, 60, 59. 124 AP1, 61. 125 Kauppi, 130. | AP2, 33, 32. 126 AP2, 33.

Kristeva  321 which still lies beneath the article’s veneer of scientific e­ rudition.127 In conclusion, they counsel that Kristeva should abandon her ‘imprudent’ and ‘unfounded’ references to science and devote herself to the practice of incantatory magic wherein, they surmise, lies her true calling.128 This fraught exchange, which recalled some of the tensions opposing Barthes and Picard in the early 1960s, would be replayed in the late 1990s when Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont lambasted Kristeva in ­Fashionable Nonsense as one of the intellectual frauds they deem guilty of ‘abuse of science’.129 Once again, Kristeva emitted an aggrieved, bristling, and very personal riposte, this time in the mainstream weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. Seeking to retaliate from every possible angle, Kristeva wonders whether her suicide would satisfy her tormentors; reproaches Sokal and Bricmont for breathing malicious new life into a thirty-year-old controversy; reminds her readers that she has already made a response to Lusson and Roubaud’s attack; specifies that she was young, sick, and ‘exiled’ when she wrote ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’ (one of the titles mentioned in Sokal and Bricmont’s chapter); assures her audience that much praise has been lavished upon her work; and suggests that Fashionable Nonsense testifies to a new strain of American francophobia.130 Intimations of Intertextuality in ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’ For all its thickets of jargon and negative surrounding controversy, ­‘Towards a Semiology’ demands attention in this genealogy because Kristeva’s interest in Saussurean anagrams, as well as her many ­statements about literary texts, are evidently connected to the notion of intertextuality as it appears in the exactly contemporaneous ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’. The idea of the ‘text’, somewhat perplexingly extended to include all human subjects involved (‘[s]ince the interlocutor is a text, so too is the subject’), is described by Kristeva as ‘a double’, a process of ‘writing-­ reading’ (‘écriture-lecture’) necessarily involving a relationship to the literary past.131 To write, as Kristeva explains with reference to the 127 AP2, 36. 128 AP2, 36. 129 Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998); first published in French the preceding year as Impostures Intellectuelles (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997). | About the ­Barthes-Picard dispute, see p. 6. 130 Julia Kristeva, ‘Une désinformation’, Le Nouvel Observateur, vol. 1716 (25 ­S eptember–1 October 1997), 122. 131 Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 30, 26, 29, 29.

322  Kristeva etymology of the French verb ‘lire’ (‘to read’), is an acquisitive, potentially aggressive mode of interaction, ‘an active appropriation of the other’.132 To this rather Nietzschean c­ onception of writing as reading, seizure, appropriation, Kristeva adds a temporal emphasis (‘[b]y writing while reading the anterior or synchronic literary corpus the author lives in history’) and Bakhtinian emphases on writing as an act of either agreement or rebuttal (a ‘writing-response’) and on poetic language as a ‘dialogue of texts’.133 These and related formulations underscore the extensive multi-­ relationality the term has come to evoke.134 No fewer than four prepositions, for example, are essayed in discussion of the variety of connexions between Lautréamont’s texts and other texts: Another book is always present in the book, and it is on the basis of that book, over it and despite it, that the Chants de Maldoror and the Poésies are constructed.135 Writing is portrayed as a drama in which a foreign element (a ‘foreign text’) is ‘absorbed’. The outcome of this absorption – in a term Kristeva elsewhere associates specifically with Bakhtin – is ‘ambivalence’.136 But Kristeva’s ultimate preoccupation is less with the plurality of meaning so produced than with the ‘specific laws’ governing the process.137 Indeed, though Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’ also makes an appearance in the article, it does so only as the object of mathematico-logico formalism (that is, in complete contradiction with the purposes it was coined to serve). For Kristeva, to account for the ‘dialogical relation’ of a text means describing through ‘the procedures of formal logic’ ‘the mechanism of conjunction’ binding it to the rest of what she calls ‘the paragrammatic space’.138 Kristeva’s quest, in other words, is for an algorithm which would capture the processes by which texts assimilate each other. The article evinces Kristeva’s interest in formalizing relations of textual insertion and enclosure and her asseveration that all textual incorporations answer to the same rules. As Starobinski puts it, ‘Every text encloses and is enclosed. Every text is a productive product.’139 Bakhtin The second major influence on Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality is Bakhtin, whose theories of language and literature were set out in the preceding chapter. 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139

Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 30. Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 29, 29, 30. Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 30. Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 30. Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 29, 31. Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 29. Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 38, 32, 29. Starobinski, Words upon Words, 122.

Kristeva  323 Kristeva reached Paris at a time when Russian Formalism was, in part thanks to her Bulgarian friend Tzvetan Todorov, undergoing a renaissance. In 1965, Tel Quel’s book imprint had brought out Théorie de la littérature, a collection of Russian Formalist criticism he had edited and translated.140 Todorov’s well-regarded mission to acquaint the ‘West’ with eastern European thinking may have suggested to Kristeva one possible route to distinction. As Todorov’s work showed, the ability to ­engage with untranslated foreign-language texts represented a strong asset: ­according to Niilo Kauppi, France’s belated interest in literary theory ‘gave foreign intellectuals a means to integrate themselves in the field’.141 For a time, linguistic ability, and the privileged access it afforded to texts few others could read, ‘acquired a disproportionate importance’, trumping other qualifying criteria in the race for recognition.142 Introducing Bakhtin Bakhtin, for reasons set out in Chapter 5, was all but unknown in ­Europe and North America in the mid- to early 1960s. Passing allusions to him were made by Jakobson in the Preface to Théorie de la littérature and Todorov in his address at the conference on ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’ which took place at Johns ­Hopkins University in 1966.143 But these were but the faintest of premonitory whispers in comparison with what must count as the real starting gun for Bakhtinianism in the West – namely, his presentation to select ­Parisian and academic audiences by Kristeva in the mid- to late 1960s and early 1970s. Kristeva’s interest in Bakhtin dates back to her time ‘in the East’, where, as she recalls in ‘Mémoire’, he was ‘much read’.144 In May 1966, Bakhtin was one of the topics of her first conversation with Sollers at the Tel Quel offices.145 Kristeva’s sense of Bakhtin as a symptom and an analyst of his country’s revolutionary tendencies, both social and literary, may have made him seem a subject likely to appeal to Sollers, who was then known to her mainly for his Marxist sympathies. Bakhtin and his notion of the carnivalesque, as Kristeva retrospectively speculates,

140 Théorie de la littérature, ed. and trans. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Collection Tel Quel’ (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965). 141 Kauppi, 131. 142 Kauppi, 131. 143 Jakobson, ‘Vers une science de l’art poétique’, Théorie de la littérature, ed. and trans. Tzvetan Todorov, 9–13, 11. ­Jakobson’s cursory mention is misleading, subsuming Bakhtin within the very Formalist enterprise which his writings explicitly sought to debunk. | Todorov, ­‘Language and Literature’, 128. 144 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 44. 145 Calvet and Daumas, ‘Julia Kristeva et Philippe Sollers: “Le vrai personnage du couple, c’est le temps”’.

324  Kristeva may have seemed to chime with the aura of contestation and subversion already surrounding Sollers and Tel Quel.146 At around the same time as Kristeva met Sollers, bringing him ‘a considerable amount of information from abroad’, Barthes asked her to make a presentation on Bakhtin at a session of his seminar at the EPHE, a task she seems – according to the praise she herself remembers in Les Samouraïs – to have fulfilled to great effect, using the Russian’s notions as springboards to the elaboration of her own theories.147 It was in the course of this presentation that Kristeva first made use of the term ‘intertextuality’. Enthusiastically received by Barthes, the paper would make its debut the following year in Critique (a journal founded by Georges Bataille in 1946, and which at the time of the article’s appearance had Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault on its advisory board), and, in 1969, in a slightly modified version, as a chapter of Semiotike, Kristeva’s first book.148 The intervention led rapidly to the publication of a translated excerpt from Bakhtin’s recently published essay, ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, in Langages (a journal founded by Barthes and Greimas in 1966).149 In 1970, Kristeva penned ‘The Ruin of a P ­ oetics’ as a foreword to the first French translation of Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. In some regards a revised version of ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’, this later essay betrays considerably more self-consciousness about the transpositions involved in introducing an unknown figure to a new readership.150 Such recuperations, Kristeva here admits, may involve the taking of certain liberties with the original. Such léger de main, she implies, is a justifiable and indeed inevitable aspect of the attempt to ‘extract a kernel of relevance from the fusty casing of superannuated theories’ which nonetheless ‘deserve recognition as vital precursors of current thought’.151 And though the piece evinces greater 146 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 48, and ‘Julia Kristeva et Philippe Sollers: “Le vrai personnage du ­couple, c’est le temps”’. 147 Sollers, qtd in Calvet and Daumas, ‘Julia Kristeva et Philippe Sollers: “Le vrai personnage du couple, c’est le temps”’. In Les Samouraïs, Kristeva attributes to Barthes (who appears under the pseudonym of Bréhal) the following gushing praise: ‘You were passionate, precise, of course, precision is indispensable, but more than anything else you were powerful, and I really do mean powerful. A bulldozer! It’s true, Olga, you’re a bulldozer.’ – Kristeva, Les Samouraïs, 31. 148 Kristeva, ‘Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman’, Critique, vol. 23, no. 239 (April 1967), 438–65. | Semiotike, 82–112. 149 Mihail Bakhtine [sic], ‘L’Énoncé dans le roman’, Langages, no. 12 (December 1968), ‘Linguistique et littérature’, 126–132. The excerpt was immediately preceded by Kristeva’s ‘The Bounded Text’, an article which, though it makes mention of ­Bakhtin only once, and then solely in a footnote, revisits notions – of translinguistics, intertextuality, permutation – discussed in Kristeva’s article in Critique (and presumably in the seminar paper from which it derived). – ‘The Bounded Text’, 60n10. 150 RP, 102. 151 RP, 106–7.

Kristeva  325 expository conscientiousness (through the provision, for example, of serviceable definitions), it also gives a notably post-structuralist spin to her interpretation.152 In this account, Bakhtin’s opposition to the universalist endeavours of the Formalists and the structuralists leads to him being cast as the agent of a shift towards the historical, the situated, the contingent, the specific. With Bakhtin, argues Kristeva, the search for the tale beneath all tales (most notably carried out by Propp), the myth beneath all myths (as exemplified by Lévi-Strauss), and the laws of narrative (undertaken by Barthes in ‘An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’), gives way to a recognition of the irreducible, unschematizable plurality and difference of narratives.153 It is in these Bakhtin-centred articles, as well as in a few other pieces published in the same period in key organs of the French literary-critical avant-garde (most notably, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, ‘The Bounded Text’, ‘Concerning Scientific Ideology’), that Kristeva formulated the concept of intertextuality.154 The following pages look in detail at ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’, Kristeva’s crucial essay of 1967. ‘WORD, DIALOGUE, AND NOVEL’

The differences between the two versions of Kristeva’s first essay on Bakhtin – that published in Critique in 1967 and that published in 1969 in Semiotike – are few and relatively minor. Nonetheless, they warrant attention for what they signal about each figure’s position within the French cultural landscape. The most obvious divergence pertains to the pieces’ titles. In the Critique piece – ‘Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman’ – Bakhtin’s name has pride of place in the title. The essay is ­presented as, first and foremost, a discussion of his conceptions of ‘word, dialogue, and novel’. This onomastic prominence is the more noteworthy for the unknown Bakhtin’s name must have represented for most contemporary readers.155 In Semiotike, the second version of the

152 In RP, Kristeva does what she never did in WDN, defining Bakhtin’s concept of ‘the word’ with reference to slovo’s valences in the original Russian, explaining dialogism and polyphony, and justifying her choice of the term ‘translinguistics’ to translate Bakhtin’s ‘metalinguistics’. – RP, 108–9. See note 164 below. 153 ‘no generalised Narrative, but Narratives in the plural […] Post-formalist “poetics” considers its objects of study in terms of their own specificity, typologically differentiated.’ – RP, 108. 154 Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’; Kristeva, ‘The Bounded Text’; Kristeva, ‘Concerning Scientific Ideology’, published as ‘À propos de l’idéologie scientifique’, Promesse – Pratiques: textes, lectures, vol. 27 (1969), 53–77. 155 Bakhtin’s foreignness is evident from a footnote outlining the basic facts of his life and work: ‘Mikhail Bakhtin has published the two books cited in the bibliography at the head of this article. His theories have visibly influenced the writings of certain Soviet theorists of language and literature in the 1930s (Voloshinov, Medvedev).

