Gender and Narrativity 9780773584310

It is impossible to imagine a community that is not divided into at least two gender groups. It is equally impossible to

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Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Telling Difference
1 Toward an Epistemology of Gender
2 Telling the Feminine
3 Sex, Lies, and Photography: Reading Detective Fiction as Psychoanalysis in Timothy Findley's The Telling of Lies
4 F(r)ictions: Feminists Re/Writing Narrative
5 The (W)rite of Passage: From Childhood to Womanhood in Lucy Maud Montgomery's Emily Novels
6 Writing Toward Absence: Frances Gregg's The Mystic Leeway
7 Parsifal and Semiotic Structuralism
8 Androgynous Realism in Heinrich von Kleist's Die Heilige Cäcilie oder Die Gewalt der Musik (Eine Legende)
9 Clough, Claude, Arnold, and Marguerite: Male Heterophobia in Victorian Poetry
Notes on Contributors
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
V
W
Y
Z
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GENDER AND NARRATIVITY

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GENDER AND NARRATIVITY

TADAC PAPERS/CAHIERS

TADAC

II

EDITED BY BARRY RUTLAND

Centre for Textual Analysis, Discourse, and Culture Carleton University Press

© Individual Authors, 1997 Published by Carleton University Press Printed and bound in Canada

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Gender and narrativity (TADAC papers = Cahiers TADAC ; 2) ISBN 0-88629-298-0

1.Gender identity in literature. 2. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Rutland, R. N. (R. Barry) II. Series: Papers (Centre TADAC) ; 2.

PN56.S52G45 1997

809'.923 C96-900720-5

Cover Design: Your Aunt Nellie Typeset: Mayhew & Associates Graphic Communications, Richmond, Ont. in association with Marie Tappin Front Cover: Eve, the Serpent, and Death by Hans Baldung (called Grien), c. 1510-1515. Oil on linden, 64.0 x 32.5 cm. National Gallery of Canada. Ottawa.

Carleton University Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing program by the Canada Council and the financial assistance of the Ontario Arts Council. The Press would also like to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage, Government of Canada, and the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation, for their assistance.

CONTENTS Preface

vii

Introduction: Telling Difference

Barry Rutland

i

1 Toward an Epistemology of Gender

John Verdon

19

2 Telling the Feminine

Robert Richard 3 Sex, Lies, and Photography: Reading Detective Fiction as Psychoanalysis in Timothy Findley's The Telling of Lies Barbara Gabriel

47

87

4 F(r)ictions: Feminists Re/Writing Narrative

Barbara Godard

115

5 The (W)rite of Passage: From Childhood to Womanhood in Lucy Maud Montgomery's Emily Novels

G.A. Woods

147

6 Writing Toward Absence: Frances Gregg's The Mystic Leeway Ben Jones 159 7 Parsifal and Semiotic Structuralism

/ Iain Prattis 8 Androgynous Realism in Heinrich von Kleist's Die Heilige Cdcilie oder Die Gewalt der Musik (Eine Legende) Arnd Bohm

175

199

9 Clough, Claude, Arnold, and Marguerite: Male Heterophobia in Victorian Poetry

Barry Rutland

221

Notes on Contributors

252

Index

255

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PREFACE

TADAC, the Centre for Textual Analysis, Discourse, and Culture, was established in 1984 as an Organized Research Unit of the Faculty of Arts of Carleton University, Ottawa, in what has since become the School of Modern Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literary Studies. Its mandate was to coordinate research among faculty members and graduate students interested in the study of world literature within the broad context of general cultural theory and cultural history, both at Carleton and other institutions in Canada and abroad. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, TADAC evolved into a national organization and in 1993 was registered as a Learned Society. Gender and Narrativity, volume 2 of TADAC Papers/Cahiers TADAC, is one of two collections of thematically related essays to emerge from the research project of the same name, the other being volume 3, Isak Dinesen: Reassessments for the 1990s, edited by Gurli A. Woods and published by Carleton University Press in 1994. Volume 1 is Text and Ideology / Texte et ideologie, edited by R.B. Rutland and A.W. Halsall, published by TADAC in 1988. (The numbering of volumes in the series relates to the succession of research projects rather than to dates of publication.) The project "Gender and Narrativity" was initiated in 1987 with an International Colloquium at Carleton. The present volume draws on papers presented at that conference or written subsequently by conference participants. The first category includes the essays by John Verdon, Iain Prattis, Barbara Godard, Gurli Woods, Arnd Bohm, and

Ben Jones, the latter four revised since original presentation. The second includes the contributions of Robert Richard, Barbara Gabriel, and Barry Rutland. Iain Prattis's paper has appeared in substantially the same form in Anthropological Poetics, edited by Ivan Brady (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997: 111-31); Barbara Godards in considerably different forms in the Croatian journal, IZRAZ 2(3) 1990 (in Serbo-Croat) and in Signature I (Summer 1989); Ben Jones' article provided the basis for the introduction to his edition of Frances Gregg's autobiography, The Mystic Leeway. Exploration of the gender-narrativity nexus was relatively immature when the TADAC project was initiated a decade ago. The abiding pertinence of several of the contributions to the 1987 colloquium to developments since that time, and ongoing interest in the issue that resulted in the writing of new essays, led TADAC and Carleton University Press to publish Gender and Narrativity. I wish to thank on behalf of TADAC all who participated in the production of this volume, especially colleagues at Carleton and elsewhere who refereed contributions, and graduate students who helped to prepare the text, particularly Gail Anderson, who did much of the electronic editing, and Christine Mains, who undertook the electronic typesetting. I also thank John Flood and the staff at Carleton University Press for bringing the project to completion. I acknowledge my gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which supported the 1987 conference and contributed to the costs of publication, and the Dean of Arts of Carleton University, who provided additional funding. Barry Rutland Director, TADAC General Editor, TADAC Papers /Cahiers TADAC

INTRODUCTION: TELLING DIFFERENCE Barry Rutland

Gender is a fundamental constitutive category of culture, narrative is a basic cultural practice. It is impossible to conceive of a human community that is not ab initio divided into two (at least) gender groups; it is equally impossible to imagine a human community that does not tell/enact stories. What is the relationship between the category and the practice? The nine essays that follow broach this question in terms of current theories of meaning and text. Gender is a secondary formation grounded in biological reproductive sex but distinct from it, as a building is distinct from and heterogenous to the land on which it stands. In Constructing Men and Women Marilyn Mackie observes: "Sex" refers to physiology and "gender" to the sociocultural elaborations upon physiology. To go a step further, sex roles (behaviors stemming from biological sexual differences) may be distinguished from gender roles (socially created behaviors differentially assigned to men and women). (Mackie 1987, 3)

Although erected on the ground of biological givens, gender is symbolic and discursive rather than natural. There is, arguably, a radical discontinuity between biological reproductive sex and cultural gender that dissolves the binary male/female. One can go further than Mackie in severing the connection between anatomically determined bodily

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behaviour and what the body signifies, as does Judith Butler Gender Trouble (1990): If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of "men" will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that "women" will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution ... there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two.... When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male body, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one. (6)

As a primary categorial organizer, gender grids the material biological body and the social universe of bodies with meaning. Bodies are complexes of signs inscribed on complexes of organs; genderization is the earliest of inscriptions, beginning at birth with the ocular evidence of external genitalia read as infallible and indelible signs: "Its a boy!" "Its a girl!" At its first cry the newborn is directed with Rhadamanthine finality through one of the two doors of identity and destiny, the one inscribed Men, the other Women (see Lacan 1977, 151). Where there is uncertainty as to gender identity or when an initial identity has to be revised, a crisis ensues for the individual and the society, as in the notorious case of Herculine Barbin, raised as female, compelled by law to assume maleness (see Foucault 1980). A striking manifestation of the foundational character of gender difference to the structure of culture is grammatical gender. While altogether missing in some languages, such as Finnish, and greatly attenuated in others, such as English, meaning cannot be generated in, for example, French without systematic gender assignments to nominals and their modifiers. The term "gender" is used by linguists in its root sense of kind or class, and grammatical gender refers to noun-agreement classes: "The woman ... she ... her ... "; "la belle femme ... elle ... "; "le beau gar^on ... il ... ". As such, grammatical gender assignment may not accord with that of biological science or everyday observation: German Madchen (girl) takes the neuter article, das. Grammatical

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gender may coexist with other classifying binary categories, such as animate/non-animate, human/non-human (see Corbett 1991, 105-44). Nevertheless, its near universal frequency indicates that binary gender distinction, both masculine/feminine and gendered/non-gendered (neuter), are basic to the linguistic mapping of the world of objects and states in order to construct a knowable, workable reality. In other words, gender is a constitutive, adliminal cognitive category. A Whorfian question arises: to what extent is our cognition negatively constrained by perception of reality in terms of an oppositional male /female difference? For what is true at the lexical and sentential level is also the case at the level of narrative discourse: it is impossible to conceive of a story that is not "about" human or human-like actants, and it is impossible to imagine such actants as ungendered. Even a narrative such as Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which attempts to construct a world in which sexual differentiation as a matter of symbolic status and identity assignments does not exist—where everyone is both male and female and neither—demonstrates this fact, because Le Guin's fictional world is constructed precisely within and against the gendered character of the typical novel or film, which fairly wallows in sexual differentiation as the significant reality-generating category—which, indeed, instantiates the ideological compulsion of narrative to (re)produce the heterosexual reproductive couple. Narratives, not only literary narratives of the type with which this volume is chiefly concerned, but all manner of narratives told in words (histories, biographies and autobiographies, myths and folktales, jokes and anecdotes, legal documents, sociological analyses, etc.), enacted by bodies (ritual, mime, dramatic performance), and figured iconically (painting, sculpture, photography) assume gender differentiation as a foundational given. Those discourses which offer themselves as gender-free—the philosophic and scientific, for example—can be deconstructed to reveal silent gendering in terms of patriarchal masculinity as the governing norm. Narrative, then, seems always to refer to a world which is "naturally" distributed along dual gender lines.1 But do narratives indeed refer to an antecedent dual gendered reality? Narrative is perhaps the most basic mode of cognition ("narrate ... from narrat-y narrare, prob. for * gnarare, related to gnarus knowing ... thus ... to KNOW." Oxford International Dictionary of the English Language). Narrativity is an epistemological activity, the construction of normative worlds that legislate reality in terms of values. Grammatical gender itself, to the extent that it is semantically rather than morphologically

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grounded, tends to involve value assignments: masculinity is associated with strength, physical and moral, and with truth; femininity with frailty, ambiguity, and deceit. Whether presented as fictional alternatives to or veridical accounts of the real, narratives constitute information in the sense of that which in-forms—gives shape and direction to or programs—behaviours. The outcome of the telling/hearing (or reading of) stories is action, including the action of internal dispositions, judgment of ones self and the world. Ideological formations are constructed as narratives that constitute plans of belief and action; hence Jean-Francois Lyotard can identify postmodernism in terms of the discrediting of the Enlightenment s grands recits (big stories, metanarratives) of ineluctable progress and emancipation (1984; see Godard, below). Fictional narrative is a particularly compelling mode of knowing because it purports to represent an extratextual reality that bears its meaning transparently as an essence manifest in the substance of the world. This, however, is an illusion; Gayle Ormiston and Raphael Sassower write in Narrative Experiments: Each narrative or text appeals to some regulative principle allegedly situated outside its structure and techniques, and each attempts to stand outside the context and conflicts it evaluates. But ... the force and significance of each appeal, and thus the establishment of authority, is generated in and through the declarative act. The text announces its authority, for which it is the sole representative. In effect, the foundation of authority is not external to the narrative, nor is it comprehensible as a regulative principle; it remains internal to and constitutive of the context it fabricates. The narrative is its own foundation, and cannot be accounted for apart from the scene it describes. (Ormiston & Sassower 1989, 105)

In other words, narrative is performative in the speech act theory sense: it posits that to which it refers, and that to which it refers has no being apart from acquiescence with the narrative assertion. With this statement in view, let us take two familiar ur-narratives of gender differentiation, both of enormous authority within our culture although of very different and, indeed, apparently opposed discursive and institutional provenances, one religious and moral, the other (ostensibly) secular and medical. The first is the creation story of Genesis. There are, in fact, two stories that are quite different as ur-narratives of gender. The first story, given in chapter 1, tells of how God creates the