326  Kristeva article is printed under a curtailed title, reading simply ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’. The alteration is perhaps less trivial than it might seem. In the two years since its initial outing in Critique, Bakhtin’s name had become less needful of introduction. Kristeva’s position, too, had changed considerably. In 1966 (when she gave the paper) and 1967 (when the ­Critique version came out), she had been a recent arrival to France, a charismatic graduate student on a doctoral grant, her name as foreign as that of the author she was introducing (indeed, one reviewer responded to the article by accusing her of being a Soviet spy).156 By the end of 1969, however, Kristeva had two books and eighteen articles to her name  – some of them highly controversial and virulently debated in the periodicals of the day; she was, moreover, married to a famous French novelist, and extremely well connected in academic and literary circles.157 The essays featured in Semiotike, in other words, were not the work of an unknown beginner but that of an established theorist. The removal of Bakhtin’s name, in this context, may form part of a strategy intended to present the book’s eight chapters as the building blocks of Kristeva’s own theoretical system rather than as a collection of occasional pieces consisting of analyses of other theorists’ insights. Kauppi sees the use of

Fallen into disgrace during the Stalinist period, Bakhtin now stands rehabilitated; he lives in the provinces and is working on a new book dealing with the problem of speech genres.’ – Critique, 438. 156 The reception afforded the first publication of the Bakhtin article – seemingly a combination of distrust for a woman bearing an Eastern name and writing about a Soviet-era Russian theorist, and of animosity towards the journal’s leftist leanings – was negative and, in Kristeva’s view at least, fairly slanderous: I cannot pass over in silence the scandal which our attitude represented to the eyes of the moderate intelligentsia. I will gloss over the reception first afforded me by French public opinion: an insulting article in the paper Minute which thought it had uncovered in me, on the basis of an article on Bakhtin I had published in Critique, a Soviet spy. – ‘Mémoire’, 49 The story of Kristeva’s possible role as a spy was revived and received ­considerable media attention in 2018: see ‘Julia Kristeva was communist secret agent, Bulgaria claims’, Guardian, 28 March 2018, www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/28/ julia-kristeva-communist-secret-agent-bulgaria-claims; Jennifer Schuessler, and ­B oryana Dzhambazova, ‘Bulgaria Says French Thinker Was a Secret Agent. She Calls It a “Barefaced Lie”’, New York Times, 1 April 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01 /arts/julia-kristeva-bulgaria-communist-spy.html; Dimeter Kenarov, ‘Was the Philosopher Julia Kristeva a Cold War Collaborator?’, New Yorker, 5 September 2018, www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/was-the-philosopher-­julia-kristeva-a-cold-­ war-collaborator [all accessed 23 July 2019]. 157 The two books in question were Semiotike and Le Langage, cet inconnu (Paris: Seuil, 1969) (the latter published under the name of Julia Joyaux). For a full b ­ ibliography of Kristeva’s writings, see Hélène Volat, ‘Julia Kristeva: A Bibliography’, www. hvolat.com/Kristeva/kristeva.htm [accessed 23 July 2019].

Kristeva  327 Greek lettering on the title page, and the air of timelessness it was likely designed to foster, as part of the same strategy.158 Saussure’s anagrams, centre-stage in the piece which so aroused the ire of Roubaud and Lusson, continue to play a part in ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’. Though principally confined to a footnote appearing on the article’s third page, the terms of Kristeva’s acknowledgement leave little room for doubt as to the theory’s continuing importance to her own work. Bakhtin’s may be the name foregrounded in the essay’s t­ itle, but the Russian theorist’s ideas, she explains, will enter her discussion only ‘insofar’ as his views accord with Saussure’s newly discovered writings.159 No rationale is given for the application of this constraining filter, nor is anything said of the Saussurean conceptions which are thus erected into a selection principle: the reader’s acquaintance with these only ­recently published texts is simply taken for granted.160 Nor is the assumed compatibility between Saussure and Bakhtin’s theories e­ xplained. The sleight of hand is representative of the piece’s u ­ napologetically axiomatic approach, and, to a degree, of its arguably infelicitous tonal forcefulness. Placing Bakhtin Like Jakobson and Todorov in their essays of 1965 and 1966, Kristeva struggles to position Bakhtin in relation to Formalism, ­paradoxically situating him both within and outwith the movement.161 His work, she states, ‘represents one of that movement’s most remarkable ­accomplishments’ and also ‘one of the most powerful attempts to ­transcend its limitations’.162 Kristeva’s aim, it seems, is to present Bakhtin as a semiologist avant la lettre – one whose work led him to tackle ‘the fundamental problems presently confronting a structural analysis of narrative’.163 The vagueness of this initial genealogical placement  – which positions Bakhtin as a Formalist and a father figure to structuralism – adumbrates the mischaracterization of Bakhtin perpetrated throughout the essay. Kristeva’s qualified affiliation of Bakhtin to these schools of criticism is the more perplexing because she does in fact accurately render his 158 Kauppi, 134. 159 WDN, 90n4. 160 The two later passing mentions of the ‘Anagrams’ do not help – see WDN, 69. More generally, the tone of much of the article seems calibrated to imply that responsibility for any confusion as to the author’s meaning lies squarely with the reader. 161 Jakobson, ‘Vers une science de l’art poétique’. | Todorov, ‘Language and Literature’. 162 WDN, 64. 163 WDN, 64. This reference to contemporary work on narrative structure is the first of the essay’s references to the nearly exactly contemporary issue of Communications 8 (1966), devoted to ‘the structural analysis of narrative’ and featuring essays by ­Barthes, Greimas, Bremond, Eco, Gritti, Morin, Metz, Todorov, G. Genette. – WDN, 91n21.

328  Kristeva view of the limitations of linguistics. And indeed in one of the essay’s rare direct quotations from Bakhtin, she signals her awareness of his position and concomitant development and promotion of a ‘metalinguistic’ approach to communication and to literature. In Kristeva’s account, however, Bakhtin’s chosen prefix (‘metalingvistika’) is silently altered: what Bakhtin calls for, she states, is not a ‘meta’ but a ‘translinguistic procedure’.164 In Kristeva’s translation, the term encompasses the kinds of relation she – and not Bakhtin – refers to as intertextual: Bakhtine postulates the necessity for what he calls a translinguistic science, which, developed on the basis of language’s dialogism, would enable us to understand intertextual relationships165 At the heart of Bakhtin’s metalinguistic approach to language and ­literature sits slovo, his capacious notion the ‘word’, or utterance. In this case too, Kristeva tellingly strays from her Bakhtinian source in her interpretation of this central concept, contradictorily reducing it to the very ­linguistic and Formalist flatness it was designed to transcend. Three times, Bakhtin’s ‘word’ is described as a ‘minimum unit’ – a ­definition which perplexingly partakes of the analytical segmentation (or ­‘hewing out of texts’) Bakhtin is rightly said to have rejected.166 The use of such terminology, once again, reflects Kristeva’s marked partiality for the ­language of contemporary linguistics.167 Kristeva’s espousal of terminologies Bakhtin eschewed is represented by myriad examples. Her retention of ‘poetic language’ as a phrasal ­synonym for literature is a case in point.168 As against this, Bakhtin’s valuation of the novel above all literary genres emerges clearly from his books on Dostoevsky and Rabelais, as well as from the essays collected in The Dialogic Imagination and Speech Genres (though these collections

164 Prosaics, 131. | WDN, 66. Kristeva’s choice of coinage seems motivated by the wish to avoid confusion between Bakhtin’s term and the idea of linguistics and criticism as ‘metalanguages’ – languages about other languages – which was prevalent in French critical circles at this time. – WDN, 88. As she explains in her later presentation of Bakhtin in ‘The Ruin of a Poetics’: The science of this polyphony will therefore be a science of language, but not a linguistics: Bakhtin calls it ‘metalinguistic’. Since this term is nowadays kept to distinguish the hierarchically superior status, as a sign-system, of a true language, compared with language treated as an object of study, it would be more accurate to use the term ‘translinguistic’ for the domain which Bakhtin glimpsed. – RP, 109 165 WDN, 69. 166 WDN, 65, 66, 69, 64. 167 This idea of ‘unités minimas’ features prominently in Greimas’s Structural ­Semantics (1966), to which Kristeva explicitly refers in a footnote to ‘The Bounded Text’. – 59n3. 168 WDN, 69.

Kristeva  329 were not ­available to Kristeva at the time). Furthermore, in The Formal Method, Medvedev/Bakhtin specifically contest the primacy granted by the ­Formalists to ‘poetic language’, criticizing the very concept as ‘methodologically extremely complex, confused and controversial’, and identifying it as the very emblem of the Formalists’ ‘incorrect orientation of poetics toward linguistics’.169 Indeed, it is to reflect Bakhtin’s generic preference for the novel, his critique of the Formalists’ relegation of prose to the realm of the non-literary, and his call for ‘a radical revision of the fundamental philosophical conception of poetic discourse’ that Morson and Emerson coin the notion of ‘prosaics’ to capture the keynote of Bakhtin’s aesthetics.170 By retaining the phrase, most notably employed by Jakobson before her, Kristeva affiliates herself to the Formalist enterprise (which was, as its name in Russian clearly indicates, devoted to ‘the Study of Poetic Language’).171 As well as bearing such traces of her Formalist inheritance, Kristeva’s essay bristles with structuralist language: references to logic, signifying systems, functions, indices, dimensions, and schemes (among many such relatively arcane notions) are unfurled without definition.172 With its numerous lists, its diagrams and table, its references to Greimasian levels, Benvenistan utterances, and Jakobsonian axes, Kristeva’s essay establishes itself within much the same theoretical world of discourse as Roland Barthes describes in ‘An Introduction to the Structural ­A nalysis of Narrative’.173 For Kristeva, structures, albeit ‘dynamized’, reign ­supreme, and Bakhtin, in spite of his disagreement with structuralism’s premises, is said to deal with ‘structure at its deepest level’.174

169 Medvedev/Bakhtin, Formal Method, 80, 85. | See Chapter 5, pp. 281–2. | The first footnote to ‘Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman’ (but not of WDN) indicates that Kristeva knew of Medvedev and Voloshinov’s existence, and of Bakhtin’s influence upon them. – Critique, 438. ‘The Bounded Text’ (1968) indicates that she knew The Formal Method itself by the time she wrote the piece. – 59n2. ‘The Ruin of a Poetics’ (1970) refers to both The Formal Method and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. – RP, 105. 170 Prosaics, 16. | ‘Discourse in the Novel’, DI, 267. For an explanation of Morson and Emerson’s prosaics, see Chapter 5, p. 289, note 139. 171 The Russian name of the ‘Society for the Study of Poetic Language’ was OPOIAZ (see Chapter 4, p. 256, and Chapter 5, p. 281). The notion of poetic language remains centre-stage in Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), and in Todorov’s Mikhaïl Bakhtine: le principe dialogique (1981). 172 WDN, 88. 173 That this forms part of Kristeva’s intention is clear from a footnote specifically ­directing attention to the issue of Communications, vol. 8 (1966) in which Barthes’ article – alongside other related pieces – was originally published. – WDN, 91n21. 174 WDN, 76 (‘the dynamic analysis of texts’). | WDN, 88. | For Bakhtin’s statement of disagreement with structuralism, see ‘Toward a Methodology of the Human ­S ciences’, SG, 169, qtd in Chapter 5, p. 299.

330  Kristeva Yet Kristeva evidently aims to do more than reiterate the structuralist status quo. The essay’s objective is to enlist Bakhtin’s ideas in an attempt to ‘go beyond’ what is generally agreed.175 One of the ways in which Kristeva seeks to overcome what Bakhtin refers to as structuralism’s ‘enclosure in a text’ is by following him in widening the interpretative frame.176 Bakhtin, she states, allows history and society back into the picture, but he does so – at least in Kristeva’s rather Nietzsche-inflected interpretation – only by envisaging history and society themselves as texts.177 Similarly, the addressivity Bakhtin foregrounds in the notion of dialogism becomes, as transposed by Kristeva to the realm of literature, an encounter between author and reader as texts: The interlocutor, then, is the writer himself, but as reader of another text. The one who writes is the same as the one who reads. Since his interlocutor is a text, he himself is no more than a text rereading itself as it rewrites itself.178 Here, the excessive, befuddling circularity of Kristeva’s author-reader complex – one redolent with post-structuralist overtones – seems at odds with Bakhtin’s own abiding interest in preserving distinctions.179 ­Moreover, there is a difference worth retaining, a sceptic might counter, between the idea that an authorial subject is shaped by texts and the idea that that subject is a text. This thoroughgoing textualization of the world and the p ­ arties ­involved in acts of reading and writing provides the foundation for ­K risteva’s treatment of the subject. In terms which bear striking s­ imilarity to those used by Barthes in ‘The Death of the Author’ (the first version of which appeared in English in 1967), Kristeva writes of authorship as a ­disembodying, impersonalizing process. Her technical definition of

175 176 177 178

Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 25. ‘Toward a Methodology of the Human Sciences’, SG, 169. WDN, 65. WDN, 86–7. | Though Kristeva could not have known it, one of Bakhtin’s statements in ‘Toward a Methodology of the Human Sciences’ does tend in this direction in its Nietzschean and quintessentially semiological proposal that the textual metaphor be applied outside the strictly literary realm: if the word ‘text’ is understood in the broad sense – as any coherent complex of signs – then even the study of art (the study of music, the theory and history of the fine arts) deals with texts (works of art). – ‘The Problem of the Text’, SG, 102

179 Morson and Emerson state, for example, that Bakhtin ‘tends to stress the i­mportance of boundaries and of unmerged horizons, which provide the outsideness that ­ultimately makes all dialogue and creativity possible’, and also that ‘[h]e sees the positive side of boundaries and what they make possible, which is “creative understanding”’. – Prosaics, 166, 230. See Chapter 5, p. 297.

Kristeva  331 authorship as ‘the possibility of permutation from S to A’ (where S designates ‘the subject of narration’ and A ‘the addressee’ or ‘reading subject’) owes much to Benveniste’s distinction between the ‘subject of enunciation’ and the ‘subject of utterance’, but her discussion also mobilizes a number of metaphysically resonant images to convey the dissolution of selfhood involved in the act of writing.180 Kristeva writes of ‘an anonymity, an absence, a blank space […] At the very origin of narration, at the very moment when the writer appears, we experience emptiness.’181 As in Barthes’ essay, the death of the author ushers in a birth – not in this case the birth of the reader, but that of the character: ‘On the basis of this anonymity, this zero where the author is situated, the he/she of the character is born.’182 Kristeva’s argument in ‘The Ruin of Poetics’ (published a year after ­Semiotike) is more centrally concerned with Bakhtin as a deconstructor of ideas of Cartesian selfhood and of literature as mimetic representation: The truth of the word/discourse does not reside, for Bakhtin, in a referent which lies outside the discourse which it should reflect. But it does not coincide, either, with the Cartesian ego, master of his ­discourse, which is identical with him and representing itself in him.183 Once again in this later piece, Kristeva’s account conflates Bakhtin’s ­dialogism with her own theory of intertextuality. In the realm of impersonal textuality she describes, the dispersed, ‘pulverized’ subjecthoods of speaker/writer and listener/reader become ‘plural’ and ‘fragmentary’: The word/discourse is scattered in a thousand facets, in a ­multiplicity of contexts – in the context of the discourses, in the intertextuality where the speaker becomes plural and becomes fragmentary, but also in the listener.184 Here, Kristeva misleadingly associates Bakhtin with her own belief in the dissolution of the subject in writing, erroneously attributing to him an anti-subjective, anti-referential outlook he did not espouse. The splitting of the subject, she avers, is of a piece with ‘the crumbling away of the representational system’.185 But Bakhtin shows no investment in the ‘death of the subject’, the ‘deconsecrated “I”’, or the renunciation of the ‘ideological principle of identity’.186 Least of all does he attribute such 180 181 182 183 184 185 186

WDN, 74–5. WDN, 74. WDN, 75. RP, 109. RP, 109–10. RP, 114. RP, 115, 113.

332  Kristeva nullification to the unconscious workings of desire, as Kristeva does more than once.187 Kristeva’s treatment of the authorial subject is connected to the toppling of the figure of the author-god which the essay, ahead of more famous pronouncements by Barthes and Foucault, also carries out. In a passage which reflects Kristeva’s reading of Bakhtin, dialogism comes to stand, contra the monologism of the epic genre, for the demise of god, ultimate subject and centre of order.188 In the epic, she opines, the narrator’s absolute point of view […] coincides with the wholeness of a god or community. Within epic monologism, we detect the presence of the ‘transcendental signified’ and ‘self presence’ as highlighted by Jacques Derrida.189 The reference to Derrida, and the use of such deconstructive epigrams as ‘destructive genesis’ (as a description of writing), bespeaks the ­catholicism (or discombobulating inconsistency) of Kristeva’s critical allusions and again signals her interest in ‘going beyond’ the ‘inherent limitations’ of structuralism.190 Drawing on Bakhtin’s ideas concerning dialogism’s roots in carnival, itself an ‘anti-Christian and antirationalist’ form which ‘challenges God, authority, and social law’, Kristeva declares the history of the novel, quintessential genre of dialogism and modernity, to be ‘the history of the struggle against Christianity’.191 Dialogic texts, as she also explains in ‘The Ruin of a Poetics’, confront ideas with each other rather than reflecting or asserting ideologies: as such, they are associated with the anti-theological thrust of modernity.192 Monologism gives way to ‘a kaleidoscopic and pluralist way of writing’.193 This strand of Kristeva’s writing on Bakhtin aligns her (and intertextuality) with the atheism of all the dominant modes of thought examined in this genealogy.

Enter Intertextuality How then do intertextuality and its cognates enter this dense and ­esoteric essay? 187 ‘The speaker who is divided by his listening – and by his desire – for the “other”.’ – RP, 113. 188 See, most obviously, ‘Epic and Novel’, DI, 3–40. 189 WDN, 77. 190 Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 25. Kristeva identifies these ‘inherent limitations of structuralism’ as ‘staticism’ and its ‘non-historicism’. 191 WDN, 79, 85, 80. 192 ‘Dostoevsky’s text […] forms a structure which cannot be summed up […] it is ­plural, anti-totalitarian and anti-theological.’ – RP, 110. 193 RP, 115.

Kristeva  333 ‘An Intersection of Textual Surfaces’ Kristeva’s reconceptualization of subjects and authors as texts forms part of her topographically rendered sense of literature as an impersonal, dynamic, self-regulating realm. Her earliest representation of intertextuality (though the term itself only appears on the following page) is explicit in crediting Bakhtin for the ‘dynamization of structuralism’ she seeks to bring about: Bakhtin was one of the first to replace the static hewing out of texts with a model where literary structure does not simply exist but is generated in relation to another structure. What allows a dynamic dimension to structuralism is his conception of the ‘literary word’ as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character), and the contemporary or earlier cultural context.194 Although this ‘spatial conception of language’s poetic operation’ may at first seem to smack of precisely the kind of Jakobsonian, Greimasian, Benvenistan ‘hewing out’ Bakhtin stands against, the passage is in fact surprisingly close to one of his own descriptions of the position of the author.195 In ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, he states that, The language of the novel can be located neither on a surface nor on a line. It is a system of surfaces that intersect. The author as creator of everything having to do with the novel cannot be located on any of these linguistic surfaces. Rather, he resides within the controlling center constituted by the intersection of the surfaces. All these surfaces are located at varying distances from the authorial center.196 Kristeva’s use of Bakhtin’s image paves the way for the coinage of intertextuality which shortly follows. Once again, the modes of operation of the ‘word’ are conjured in spatial terms, its trajectory between subject and addressee being pictured as a horizontal axis, and the sum of its relations to the body of existing literature as a vertical axis: The addressee […] is included within a book’s discursive universe only as discourse itself. He thus fuses with this other discourse, this 194 Kristeva, ‘Mémoire’, 44. | WDN, 64–5. 195 WDN, 65. 196 That Kristeva knows this passage is clear from the fact that it is one of the few quotations from Bakhtin which her essay actually gives, albeit in a note. – WDN, 91n18. Kristeva gives the source as ‘Slovo v romane’, Voprosy literatury, no. 8 (1965), 84–90. The passage (silently shortened in Kristeva’s translation) appears in ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, DI, 48.

334  Kristeva other book, in relation to which the writer has written his own text. Hence horizontal axis (subject-addressee) and vertical axis (text-­ context) coincide, bringing to light an important fact: each word (text) is an intersection of word [sic] (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read.197 This rather ponderous and opaque diagrammatic depiction of literature evidently refers to a series of antecedent linguistic representations of the communication circuit, from Saussure’s basic schematic illustration of the speech situation and distinction between the syntagmatic and ­associative relations, to Jakobson’s more elaborate schema with its six functions and axes of selection and combination, to Greimas’s semantic axes, to name but a few.198 In seeming emulation of such linguistic ­formalizations, Kristeva unveils a binary nomenclature anchored to Bakhtin’s terms of ‘dialogue’ and ‘ambivalence’.199 But the terms as she uses them bear but the slightest of family resemblances to their counterparts in Bakhtin. Kristeva’s ‘dialogue’, for example, retains no trace of the lively vocal dimension Bakhtin made central to his writing. As he notes in ‘Toward a Methodology of the Human Sciences’, ‘I hear voices in everything and dialogic relations among them’. 200 Likewise, Kristeva’s ‘ambivalence’ seems but tenuously linked to Bakhtin’s numerous uses of the term in Rabelais and his World, in which it denotes thematic oppositions between death and birth, decline and renewal, the high and the low. Building upon this terminology in her first use of ‘intertextuality’, Kristeva credits Bakhtin with the insight that any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double. 201 The first thing to note is that this inaugural definition of intertextuality coincides with an emphasis on universal law. The statement’s intended generality of application is conveyed through the comprehensiveness of the twice-repeated adjectival determiner ‘any’ (‘any text … any text’),

197 WDN, 66. 198 Saussure, Course, §28, 13 (see Figure 5.1 in Chapter 5, p. 272) and §170–5, 144–8. | Roman Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, 357–8. | Greimas, Structural Semantics, 20–1. 199 WDN, 66. 200 ‘Toward a Methodology of the Human Sciences’, SG, 169. 201 WDN, 66.

Kristeva  335 and the timeless present tense, and passive voice of the verbs (the latter being an apt rendering of the impersonal self-reflexive form – ‘se ­construit’  – used in French). However, the ambitious inclusiveness of Kristeva’s pronouncement cannot conceal the paradox upon which it rests (and to which it may owe its memorability and afterlife in literary criticism). What makes the axiom striking – the juxtaposition of two antithetical images – is also what leaves it open to the most various interpretations. The two metaphorical strands of Kristeva’s definition – which state first, that ‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations’, and second, that ‘any text is the absorption and transformation of another’ – will now be considered in turn. ‘A Mosaic of Quotations’ Though the fact is nowhere explicitly stated, Kristeva’s comparison ­ etween the construction of a text and the art of ‘mosaic’ appears to be b ­ orrow drawn directly from Bakhtin’s works. Specifically, she appears to b from his survey of the citationality embraced by medieval culture: The role of the other’s word was enormous at that time: there were quotations that were openly and reverently emphasized as such, or that were half-hidden, completely hidden, half-conscious, unconscious, correct, intentionally distorted, unintentionally distorted, deliberately reinterpreted and so forth. The boundary lines between someone else’s speech and one’s own speech were flexible, ambiguous, often deliberately distorted and confused. Certain types of texts were constructed like mosaics out of the texts of others. The so-called cento (a specific genre) was, for instance, composed exclusively out of others’ verse-lines and hemistichs. 202 Thus, Kristeva’s use of ‘mosaic’ is revealed as a piece in her own m ­ osaic rendition of Bakhtin, and a piece which, by virtue of the distortion wrought upon it, illustrates the aptness of ‘absorption and transformation’ as a description of the changes involved in the redeployment of snippets of text. Indeed, Kristeva and Bakhtin’s uses of the image of mosaic differ significantly. Bakhtin evokes the craft – one involving the meticulous juxtaposition of individual, often geometrically regular tiles – as an analogy for one among a wide gamut of citational practices, one corresponding to the form of the ‘cento’, itself a specific, highly constrained form of poetry. The ‘cento’ was defined by the Victorian miscellanist Charles Bombaugh in 1860, as ‘a cloak made of patches’ (a textile

202 ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, DI, 69.