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universe in six days. In verses 26-28, He creates man and woman simultaneously and gives them joint superintendance of the earth: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them [sic] have dominion. ... So God created man in his own image ... male and female created he them." Here is a story of equality, not only explicitly of the genders but implicitly of the divine and the human. The second story, which begins with the fourth verse of chapter 2 and continues through the whole of 3, is more complex and tells of inequality. For one thing, creation is presented as something very like a classical business undertaking, with God providing the capital and Adam the labour. In verses 4-6, the newly created earth is barren; God then makes Adam from a handful of the earths dust to till it (v.7). He then makes Eden and plants it with two kinds of trees, the sort that bear ordinary fruit, suitable for sustaining ordinary human life, and two extraordinary species, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (w.8-9). In verses 16-17, God gives Adam permission to eat of the first sort and prohibits consumption of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. He then decides that Adam needs a "help meet." He sets about creating, somewhat tardily, the various animal species and has Adam name them (origin of language), but at the end of the process it is found that there is still no helpmate for Adam (w. 18-20). God then casts Adam into a deep sleep, removes one of his ribs, closes up the wound, and transforms the rib into the desired helpmate, whom Adam names "Woman, because she was taken out of Man"— she is "bone of [his] bones," and "husband and wife are one flesh" (origin of patriarchal marriage as coterminous with that of gendered humanity). The newly created pair, however, while "naked" are "not ashamed": there is as yet no culture (w.21-25). The third chapter of Genesis tells the story of the Fall. The serpent tempts Eve with the prospect of the knowledge that would come from eating the forbidden fruit (Eve is aware of the prohibition—in 3:2-3 she repeats the terms of 2:16-17). This knowledge will prove to be awareness of difference. Her desire aroused by the sensuous allure of the fruit and the prospect of power, Eve succumbs and induces Adam to do likewise (w. 1-7). The result is a lightning-bolt of knowledge as consciousness of gender, so appalling that the couple at once takes steps to conceal its signifiers: "And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons" (v.7). Thus culture is precipitated by the sublation of bodies to differential signs. God subsequently punishes

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both his human creatures with the inevitability of death and Adam with the necessity of labour to sustain foredoomed life. The special punishment he inflicts on Eve is grounded in and augments her beingin-difference: "Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee" (v.16). Woman is condemned to a biological destiny within a cultural servitude; she is punished where she sinned, in her desire. The second ur-narrative of genderization, composed some millenia after the first, is Sigmund Freud's story of the Oedipus complex, for our purposes isolable in two essays of the mid-1920s, "The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex" and "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinctions Between the Sexes" (Young-Bruehl 1990, 294303, 304-14). Freud finds the male Oedipal process straightforward: the threat of castration, imaginary but compelling, dissolves the Oedipus complex altogether in the boy's identification with the father and the internalization of the paternal law as the superego. But the little girl has a "pre-history" of identification with the mother which must be displaced by dependence upon the father. This is precipitated by a scopic event, analogous to the very event that occurs to Adam and Eve after they have eaten the forbidden fruit. To quote a well known passage from the second essay: There is an interesting contrast between the behaviour of the two sexes ... when a little boy first catches sight of a girl's genital region, he begins by showing irresolution and lack of interest; he sees nothing or disavows what he has seen, he softens it down or looks for expedients for bringing it into line with his expectations [that women too have penises]. It is not until later, when some threat of castration has obtained a hold upon him, that the observation becomes important to him: if he then recollects or repeats it, it arouses a terrible storm of emotion in him and forces him to believe in the reality of the threat which he has hitherto laughed at. This combination of circumstances leads to two reactions ... horror of the mutilated creature or triumphant contempt for her ... A little girl behaves differently. She makes her judgment and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows she is without it and wants to have it. (Young-Bruehl 1990, 309)

The knowledge precipitated by this event is the notorious Penisneid which, Freud speculates, is accomodated by equating the penis with the baby which the little girl desires her father to beget upon her, set-

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ting her up for her inevitable destiny within the heterosexual economy as wife and mother. That which dissolves the Oedipus complex for the boy initiates it for the girl, who consequently fails to develop an adequate superego and must be coerced into acceptable psychic development and gender behaviour: The fear of castration being thus excluded in the little girl, a powerful motive also drops out for the setting-up of a superego and the breaking-off of the infantile genital organization. In her, far more than in the boy, these changes seem to be the result of upbringing and of intimidation from the outside which threatens her with loss of love. The girl's Oedipus complex is much simpler than that of the small bearer of the penis ... it seldom goes beyond the taking of her mother s place and the adopting of a feminine attitude towards her father. (Young-Bruehl 1990, 299-300)

Just beneath the surface differences between the biblical and psychoanalytic narratives is a fundamental sameness: a transposition from nature as non-awareness of gender difference to culture as the product of such awareness. All the axiologizations and all the pragmatics of relationship are predicated upon it: the male as morally capable, the woman as culpable, the man therefore as justifiably empowered, the woman as disempowered. In both narratives the genitalia are purely signs. Freud s story posits a virtual equivalence of the Forbidden Fruit with the male genitals. Gods prohibition arbitrarily assigns value to the fruit (Adam already knows the world as names, not things). The Genesis account does not bestow a sexual reproductive function on the genitalia until after Adam and Eve have discovered the symbolic function of these organs. In the Freudian story biological function is ordained by the cultural law that flows from the sublation of organs to signs. Each narrative pretends to do no more than report on the "natural facts" of gender difference; each stages an ideology of gender grounded in relations of power which the narratives authorize. Is the biblical story a "pre-scientific" account of the Freudian thesis, or the latter a "scientific" retelling of the ancient myth? In either case, Western culture seems to be trapped within the circuit of a founding narrative which author-izes a binary gender difference which, in turn, author-izes corollary differences of power and esteem. There is an arbitrariness to this process in that the relations of power, while sanctioned and reproduced by narrative, are not consubstantial with it, just as the signifying function of the penis as phallus is not

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inherent in the anatomical organ. An inversion or other radical troping of the narrative tradition may serve to generate alternative valuations of gender that can, in turn, so inform the behaviour of men and women as to effectuate altered relations of power. Can narrative be mobilized to displace the kind of knowing it constructed in the first place? Can the narrative function be troped to alter the narrative effect? The essays of Gender and Narrativity, while expressing their authors' individual interests and expertise, including theoretical preferences— psychoanalytic, feminist, deconstructive, new historical—are written within terms of these questions. Although they do not constitute sequential chapters that argue a common thesis—indeed, there are some profound disagreements among some of the papers—a network of filiations produces an effective unity in terms of a critique of the received gender-narrative nexus. The first two essays address issues of general import for revising the reading of literary texts under the rubric of gender, and for the telling of new stories of gender relations and values. The remaining seven deal with the construction of gender in specific genres or works: three are centred on the narrative construction of femininity, three on masculinity, and one on the deconstruction of that binary. Other filiations—theoretic, period-specific, national-cultural— cross-link the contributions within this scheme. The field indicated by the title of the volume is thus traversed along a number of intersecting axes to provide the reader with material toward answering the questions. In "Toward an Epistemology of Gender," John Verdon surveys a wide area of pertinent biological and anthropological research in a highly controversial field, the nature/culture problematic of gender, raised in the Mackie and Butler passages cited at the opening of this introduction: to what extent is cultural gender rooted in and constrained by human biological evolution? This is a far from innocent question, perturbed as it is by ideological differences: those who opt for an irrefrangible continuum from nature to culture may be, and are very likely to be perceived as, conservatives where the politics of gender is concerned, while those who argue for a rupture between biology and culture are, or are presumed to be, radicals intent on overturning received gender relations. Verdon is on the progressive side, but he is also aware that the human, like all other species, has evolved within a natural environment and remains inscribed, physiologically and in terms of cognitive capacities, with ineffaceable traces of this process. To summarize his argument in a different but cognate set of terms: from the species point of view, the two biological sexes are complementary in

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the reproductive process, which is the reproduction of germ lines, not of individuals or for that matter populations (see Dawkins 1989). "Nature" as biological process is concerned only that the complex of macromolecules constituting the human genome perpetuate itself as prolifically as possible. "Natural" gender reduces to meiosis, the process of combining the DNA of two individuals in dual sexed procreation (see Lacan 1982, 139). On this ground of biological reproductive sex, cultural gender is constructed by taking the anatomical differences that have evolved in the service of meiosis as originary signs. Where meiosis functions in terms of complementary sexes, culture posits opposing genders in a narrative of difference and hierarchy. Verdon seeks to open another story wherein gender is not an accomplished fact but an ongoing process in which we can intervene creatively by adopting the complementarity of biological nature as a ground of cultural value, to overcome the limiting distortions of oppositional gender. Maleness and femaleness are not simple givens but complex repertoires of traits and tendencies distributed generously beyond anatomical difference as restrictive signs, and likewise beyond the requirement of the meiotic process for a sufficient number of reproductive couplings to ensure the continuation of the species. Verdons essay establishes one side of the perspective of gender in relation to narrative in which to consider the topic at large and the essays that make up the bulk of this volume. The other, complementary side of the perspective is supplied by Robert Richards "Telling the Feminine." The Freudian story of gender origins has been cited already. As one of the most compelling discursive formations of modernity, psychoanalysis has generated not only its founders ur-story but both more radical versions of that story and oppositional stories, represented here by Richard s Lacanian essay in the first case and Ian Prattis s Jungian essay in the second. "Telling the Feminine" is focused on femininity but speaks to the construction of gender as such. In effect, Jacques Lacan initiated a new story of gender when he mapped Saussures structuralist linguistics onto Freud's psycholanalysis to theorize gender as a matter of differential signs (see Lacan 1982, 1-26, 27-57). Lacan debiologizes Freud in that he insists on the decisiveness of the rupture between nature and culture, with gender as the site of that rupture. His theory deconstructs the masculine /feminine hierarchy while at the same time acknowledging its inevitability: woman is "a symptom of man"—she is obliged by structural default to take up the position of the signifier in relation to the male as signified (168-70). From this has derived a potent body of

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revisionist psychoanalytic theory associated with feminist thinkers such as Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva among others (see Butler 1990), that has come to inform the debate on gender, not least in literary critical circles, and which is refracted throughout Gender and Narrativity. A radical Lacanian, Richard pushes the nature/culture rift in a provocative way. The feminine, he asserts, taking off from the "suggestive value" of Georg Cantor s notion of the transfmite in number theory, constitutes an "actual infinite" (see Richard, this volume, note 2). The Cantorian transfinite is to number theory what the Derridean trace is to language: an uncountable that nevertheless counts in every finite series. Feminine jouissance is transfinite to subjectivity (always gendered), male and female alike. It is not simply the complement and parallel to masculine sexual enjoyment; it moves beyond the body and beyond pleasure. To summarize Richard s argument by making explicit what is implicit to it, if the feminine is eternal it is because it is infinite; it partakes of the nature of desire and language. Language is infinite in that, as a system of signifiers, it is capable of generating meaning endlessly and non-iteratively; desire is a precipitate of the language process, what happens to the affective body sublated to symbolic interchanges through the "second birth" which every individual undergoes with language acquisition, awareness of kinship relations, and entry into culture or what Lacan terms the Symbolic generally, whereby s/he becomes a subject. The feminine thus has nothing of the natural; desire for the feminine is the motive of civilization, understood as the secondary environment the species has constructed for itself on the ground of the primary natural. The feminine is not the female or even woman; women desire and pursue it too. But the woman, who can conceive and bear children, who can be impregnated with and nurture otherness, is privileged where the actual infinite of the feminine is concerned, because the feminine is that radical Otherness that always eludes reduction to the masculine Same. Richard situates his thesis within the context of the debate over "Political Correctness," which he sees as grounded in an atomistic notion of persons and personalities that, as an instantiation of the masculine finite, attempts to evade the foundationality for culture of gender difference. The remaining essays in Gender and Narrativity, focusing on either femininity or masculinity (but always, as well, the relation between them), can be read within the perspective set out by the Verdon and Richard articles. The story of gender is much more complex than the

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masculine-feminine antithesis promoted by the heterosexual ideology sanctioned by the Genesis myth and the long narrative tradition it heads. Sexuality, as distinct from anatomically marked gender, works itself out in ways that transgress ideological identification of the masculine and the feminine with visible organs and reproductive functions. This hypothesis implicitly or explicitly underlies all contributions to the volume. In "Sex, Lies, and Photography: Reading Detective Fiction as Psychoanalysis in Timothy Findleys The Telling of Lies" Barbara Gabriel explores the discursive, generic, and intertextual factors constitutive of this novel to reveal how it retells, obliquely, the gender story from a marginal perspective that decentres discursive authority. The detective novel is the model of narrative in general in that it posits a truth in terms of an answer to a question: Findley's narrator-sleuth is driven to answers she has evaded throughout her life, answers that question her own sexuality and, by implication, the cultural truth of normative heterosexuality that narrative tradition re-posits and sustains. The Gabriel essay thus raises a caveat with regard to the gendernarrativity nexus as the entry point into the volume s exploration of it in the subsequent contributions. It is a commonplace of literary history that the first women writers to achieve canonical status, at least in English, were novelists: Burney, Radcliffe, Shelley, Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), and Virginia Woolf are regarded as the peers of, if not superior to, their contemporary male counterparts in the genres of fiction they practised. Until recently, few women had gained the same status in poetry and drama. This situation is germane to the question of the relationship between gender and genre. A number of factors, negative and positive, are involved: the exclusion of women from educational and career opportunities limited their experience to the spheres of everyday domestic activity and intimate relations, regarded as suitable material for novels but not for "noble" genres, such as the epic poem or the philosophic disquisition. At the same time, a growing readership nurtured precisely by those experiences created a demand for novels and fostered a culture in which the novel came to occupy a central if unacknowledged place. It is arguable, along Bakhtinian lines, that women's writing flourished in prose fiction because of the peculiar generic nature of the novel. Bakhtin argues (1981) that the novel has no discourse of its own but takes up and juxtaposes the myriad discourses of contemporary society; that, as a genre, or rather, a generic mode, it does not serve monologic closure but dialogic openness.