336  Kristeva image notably at odds with the inorganic image of mosaic). In poetry, he writes, it denotes a work wholly composed of verses, or passages promiscuously taken from other authors and disposed in a new form or order, so as to compose a new work and a new meaning. According to the rules laid down by Ausonius, the author of the celebrated Nuptial Cento, the pieces may be taken from the same poet, or from several; and the verses may be either taken entire, or divided into two, one half to be connected with another half taken elsewhere; but two verses are never to be taken together. 203 Kristeva’s own treatment of the trope wholly effaces Bakhtin’s preoccupation with the gradations which distinguish verbatim quotation from less faithful modes of copying and imitation. 204 To add to the confusion resulting from this unmarked borrowing, Kristeva’s subsequent use of the image of mosaic in the same essay drastically reduces the generality of her own tenet. For this time, she asserts that Menippean satire – rather than ‘any text’ – is an all-inclusive genre, put together as a pavement [in the original French, mosaïque] of citations. It includes all genres (short stories, letters, speeches, mixtures of verse and prose). 205 In ‘The Bounded Text’, which was published in the following year, Kristeva is even more specific in her application of the trope, describing Antoine de la Sale’s writings as ‘heterogeneous mosaics of texts’. 206 Such oscillations are detrimental to the clarity of Kristeva’s definition of intertextuality. This very looseness, however, arguably explains the notion’s ‘success’ in the academic marketplace of ideas. In other words, a deficit of rigour at the point of inception may be responsible for intertextuality’s

203 Gleanings from the Harvest-fields of Literature, Science and Art: A Mélange of ­E xcerpta, Curious, Humorous, and Instructive [1860], collected by C.C. ­B ombaugh (Baltimore, MD: T. Newton Kurtz, 1870), 52. | Paul Saint-Amour, documenting the increasing prevalence in the nineteenth century of ‘a recombinant rather than ­radically originary view of literary creation’ – one which reconfigured creation as imitation, appropriation, collection, quotation – attends to the Victorian vogue for the cento. – The Copywrights, 26, 40–7. In so doing, he devotes attention to Bombaugh’s Gleanings. | Tiphaine Samoyault defines the cento by reference to its Latin etymology and names Paul Éluard’s Premières vues anciennes as a modern example of the form. – L’Intertextualité, 35. 204 See Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’, DI, 7, 39. | Prosaics, 338. 205 WDN, 83. 206 Kristeva, ‘The Bounded Text’, 41.

Kristeva  337 popularity as an interdisciplinary, indeed all-purpose, designator for instances of text reuse of the most diverse kinds. ‘Absorption and Transformation’ In ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’, Kristeva significantly broadens the purview of intertextuality in the clause immediately following that about texts as mosaics. In an organic image more evocative of chemistry and biology than of artistic craft, the text is now said, after a semi-­colon (a comma in the original French) which would seem to proclaim equivalence but in fact introduces contradiction or at least variation, to be ‘the absorption and transformation of another’. In this phrase which ­functions ambivalently as an addition or a revision, metaphors are mixed, and the scope of intertextuality is dramatically widened. As Sarah Dillon remarks, Kristeva’s elaboration renders the image of the mosaic curiously inadequate to represent the interpenetration of utterances, discourses, sign-systems or, here, texts, that constitutes the text and that characterizes the nature of textuality. 207 Dillon’s solution, following Gérard Genette, is to propose the palimpsest as ‘[a] more compelling figurative and theoretical metaphor of the text’. 208 Though the breadth of Kristeva’s conception might be regarded as a strength, the juxtaposition of such incompatible, indeed, contradictory images, is logically problematic, fostering a definitional haziness which explains the polyvalence and ambiguity which pertain to intertextuality to this day. While approaches to texts as technical or artistic assemblages of bounded, clearly definable component parts seem redolent with structuralist ambitions, their portrayal in organic terms – of ‘absorption and transformation’ – reflects a more post-structuralist outlook (that associated, for example, with the images of anastomosis or rhizomatic writing explored in Chapter 1). These juxtaposed but fundamentally antithetical representations of textual relations – opposing ideas of mechanicity and organicity, itemized separation and fusion – arguably constitute the starting point for much of the confusion which continues to undermine the usefulness of ‘intertextuality’, which is still routinely treated as a mere synonym for text reuse.

207 Sarah Dillon, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (London: Continuum, 2007), 86. 208 Dillon, 86. | Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: La Littérature du second degré (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982).

338  Kristeva Exit Intersubjectivity Kristeva’s next sentence in ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’ asserts the dissolution of the subject. Whether conceived of as a process of mosaic assembly, or as one of absorption and transformation, writing, she declares, involves not a dialogue between subjects but a relation between texts. Capitalizing on the epigrammatic symmetry afforded by her two key terms, she posits that ‘[t]he notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least d ­ ouble’ – an affirmation which notably runs counter to Bakhtin’s own non-­ deconstructive approach to the self. 209 Moreover, falling prey to the very logocentrism Bakhtin and Derrida combat (albeit in markedly different ways), Kristeva distorts dialogism by equating it with intertextuality, her own far more writerly notion: Bakhtin […] does not see dialogue only as language assumed by a subject; he sees it, rather, as a writing where one reads the other […] Bakhtinian dialogism identifies writing as both subjectivity and ­communication, or, better, as intertextuality. Confronted with this dialogism, the notion of a ‘person-subject of writing’ becomes blurred, yielding to that of ‘ambivalence of writing’. 210 Bakhtin’s emphasis on the voice and embodied, fully situated acts of ­parole – on slovo as utterance originating in a human person – is ­silenced in Kristeva’s account, sidelined in favour of an impersonal and intertextual view of literature. However, later in the essay, she does in fact distinguish intertextuality from dialogism – but she does so by affiliating each to the writing of different historical periods. According to Kristeva, the examples of novelistic polyphony named and studied by Bakhtin – via Rabelais, Swift, Dostoevsky – showcase dialogism but not intertextuality. Only in the late nineteenth century, with the advent of the truly ‘modern polyphonic novel’, she contends, does a more radical form of the mode emerge: ­ olitical, Beginning with this break – not only literary but also social, p and philosophical in nature – the problem of intertextuality (intertextual dialogue) appears as such. 211

209 WDN, 66. It is also sharply at odds with the influential chapter on subjectivity in language in Benveniste’s Problems of General Linguistics, in which he calls for language to be considered ‘within the framework of discourse. This is language in so far as it is taken over by the man who is speaking and within the condition of intersubjectivity, which alone makes linguistic communication possible.’ – Benveniste, 230. 210 WDN, 68. 211 WDN, 71.

Kristeva  339 Kristeva’s attempt to historicize what she calls ‘the problem of intertextuality’ raises many more questions than it answers. What for instance, is this ‘break’ to which so much importance is ascribed? The essay in question does not say, but a degree of clarification is tendered in ‘The Ruin of a Poetics’, the essay Kristeva would write as an introduction to the French translation of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics in 1970. In this later piece, Kristeva writes of the break she had previously identified as the consequence of the ‘breach of the “I”’. 212 Bakhtin, she opines, is on the cusp of truly modern theory of writing – a theorist halted on the threshold because Dostoevsky himself is a writer on the threshold: Dostoevsky’s text […] is itself situated at the hinge between ­representation and that which goes beyond representation: objectal description and polyphonic fragmentation. It is this second aspect which Bakhtin is the first to hear – and this aspect is the precursor to a new literature, requiring a new theory. 213 She sees herself, by contrast, as a theorist of the modern text, the ­intertextual text. Bakhtin thus emerges as the theorist of a kind of pre- or proto-modernism, one who, by implication, paves the way for Kristeva as the theorist of fully achieved, intertextual modernism, no longer enthralled to referential (or ‘objectal’) thinking. 214 ‘A Permutation of Texts, an Intertextuality’ Kristeva’s next intervention on this theme appeared in the pages of ­L angages, a journal founded by Barthes and Greimas in 1966 and specializing in the study of natural language and signifying systems. In an issue devoted to the exploration of the relation between ‘Linguistics and Literature’ in 1968, Kristeva published ‘The Bounded Text’. Here, intertextuality is said to denote a text’s relations to ‘different kinds of anterior or synchronic utterances’, and the text is defined as ‘a permutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another’. 215 The spatial analogies favoured in ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’ still hold sway; the idea of neutralization recalls the earlier emphasis on ‘ambivalence’ as an effect of intertextuality; and the foregrounding of permutation, as 212 RP, 111. 213 Kristeva, ‘Une Poétique ruinée’, 20 (my translation; for no stated reason, these two sentences – the last of the penultimate paragraph of the essay – are omitted from the English translation provided in RP). 214 RP, 116–7. 215 Kristeva, ‘The Bounded Text’, 36.

340  Kristeva well as recalling the mobility of parts within a mosaic and Saussure’s preoccupation with anagrams, signals Kristeva’s continuing partiality for mathematical formalization.216 Here, more explicitly than in the earlier essay, ‘text’ and ‘intertextuality’ become synonymous nouns. The intertextuality of every text calls for a semiological approach: ­semiology, avers Kristeva, studies ‘the text as intertextuality’. 217 Reprising her earlier idea of literary semiology as the study of the ‘mechanism of conjunction’ between texts, Kristeva insists that the object of semiological investigation is ‘of a translinguistic order’ (that is, devoted to the analysis of the transpositions involved in the integration of foreign textual snippets), rather than consisting of any single text or textual unit. 218 Genotext and Phenotext The following year gave rise to another elaboration of Kristeva’s thoughts on intertextuality. In the little known article Kristeva published in Promesse in 1969, mentioned earlier in this chapter as the site of her response to Roubaud and Lusson’s withering critique of her use of mathematical language, she unfurls a new dyad of notions uniting linguistic and biological approaches to texts. In reflecting again upon the features of radical texts which appeared after the historical ‘break’ she postulates in ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’, Kristeva draws explicitly on the model of generative grammar, and, ­specifically, on Šaumjan and Soboleva’s discussion of ‘the ­t wo-level principle in linguistic studies’. 219 Šaumjan and Soboleva, she explains, write of the ‘transformations’ and ‘combinatory rules’ by which thoughts (at the level of deep structure) are embodied in linguistic form (the level of ­surface structure). Generative grammar, she continues, ‘calls these “domains” surface structure and deep structure […] We have called them, following Šaumjan and Soboleva, phenotext and genotext’. 220 Kristeva adapts this partition to the realm of literature, dividing the pre-textual realm from its ‘phenomenal realization’ in language. 221 The ‘absorption and transformation’ of this new dyad constitutes further evidence of Kristeva’s extreme propensity to syncretism. Explicitly imported from

216 Kristeva’s definition of ‘an ideologeme’ as ‘an intertextual function which plots a text in terms of its historical and social coordinates’ is one example of her attempt to translate intertextuality into mathematical language. – Kristeva, ‘The Bounded Text’, 37. 217 Kristeva, ‘The Bounded Text’, 37. 218 Kristeva, ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, 29. | Kristeva, ‘The Bounded Text’, 37. 219 Sebastian K. Šaumjan, and P.A. Soboleva, ‘Formal Metalanguage and Formal ­T heory as Two Aspects of Generative Grammar’, COLING (1973), 63–86, 68. 220 Šaumjan and Soboleva, 69 and 82, 81. | Kristeva, ‘Concerning Scientific Ideology’, 64. 221 Kristeva, ‘Concerning Scientific Ideology’, 64.

Kristeva  341 a subfield of linguistics, it also seems calculated to chime with psychoanalysis’s topographical schematization of the self as a stratified system of agencies. 222 Kristeva’s terminological choice also, perhaps even more obviously, functions as a reference to the biological notions of genotype and phenotype. 223 Turning texts into organic and psychological extensions of the human body, the terms hint at Kristeva’s deliberate attempt to conjoin literary explanations with those derived from other disciplinary quarters. In ‘Theory of the Text’ (1973) – a piece which played an important role in enshrining Kristeva’s newly coined notion of intertextuality – Barthes names the phenotext as a suitable object of study for semiology (that is, for structural analysis, or what he refers to in ‘To Write: An Intransitive Verb’ as ‘semio-criticism’) because such an approach steers clear of the question of the subject. By contrast, the genotext, domain of the ­subject and its drives and impulses, is not amenable to structuralist ­analysis, calling instead for a Kristevan ‘semanalysis’, whose aims are precisely to attend to the subject-in-process and map the relations ­between phenotext and genotext. 224 One of the obvious shortcomings of the genotext, as Culler points out, is that, as an abstract, merely postulated realm, it is a ‘text of i­nfinite possibilities which serves as substratum to any actual text’. 225 This ­limitless ambit, as he notes, means that One cannot use it to any purpose since one can never know what it contains, and its effect is to prevent one from ever rejecting any proposal about the verbal structure of a text. Every combination or relation is already present in the geno-text and hence a possible source of meaning. There is no standpoint from which a proposal could be rejected.226 The postulation of the genotext, in other words – as, more broadly, the coining of intertextuality itself – opens the door to an extreme form of critical pluralism.227

222 See Chapter 3, p. 232. 223 ‘Kristeva turned to biology and the oppositions between genotype and phenotype, which she imported into linguistics as a mode of articulation between genotext and phenotext’. – Dosse II, 13. 224 Roland Barthes, ‘To Write: An Intransitive Verb’, 12. | Roland Barthes, ‘Théorie du Texte’ [1973], Encyclopaedia Universalis, www.­universalis.fr/encyclopedie/­theoriedu-texte/ [accessed 23 July 2019]. 225 Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 287. 226 Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 288. 227 The notion is retained and discussed further in Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language, wherein ‘texts of the avant-garde (Mallarmé, Joyce)’ are defined as those in which ‘the flow of drives’, usually confined to the genotext, becomes apparent in the ­phenotext. – 86–9, 88.

342  Kristeva ‘Theory of the Text’: A Barthesian Synopsis Barthes’ 1973 ‘Theory of the Text’ entry in the Encyclopaedia Universalis offers a helpful synoptic elucidation of the ideas developed in Kristeva’s teeming and often rather confusing early essays. Barthes’ discussion of intertextuality mobilizes Kristeva’s language and ideas as well as redeploying positions expressed in his own published essays. It sets out her claims regarding the relevant ‘epistemological mutation’ which, from the nineteenth century through to the 1960s, led to a redefinition of the notions of literature, work, and text. Like Kristeva, he uses the universalizing adjective ‘tout’ (‘every’ or ‘any’) to equate ‘text’ and ‘intertextuality’: ‘every text is an intertext’, he states, and intertextuality is the ‘condition of any text’. In terminology closely resembling that favoured in Kristeva’s more Saussure-inflected pieces, Barthes writes of intertextuality as ­effecting the ‘redistribution’, ‘permutation’, or ‘deconstruction-­ reconstruction’ of texts. 228 Elaborating on her Bakhtinian musings, he accentuates the importance of non-literary intertexts – heteroclite, often anonymous ­snippets of culture which appear in texts without being framed between demarcating quotation marks: the intertext is a general field of anonymous expressions, unconscious and automatic quotations given without inverted commas, the origin of which is rarely identifiable. In this, as in his insistence upon the fact that intertextuality ‘cannot be reduced to a question of sources or influences’, Barthes closely revisits his own writing in ‘From Work to Text’ (1971), in which he had asserted that: The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-­ between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the ‘sources’, the ‘influences’ of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas. 229 This intertextual hybridity, Barthes stresses in the later piece, invalidates any simple distinction between high-brow and low-brow literature. 230 Also revisiting his own reference to texts as ‘tissues of quotation drawn 228 ‘The text redistributes language (it is the field of this redistribution). One of the means of this deconstruction-reconstruction is the permutation of the texts, or shreds of texts, which have existed or exist around the text in question, and ­ultimately within it.’ – Barthes, ‘Théorie du Texte’. 229 WT, 160. 230 ‘[T]extual theory will not hold itself to the usual distinction between “good” and “bad” literature’. – Barthes, ‘Théorie du Texte’.

Kristeva  343 from the innumerable centres of culture’ in ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) (‘any text’, he states in the Encyclopaedia, ‘is a new tissue made of past quotations’), Barthes draws on the etymology of the word ‘text’ to fan out its textile and organic connotations: it is a tissue; but whereas criticism […] heretofore unanimously emphasized the finished ‘tissue’ (the text being a ‘veil’ behind which truth, the real message, in other words meaning, was to be sought), the contemporary textual theory is turning away from the text-asveil and endeavours to perceive the tissue in its texture, in the weave of codes, expressions, signifiers in which the subject situates itself and unmakes itself, as a spider which would dissolve itself in its own web. 231 Barthes’ emphases on the outdated image of the text as a finished fabric and on that of the text as organic tissue recalls Bakhtin’s mention of the ‘cento’ (‘a cloak made of patches’) and Kristeva’s evocation of ‘absorption and transformation’ as processes defining of intertextuality. 232 The immediate contexts of intertextuality’s emergence – the cultural, theoretical, and personal influences which shaped Kristeva’s views of language and literature in the run-up to her first use of the term in ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’ – have a great deal to do with the polysemy which has characterized the notion over its fifty-year history. What emerges most strikingly from a consideration of her early essays about Saussure, Bakhtin, and their structuralist aspiration to achieve a ‘conjunction of literature and linguistics’, is the sheer variety of the materials they seek to yoke together. 233 While this heterogeneity reflects the intellectual excitement Kristeva experienced in the years following her arrival in Paris, the diversity – and the logical inconsistency it introduces – does not make for easy reading or facilitate the application of the essay’s theoretical ideas to critical practice. The pullulating metaphorical range of Kristeva’s own glosses in ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’ renders the notion plural and paradoxical from the outset. Fusing Saussure and Bakhtin, science, linguistics, and philosophy, structuralism and post-structuralism, the term

231 DOA, 146. | Barthes, ‘Théorie du Texte’. 232 In an image which recalls Nietzsche’s frequent return to the idea of the spider in its web, Barthes emphasizes the dissolution of the subject to which semanalysis – or, as he proposes, ‘hyphology’ – is uniquely positioned to attend: ‘The amateur of neologisms might thus define textual theory as a ‘hyphology’ (hyphos being the tissue, the veil and the spider’s web)’. – ‘Théorie du Texte’. 233 Barthes, ‘To Write: An Intransitive Verb’, 12.

344  Kristeva functions as a litmus test of the academy’s predominant preoccupations in the late 1960s. This syncretism, which probably played a part, through the conspicuous display of modish cultural capital, in earning Kristeva her place within an influential avant-gardist coterie, also explains the contradictions which plague contemporary uses of the term. 234 Her pronouncements, though they have caught the imagination of generations of critics, seeming to many to capture a fundamental ‘truth of writing’, have given rise to countless attempts at elucidation without, however, achieving the stability associated with interpretative consensus. 235

234 The technical minutiae of Kristeva’s engagement with Bakhtin are also disconcerting: in particular, a pervasive haziness blurs the boundaries between his thought and language and hers. The use of quotation marks is rare and unsystematic; italics are deployed in opaque, seemingly haphazard fashion, without any indication as to whether they are being used to denote quotation or emphasis. – See WDN and RP especially. 235 Barthes refers to a ‘truth of writing’, Foucault to ‘an immanent rule’ of writing. – DOA, 146, and WA, 116.

Conclusion

The history of intertextuality is a story of epistemological seisms, interdisciplinary graftings, and ingenious appropriative distortions. As well as offering an analysis of the plural meanings accrued by a single critical term, this book is thus also a case study of how local triggers interact with large-scale cultural tectonics to generate new concepts, and an ­illustration of the productivity and pitfalls of analogical thinking. While intertextuality emerges from these pages as a revelatory litmus test of theoretical thinking in the 1960s, it also functions as a heuristic tool by which to highlight and explain the most prevalent ways of framing literature today. In even the most crystalline of its expositions, intertextuality remains paradoxically poised between self-evident banality and forbidding ­abstraction. Whilst it is undoubtedly a concept which has given rise to an unmanageably wide spectrum of uses, it transpires from these enquiries as more than the vacuous truism which humanistic sceptics suspect it to be. Born of an intensely theoretical moment, it is a term which gains from being deployed with care, in cognizance of the conditions of its genesis and cargo of informing philosophies. Bearing with it some of the seriousness and heft it derives from ­Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Saussure, Bakhtin, and Kristeva – among the many other protagonists whose roles are explored in these pages – it is a considerably more radical theory than it is credited for being when it is reduced to a mere synonym for text reuse. Its anti-foundationalism continues the erosions of belief instigated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – belief in the subject, free will, originality, genius, even in art as a special category of human activity. Such uncompromising lucidity retains its power to shock even as it persuades. As a result, critics and teachers of literature often find themselves holding and inculcating incompatible views at once – espousing key tenets of post-structuralist theory and its deterministic implications on the one hand, and simultaneously adhering to the humanistic outlook which endows authors with intentionality on the other. That two such contradictory positions can coexist within a person and within a culture should be no cause for surprise. As Nietzsche states in The Gay Science,

346 Conclusion ‘the conditions of life might include error’.1 For Dennett, likewise, our conviction of our own free will and agency is as powerful as it is illusory. 2 It is possible to grasp this fact and still experience life, and acts of writing, as series of conscious decisions. It is possible to read a text and enjoy it intellectually and emotionally, even whilst knowing that an ­algorithm – the author’s embodied mind – produced it and that another – the reader’s mind – is deciphering it. The psychological immediacy of our affective responses to texts does not invalidate the reality of the chemical reactions and cognitive events which underpin them (any more than feelings of love, for example, are invalidated by knowledge of their rooting in chemistry). To acknowledge this, and to be able to consider our lives and texts from different vantage points, each involving a different level of explanation, is testimony to the power of reasoning rather than to inconsistency. In such light, intertextuality need be no cause for alarm. What harm in seeing creativity for what it is? What sense in pretending that it is what it is not? It is this attitude, welcoming of knowledge and accepting of all it might mean for human self-conceptions, which animates the writings of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, and which, in turn, drove those ‘seekers after knowledge’ who in their wake laboured to uncover ‘the truth of writing’.3

1 GS, §121, 117. 2 See Chapter 1, pp. 104–6. 3 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith, 3. (See note 72, p. 204.) | DOA, 146.

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356 Bibliography • • • • • • • • • • • • •

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Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by ‘n’ denote endnotes. Ackroyd, Peter 75–6 Allen, Graham 2–3; Intertextuality 2 Allen, Grant 67 Allusion 19–20, 109–11, 221 Alter, Stephen 43, 248 anastomosis 27, 93–6, 102, 337 Andrews, Lucilla 15 Angenot, Marc 3–5, 7 Appleman, Philip 45, 66 Aristotle 40, 87, 229, 286; Poetics 87, 286; Scala Naturae 43 art: ‘Art as Device’ (Shklovsky) 283; dreams and 222–3; Freud’s non-mimetic view of 235–6; and psychoanalysis 222–3; and the riddle of creativity 222–5; unconscious determinations of 235 artificial intelligence 241, 312 ‘artist-god’ 135, 148, 150, 157; see also ‘author-god’ Assmann, Aleida 79–80 Asssoun, Paul-Laurent 203, 222n186 Attridge, Derek 250, 251, 258, 260n77 Auden, W.H. 14, 195; ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ 195 ‘author-god’ 96, 109, 157–9, 160, 185, 234, 332; see also ‘artist-god’ Bakhtin, Mikhail 3, 4, 30, 31, 112, 216, 262, 263–300; on ‘the already’ 291–7; the Bakhtinian Renaissance 263–70; The Dialogic Imagination 265, 284, 328–9; on dialogism 274–7, 297; ‘disputed texts’ controversy 263n2, 269n30, 270, 281; The Formal Method in Literary

Scholarship (Medvedev/Bakhtin) 281, 283, 329; ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’ 324, 333; on genre 286–8; on heteroglossia 268, 277–8, 289–90, 297; Kristeva’s introduction of 322–32; on language as discourse 272–8; on language in history 278–80; on literature and evolution 284–6; Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Voloshinov and Bakhtin) 263n2, 270, 293; on the novel 288–91; on polyphony 268, 276, 288, 290, 294, 297; on preserving creativity 297–300; ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’ 271; on pseudo-objective narration 294; against Russian Formalism 280–4; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Art 265; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 265, 273, 277, 324, 339; Rabelais and his World 265, 328, 334; against Saussurean linguistics 270–80; Speech Genres 329; theories of language and literature as intertextuality avant la lettre 270–300; ‘Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences’ 299, 329n174, 330n178, 334 Bally, Charles 259 Balsamo, Gian 91 Banks, William P. 242 Baron, Scarlett: ‘Strandentwining Cable’: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality 7–8 Barthes, Roland 1, 3, 6, 8, 10, 13, 17, 20–2, 27–8, 30, 31, 84, 92, 95–6, 106, 108, 110, 113, 133, 135–6,