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Bakhtins category of novelness is closely allied to his category of the carnivalesque: both deploy strategies of parody and masquerade that are deconstructive of authority; both access potentiality of meaning beyond the semantic closure of canonical discourse. The novel proved immune to masculinist appropriation, in spite of the importance of male authors such as (again to confine discussion to literature in English) Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson to its development. Indeed, the problematization of gender ideology emerges in the novels of Fielding and especially Richardson, who also, through his multivoiced epistolary method, contributed to opening a discursive space in which women were able to write as women. Women writing (and reading) novels effectively altered the terms of gender ontology from^the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries in a long process of discursive evolution that moved from subversions of the patriarchal, immediately recuperated or left marginal, to deconstructive displacements. In "F(r)ictions: Feminists Re/Writing Narrative," Barbara Godard exposes this cultural evolutionary process at an advanced stage in our own culture in our own time. She examines strategies employed by a number of contemporary Canadian female (and feminist) writers to trope by inversion received genres of fiction, to exploit the novels potentiality for "making it new." It is precisely at the rhetorico-generic level that the battle to reverse value assignments or, more radically, to deconstruct them altogether, must be fought out. Godard, nicely complementing Gabriel, shows how a number of feminist fiction writers, notably Eve Zaremba, Marion Foster, Elizabeth Bowers, and Carol Shields, employ a canonically marginal sub-genre, detective fiction, to displace the received narrative construction of female secondariness, powerlessness, and victimhood in order to constitute heroines who are empowered and self-vindicating. These texts rewrite the masculinist myth and expose its arbitrariness. Godard devotes particular attention to Swann: A Literary Mystery, where Shields, with superb irony, exposes the arbitrariness of both subject and text construction, as a group of careerists, in arrogant good faith, set about revising a woman's life and writing to fit their several obessions and interests. In effect, Mary Swann and her poetry emerge precisely as the feminine infinite in this narrative, motivating the biographical research, literary-critical lucubrations, and outright crimes of the other characters. The thefts of manuscripts and artifacts, whether out of professional ambition or commercial greed, constitute a form of the masculine finite that comically reacts upon itself by forcing the little circle of scholars into pushing the slender Swannian corpus into textual infinity.

BARRY RUTLAND

The other essays on femininity deal with texts that, through the contrast between them, exemplify the range of narrative forms called into play in constructing gender while, at the same time, affirming the identity of the task they all undertake. In "(W)rite Of passage: From Childhood to Womanhood in Lucy Maud Montgomery's Emily Novels," Gurli Woods discloses a subtext of desire and anxiety in a work by Canada's best known and one of the world s most loved writers of fiction for young women, Lucy Maud Montgomery. Her analysis elicits a conflicted complex in Montgomery's story of an adolescent girl growing to mature sexuality within the network of patriarchal relations of pre-modern Canada. As such, it exemplifies the practical relationship between genderization and narrativity as a matter of accommodating meanings and motives that defy one another ideologically. The plot incident that Woods focuses upon occurs within a church and attempts to mediate opposing vectors of desire/power—patriarchal authority, religious and sexual, on the one hand, feminine restiveness and will-todiscourse on the other—within a resolution that returns the incipiently transgressive heroine to her "proper" place as supplementary sign to the male. Woods contributes to the reassessment of Montgomery's fiction as more complex and shadowed than is usually allowed. Her challenges are always recuperated to gender orthodoxy, but in the Emily novels at least a residue of protest remains. Life-writing as a narrative mode has received a great deal of scholarly and critical attention of late as a result of the poststructuralist theory of subjectivity as a process of textuality. There is a continuum of subjectification in and through life writing that extends from secret diaries not intended for the eyes of others, through journals composed as eventual public documents, to autobiography as self-vindication, thence—the first brissure (hinge: break/connection)—to third-person biography as apologia, to fictionalized autobiography and biography that consciously organizes empirical "fact" in terms of narrative conventions, at which point life writing hinges with fiction strictu sensu. In "Writing Toward Absence: Frances Gregg's The Mystic Leeway" Ben Jones discusses a historically important autobiographical text unknown to the general literary-scholarly community until his recent edition for Carleton University Press (Gregg 1995). Gregg was closely associated with the single most important circle of writers in the formation of literary modernism in English, that centred on Ezra Pound in the period around World War I. Jones's respectful analysis, employing a deconstructive strategy informed by psychoanalytic concepts, reveals the

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silent marginal woman as the constitutive inaugurer of the writing into being of the identity of the Other(s). Lover of Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, John Cowper Powys, and lesser lights of the High Modernist constellation, Gregg tells of desire as ressentiment that works itself out to a reproachful fading to absence. That absence, however, posits the presence of those who fed upon her desire. In Richardian terms, it is the feminine as actual infinite, the trace that provokes the meaningfulness of the celebrated lives to whom Frances Gregg is a footnote. The last three papers, centred on the construction (and deconstruction) of masculinity, tend to bear out the implications of the opening articles by Verdon and Richard in striking ways: each deals with a narrative that reflects gender as a deviation from, a troping of, nature and posits the masculine as finite, the feminine as correspondingly infinite. Iain Prattis s " Parsifal and Semiotic Structuralism" is grounded in a psychoanalytic narrative of gender, that of Carl Jung, that runs counter to the one told by the founder of the discourse. Prattis, an anthropologist, writes in response to an important ethnological adaptation of Freudian male centred theory of gender origins and identity, Claude Levi-Strauss's structuralist account of the origin of culture in male reduction of woman to circulating sign, arguing that "semiotic structuralism" leaves Levi-Strauss incapable of reading one of the key narratives of the Western tradition, that of the Grail Quest. Prattis discusses the Parsifal story in detail and in various tellings, interpreting it in terms of one of Jung's most influential concepts, that of primordial human androgyny and the animus/anima distinction/complementarity. Patriarchal will-to-power denies androgyny and represses the feminine anima principle in the male in favour of aggressive, possessive masculinity. The "foolish," i.e., not wholly assimilated to the conventionally masculine, Parsifal finds the completion of identity needed to accomplish his quest for the sacred object, the Grail, and the universal healing it will bring about, by accessing androgynous Being, which he achieves by acceding to Blanche Fleur s insistence on a relationship that is at once both intimate and chaste. One might note that the Grail Myth as interpreted along the lines of Prattis s article remains operative in modern narrative culture: the young hero and heroine of A.S. Byatts very successful novel Possession (1990) work out a similar story, set in part in the Armorica of the Grail legend, against an elaborate conspiracy of masculine aggression and will-to-power in the matter of control of literary documents, not unlike that in Carol Shields's Swann, written independently about the same

BARRY RUTLAND

time. Again, the feminine is the site of openness to infinite possibility, whereas the masculine is the site of power through closure. In this regard, androgyny should not be conceived of as a hybrid state of femininity and masculinity but as a suspension of the masculine willto-power in the face of knowledge of the feminine infinite. The contributions of Arnd Bohm and Barry Rutland are New Historical, to the extent that this label indicates a principled deployment of modern theoretical tools for traditional scholarly and critical purposes, rather than a distinct theoretical formation. Both also deal with nineteenth century texts, and both, like the Prattis essay, appeal to the hypothesis of a labile sexuality beyond the rigidities of oppositional gendering, although not on Jungian grounds. Bohms "Androgynous Realism in Heinrich von Kleists Die Heilige Cdcilie oder Die Gewalt der Musik (Eine Legende)" concerns a relatively neglected story by a major figure in German romanticism. "Saint Cecilia or the Power of Music (a Legend)" traces a curious diagonal path across conventional narratives of gender identity and valorization. Bohm locates Kleists typically elusive tale within the cultural politics of nineteenth century Germany. He puts his finger on the difficulty that Kleist presented to the project of "establishment" criticism of the Imperial epoch, of writing into being an authoritarian, militaristic masculinity, normative and racially defining. Kleists fictional saints legend, set in the troubled period of the Reformation, tells of masculine will-to-power miraculously neutralized by the power of feminine music. Again, the feminine emerges as that which escapes male finitude, an actual infinite which is not religious, although sited within the theological infinite of orthodox Christianity. In this respect, it can be argued that both the Prattis and Bohm narratives indicate that the feminine infinite is the principle that patriarchal religion seeks to appropriate, whether as the Grail or as the saintly feminine voice, a manifestation of the Lacanian voix acoustique (see Richard, this volume). Barry Rutland's "Clough, Claude, Arnold, and Marguerite: Male Heterophobia in Victorian Poetry," like the Bohm essay, deals with gender in a specific historical context, but in terms of biographical narratives projected into literary narratives. It also reminds us that narrative is not necessarily a matter of prose: as Bakhtin demonstrates (1981), the dialogizing function of novelness can colonize other genres, and in the nineteenth century did so on a massive scale. Arthur Hugh Clough and Matthew Arnold were two eminent mid-nineteenth century English poets; they were also typical of males of their class, the public school

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and Oxbridge educated, in their gendering. For men of their generation, gender ideology was already complexly problematized, and their writing cannot be understood outside of the feminist movement that enjoyed a period of militancy in the 1840s, preparing the way for the "New Woman" of the late Victorian-Edwardian period, precursor of the woman of the twentieth century liberation movement. Rutland traces connections among social matrix, genderization, and cultural politics. The poetry of these close friends bespeaks divergent cultural-political trends that are also, more fundamentally, differences of gender valorization. Cloughs Amours de Voyage and Arnolds "Switzerland," Rutland argues, work out the terms of this divergence intertextually, Cloughs fictional narrative shadowing Arnold s problematic story grounded in personal experience. The gender positions that the two poets take up are homologous with contrasting ideas of culture and identity—ideas that have been formative down to our own time. Gender and Narrativity is not offered as a collection of neutral, value-free treatments of the topic, even when couched in the discourse of science, as in the case of the Verdon article. Just as everyone is inescapably gendered in terms of the culture and must live his/her actual sexuality within/against the rubrics of that gendering, so anyone who writes of gender must do so from one or other possible position within the state of discourse at the moment. In our age of postmodern instability and flux, the discourse is unsettled and shifting and a discourse counter to that traditionally vectored by narrative has already begun to emerge—this volume bears witness to that. The contributors necessarily experience and express the slippage; what they write is not only about it but of it—critical unwritings of the received narrativizations of gender. Their essays participate in the deconstructive troping of gender valorizations that will enable an alternative knowledge to displace the traditional and discredited. NOTE 1. The postmodern human/machine hybrid, the cyborg (from cyberneticorganic) may represent an evolutionary leap for the species, and cyborgicity, in that it permits practical intervention in and transcendence of organically based sexual differentiation, appears to have the potential to transform gender as hitherto constituted and practised. Gender may become an optional matter for purposes of pleasure and cognitive perspective. Bodily gender may become as arbitrary as, and much more susceptible to alteration than, grammatical gender. Already a consider-

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able body of radical sci-fi narrative has arisen out of speculation on the implications of the cyborg condition (see Gray 1995). However, it is doubtful that the category of sexual gender will or can be eliminated. WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Butler, Judith. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. Byatt, A.S. (1990). Possession. London: Chatto & Windus. Corbett, Greville. (1991). Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dawkins, Richard. (1989). The Selfish Gene, new ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel, ed. (1980). Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphodite. Trans. Richard McDougall. New York: Colophon. Gray, Chris Hables, ed. (1995). The Cyborg Handbook. New York and London: Routledge. Gregg, Frances. 1995. The Mystic Leeway. Ed. Ben Jones. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. Lacan, Jacques. (1977). Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Allan Sheridan. New York and London: Norton. . (1982). Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. Ed. Juliette Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. New York and London: Norton. Le Guin, Ursula. (1969). The Left Hand of Darkness. London: MacDonald Science Fiction. Levi-Strauss, Claude. (1963). "The Structural Study of Myth," Structural Anthropology 1: 206-31. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York and London: Basic. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Masumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mackie, Marilyn. (1987). Constructing Men and Women: Gender and Socialization. Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Ormiston, Gayle, and Raphael Sassower. (1989). Narrative Experiments: The Discursive Authority of Science and Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, ed. (1990). Freud on Women: A Reader. New York and London: Norton.