372 Index 153–64, 169, 176–7, 185–9, 190–1, 233–4, 254, 258–62, 266n14, 302n8, 303–4, 306–8, 321, 324–5, 327n163, 329, 330–2, 339, 341–4; ‘The Death of the Author’ 1, 13, 22, 95, 113, 153, 330; The Fashion System 260; ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’ 259; ‘Myth Today’ 258; The Pleasure of the Text 113, 154, 162, 163, 187; On Racine 260; The Rustle of Language 96; ‘From Science to Literature’ 259–61; S/Z 23, 97, 113, 133, 153, 154–5, 157, 163, 260; ‘Theory of the Text’ 341–3; ‘From Work to Text’ 8n41, 20, 113, 153–4, 158–9, 234, 342; and ‘a unique science of culture’ 258–60 Bataille, Georges 324 Baudrillard, Jean 12 Beardsley, M.C. 106–11 becoming (process) 55–9, 89, 97, 155, 191, 279, 279n81, 296 Beer, Gillian 43n52, 90, 91, 98, 248–50 Benda, Julien 64; Le Bergsonisme, ou une philosophie de la mobilité 64; La Trahison des Clercs 64 Benveniste, Émile 31, 259, 307–10, 312–13, 331, 338n209; Problems of General Linguistics 307–8 Bergson, Henri 26–7, 29, 56–64, 72, 75–80, 84, 88, 100, 279–80, 286, 288, 297; ‘anarchical mysticism’ 64; Creative Evolution 26, 56, 60, 64, 76, 80, 279, 286, 297; Matter and Memory 76; Time and Free Will 76, 79 Bertelli, Dominique 96 Bible 35, 48, 91, 91, 165 Blackmore, Susan 102–3 Bloom, Harold 29, 93, 193; Anxiety of Influence 93, 221n178, 236–7; A Map of Misreading 221n178, 236n276, 237 Blum, Léon 64 Boileau 286 Bök, Christian 34–5, 98; The Xenotext Experiment 34–7 Bombaugh, Charles 9, 335–6 Bopp, Franz 250 Borges, Jorge Luis 10, 12–14, 165n240; Fictions 12; ‘The Library

of Babel’ 12, 13; ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ 12–13 Bourdieu, Pierre 5–6, 153; Homo Academicus 153 Bourget, Paul 169; Essais de psychologie contemporaine 169 Bouthors-Paillart, Catherine 301, 302n8 Bradley, F.H. 76 Brandes, Georg 115, 118, 119–20, 122–3, 125, 139n113, 169; Creative Spirits of the Nineteenth Century 169; on Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism 118, 126 Bricmont, Jean 321; Fashionable Nonsense (Sokal and Bricmont) 321 Brooker, Jewel Spears 80 Brooks, Peter 192, 246–7 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 66 Burroughs, William 34, 98, 291; The Ticket That Exploded 34 Butler, Samuel 66, 76 Butor, Michel 14, 21 Calvin, John 46 Carlyle, Thomas 91; On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History 91 Carter, Angela 14–15 Cartesian cogito 200–1; see also Descartes, René Cartesianism 29, 137, 179, 194, 225, 240–2, 331; see also Descartes, René Cervantes, Miguel de 12; Don Quixote 12 Chalmers, David 243–4 Chambers, Robert 38; Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation 38, 43 Chomsky, Noam 31, 307, 309–12, 314, 314n86; Aspects of the Theory of Syntax 307, 309; Syntactic Structures 309 Christianity 47n68, 55–6, 115, 144n135, 147, 158, 332 Christian morality 142, 144n135, 145, 158, 182 Cianci, Giovanni 77 Clark, Alan 243–4 Clayton, Jay 3, 4, 93 cognitive science 241, 243; and cognitive poetics 111n418 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 82, 84, 111; The Ancient Mariner 83; Kubla Khan 83

Index  373 communism: in Bulgaria 301; in France 304–6 Compagnon, Antoine 12, 207 Conrad, Joseph 66 Copernicus 48, 199, 290 Crawford, Robert 76 creation: literary and artistic 9–10, 12, 22, 23, 26–8, 31, 57–8, 63–4, 69, 73, 78, 81, 83, 85, 88–9, 93, 105, 123, 128–9, 132, 134, 141, 142, 150–1, 156, 158, 167, 173n276, 178–9, 186n334, 193, 204, 223–5, 233n252, 239–40, 269, 282, 287, 295, 297, 298, 299–300, 336n203; ‘special creation’ 26, 48, 38–9, 56; of the world 21, 26, 36, 38, 41–4, 48, 50, 56, 62–63, 140n114 creative evolution 61n154, 63, 64, 75, 280 creativity 17, 23, 26–9, 31, 33–4, 47, 84–5, 102, 105–7, 110, 182, 192–3, 207, 222, 231, 235, 240, 269, 297– 300, 312, 330n179, 346; Bakhtin on 297–300; as combination 235; and selfhood 102–12 ‘Creator’: invocations by Darwin and his contemporaries 41, 48, 50, 89, 90 Crick, Francis 28, 103; the ‘Astonishing Hypothesis’ 28, 103 critical monism 113, 159, 166, 181, 184–5 critical pluralism 30, 113, 150, 166, 181, 184–5, 190, 211, 216, 341 Cuddy, Lois 74–5 Culler, Jonathan 4, 5n22, 19–20, 251n15, 252, 254, 258, 260, 261n85, 315–16, 341 Curtius, Georg 250 Cuvier, Georges 39n27, 58 Dalí, Salvador 197 Danto, Arthur 24 Darwin, Charles 4, 26–30, 33–4; applications of evolutionary theory to literature and culture 65–88; Autobiography 38, 45n58, 47n68; Darwin’s theory of evolution 33, 37–45; The Descent of Man 60; On the Origin of Species 4, 26, 36, 37–39, 40n34, 41n38, 42–3, 44, 45–9, 51–3, 56, 58, 62, 65, 67n190, 89, 98, 132n77, 201, 249n6, 253n27; evolutionary theory

and intertextuality 88–112; Freud’s interest in 201–4; generalizability and interdisciplinary extensions of evolutionary theory 65–6; on HMS Beagle 37; impact on literature and literary criticism 66–88, 256, 283–6; impact on philosophy 51–64; impact on religion 47–51; invocations of a ‘Creator’ by Darwin (and his contemporaries) 41, 48, 50, 89, 90; ‘Tree’ diagram 44 Darwinism 49, 76; ‘Social Darwinism’ 51; ‘Universal Darwinism’ 99 da Vinci, Leonardo 235 Dawkins, Richard 27, 100–2 ‘death of god’ 28, 89, 142–5, 148, 150, 151, 158–60, 167–8 De Biasi, Pierre-Marc 4, 6n24 Debord, Guy 11 Deecke, L. 241 Deleuze, Gilles 91, 97–8, 152, 240, 244; Nietzsche and Philosophy 152 de Man, Paul 237, 261n82, 267 Dennett, Daniel 33, 46, 65, 99–102, 104–7, 346; Darwin’s Dangerous Idea 107 Derrida, Jacques 6, 18–19, 22–3, 28–9, 31, 92n330, 113n2, 133, 152, 156, 176–7, 180–1, 183, 192, 226, 228–31, 233, 237, 240, 244, 246, 261, 306–8, 313, 318–19, 324, 332, 338; ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ 229; Of Grammatology 23, 307–8, 318n110; iterability 19, 22; ‘Signature Event Context’ 19; Writing and Difference 228, 231, 318n110 Descartes, René 142, 200; see also Cartesianism; Cartesian cogito determinism 68, 192, 202n58, 223, 235, 246, 279, 299, 312, 345; Bakhtin on 299; and Freudian metapsychology 223–5 Dewey, John 65n177, 89 diachronic approaches to literature 30, 80, 86, 93, 251 dialogism 3, 266, 274–7, 297, 322, 328, 330–2, 338; Bakhtin on 274–7, 297 Dickens, Charles 294; Little Dorrit 294 digital humanities 9, 110 Dillon, Sarah 214, 337; The Palimpsest 214, 337

374 Index DNA 34–6, 100n366, 103 Donald, Merlin 244 Dosse, François 3, 307, 314 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 265, 273–4, 276–7, 299, 324, 328, 332n192, 338–9; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Art (Bakhtin) 265; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin) 265, 273, 277, 324, 339 dreams: art and 222–3; censorship in 208–9; condensation in 209–10; displacement in 210–11; genesis of 207–9; interpretation of 215–16; as language 213–14; and memory 217–18; processes of 209; psychoanalysis and 222–3; as repetition and collage 207–8; secondary revision in 212–13; syntactical arrangement of 211–12; as text 213–14 Duchamp, Marcel 11 Eagleton, Terry 206, 213n135, 246n328 Eco, Umberto 13; The Name of the Rose 13, 14, 23 École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) 266n14, 301, 303, 306–7, 324 ego 174, 196, 204n73, 216, 220, 231, 238–9, 331 Einstein, Albert 75, 197 Eliot, George 14, 66, 144n135 Eliot, T.S. 10, 18, 22, 27, 29, 64, 74–88, 105–6, 110–11, 133n85, 134n90, 171n273, 288; ‘Experiment in Criticism’ 77, 81; ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ 77, 83–85, 111; ‘The Function of Criticism’ 77, 81; ‘The Love Song of E. Alfred Prufrock’ 110; ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ 18, 22, 64, 77–81, 83, 105, 133n85; The Waste Land 10, 84, 110 Ellis, Havelock 200, 218 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 10 Encyclopaedia Universalis 342–3 engrams 244 Esterson, Allen 198 eternal recurrence 134, 151, 152n178, 163, 165–6; Freud refers to 221 Eugenides, Jeffrey 24; The Marriage Plot 24 evolution 4, 26–7, 31, 33, 202, 232, 243n315, 248–9, 255, 311–12;

applications to literature and culture 65–88; Darwin’s theory 33, 37–45; generalizability and interdisciplinary extensions 65–6; impact on literature and literary criticism 66–88, 256, 283–6; impact on philosophy 51–64; impact on religion 47–51; and intertextuality 88–112; linguistics and 251, 283 existentialist humanism 3 exograms 244–5 extended mind theory 30, 236, 240–5; ‘The Extended Mind’ (Clark and Chalmers) 243 Felman, Shoshana 247 Ferrer, Daniel 25 Flaubert, Gustave 1, 7–8, 10, 12–14, 21–2, 29, 163–5, 166, 168–79, 182, 190, 295; and bourgeois stupidity 175–9; Bouvard and Pécuchet 8, 162, 164–5; Dictionary of Received Ideas 8; and impersonality 169–75; Madame Bovary 7; Nietzsche and 168–79; and repetition 175–9; The Sentimental Education 7–8; The Temptation of Saint Anthony 8, 164–6, 169 Fliess, Wilhelm 199, 203, 216, 225, 230 Forster, E.M. 66 Foucault, Michel 1, 6, 8, 10, 22, 28, 57–8, 113, 126, 148, 152–4, 161n217, 163–7, 169, 171n273, 180, 185–7, 190–1, 245–6, 254, 324, 332, 344n235; ‘Fantasia of the Library’ 113, 154, 164–6; Madness and Civilization 152; The Order of Things 57; ‘What Is an Author?’ 113, 148, 154, 161n217, 163n232, 171n273, 186 Freeman, Derek 41n41, 53–4 Freud, Sigmund: analogies for memory 219–20; on art and the riddle of creativity 222–5; on art, dreams, and psychoanalysis 222–3; on the art of interpretation 215–16; Autobiographical Study 200–3, 213, 216, 225; Beyond the Pleasure Principle 194n8, 220, 221, 203n64, 215n142, 217n156; ‘conquistador’ 198–200; ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’ 235; ‘crusade of revolution’ 193–204; on Darwin and Nietzsche 201–4; death of 196;