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I TOWARD AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF GENDER John Verdon

That higher life forms exist in the two physical categories of female and male is universally self-evident and is not of itself a problem. Beyond this basic understanding, however, the two sexes become associated with a vast panorama of cultural phenomena, including categorical ascriptions of social roles, behavioural expectations, and personality characteristics. How does the simple, incontrovertible, and universal fact of biological dimorphism generate the staggering complexity of cultural, social, and psychological dynamics of the human condition? It is the translation of the biological into social/cultural experience that is the heart of an epistemology of gender. An elaboration of the relationship between the knowing1/knowledge of biological sex and the socially constructed knowing/knowledge of gender categories requires a multi-disciplinary approach involving areas such as biology, evolution, communication, language, perception, and cognition. "Reality" is here assumed to be essentially process and pattern.2 A reality of process means that reality is dynamic and fluid, rather than composed of artificially fragmented, static "objects." A reality of pattern means we are able to expand our understanding of processes and their determination to include non-material and non-energetic factors. There are many impediments to the integration of this view into an everyday understanding of life. Some of the primary impediments are the presuppositions inherent within the structure of modern languages

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and subsequently of thinking. The subject-verb-object structure common to the syntax of a complete sentence and consequently of a complete thought is a ubiquitous organizing factor shaping a view of reality as essentially fragmented. Taken to its ultimate, the result is the prevailing scientific world view which regards reality as constituted out of a set of basic particles with a fixed nature.3 For many, the scientific view is not a representation of reality but rather reality itself, an unquestionable given that therefore does not demand a prerequisite belief. However, some epistemological errors take a great deal of time before they become evident enough to correct. The development of systems theories and approaches has increasingly permitted a view that sees the distinction between separate entities as arbitrary, the drawing of imaginary lines to enable the perception of differences and pattern, much like the Gestalt of one figure perceived out of a number of potential figures embedded in the contextual ground. AUTOPOIESIS

The description of living systems and the systemic analysis of biological, processes is important in laying a theoretical foundation that presupposes a "mind-body" unity rather than a duality. The work of Maturana and Varela (1980, 1987) and Varela (1979) provides such a theoretical foundation. Living systems differ from other systems by their apparent autonomy. The appearance of autonomy is created because living systems hold their own organization as a variable that is maintained constant, through the production and functioning of the components that specify it as a system. In short, living systems have a self-referential, homeostatic and circular organization. This most important characteristic of living systems has been termed by Maturana and Varela the systems autopoiesis—from the Greek auto = self, and poiesis = to produce. Thus, living systems are self-producing and as such subordinate all changes to the maintenance of their organization, no matter how profoundly they may otherwise be transformed in the process. In this way an autopoietic (living) system can be said to have individuality. By holding its own organization as an invariant throughout its continuous (self-) production, an identity is actively maintained which is independent of its interactions with an observer (Maturana & Varela 1980, 80). By describing a cognitive system as one whose organization defines a domain of interaction within which it can act with relevance to the maintenance of itself, then the process of cognition can be understood

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as the actual acting or behaving in this domain (Maturana & Varela 1980, 13). Thus a cognitive system is a living system and living and cognition are the same process. As we will see, this theory permits us to elaborate a phenomenology/cognition that is relevant to an autonomous identity, which in turn is constituted by a particular structure and organization. More significantly, by linking structure and ontogeny with a consequent type of phenomenology, the concept of autopoeisis is a particularly appropriate framework with which to understand each sex individually as well as interactionally as one species. I will argue that the structural and ontogenic differences between the sexes are exemplified in corresponding patterns of perception and cognition. While the content of a particular living systems phenomenology is relatively unlimited, there are some stipulations. Since autopoietic organization defines a living system as a unity, the phenomenology of the system is totally subordinated to the maintenance of its unity (identity). The particular form of the phenomenology of each autopoietic unity depends on the particular way in which its autopoiesis is realized. Finally, all biological phenomenology is determined and realized through individual autopoietic unities and consists of all the paths of transformations homeostatic systems undergo, singly or in groups, in the process of maintaining the constant of their defining individual relations. In this way the structure of a living system is inclusive of its ontogeny. Applying the principles of an autopoietic system to the workings of nervous systems, we see that a nervous system interacts only with relations that are necessarily mediated by physical interaction. For instance, the objects seen by an animal are not determined by the quantity of light absorbed, but rather by the relations that hold between the receptor-induced states of activity within the retina. The types of relations that are possible are determined by the connectivity of the various types of cells involved. In general, the organization and structure of an autopoietic system define in it a bias, a point of view or perspective, from within which it interacts, by determining at any instant the possible relations accessible to or generated by its nervous system. The phenomenology of the nervous system is exclusively that of the changes of state of a closed neuronal network such that, for it, there is no inside or outside. The distinctions between internal and external origins of changes of state of the nervous system can only be made by an observer beholding an organism as a unity.4 In fact, in terms of the operation of a nervous system, it is not possible to distinguish between perception and hallucination. Thus, perception should not be considered

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as the grasping of an external reality; it is more accurately considered the specification of one. Since the cognitive domain of any autopoietic system is relative to the specific manner in which its autopoiesis is realized, the knowledge of an organism changes as the manner in which its autopoiesis (the maintenance of identity) is realized during ontogeny also changes. The consequence is that absolute knowledge is not possible and the validation of all possible relative knowledge is achieved through the successful autopoiesis of a living system. Fundamental to the understanding of sex developed here is the bridge between the behavioral parameters circumscribing the individual and those circumscribing the species. Autopoietic systems themselves can be composed of, or be components of, autopoietic systems of different orders. The concept of composite autopoietic systems sets a frame within which both the individual and the species can be viewed and described in equivalent terms. However, the hierarchy of different orders of autopoietic systems places certain constraints on the priorities that can be established within each of these different orders of autopoietic systems. Higher order (composite) autopoietic unities are defined topologically through the coupling of component (lower order) autopoietic unities. When a higher order autopoietic system (unity) undergoes self-reproduction (possibly through the self-reproduction of one the component unities), an evolutionary process takes place whereby the evolution of the manner by which a component autopoietic system is realized is necessarily subordinated to the evolution of the manner by which the higher order or composite unity is realized. Stated succinctly, it is only after becoming constituted as an autopoietic unity (individual) that reproduction can take place as a biological phenomenon (Maturana & Varela 1980, 97). It follows that the human species must be a composite autopoietic unity and that individual males and females are component autopoietic unities. In turn, it is possible to see that the realization of the autopoiesis of females and males is subordinated to the maintenance of the autopoiesis of the species. Two important consequences result from this view: (1) although male and female may contribute equally in the maintenance of the autopoiesis of the species, they would logically contribute differently (or two sexes would be redundant); (2) from the perspective of an individual, the perceptual/cognitive experience of this speciesserving dimorphism would likely involve certain aspects of a transpersonal phenomenology.

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A remaining concern in this brief summary of autopoiesis regards the dynamics of communication between individual unities (organisms). A recursive or expanding domain of communicative interactions is generated by interlocked ontogenies constituting together a domain of mutually triggering consensual conducts, which in turn become specified during the ongoing process of interacting. A linguistic domain then, can be defined in autopoietic terms as a consensual domain of communicative interactions arising from the coupling of the ontogenies of otherwise independent autopoietic organisms, whereby the organisms mutually orient to each other with behavioral modes that have been internally determined and specified during their coupled ontogenies. A linguistic domain or even the component communicative and linguistic interactions are intrinsically non-informative, despite the ability of an observer (by overlooking the internal determination of the autopoiesis which generates the domain) to describe such interactions as if they were. This summary of autopoietic theory, while necessarily brief (and correspondingly dense), is an important part of the conceptual framework for what follows. Because this paper integrates the ideas of several different theorists, it is faced with the problem of merging the diverse "languages" used by them to paint their conceptual landscapes. While this is taxing, it is useful to be able to piece together each theorist s impressions, somewhat like taking into account each blind persons version of what an elephant is in order to derive a more complete idea of what an elephant looks like. In what follows we therefore shift into a compatible but different viewpoint. EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN BIOGRAM

The human species is itself a living (autopoietic) system with a unique organization and structure. To describe it accurately we must begin with the presupposition that it is systems, rather than traits, which evolve. By keeping in mind that the primary units of evolution are systems, we can better understand the incredible ecological complexity inherent in all organism-environment mutualisms. The theory of evolution is popularly interpreted to mean that the individual is the "unit of survival." However, the unit of survival can be more accurately described as a mutualism—the "individual-inenvironment." It is equally conceivable to consider a species-in-environment mutualism as a unit of survival. This approach is especially

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useful for articulating the uniqueness of the human species. It is widely accepted that the greatest evolutionary advantage achieved by the human species is an unsurpassed adaptability. As a species or as individuals we cannot only live, but live well and even thrive in almost every geographic location on the globe. Furthermore, humans can acclimatize with relative ease from one location to another (perhaps even off the globe as well). This agility in making an indeterminate number of ecosystems comfortably our own depends (among other things) on the isomorphic development of our sexual and symbolizing processes. However, human adaptability is not a trait, rather it is a feature of the systems that constitute the species-in-environment mutualism. Assuming that no structure has significance without a functional context (Count 1973, 214), then a comprehensive understanding of the total behavioral architecture of any species (concisely termed by Count as the species' or organism's "biogram") can only be achieved in relation to its evolutionary and ecological context. The elaboration of a biogram begins with a functional distinction between those life processes concerned with the well-being of the individual and those by which the individual propagates its kind (Count 1973, 15). The vertebrate biogram can be viewed as engineered primarily on a diphasic basis: a phase of reproductive quiescence and a phase of reproductive activity. Each is marked by corresponding behavioral patterns. The phases persist regardless of the gregariousness or solitariness of the life habits of the individual (16-17). Count offers the generalization that specialized adaptations of an animals life mode are effected during the non-reproductive phase (30). Only after the nonreproductive life mode has been remodeled is the reproductive life mode brought into the new adjustment. While the non-reproductive phase of the vertebrate biogram is the most flexible in behavioral terms, much is not known of it. For instance, it is not known whether: (1) the intrasex hierarchies persist, or (2) how far intersex dominances are maintained. Frequently it is only during this non-reproductive phase that a flock will admit strangers into its membership, as the reproductive phase sees a heightened individualism (56-57). It is during the reproductive phase that the hitherto homoiomorphous society (in terms of its behaviour) develops sex moieties, while the passing of the phase witnesses the recession of this social dimorphism. Given that the evolutionary unit of survival is the organism-inenvironment mutualism, then the onset of the reproductive phase can be understood as a question of timing the optimum environment-

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organism conditions in appropriate synchronous cycles. For example, in spring increased amounts of light help to "warn" the organism via the pituitary gland, which then stimulates the reproductive system into assuming phasic dominance. Thus it is specific environmental contingencies which warn most organisms into and through all the biogrammatic phases. However, the reproductive phase is proportionately more reliant on environmental cycles as the activational context synchronizing phasic processes. As we move up the evolutionary ladder there is a shift in the location of warning mechanisms. In the monkey, for instance, practically all determination and inhibition of behaviour is due to external, immediately present social forces (presence of other animals) rather than concrete environmental features (Count 1973, 97). The abstraction from concrete environmental and social "warning mechanisms" is carried furthest in the human species (perhaps the cetaceans are an exception), where the importance of internalizing social forces is tremendously expanded. Humans differ from other vertebrates and alloprimates in the particularly rich contents of their biogrammatic framework. These contents are indicative of the influence of symbolopoetic action upon (without disrupting) the more fundamental neuropsychic mechanisms (106). While humans continue to share an innate grounding with lower relatives, the power to symbolize permits social generalizations. In turn, symbolopoesis is not simply attributable to cerebral mechanisms or to neocortical function; rather, "it is profoundly a functioning of mechanismal totality" (263). Essential to this mechanismal totality are the structural and ontogenic processes constituting human sexual dimorphism. Bateson (1972) has proposed that the fundamental components of mammalian communication are "contingencies of relationship." The development of phasia and symbolopoesis may represent the emergence of a capacity to communicate in a way other than, and about, contingencies of relationship.5 When contingencies of relationship become concretized social generalizations, they are more easily understood as statuses (a status always implies a moiety of a dyad). In humans, statuses themselves can achieve status. Thus, humans are the only species known with the ability to hold plural statuses simultaneously (Count 1973, 148). The development of language (at least partially dependent on the capacity for phasia and symbolopoesis) may be the foundation upon which the ability to hold multiple statuses arose. All statuses are somehow codes which become formalized out of groups (148). Fluid patterns of communication utilizing contingencies of rela-

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tionship can become fixed in symbol and in identity as part of an "organizational homeostasis and locative ego" (251). By regarding the evolution of phasia, symbolopoesis, increasing complexities of social interaction, etc., as isomorphic complexes of systems, we are better able to comprehend the novelty of human sexual dimorphism. The vertebrate reproductive syndrome is always a matter of bisexual complementarity. In almost all mammals the process of this complementarity is timed by an oestrus cycle. However, in humans (and in a very few primates) the process is determined by a menstrual cycle. The human menstrual cycle is unique because both the non-reproductive and reproductive biogrammatic interests are brought into mutual and possibly simultaneous relation and support (Count 1973, 106). That is, the interests and capabilities of the non-reproductive phase can be activated concurrently with the interests and capabilities of the reproductive phase. Further, the reproductive biogrammatic interests are initiated by social "warning mechanisms" (the actual presence as well as the internalized representations of other humans and subsequent categories of contingencies of relationship) occurring on either single or combined levels. The primate menstrual cycle is largely independent of simple, externally concrete and social "warning mechanisms." The flexibility of primates to choose alternate ecologies is limited by constraints related to their specialization to particular ecologies. Humans, however, have the benefit of the menstrual cycles independence from specific environmental contingencies in conjunction with a unique morphology, nervous system, and neuro-anatomy (including the neocortex). The conjunction of these systems within the human species embodies the merging of the evolutionary and exploratory flexibilities of the non-reproductive biogrammatic interests with reproductive biogrammatic modalities, which in turn permits sexual behaviour to function as a context for, as well as within the contexts of, a wide variety of categories of contingencies of relationship. More simply, sexual behaviour becomes "neocprtical" in the metamorphic sense that it functions as a "field" or "stratum" within which many other areas of activity ultimately (and intimately) become associated with one another. Sex is no longer exclusively for reproduction, but becomes generalized to levels of social and individual play, communication, pleasure, etc., independent of environmental and reproductive cycles, while at the same time continuing to function as a medium of social cohesion. In this way the human biogram may be viewed as a recent evolutionary strategy aimed at achieving: (1) a relative autonomy from specific

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environmental contingencies; (2) complex patterns of hierarchical and non-hierarchical social relations and contingencies of relationship; (3) a social cohesiveness utilizing either or both the non-reproductive and reproductive behavioral repertoires, in sequence or simultaneously. The processes of biological development for all humans are overwhelmingly similar and the biological differences between males and females are small compared to such similarities. Moreover, it is much easier to measure differences between individuals without regard to sex than it is to measure differences between males and females. However, sex-specific developmental patterns are active on a continuous as well as on a phasic basis. It is the organizational patterns underlying human biological dimorphism which are the foundation of a symbolic template out of which gender categories and knowledge develop. To put it simply, having a female or male body is not like having a static fact/noun category, but is rather like being within a developmental, experiential, unfolding process. In addition, the biological entity, from conception to death, experiences its ontogeny (including sex-specific developmental patterns and processes) as a perceiving being. THE BIOLOGICAL/CULTURAL INTERFACE

The cosmologies and belief systems of many cultures make nonarbitrary symbolic use of gender to label or make fundamentally distinct components of experience or consciousness. By non-arbitrary is meant that the assignment of gender terms appears to be lawful and regularly patterned cross-culturally (Laughlin 1983, 2). The primacy of perception over cognitive differentiation not only dominates early neurocognitive development but continues to form the "ground of being" out of which cognition arises. The inherent order of perception is primary not only for moment-to-moment cognition but for ontogenesis as well (13). The perceptual "ground" becomes relatively unconscious as higher cognitive functions emerge and, as such, remains as a matrix of perceptual filters shaping the formation of a symbolic template. Perceptual filters refer to the structural and ontologically dependent phenomenology by which an autopoietic system specifies a reality. Perceptions are both shaped by the highest level of organization and are registered as tacit, unconscious experiences. The development of the nervous system (sensorium) is precisely and innately ordered. While never fixed or inflexible, "sensorial organization emerges during development mediating an ever ordered, yet ever richer, more flexible, and more complex

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field of perception" (13). However, an organisms phenomenology, based on its field of perception, remains subordinated to its structure and ontogeny. Instrumental to the formation of sex-specific perceptual filters and a symbolic template is the inevitable association of the womb with the lifeworld (Laughlin 1983, 2). Memories of the largely undifferentiated totality of immediate perceptual experience within the womb/lifeworld become associated with or symbolized by mother. Mother also becomes the first and quintessential "woman." Thus, despite the emergence of more advanced neurocognitive functions, a fundamental cognitive formula remains as an organizing or perceptual filter: "womb = woman = world" (3-4). The autonomy and self-referential circularity of living systems is not inconsistent with this cognitive equation. The cognition of "womb = woman = world" can be likened to a first order (individual) autopoietic organisms perception of its autopoietic subservience to the higher order (species) autopoietic system. On a cultural level, the predominant orientation toward the lifeworld will influence how the sex-specific perceptual filters will specify and integrate particular cognitions of gender. For example, a positive orientation to the lifeworld tends to encourage individuals to substantiate, integrate, and potentially to transcend ontologically sex-specific perceptual orientations into complementary cognitions of the other sex. By complementary we intend a sense of symmetry, balance, and fluidity of interaction. On the other hand, an ambivalent or negative orientation to the lifeworld fosters a substantiation, integration, and crystallization of each sex into a cognition defined in terms of some sort of opposition to the other sex. By oppositional we mean a sense of a more radical asymmetry, conflict, segregation, and anxiety, emphasizing a need to control or dominate the other sex. To reiterate, the developmental processes integral to each sex can be viewed as a tri-level experience: the unfolding process of the sensorium, the perceptual experience mediated by the sensorium, and the cognitive/cultural appreciation of the developmental process. While the underlying cognitive and perceptual processes are universal, the virtually unlimited potential for variety in behaviour arises with the highly complex interrelations between these levels of experience and the many other environmental and cultural variables that are possible. Fundamental to sex-specific developmental processes and the corresponding organization of perceptual filters are the different relationships of each sex to the maternal environment/lifeworld, or womb. In order to

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understand the nature of these sex-specific perceptual filters it is important to elaborate and characterize the corresponding differences in the patterns of structural and ontogenic development. It has been postulated that the X and Y chromosomes may be in charge of an auxiliary system which intervenes after conception in the way that the other forty-four chromosomes are expressed (Durden-Smith & deSimone 1983, 113). It is believed that the X chromosome is largely sexually neutral. Its role in sex differentiation is primarily involved with the maintenance of the ovarian function in the female. However, the information it carries is essential for proper development beyond that specific to sex-morphology, as no person, stillbirth, or abortus has been found without at least one X chromosome (Ounsted & Taylor 1972, 245,249). Even in the event that only one X chromosome is present, female morphological development proceeds to some degree, with the exception that ovaries and the subsequent hormonal cycles do not develop. Only the Y chromosome is sex determining, yet it does not contain any complex male-forming genes. In fact it contains no significant genetic information specific to itself (only a gene for hairy ears) (Bleier 1984, 41). Its primary function is believed to be the "cause of certain potential autosomal and X-coded information to become manifest in the phenotype" (Ounsted & Taylor 1972, 245; see also DurdenSmith & deSimone 1983, 114). The differentiation of sex morphology, beginning with the differentiation of the gonads, occurs within the womb during the fifth to twelfth week of ontogenesis. For the first five weeks of embryonic life all embryos are morphologically female. If the fetal gonads are removed before differentiation takes place, the embryo will autonomously continue to develop into an apparent female morphology, lacking only ovaries, regardless of the genetic sex (Sherfey 1966, 38). Sexual differentiation occurs during the following three to seven weeks. However, it is only the male who is required to undergo a sex-specific transformation of morphology (40). In order to do this, the male embryo must elaborate extremely large quantities (relatively speaking) of androgen throughout fetal life to overcome both its innate female anatomy and the effects of the circulating maternal estrogens (43). Certain complications can arise if the particular male embryo happens for some reason to be androgen insensitive, or fails to produce androgen. In such cases the embryo will remain an apparently morphological female until puberty, when expected further female development fails to occur.

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At this point it is perhaps useful to characterize, on a sort of archetypal level, the male s perceptual experience of his relationship to the lifeworld that results from his structural developmental pattern. The male, to become and be a male,6 must differentiate from some fundamental aspects of the environmental-matrix (the lifeworld as represented by the womb, the maternal hormonal environment, and the initial female morphology). In autopoietic terms, this developmental pattern is more than a single structural transformation; rather, it is a feature of the male s (as a living autopoietic system) ontologic organization, and thus of his organismic identity. The female, in contrast, can be characterized, in her pattern of morphological development, as identifying-with-the-environment.7 The characterization is derived from the difficulty in determining the primacy of the fetal or maternal estrogens in the female neonate s development as well as the relatively homogeneous continuation of her ontogenesis with respect to the initial morphology (Sherfey 1966, 40). Thus, the females structural ontogeny also reflects a particular organismal identity. This initial and embryonic genesis of sex morphology is the basic perceptual template upon which later metamorphically similar perceptions will be overlaid/associated. The similarities of experience of all humans within the womb, regardless of sex, far outnumber the differences. In addition, individual differences in experiences within the womb far exceed those occurring between the sexes. However, the actual "weight" of the differences which make a difference in sex morphology may be substantially disproportionate to their number. The next phase in the developmental sequence of patterned differences of perceptual experiences involves the interaction of infant and mother at birth. What is important to consider is not only the event of birth, but the entire period of early child development. The different relationships to the lifeworld that are established in utero, during birth, and in early infancy continue to manifest themselves throughout the life of the individual. Apart from the infant s bonding with mother as primary love object (Chodorow 1978), the relationship between male and female parental figures is the next significant social dyad that is encountered by the infant. These parental figures not only represent primary gender role models, but are a basis of family role interactions from which a child derives an initial orientation toward society (Laughlin 1983, 3). At birth a relationship to the mother/lifeworld patterned similarly to that in the womb is likely to occur. The female child is born from a female and is female. A recognition which can

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typically arise on some level between the mother and daughter is (all things being equal) likely to embrace aspects of identity that build on the initial primary perceptual experience and organizational identity. The male child, however, is born from a female but is not female. A recognition between mother and son can typically involve some aspects of identity but would logically include a profoundly different emphasis on those aspects relating to the other-than-self.8 Despite the fact that in some societies all children are categorized as "its" along with the elderly, who return to this category, the potential for the recognition of the individual child's future sex (if not gender) undoubtedly remains. Simultaneous with the growing awareness of the parental and/or social male/female dyad is the gradual emergence of more advanced neurocognitive functions mediated by structures which include the prefrontal lobes, the inferior parietal lobe, and secondary association areas. The cognitions which are mediated by these structures (and throughout ontogenic unfolding) develop within a context that is either in complementarity with, or in opposition to, the primacy of the world of immediate experience—perceptually the womb = woman = world (Laughlin 1983, 4). Despite the context, cognitive development entails the differentiation of distinct concepts, objects, and events from an undifferentiated unfolding-enfolding lifeworld. Furthermore, these cognitions emerge and develop in a sort of isomorphic conjunction with a growing awareness of the parental dyad and thus become associated with the male parental or social figure and subsequently with the male in general (3-4). Theoretical explanations of the equation of male with knowledge acquired during, and derived from, conceptual development would include the "recognition of simple intransivity (lifeworld = mother, mother = father, father = cogito) in a Piagetian (1980, 84) frame, or ... the simple logic of metaphoric and metonymic relations (lifeworld:mother::cogito:father) in a Levi-Straussian (1968) frame" (Laughlin 1983,4). While the above equation is based on linkages between mother and father, it is important to note that the "institutions" of motherhood and fatherhood are quite different. Motherhood is incontrovertibly "organic" whereas fatherhood requires a culturally dependent knowledge of paternity. This sort of knowledge is isomorphic with the neurocognitive process whereby the differentiation of discrete objects/events serves in the adaptation to an "ever unfolding-enfolding lifeworld" (Laughlin 1983, 4). Thus, despite the incredible cultural variation in the details of gender categories and roles, an initial non-arbitrary