Index  375 Derrida on 228–31; ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’ 199; dream censorship 208–9; dreams as language 213–14; dreams as repetition and collage 207–8; dreams as text 213–14; ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ (Derrida) 229; ‘Freud Wars’ 197–8; genesis of dreams 207–9; The Interpretation of Dreams 196, 205n74, 206, 215, 223–4, 233; on Jensen’s Gradiva 222–3, 233; Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious 206n84, 210n117, 214n140, 218, 220; Kofman on 233–6; Kristeva on 231–3; Lacan on 226–8; memory and dreams 217–18; memory and repetition 216–22; memory, repetition, and pleasure 220–2; memory and the unconscious 216–17; mental apparatus 216–22; metapsychology 223–5; ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’ 233; names the ‘ego’, the ‘id’, and the ‘superego’ 196, 216, 220; presented with Charter Book of the Royal Society 197; ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ 194n8, 200, 216, 225, 229; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life 206n84, 210n117, 224; reborn posthumously 245–7; relations to post-structuralism 236–45; roads to the unconscious 204–16; scientific ambitions 200–1; the secondary revision in dreams 212–13; self-analysis and dreamanalysis 205–7; on ‘the solution of the riddle of dreams 207–16; Studies on Hysteria (co-authored with Breuer) 194n7, 223; syntactical arrangement of dreams 211–12; will to truth 198–200; ‘The Uncanny’ 217n156, 221, 233; as ‘Viennese libertine’ 29, 196 Freudianism 195 ‘Freud Wars’ 197–8 Frye, Northrop 27, 85–8, 238; Anatomy of Criticism 86 Galton, Francis 72–3, 210; Hereditary Genius 72 Gemes, Ken 113, 166, 179–80, 184 genealogy 288, 328; Darwinian 27, 43–4, 56, 101, 248, 249n5; of intertextuality 3–4, 26, 30, 133,

191–2, 201, 236, 249, 254, 270, 284, 321–2, 332; genealogical trees 27, 39n28, 43, 44, 45, 51n88, 56, 58, 62, 78, 90–94, 95, 97–8, 100, 102, 140, 249, 285; intertextual theory’s rejection of genealogical thinking 90–8, 108, 158n200; as method 90–8, 142n123, 153, 182, 202, 248 genetic code 35 genetic criticism 84, 109–11, 244 Genette, Gérard 7n40, 20, 214, 303, 307, 337; Palimpsests 214 genome 34–5 genotext 232–3, 312, 340–1 genre 31, 88, 139, 237, 255, 273, 280, 282n92, 284–92, 328–9, 332, 335–6 geological record 36 Gissing, George 66 god 21, 26, 28, 35, 39, 40, 44–5, 48–50, 60, 63, 89–90, 92, 96, 109, 135, 138, 142–8, 150–1, 157–60, 167–8, 182–3, 185, 234, 332; ‘death of god’ 28, 89, 142–5, 148, 150, 151, 158–60, 167–8 Gödel, Kurt 319 Goldmann, Lucien 31, 303, 305, 307 Goldsmith, Kenneth 16–17, 27, 29; Uncreative Writing 16–17 de Goncourt, Edmond and Jules 169 Gosse, Philip 38; Omphalos 38 Greimas, A.J. 31, 307, 319; Structural Semantics 307, 308n48, 319, 328n167 Guattari, Félix 97–8, 240, 244 Habib, M.A.R. 76 Hanshe, Rainer J. 169 Harding, Jason 77 Hardy, Thomas 66 Hayman, Ronald 139, 143n134 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 303 Heidegger, Martin 152, 181 Hellström, Petter 91 Herschel, John 41 heteroglossia 3, 268, 277–8, 289–90, 297 Hirsch, E.D. 184 Hjelmslev, Louis 307; Prologomena to a Theory of Language 307 Hollingdale, R.J. 115n5, 115n8, 120n28, 138 Holquist, Michael 263n2, 264–7, 279, 299n205 Horace 14, 286

376 Index Houdard-Mérot, Violaine 4, 17n86 Houellebecq, Michel 15; The Map and the Territory 15 Howard, Jonathan 33n2, 37, 38n24, 40n34, 41, 46, 48 human intelligence 58, 105 Huxley, Thomas Henry 41, 44n56, 47 Ibsen, Henrik 169, 210 id 196, 196n16, 216 imitation 2, 9, 20, 154, 293, 316, 336; the meme as a unit of 101 intelligence: artificial 241, 312; human 26, 33–4, 47, 57, 58–61, 63, 88, 99, 105 intentional fallacy 106, 107–9 intentionality: allusion and 109–12; genetic criticism and 109–12 the intentional stance 106–7, 109 interpretation of dreams 23, 207–16 intersubjectivity 21, 334, 338–9 Irwin, William 4–7, 190; ‘Against Intertextuality’ 5 Iser, Wolfgang 3 iterability 19, 22 Jakobson, Roman 36, 227–8, 240, 246, 253, 256–7, 259, 265–6, 275, 281n86, 282n92, 283–4, 307–8, 314n88, 315n89, 323, 327, 329, 333–4; Essays in General Linguistics 307; Six Lectures 257 Jauss, Hans Robert 3 Jenny, Laurent 13n70, 18, 20, 25 Jensen, Wilhelm 222–3, 233; Gradiva 222–3, 233 Johnson, Christopher 219, 223n250 Jones, Ernest 196–7, 198n31, 199, 201–3, 205, 245n325 Joyce, James 5n20, 7, 8, 10, 14, 21, 84, 93–4, 96, 98, 102, 165n240, 186, 244–5, 294, 341n227; Finnegans Wake 8, 84, 94, 96, 244; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 21, 294; Ulysses 5n20, 8, 93–4 Kafka, Franz 10, 14, 165n240; The Metamorphosis 189 Kant, Immanuel 9, 138, 146n143, 204; Critique of Judgement 9n48, 204 Karcevskij, Sergej 254 Kasparov, Gary 106 Kauppi, Niilo 320, 323, 327

Kay, Lily E. 35–6 Kenner, Hugh 294 Kingsley, Charles 66 Kofman, Sarah 29, 131, 152, 195, 223, 233–6; The Childhood of Art 233; on creativity as combination 235; on Freud’s demystification of the ‘author-god’ 234; on Freud’s non-mimetic view of art 235–6; on Freud’s view of the unconscious determinations of art 235 Köhler, Joachim 169 Kornhuber, H.H. 241 Kristeva, Julia 1, 3, 8, 10–11, 18–21, 29–32, 84, 90, 102, 163, 192, 214n141, 226, 231–3, 234, 236, 238, 240, 245–6, 248, 262, 265–6, 270, 275, 282n92, 299–300; attempts to ‘do something else’ 313–14; and Bakhtin 322–32; ‘The Bounded Text’ 19n98, 324n149, 325, 328n167, 329n169, 336, 339; and the birth of intertextuality 301–44; coins notions of ‘genotext’ and ‘phenotext’ 340–1; on intertextuality as ‘absorption and transformation’ 11, 337; on intertextuality as intersection of textual surfaces 333–5; on intertexuality as ‘permutation of texts’ 339–40; intimations of intertextuality in ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’ 321–2; Les Samouraïs 303, 306–7, 313, 324; publications in Tel Quel 304–6; relations to communism 304–6; Revolution in Poetic Language 232, 329n171; ‘The Ruin of a Poetics’ 324, 329n169, 332, 339; and Saussure 314–22; ‘Semiotics: A Critical Science and/ or a Critique of Science’ 231; Semiotike 313, 320, 324–6, 331; from Sofia to Paris 301–4; and Sollers 304–6; ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’ 231; the text as ‘mosaic of quotations’ 335–7; ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’ 317–21, 325; ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’ 325–7; work at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale 307 Kroeber, Alfred 94, 95, 102 Kynes, Will 19n99, 110

Index  377 Lacan, Jacques 29, 192, 226–9, 233, 240, 245, 246, 309; ‘The Insistence of the Letter’ 226 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 152 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 43, 53, 54, 62, 189 language: arbitrary signs 252–3; art and 130–1; Bakhtin’s theories of 270–300; and connectivity, repetition 133–6; culture as 257–62; dialogism 274–7; as discourse 272–8; dreams as 213–14; heteroglossia 277–8; in history 278–80; langue and parole 251–2; as net 126–30; Nietzsche’s critique of 126–36; poetic language 256, 281–3, 322, 328–9, 334, 338; Saussure’s redefinition of 248–54; and semiology 253–4; and structuralist linguistics 248–54; synchrony and causation 253; utterance 273–4; world as 131–3 ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’ 259–60, 266, 323 langue 30, 251–2, 270, 279, 281n86, 283, 310 Laplanche, Jean 205; The Language of Psycho-Analysis (Laplanche and Pontalis) 205, 225 Lautréamont, Comte de 10–11, 322; Les Chants de Maldoror 322 Lawrence, D.H. 66 Le Brun, Philip 76–7 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 46, 271, 283, 313 Le Rider, Jacques 169 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 8, 257–9, 260–1, 307–9, 325; Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians 257; founder of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale 307; ‘The Structural Study of Myth’ 258 Lewes, George Henry 27, 66, 68–71, 286 linguistics 248–54 Linnaeus, Carl 256 Locke, John 46 Lodge, David 5n22, 261n81, 267–8 Loewenberg, Bert James 46, 60n144 Lossky, Nicholas 279; The Intuitive Philosophy of Bergson 279 Lowes, John Livingston 83–4, 111

Lusson, Pierre 32, 319–21, 327, 340 Lyell, Charles 36, 39, 45n58, 132n77, 248 MacFarlane, Robert 9n47, 10, 21, 23; Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature 9n47, 10 Mailhos, Jacques 96 Mallarmé, Stéphane 10, 14, 21, 159, 165n240, 341n227; ‘Crise de vers’ 21 Mann, Thomas 14, 197 Marlowe, Christopher 73 Martineau, Harriet 50 Martinet, André 307, 309; Elements of General Linguistics 307 Marx, Karl 14, 245n327, 303 Marxism 2, 5, 31, 268; Bakhtin as Marxist 269n30; Goldmann as Marxist 303; Kristeva as Marxist 303–5, 307, 323; Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Voloshinov/Bakhtin) 263n2, 270, 293 materialism 26, 49, 60, 98, 299 Mayr, Ernst 42, 43n55, 46 McEwan, Ian 15; Atonement 15 Medawar, Peter 198 Medvedev, Pavel 263n2, 281, 283, 329; ‘disputed texts’ controversy 263n2, 269n30, 281; The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (Medvedev/Bakhtin) 281, 283, 329 memes 98–102; memetic theory 103 memory: Freud on 216–22; Freudian analogies for 219–20; role in dreams 217–18; and pleasure 220–2; and repetition 216–22, 220–2; and the unconscious 216–17 Menary, Richard 244 Mendel, Georg 54, 65n175, 100 Meredith, George 66 metaphysics 53, 60, 82, 201, 225, 227, 228n225 metapsychology 223–5 Mill, John Stuart 169 Miller, J. Hillis 96, 237, 261n82; Ariadne’s Thread 96 Modern Synthesis (in biology) 65 monologism 159, 280, 332 Moore, George 140 Moore, Marianne 10

378 Index Morson, Gary 263n2, 265, 271, 278–80, 286, 299 Moscow Linguistic Circle 256 Müller, Max 250, 285 Murry, John Middleton 81, 86n303 Naden, Constance 67 natural selection 42–4, 47, 49, 51, 53, 58n126, 65n175, 99 natural theology 48, 109 Nehamas, Alexander 113, 126n52, 128–32, 134, 139, 149, 152n178, 166, 178, 180–1, 184–91; ‘The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal’ 181n310, 184–6, 189–90; ‘What an Author Is’ 186, 188 Neu, Jerome 193 neuroscience 103, 241, 244 Newton, Isaac 54, 58–9, 72, 75, 197 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 18, 28, 249; The Anti-Christ 147, 158, 166; aristocratic radicalism 118, 126; on art 130–1; Beyond Good and Evil 137, 142, 146, 151, 161, 166, 175; biographical intimations of an intertextual outlook 113–26; The Birth of Tragedy 148–9, 151; Complete Works 203; critique of language 126–36; critique of subjecthood 136–7; Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality 146; on the death of the author 148–50, 157–64; on the death of god 28–29, 142–5, 148, 150–1, 158–9, 160, 167–8; and Flaubert 168–79; Ecce Homo 18, 105, 116, 137, 151; on ‘free spirits’ 143, 168; Freud on 201–4; The Gay Science 89, 103, 142–4, 143, 148, 345; On the Genealogy of Morality 132, 135, 143, 151, 166, 170, 202; on German culture 117–18, 120–1; on god 142; Human, All Too Human 133, 161; interpretation as distortion 166– 91; on language as net 126–30; the Nietzschean renaissance 153; on overcoming influence 114–19; posthumous birth in France 151–3; and the problem of interpretation 180–91; rhetorical intimations of intertextuality in Nietzsche’s works 146–51; rupture as principle 119–26; on Schopenhauer 114–16;

‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ 114, 129; seeds of intertextuality in Nietzsche’s works 113–51; on the stages of revaluation 166–8; on style 137–41; text as net 146–7; text as spider’s web 154–6; theoretical intimations of intertextuality in Nietzsche’s works 126–45; Thus Spoke Zarathustra 89n314, 120, 128n61, 132, 138–9, 142–3, 147, 151, 158n200, 166, 169, 171; ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’ 126, 128n61, 131, 136, 146, 176, 253; Twilight of the Idols 119n25, 127, 137, 142, 144n135, 166, 170; on the unity of self and culture 179–80; Untimely Meditations 114, 117, 121, 152; on Wagner 116–19; on the will to power 28, 115, 131, 134, 143, 149, 167, 178, 181, 183, 189–90, 216; on the world as text 131–3; on writing and reading 119–26 Nordau, Max 140; Degeneration 140 Oedipus complex 195, 221n178, 237 Ong, Walter 12, 15, 16 OPOIAZ (Obshchestvo izucheniia poeticheskogo iazyka) 256, 281, 329n171 Orr, Mary 2, 3; Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts 2 Paley, William 48, 109; Natural Theology, or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature 48, 109 Parisian Institute of Psychoanalysis 228 parody 2, 11, 20, 139, 279, 293 parole 30, 251–2, 270, 272–3, 279, 281n86, 310, 338 patchwriting 17 Péguy, Charles 64 Perec, Georges 14–15, 96; Life A User’s Manual 14 Perloff, Marjorie 15–17, 27, 29; Unoriginal Genius 15–16 personal sovereignty 105 phenotext 232–3, 240, 312, 340–1 philology 87, 114, 121n35, 123, 148, 181–2, 184, 248–9, 250, 255, 264, 271

Index  379 Picard, Raymond 6, 321; Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture 6 Picasso, Pablo 11 plagiarism 9, 10, 11, 15, 22 Plato 40, 58, 92n330, 138, 146n143, 147, 149, 178, 229, 311 pleasure: and repetition 25, 136, 220–2 Plett, Heinrich 5 Pleynet, Marcelin 304 Pockett, Susan 242 polyphony 184, 268, 276, 288, 290, 294, 297, 325n152, 328n164, 338–9 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 205, 225; The Language of Psycho-Analysis (Laplanche and Pontalis) 205, 225 Pope Pius IX 45, 49 post-structuralism 2, 5, 23, 29, 112, 181, 236, 260–2, 313, 344 Pound, Ezra 10, 165n240 Prague Linguistic Circle 257, 308 problem of interpretation: Nietzsche and 180–91 Propp, Vladimir 255–6, 259, 286, 325; Morphology of the Folktale 255–6, 259, 286, 325 Proust, Marcel: In Search of Lost Time 96 Psychoanalysis 112, 193, 196, 198, 200–2, 204, 212, 222–3, 226–8, 231, 234, 246–7, 290, 308n48 Rabelais, François 14, 265, 328, 334, 338 radical pluralism 181 Read, Herbert 82; Phases of English Poetry 82 Reade, Charles 66 reductionism 65–6, 76, 99, 195, 226, 309 referential fallacy 23–4, 96, 164, 235–6, 239 Reformation 47 religion: Freud as an enemy of 199; and literary interpretation 187; implications of Darwinian theory for 26, 38, 43n55, 47–51, 55–6; Nietzsche’s writing emulates the form of 139; Nietzsche deplores art which acts as valet to 170 Renan, Ernest 119, 144n135, 169, 174n280 repetition: dreams as 207–8; Flaubert and 175–9; Freud on 216–22;

intertextuality as 164–6; and memory 216–22; in the natural world 26; and pleasure 220–2; in psychic life 29, 59, 191–2, 221, 238, 292, 316; textual repetition 2, 7–8, 9n51, 11–12, 19n99, 21, 25, 135–6, 154–6, 164–6, 220, 238 rhizome 27, 97–8, 240 riddle of creativity: art and 222–5; Freud and 175–9 Riffaterre, Michael 20, 23–5, 96n344, 164, 236 Ronell, Avital 116n15, 117n19, 118n20, 121 Rosch, Eleanor 241–3; The Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch) 242 Rothstein, Eric 3, 4, 93 Roubaud, Jacques 14, 32, 319–21, 327, 340 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 46 Roussel, Raymond 10, 14, 165n240 Rudova, Larissa 279, 279n81 Russian Formalism 30, 254–7, 260, 270, 280–4, 323 Russian Orthodox Church 265 Ruwet, Nicolas 309, 310n58; Introduction to Generative Grammar 309 Saint-Amour, Paul 8–9, 21, 336n203; The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination 8 Saint Augustin 303 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin 82, 174n280 Samoyault, Tiphaine 4, 25, 304, 336n203 Sand, George 169, 175 Sartre, Jean-Paul 3 Šaumjan, Sebastian K. 340 Saussure, Ferdinand de 4, 303; on the arbitrariness of signs 252–3; Course in General Linguistics 250, 316; diagram of the ‘speech circuit’ 272; Dissertation on the Primitive Vowel System in Indo-European Languages 249; on langue and parole 251–2; Kristeva on 314–22; Saussurean linguistics 270–80; the ‘second Saussurean revolution’ 314–17; on semiology 253–4; and structuralist linguistics 248–54; and the synchronic turn 249–51;

380 Index on synchrony and causation 253; theory of anagrams 31, 314–17, 318, 321, 327, 340 Scala Naturae or ‘Great Chain of Being’ 40, 43 Schleicher, August 249, 250 Schopenhauer, Arthur 28, 114–17, 119, 120, 125, 129, 146n143, 173, 205; The World as Will and Representation 115 Schrift, Alan 113, 132, 138, 142, 146n139, 150, 166, 177, 180–4 science 3n9, 28, 36–8, 44n56, 46, 48–9, 52, 56, 60, 81, 84n289, 97n346, 105, 109, 111, 128–9, 158–9, 171n273, 193n5, 195n15, 197, 199, 202, 225, 272, 279, 288, 328; cognitive science 111n416, 241–3; Freud’s scientific ambitions 200–1; human sciences 227, 248, 257, 259–60, 266, 299, 307–13, 323; linguistic science 250, 281n86, 309; literary criticism and the dream of a ‘science of culture’ 27, 32, 68–72, 85–6, 110, 231, 248–62, 283, 304, 306, 312–13, 318, 321, 328, 341; natural science 7, 66, 82, 101, 103, 194, 195n12, 201, 248–9, 312; Nietzsche on 129, 143, 170, 201, 234n261; Roland Barthes and ‘the constitution of a unique science of culture’ 258–60; social sciences 83, 312 Sedgwick, Adam 39n27, 47n68, 49 self-analysis (Freudian) 205, 216; and dream-analysis 205–7 selfhood 33–4, 173, 193, 242, 331; and creativity 102–12 semio-criticism 259, 341 semiology 253–4, 258, 304, 308, 312–13, 325, 340–1; ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’ 317–22 Shakespeare, William 58–9, 70–3, 81, 86, 269 Shaw, George Bernard 66 Shklovsky, Viktor 264, 281–3; ‘Art as Device’ 283 Situationists 11 Smith, David Livingstone 194 Soboleva, P.A. 340 ‘Social Darwinism’ 51 Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOIAZ) 256, 281, 329n171

Sokal, Alan 321; Fashionable Nonsense (Sokal and Bricmont) 321 Sollers, Philippe 31, 302n9, 304–6, 323–4 Sophocles: Oedipus Rex 223 ‘special creation’ 26, 48, 38–9, 56 Spencer, Herbert 26, 51–60, 62, 66–7; First Principles 52–3, 66–7; Principles of Biology 52; Principles of Ethics 52; Principles of Psychology 52; Principles of Sociology 52; ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’ 52; Social Statics 52; System of Synthetic Philosophy 52, 71 Starobinski, Jean 315–18, 322; Words upon Words 315 Steiner, Peter 254–5 Stephen, Leslie 27, 66, 70–1, 78, 286 structuralism 31, 250, 257–62, 270; Barthes and ‘a unique science of culture’ 258–60; and post-structuralism 260–2; ‘the structuralist epoch’ 306–7 structuralist linguistics 227; Saussure and 248–54 subjecthood 17, 22, 28, 105, 136–45, 154, 159–63, 173, 176, 179, 188, 190, 192, 225–6, 231–2, 239, 252–3, 275, 277, 313, 321, 330–4, 338, 341, 343, 345; intersubjectivity 21, 338–9, 334; subjectivity 1, 17, 104, 176, 179, 187, 231 Sulloway, Frank 206 Sully, James 214; ‘The Dream as a Revelation’ 214 super-ego 196, 216 Surrealists 21–2 Sweet, Henry 250 Swift, Jonathan 338; The Battle of the Books 13 Swinburne, Algernon 66 Symonds, John Addington 26–7, 29, 48, 54–60, 62, 66, 71–4, 77–8, 80–1, 285–6; ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Art and Life’ 71; Essays Speculative and Suggestive 54, 71; ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’ 48 synchronic approaches to language and literature 31, 163, 249–51, 256, 278–9, 284, 322, 339

Index  381 Taine, Hippolyte 27, 66–8, 70–3, 74n224, 78, 174, 286; on the ‘laws of human vegetation’ 68; History of English Literature 67, 70 Tallis, R.C. 198 teleology 41, 43, 43n55, 48, 53, 61n154, 109, 147 Tel Quel 31, 151, 228, 301, 303, 304–6, 317–18, 320, 323–4 text reuse 9, 16, 19, 21, 24, 245, 337, 345 Thirlwell, Adam 13–15; The Escape 14 Thompson, Evan 241–3; The Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch) 242 Todorov, Tzvetan 31, 253, 257, 259, 265–7, 270, 282n92, 299, 301–3, 307, 312–13, 323, 327, 329n171; Mikhaïl Bakhtine: le principe dialogique 267, 329n171; Théorie de la littérature (ed.) 266, 302, 323 Tomachevski, Boris 259 Topia, André 8 transmutation 26, 33n2, 38–40, 43, 43n55, 83–4 Tree of Life 43, 45, 51n88, 56, 62, 78, 91, 94–5, 100, 140n114, 285 trees of life of life and culture 90–5, 95 Trilling, Lionel 193, 198 Trinitarianism 158 Turgenev, Ivan 169, 294; Fathers and Sons 294; Virgin Soil 294 Tynjanov, Jurij 281n86, 283 unconscious 29, 192, 226–8, 245; memory and the 216–17; roads to the 204–6; the unconscious determinations of art 235 utterance 18, 30–1, 156, 207, 253, 259, 273–4, 275, 277, 282, 292–4, 298, 318n110, 328–9, 331, 337–9 Valery, Paul 10, 160, 253 Van Hulle, Dirk 241, 244–5

Varela, Francisco 241–3; The Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch) 242 Voloshinov, Valentin 263n2, 270–2, 279, 283, 293–5, 298, 326n158, 329n172; ‘disputed texts’ controversy 263n2, 269n30, 270; Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Voloshinov/Bakhtin) 263n2, 270, 293 Voltaire 46 von Humboldt, Wilhelm 310 Wagner, Richard 28, 114, 116–19, 120, 121n31, 138, 140, 171n270, 177 Wahl, François 304 Wallace, Alfred Russel 37, 43n54, 202 Ward, Mary Humphry 66 Wegner, Daniel 242; The Illusion of Conscious Will 242 Wells, H.G. 66, 197n23 Wilberforce, Samuel 36, 44n56 Wilde, Oscar 10, 12 will to power 28, 115, 131, 134, 143, 149, 167, 178, 181, 183, 189–90, 216 Wimsatt Jr., W.K. 106–11 Wolf, A., The Philosophy of Nietzsche 76 Wollheim, Richard 206 Wolman, Gil 11 Woolf, Virginia 197n23, 294 ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’ 21, 31, 231–2, 318n110, 321, 324–7, 337–40, 343–4 World War I 15, 64n171 Yeats, W.B. and Georgie (née HydeLees) 21–2 Yonge, Edward 9 Zola, Émile 66

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