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association of the female (and feminine gender categories) with the lifeworld is matched by an equally non-arbitrary association of the male (and masculine gender categories) with the process by which cognition develops its adaptive structures (4), in addition to the association of the male as differentiated from the lifeworld. The next significant phase in the unfolding ontogeny of sexual dimorphism, offering events and perceptual experiences with deep implications for each sex, occurs at puberty. During this period the morphologies and nervous systems of both sexes substantially mature, thus becoming (potentially at least) more actively engaged in higher order autopoietic (species-level) phenomenology. The onset of this phase of development carries the potential for an increase in the cognitive appraisal of present and prior perceptual experiences. Many of the changes that both sexes undergo are similar in nature; however, some profound differences exist between the sexes, including the onset of menstruation in the female and possibly the mature phallus^1 in the male. A common misapprehension concerning the menstrual cycle is to consider it as a larger period of normality punctuated by a shorter period of bleeding accompanied by unpleasant emotional and physical symptoms. However, the menstrual cycle is actually a continuous process of daily physiological and, more often than not, unconscious psychological/attitudinal changes. Evidence of the largely unconscious attitudinal changes can be found in studies noting changes in the tone of sexuality and types of dreams experienced during the ovulatory or menstrual peaks (Shuttle & Redgrove 1978). It is important to hold in mind a point previously made, that in liberating the libido the menstrual cycle makes possible a new level or order of types of relationships and contingencies of relationship (emotional, economic, etc.). The possibility of new types of relationships has profound implications for the development of new types of social organization, and thus is a fundamental element in the foundation of any society. It is not an uncommon phenomenon that when a group (two or more) of women are in some form of close association, their cycles can synchronize. Synchronization of the menstrual cycle can also extend to include the lunation cycle (Shuttle & Redgrove 1978, 13335,156-60). This sort of inter-subjective cycle synchronization can act as a profound source of "knowledge" of the world, potentially leading to the formation of information sharing and processing cults (religious or otherwise) (25). The cognitive and perceptual association of the female with the moon and its rhythms and the moon with the bio-

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sphere/lifeworld, can act as a powerful reaffirmation of the original perceptual experiences of the prenatal relationship with the womb/world. Even though cycles do not always remain synchronized, or may not synchronize at all, it is difficult not to make the association between the isomorphic nature of the lunar cycle and the average female cycle. It is possible to explore the influence of the lunar cycle in the development of notions of time and thus also of certain types of knowing and memory. The lunar cycle provides not only a marker of the passing months, but also individuates each day within this context. Thus the lunar cycle provides a potential external marker for the female s internally experienced cyclic process. The resonance of experiences resulting from menstrual and lunar cycle synchronization optimises the chances for integrating into the cognized environment notions of time, the body/psyche's internal processual cycling, and thus certain types of gnosis, leading to the beginning of a certain type of of knowingpredicting. The menstrual cycle s correlated phases of attitudes/orientation and dreams/symbols (Shuttle & Redgrove 1978) can also find their interpretive Rorschach in the daily transformation of lunar appearances. Thus, the physiological and psychological aspects of the menstrual cycle can find powerfully isomorphic parallels in the physical (e.g., tides and phasic appearances) and symbolic (interpretive associations) aspects of the lunar cycle. The complex and multileveled possibilities of association between the menstrual and lunar cycle provide further confirmation of the notion that female development occurs in a metacontext of identity with the environment. A parallel to the onset of menstruation in the female is the maturation of the male's experience of erection, and the capacity for ejaculation of a new fluid, semen. However, no matter how distinctly male this new capability is, it remains associated with the auto-erotic, oceanic-feeling, or uroboric experience of primal unity and thus with some aspect or guise of the maternal/feminine/natural (Neumann 1954, see also Dulaure 1934; Jung 1970; Vanggaard 1972; and Monick 1987). A brief elaboration of the phenomenological/cognitive dynamics involved with the males "phallocentric" structural and ontogenic transformations will help to delineate further the processual and organizational pattern that is typical of the male. The symbolic aspect of the erect penis has commonly been termed "phallus." As a symbol, its meanings generally extend beyond the directly biological10 and the roles serving goals other than passion11 or procreation (Vanggaard 1972, 11). In its symbolic aspect, the phallus is multivocalic, incorporating implications of

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power, pleasure, fertility and more. All these aspects overlap inextricably, and as with an understanding of any symbol, comprehending one aspect involves a simultaneous grasping of the symbol and its referents as a whole field. The phallus as a symbol of power can be related to fundamental biogram patterns that have come to be used as tools for communicating certain categories of contingencies of relationship. A prototypical demonstration of the aggressive erection is the baboon sitting on guard with an erect penis. Vanggaard (1972, 109) suggests that since erections and seminal emission have been observed not infrequently in association with aggressive or fearful dream situations, aggressiveness may be an effective stimulus for erection or peno-anal activity. This sort of asexual erection is also seen in the bronze age petroglyphs in association with sociocultural activities such as sailing, plowing and hunting. The depictions of these sorts of erections, whether in dreams or petroglyphs, are often interpreted as symbolic of "male powerfulness." However, a more useful description of the erection (as phallus) in such activities may be in terms of the isomorphic nature of the relational contingencies between the participant and the context. Thus, rather than expressing inherent power or capability, the erection as phallus may be a response to a perceptual Gestalt of having to enter into (e.g., by "penetrating," "merging-with" or "being engulfed by") a context in which there is an implicit liminal experience regarding the differentiation of self from lifeworld. While there is considerably more to say about the phallus, only one more consideration is essential to this discussion. The apparent autonomy of the phallus/erection lends itself to a cognition of a type of transpersonal experience: "The physical phallus has become a religious and psychological symbol because it decides on its own, independent of its owner s ego decision, when and with whom it wants to spring into action. It is thus an appropriate metaphor for the unconscious itself, and specifically the male mode of the unconscious" (Monick 1987, 17). In Images and Symbols, Mircea Eliade discusses this apparent "autonomous mode of cognition" as the basis of a transcendent means to knowledge, and states that "sexuality has everywhere and always been a hierophany" (Eliade 1969, 14). Framing these viewpoints, Neumann asserts: "Mythologically, the phallic-chthonic deities are companions of the Great Mother, not representatives of the specifically masculine. Psychologically this means that phallic masculinity is still

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conditioned by the body12 and thus is under the rule of the Great Mother, whose instrument it remains" (1954, 309). Furthermore, all phallic cults—invariably solemnized by women— have a similar theme: the anonymous power of the fertilizing agent, as the human is merely the bearer of "that which does not pass away and cannot be interchanged because it is the self-same phallus" (Neumann 1954, 49, see also Dulaure 1934). The phallus as a symbol of fertility is, like paternity, a later cultural development. The male begins by "being a copulater, not a begetter." Even when the phallus is worshipped as an instrument of fertility, it has generally been in the nature of the opener of the womb rather than the giver of seed and as a bringer of joy rather than of fruitfulness (Neumann 1954, 309). The experience and symbolic cognition of the phallus as autonomous can perhaps be understood in autopoietic terms. By considering the different levels or orders of autopoietic systems, both the phallus and certain aspects of the menstrual cycle can be viewed as phenomenological consequences of structural bridges between these different orders of autopoietic system (i.e., the bridge between the individual as an autopoietic system and the species as an autopoietic system). While both males and females can experience their own sexualities as autopoietically hierophanic, the difference between them is in the identification with the lifeworld (as a higher-order autopoietic matrix) which that sexuality serves. Perhaps the most powerful indicator of the structural differences between the sexes can be found in the different experience/perceptions of each sex's involvement in procreation. The female in carrying the developing embryo has access to a cognitive and /or perceptual experience of "other" as within. Even more so, profound structural processes (autopoietic patterns of organizing information) are required to make procreation possible. In accepting sperm and maintaining pregnancy, the female has to modulate her own immune system. This is the basic system responsible for the maintenance of organismic identity by discriminating against that which is not self. The female must simultaneously suppress part of her immune system in order to tolerate the sperm and later the fetus inside her, and boost another part to provide the extra protection against infection that she requires (Durden-Smith & deSimone 1983, 174-75). The autopoietic organization by which both the structural modulation of the female s immune system is guided and her ontogenic processes are extended to include the maintenance of fetus and neonate, and can be elegantly characterized as a multileveled identification with "other." These structural processes can generate a

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perceptual/cognitive phenomenology that is both isomorphic with and overlaid onto the previous perceptual cognitive experiences. In this regard, it is clear that the male s structure and ontogeny is radically different from the female s and thus likely to generate phenomenological cognitions relatively differentiated from the female s. The final line of evidence concerns sex differences in brain structure. Research in this area has produced few substantial results, nevertheless, some interesting data have been found. Briefly, there is evidence that the hemispheres of male brains are more specialized, communicating to each other in different languages, verbal and visualspatial, and only formally after an encoding into abstract representations (Durden-Smith & deSimone 1983, 73; Ounsted & Taylor 1972, 138; Rossi 1985, 182-84). In contrast, the hemispheres of female brains appear not to be so specialized and thus able to communicate in a much less formal and structured way, and more rapidly as well. The caudal or posterior end of the corpus callosum (a bundle of fibers by which the halves of the brain communicate with each other) has been found to be much wider and larger in women than in men. In fact, so big and clear was the difference that "impartial observers" could immediately assign to the right sex—"with 100% accuracy"—drawings made from photographs of cross-sections (Durden-Smith & deSimone 1983, 76; see also Rossi 1985, 184). These differences were also found in the brains of fetuses that were between the twenty-sixth and the forty-first weeks of gestation. The difference in the sizes of this inter-hemispheric communicator suggests a greater ease and frequency of communication between the two hemispheres of female brains. The implication of these sorts of structural differences between female and male brains may be viewed as a framework that is homeomorphogenically13 related to the other structural differences. That is, the male's greater hemispheric specialization and operational independence as well as the dedication of relatively fewer nerve fibers to inter-hemispheric communication can be viewed as both the outcome and mediating structure for the isomorphically patterned perceptions/cognitions of differentiation from the contextual matrix. The female s relatively greater correspondences and interdependence between hemispheres can be viewed similarly as an isomorphic outcome and related mediating structure of perceptions /cognitions of an identification with a contextual matrix.

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TOWARD AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF GENDER The foregoing sections constitute a theoretical base upon which an epistemology of gender can be constructed. Despite the largely overriding similarities in the ontogenic development of all humans, the relative differences in the ontogenies of the sexes are posited as the base of correspondingly different cognitive systems, which are characterized as different (perceptual) orientations relative to the lifeworld and/or contextual matrix. The male structural orientation is characterized as a differentiation from the lifeworld whereas the female structural orientation is characterized as an identification with the lifeworld. However, the question of how such perceptual filters/orientations shape a specific and culturally based symbolic template, or what a particular cognized environment specified by such a template would look like, remains unanswered. The work of Carol Gilligan (1982) provides a useful view of what a sex-specific cognized environment may look like. In her research into psychological and moral development, Gilligan found different modes of thinking about relationship and documented how these modes are associated with male and female cognized environments, as portrayed in psychological and literary texts. One of the most significant barriers to hearing the different voices lies in theoretical frameworks that presume sexual neutrality and scientific objectivity while actually reflecting a consistent male observational and evaluative bias. Thus the different voices (male and female) may be separated by an apparently common language. Gilligan not only demonstrates that contemporary models of psychological and moral development are constructed with male observational and evaluative perspectives, but also offers alternate models constructed with corresponding female perspectives. Gilligan (9-10) cites evidence from a host of sources, including both Janet Lever (1976) and Piaget (1970), indicating certain differences between boys and girls. For instance, boys increasingly become fascinated with the elaboration of rules and fair procedures for adjudicating conflicts. This orientation is felt to account for such behaviours as boys tending to play more often in large and age-heterogeneous groups and their games tending to last longer than those of girls. Girls, on the other hand, were found to be less concerned with the elaboration and maintenance of systems of rules. Thus, when a quarrel arose among the girls that were being studied, there was a tendency to subordinate the game s continuation to the continuation of relationships among the participants.

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In terms of competitiveness, Gilligan (14-15) makes the point that the anxiety experienced by women in the "fear of success" is present only when one's success was at the expense of another's failure. Thus, in so far as the view of individual achievement as a measure of success extends into adulthood, maturity can become equated with personal autonomy, while predominating concerns with relationship can appear as immaturity and weakness. According to Gilligan (17), the growth of the knowledge of intimacy, relationships, and care is not only the centre of women's moral development, but also delineates a critical line of psychological development for both sexes. When morality is conceived as concerned with the activities of care, then moral development involves the understanding of the primacy of responsibility, relationship and connection. However, the conception of morality as fairness leads moral development to emphasize the primacy of the individual and of separation as well as an understanding of rights and rules. In this view, moral problems arise for women due to conflicting responsibilities rather than because of competing rights. Resolving each type of moral problem requires a corresponding mode of thinking—contextual and narrative for the first and formal and abstract for the second (19). The two orientations toward morality not only speak of the differences between the sexes but also provide alternative conceptions of maturity. In the same vein, Robert May (1980, 59-71) identified corresponding patterns in the fantasies of men and women. The male pattern leads from enhancement to deprivation, from an initial experience of separation (the severance of connection) to an irreparable loss, from a glorious achievement to a disastrous fall. Here the theme is one of life as a succession of relationships, of replacements and separations with attachment or connection as the final reward of this dangerous and elusive quest. The female pattern tends to be a narrative in which connection, although leading through separation, is ultimately maintained or restored. Within a thematic context of life as a web and a process of continuity and change in configuration, women portray autonomy as an illusory and dangerous quest (Gilligan 1982, 48). In the analysis of men's and women's self-descriptions, Gilligan found the same orientation of identity around the themes of separation and attachment. Even highly successful and achieving women depicted their identity ("future mother," "present wife," "adopted child," etc.) and measured their strengths ("giving to," "helping out," "not hurting," etc.) in relational terms (159). In the self-description of men, involvement with others is related as a qualification rather than a realization of identity. The verbs

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of attachment that were used by the women are replaced by the men with adjectives that are descriptive of a singularity distinct from others. Thus the men describe themselves as "intelligent," "logical," "honest" and even of having or wishing to have "real contacts" or "deep feelings," although no particular person or relationship is mentioned (160-61). It is possible to see how such different vantage points entail different critical experiences in the developmental paths of each sex. While the nature of the dilemmas inherent in such critical experiences may be the same for both sexes—for instance, a conflict between integrity and care—each is likely to approach the developmental transitions within a different perspective. For males, intimacy will in all probability be a primary transformative experience in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. For women, the parallel is not intimacy but the experience of choice that creates an encounter with self through which the understanding of responsibility and truth becomes clarified (Gilligan 1982, 164). Perhaps Gilligan s most important point concerns the need for alternate models of moral and psychological development. Rather than presupposing a universal model of psychological development, based on hierarchical stages of separation and individuation (see Mahler, Pine & Bergman 1975), it may be appropriate to frame an additional model based on stages of increasing complexity or extension in the weblike nature of responsibility and relationship. For example, it is possible to conceive the development of identity as a process of incorporation. Gilligan's work presents a clear picture of a structurally based phenomenology as it is shaped within a particular culture. The two voices Gilligan presents are isomorphic with the perceptual orientations elaborated in this paper. That is, the male's perceptual orientation toward a differentiation from environment/context is consistent with Gilligan's hearing of the male voice as one of abstraction, separation, and individuation. Similarly, the female's perceptual orientation in an identity with environment/context is consistent with a female voice that is narrative, contextual, and centred on care and responsibility. GENDER AND NARRATIVE

Certain environments (and social organizations and demographics made possible therein) may tend to favour or require, for the survival and welfare of the inhabitants, particular categories of activities. Such activities may in turn be relationally isomorphic with one or the other

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of the sex-centred perceptual orientations. In this way, the subsequent cognized environment may seem to order egalitarian or non-egalitarian relationships between the sexes naturally. By egalitarian we mean a type of interdependence and balance, a sort of sexual symmetry or integration. By non-egalitarian we mean a more radical asymmetry and segregation in the relational roles between the sexes (Sanday 1981, 170-71). Sanday (1981, 33) has found that a significant predictor of sex-role behaviour within a particular culture is the creation symbolism represented within its origin myth. Creation stories reflect a cultural perception of the sources of power which she calls "inner" or "outer orientation." Sanday (57) identifies three categories of creative agents: (1) female creators, who generally originate from within something (i.e., water or earth) and create from their own bodies; (2) male, animal, and supreme being creators who originate from without (i.e., sky or another land) and create magically; and (3) couple creators originating from both within and without, and tending to create by natural reproductive processes. Thus the female is associated with nature, natural processes, and an inner orientation toward sources of power. The male, on the other hand, is associated with the sky, magical processes, and an outer orientation toward sources of power (58). These associations are consistent with the characterization of male and female processes already outlined. That is, the female's perceptual orientation toward identity with environment/context is consistent with an "inner orientation" toward sources of power. The male s perceptual orientation toward differentiation from environment/context is consistent with an outer orientation toward sources of power. The orientation of a culture s creation symbolisms can be traced to the way the people interact with their environment (Sanday 1981, 65). Both the nature of the environment and the types of activity patterns necessary to maintain the economic infrastructure are key influences in the genesis of origin mythology. The workings of these influences are perhaps most evident in nonindustrial societies, where the people are closer to the complex web of natural phenomena. Sanday (68) posits that if the environment is predominantly a source of danger (i.e., in the form of large animals), inducing a relative sense of vulnerability, then an outer orientation (measurable in such terms as the distance of males from infants and in beliefs about outer power) is likely to occur, with a subsequent male origin symbolism. Furthermore, a hostile environment is more likely to put greater emphasis on the adaptive cognitive functions of replacement, compartmentalization, and hierarchical social structur-

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ing (Laughlin & Brady 1978). These cognitive patterns tend to be isomorphic with the male processes underlying the perceptual orientation previously characterized as "differentiating from the context." Accordingly, the relations between the sexes are less likely to be egalitarian. That is, through the cognitive formula of womb = woman = world and the perceptual identification of the female with the environment, the relationship of the culture with the environment presents perceptual and cognitive parameters for an isomorphic relationship between the sexes. Thus if the environment is perceived as dangerous, then by association females are more likely to be considered dangerous by males. An evoked desire for the control or domination of the environment is likely to evoke an isomorphic desire by males to control or dominate females. On the other hand, if the environment is perceived as beneficent, its lushness providing a sense of security, and food is derived from the earth, then there is likely to be an inner orientation (measurable in terms such as greater male involvement with the young and beliefs about inward power) and a subsequent female origin symbolism (68). Migration as well as technological complexity also tends to favour sex relations that are non-egalitarian, as the underlying perceptual associations would be much the same. However, if a culture maintains female creation/origin symbolism, then it is more likely to resist a shift from egalitarian relations between the sexes. The metaphors inherent in female creation symbolism provide a basis upon which to organize the cognitive environment during social disruption (133). Cultures with a long and stable association with one environment tend to have egalitarian relations between the sexes. In these cultures, as in the majority of foraging and fishing societies, women tend to wield secular power (economic and political) as well as religious authority. In such conditions there is likely to be an inner orientation toward the perceived sources of power (5). The cognitive associations of the environment with an "inner orientation," in conjunction with the defining female processes described as identity-with-environment, are likely to establish relationships between males and females that are isomorphic with the relationship between the culture and its environment. In this way the interdependence and balance of the relational positions between the sexes act out the interdependence and balance of the relationship between the culture and environment.

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SEX, GENDER, SEXUALITY

A comprehensive elaboration of the dynamic interplay between the perceptual/cognitive orientations and cultural, environmental, and interpersonal variables would require its own volume. We have not dealt here with the vast literature concerned with traditionally researched sex differences in behaviour, such as speech or visual-spatial ability, aggression, passivity, etc. Nor have we examined overt or covert sexuality or sexual behaviour, except to make the point that sexuality is an individual expression of the complex relationship between personal, familial, and cultural experiences and ones sex. Also not examined were the substantial similarities between the sexes or the structural and ontologic changes occurring in mature life. However, on the basis of the evidence presented we can conclude that inherent sex-specific perceptual orientations act as filters in the organization of a cognized environment. These filters arise out of different male and female structural and ontological processes. We can also conclude that sex-specific perceptual orientations play important roles in the recognition of environmental contingencies and in this way contribute to the shaping of culturally specific relations between the sexes. In conclusion, we now offer definitions of the terms sex, gender, and sexuality. In higher life forms, only two sexes exist, functioning to ensure the survival of the species by providing the mechanism for reproduction and evolutionary adaptation. Gender emerges at the human level as a socio-culturally constructed category consisting of combinations of components of behaviour perceived as isomorphic or at least consistent with the sex-specific perceptual orientations. Sexuality, or "polymorphous pleasure," is both problem and solution embodied in the evolutionary experiment represented by the human species. Sexuality may be briefly defined as the "freeing of the libido" made possible by the evolution of the menstrual cycle and the more encompassing homeomorphogenetic relation between body morphology and the hierarchically organized structures of the brain and nervous system. Sexuality more particularly concerns the individual rather than the species. Thus far, our definitions permit us to posit that from two sexes are born the potential for multiple gender categories and innumerable sexualities or varieties of sexual behaviour. The concept of differences in the perceptual orientation of each sex helps explain many of the observed differences in the expectations and roles occurring between the sexes. However, it must be stressed that these different perceptual orientations provide no

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basis for the prescription of roles or behaviour. The overwhelming similarities between humans, including a complex behavioural and neurostructural architecture (biogram) which integrates reproductive and non-reproductive phase-specific systems, are substantial grounds for asserting that, generally speaking, every individual member of the species has access to most of the behavioural repertoire of the species. By stressing the primacy of perception as a basis for fundamental differences between the sexes, we are able to acknowledge the influence of biological processes in shaping initial and inherent perceptual orientation. However, potential behavioural capabilities cannot be determined or prescribed, since identical behaviours can be produced by a variety of different structural and organizational processes. NOTES 1. Perhaps the word gnosis is more expressive of the less than conscious basis of what underlies what we eventually understand as knowledge. 2. This approach to understanding the nature of "reality" is more fully developed by writers such as A.N. Whitehead in Process and Reality (New York 1929), David Bohm in Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London 1980), and Gregory Bateson in Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York 1979). 3. This view has been nicely summed up by Bruce Holbrook as the absolute-fragmented paradigm in The Stone Monkey (New York, 1981). While the "particulate" view of reality is not held by most scientists as far as their scientific theoretical understandings are concerned, it is however the prevailing view of the cultural doxa. 4. This view is stated in different terms by Bateson (1979) in his definition of mind. 5. Symbolopoesis and phasia are prerequisites to the capacity to communicate and think extensively in terms of negatives, for instance, communicating what is not desired— "I don't want the chocolate cake." The capacity to define a state of affairs, a situation, an intended goal, or a self-identity in negative terms is perhaps unique to humans. It may be considered the first and most fundamental of tropes, that is, the rhetorical "turns" of semiosic processing. 6. By male is intended a biological integrity in morphology and not any psychological aspect associated with that particular body. Throughout this work, maleness is not to be equated with masculinity. 7. The choice of the descriptive terms "identifying-with-environment" and "differentiation-from-environment" are admittedly evocative, at the least. However, in considering the great amount of controversy surrounding

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the subject of sex and gender, the terms do permit an adequate descriptive power while not euphemistically evaporating the potency of the controversy. 8. This may likely be more pertinent to the mothers experience than to the infants. Some of the structural and organizational implications for the mother will be examined later. 9. There is a great deal of controversy over the use and meaning of the terms penis and phallus. Phallus has been chosen here as more adequately representing the multivalent and transpersonal functioning of the systemic structures involved and the consequent phenomenology thereof. While penis may be descriptive of the anatomical and personal organ, phallus seems a better term for the functioning and impersonal "being" evident in the not uncommon attribution of pet names, such as "Mr. Happy," "The Wonder Weasel," etc. (cf. Robin Williams, various movies). 10. The term biological should be understood in this instance in a very narrow sense. By biological is meant an orientation opposing the body to the mind. A more useful analytical concept can be found in the autopoietic notion of structure. This permits the symbolic/phenomenological emergents to be more easily associated and integrated with structural and ontogenetic transformations. 11. It is perhaps wrong to discount passion per se from the roles that are served. It may be that to Vangaard, the term passion refers to emotions involved with sexuality. If so, the phenomenology resulting from the interaction of the male's individual structural functioning, and the structural functioning involved with the higher order of autopoietic organization of which the male in only one component, may be the source of the so-called passion. Consequently, passion should be considered much more complex and integrally involved in the meanings and goals served by the phallus. For a more complete elaboration of "Passion," see Johnson 1983. 12. It must be kept in mind that the Jungian understanding of the body expressed by Neumann is somewhat different from the understanding being developed here. The body in Neumanns sense is associated with matter and thus with nature and the lifeworld. I regard this view is essentially valid and not inconsistent with mine. 13. Homeomorphogenesis is an explanatory causal principle referring to an intercausal isomorphism between two or more changing subsystems within the same system. While total isomorphism is rare, a partial isomorphism functions such that set A can be mapped onto set B, but not vice versa. The correspondences are causally linked but are not the same. The operation of this principle is restricted to the structural and organizational development of the organisms nervous system.

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14. I intentionally use the word pleasure rather than perversity to shift the framing of sexuality to a more positive light and to avoid the assumption that human nature is somehow innately predisposed to the pursuit of "uncivilized" sensations. Furthermore, it suggests that the many forms that sexuality can take are at some level motivated by an experience of pleasure, which in turn places the functioning of sexuality more on the level of the individual than that of the species. WORKS CITED Bateson, Gregory. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine. . (1979). Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Bantam. Bleier, Ruth. (1984). Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories on Women. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Chodorow, Nancy. (1978). The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Count, Earl Wendel. (1973). Being and Becoming Human: Essays on the Biogram. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Dulaure, Jacques-Antoine. (1934). The Gods of Generation: A History of Phallic Cults Among Ancients and Moderns. New York: AMS. Durden-Smith, Jo, and D. deSimone. (1983). Sex and the Brain. New York: Arbor House. Eliade, Mircea. (1969). Images and Symbols. New York: Sheed and Ward. Gilligan, Carol. (1982). In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jung, Carl G. (1970). Civilization in Transition, Collected Works, vol. 10. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Laughlin, Charles D. (1983). "Womb = Woman = World: Gender and Transcendence in Tibetan Tan trie Buddhism." Paper presented to the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, Chicago. Laughlin, Charles D., and E.A. Brady. (1978). "Diaphasis and Change in Human Populations." Extinctions and Survival in Human Populations. Ed. Charles D. Laughlin and Evan A. Brady. New York: Columbia University Press. Lever, Janet. (1976). "Sex Differences in the Games Children Play." Social Problems 23:478-87. Levi-Strauss, Claude. (1968). The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon. Mahler, Margaret S., F. Pine, and A. Bergman. (1975). Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation. New York: Basic. Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Boston: D. Reidel.

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Manturana, Humberto R. (1987). The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: New Science Library. May, Robert. (1980). Sex and Fantasy: Patterns of Male and Female Development. New York: Norton. Monick, Eugene. (1987). Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine. Toronto: Inner City Books. Neumann, Erich. (1954). The Origins and History of Consciousness. New York: Princeton University Press. Ounsted, Christopher, and David C. Taylor. (1972). Gender Differences: Their Ontogeny and Significance. London: Churchill Livingstone. Piaget, Jean. (1970). Structuralism. New York: Basic. . (1980). Adaptation and Intelligence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rossi, Alice. (1985). Gender and the Life Course. New York: Aldine Publishing. Sanday, Peggy Reeves. (1981). Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sherfey, Mary Jane. (1966). The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality. New York: Vintage. Shuttle, Penelope, and Peter Redgrove. (1978). The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman. London: Penguin. Vanggaard, Thorkil. (1972). Phallos: A Symbol and Its History in the Male World. London: Jonathan Cape. Varela, Francisco J. (1979). Principles of Biological Autonomy. New York: Elsevier North Holland. Whitehead, Alfred N. (1929). The Function of Reason. Boston: Princeton University Press.

2 READING THE FEMININE Robert Richard

Discourse—all discourse—has forever been the object of surveillance. History is there to remind us that political or religious thought has never been totally free. And of course, esthetic discourses of all kinds (paintings, books, plays) have always been prey to censorship. Tintoretto, Moliere, Voltaire, Rousseau, etc., all had dealings with the thought police of their day.1 In the last ten years or so, the age-old practice of policing opinions has acquired a new name: political correctness, offspring of the American liberal left of the 1980s. For the purposes of this paper, I will single out two discourses that have been subjected to scrutiny from the politically correct angle: the discourse on femininity, and the discourse on art. Femininity and art are not products of nature, but of the signifies This is fairly obvious in the case of art which, literally speaking, is "artifice"; but not so obvious in the case of femininity, bound up as it is with the physical existence of women. Yet, I will endeavor to show that femininity is real artifice, existing entirely outside the finite, and thus worthy of comparison to the real or actualmfmite of the contemporary mathematician. I refer here to Georg Cantors concept of the transfinite that I cite almost strictly for its suggestive value.2 Both femininity and art are born out of the logic of the unconscious, out of the logic of the infinite, and as such will not allow for empiricist investigation. They cannot be looked at or pried into, like finite rocks, flowers or planets,

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but rather have to be "figured out," in the sense of "spent out" or taken to their limits. One might expect the thought police to step in at just this moment with a pointed question: is it not denigrating to treat women as fictions, rather than as real human beings? I respond by proclaiming right off my position—le lieu d'oujeparle, as French intellectuals liked to say in the 1970s: in the beginning was Literature, in the beginning was Language—reality or nature come after. This has all the drawbacks of a profession of faith. There are two opposite faiths, two belief systems that may be counted as opening positions: either one holds, as I do, that the infinite precedes the finite; or that the finite precedes the infinite. The latter case has nature and reality existing prior to language and literature, whose task it then becomes to variously or infinitely represent, imitating finite nature. I will have to define, at some point, the epistemological status of my opening position. But this is not the central point I wish to develop here. The main point I wish to offer up for discussion is that femininity is not to be found in nature\ but in literature or in art. Femininity is all in the telling and nowhere else. Although the feminine is in the telling, there is no teller, no author as such. Yet, there is a reader. Femininity is a form of self-telling, an autobiography with the Father as reader. Foucault comes close to defining femininity when he speaks in his later works of the self as esthetic project. But his own liberal leanings prevent him from framing the question of the self in terms of the feminine as art. That is, he does equate the self with art, but not the self with the feminine as art. Foucault was too bound up with nature and with the instinctual to ever go along with a reality like the feminine that presupposes a clean break with the referent (nature). Art produces the feminine, i.e. the production of art, by either men or women, is the production of femininity. Art is the means by which femininity can be got out into the world. To what end? For there to be civilization, is the simple answer. The task of this paper is to elaborate on this answer. As the twentieth century draws to a close, civilization as a whole seems on the verge of a profound transformation. Two hundred or so years ago, a debate wore on between the Scottish liberal thinkers (Hume, Smith, Ferguson, etc.) and the continental contractualists as chiefly represented by Rousseau. With the contemporary rise of neo-liberalism, the globalization of the economies, the demise of the nation state, it would appear that the debate has, just recently, in the last five or ten

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years, been settled in favour of the liberal thinkers working out of the Hume /Smith school. It is they who may now claim victory over the contractualists.3 It may seem odd to evoke a two-centuries old controversy between political and economic thinkers when attempting to conceptualize the feminine in todays world. Yet, the infinite/finite dichotomy, and the question over which of the two arises out of the other, are actually quite central to that long-ago debate. For the liberals of the Enlightenment, civil society exists in a state of continuity with nature: there is no absolute break between the two. As the seventeenth century English liberal thinker Bernard Mandeville said: "Man is teachable." All that is necessary for civil society to come about is a bit of pedagogy, coupled with a few discrete positive laws. Pedagogy and positive laws do not interrupt, but simply inflect or bend mans natural instincts in the right civil direction. For the contractualists of the same period, society or rather civilization is, on the contrary, the result of a sharp voluntary breaking-off from nature. Later, Foucault was to make fun of this notion of a society born out of a social contract. After all, society was not drawn up in a notary's office; it is not comparable to a document scribbled by a few rational minds gathered together around a table. Stated in this fashion, Foucault is right. For men and women to even gather round a table in order to sign a social contract presupposes the very existence of just such a contract. But what Foucault would not grasp is that the social contract theory is acceptable only if one understands it as a product not of the conscious mind, but of the unconscious. Where there is (infinite) language, there is social contract. The speaking subject who uses language—or rather who is used by language—can only experience itself as a cross between the familiar and the strange: it uncannily (unheimlich) finds itself to be at once itself and an other, at once itself and the Other. After all, language is the only tool the subject possesses in order to say "I." And yet, language does not belong to it: language is not of its own fabrication, but the creation of history and of all of humanity. The subject must therefore allow all of humanity—as well as all of history—to pass through it, thus barring it, before it can even begin to say "I." The "I"—the only "I"—to which it may lay claim is infinitely barred, and thus infinitely owned by the Other. The subjects "I" belongs to the Other. As St. Augustine says: "God [we would translate: all of humanity, everybody, history] is the most intimate of my intimacy." The social contract is thus obviously not in any real way "signed" by humans. The mere fact of possessing

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language is immediately and of itself a sign, a signature endorsing a basic truth governing the human condition: humans all have in common the fact of having nothing in common—which is to say that the only thing humans have in common is Otherness. The only heritage that all of humanity may share is that of the infinite. It is because humans are the sons and daughters of language (as Dante says in the opening paragraph of De Vulgare Eloquentis) that they just don't ever seem to "fit" into finite nature. The two opposing positions of liberalism and contractualism now appear more clearly etched. The liberals still retain something of Aristotle's moral universe. This may appear startling: after all, liberal thinkers were well aware of Galileo's conception of a morally indifferent world. Aristotle thought that nature was ordered; the liberals knew, from Galileo, that it is indifferently ordered, i.e., disorderly. Yet, the dichotomy finite/infinite is not to be assimilated to the dichotomy order/disorder, as the latter is entirely on the side of finitude. Thus, where Artistotle may claim that ordered nature is to serve as a model for the human, the liberals claim that nature, once its disorder has been corrected, makes for good civil society. The Aristotelean world picture is therefore not so foreign to the world picture of the liberals. This liberal preoccupation with order/disorder may be translated in more modern terms: the conscious rational order must give shape to the unconscious irrational disorder of nature. It is of course risky to translate eighteenth century concepts, sensibilities, etc. into twentieth century equivalents. But the American liberal school of psychoanalysis, the so-called ego-psychology school of thought, may provide the necessary credible bridge allowing one to span terminologies two centuries apart.4 It remains that the eighteenth century contractualists never spoke of the unconscious. And as just mentioned, neither did the liberals who attacked them. But Freud's invention is not at all unrelated to the contractualist notion of a distinct breaking off from nature. Freud, the man, was a liberal, and more generally speaking an anglophile who was fond of English literature, and an admirer of English political freedoms. But Freud, the theorist, is a contractualist. This becomes quite evident when Freud is read through Lacan. For Freud/Lacan, the unconscious is discourse. As infinite discourse, it is the origin of a Law that is beyond and above all laws. A Law that is singularly resistant to being taught anything: the unconscious simply does not want to know anything, as Lacan says at the start of his 1972-73 Seminar.5 Man's true

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nature is not Nature but Language. And Language, as the true unconscious of men and women, is "unteachable": it will hear of nothing else except its own pure power of enunciation. To use philosophical terms: it is pure Will over and against Understanding. Where the liberal thinkers see positive legislation as a means to keep nature under control, the contractualists see the Law of Language as the obligatory source of all positive laws. According to the contractualists, the everyday laws of society must express, ideally, the infinite excess of the Law. If they cannot always be expressive of the infinite, they must not, at the very least, run counter to it. Only then can one speak of an open, free, and truly civilized society. What I am describing—the laws as stemming from the infinite Law—was first arrived at by the thirteenth century voluntarist school of theology. For Dun Scotus and especially William of Occam, laws ought not imitate the finite perfection of nature (as Aristotle thought) but the infinite Will of God, a Will that is always in excess of nature and of Understanding. The Will of God is pure power of enunciation, i.e., an expression of the bare formal power of language. The difference is thus patent, between the liberals who wish to contain disorder and the contractualists for whom laws ought to allow for the infinite.6 It is in this vein that Rousseau thought laws should reflect the fact that humans are infinitely perfectible and fundamentally indeterminate (humans don't have a set finite identity or nature 7). This initial positioning—liberalism vs contractualism; civil society vs civilization—is in direct relation to the theme of this paper: art and the feminine as products of the infinite. Not wishing to anticipate, one may already have gathered that liberalism and contractualism constitute opposing, even competing options on the question of art and the feminine—with contractualism alone on the side of liberty. This may appear paradoxical since liberalism is, as its name implies, all about liberty. Yet, what I am suggesting here is that liberalism is in actual fact suppressive of both art and the feminine. I will return later to this important question. Civil society has to do with peace and quiet: social harmony was always of primary concern to the liberals, Locke and Montesquieu. Civilization, on the other hand, is all about institutionalized conflict— not war on the battle fields, nor even war on the parliamentary benches (politicians fighting it out using an arsenal of words). Civilization is about getting the conflict or the initial rupture with nature to persist: it is concerned with turning this initial break into a lasting institution,

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an enduring proposition—all in order that we not fall backward into nature, either bluntly so (civil society breaking down, as in contemporary Somalia), or because certains manners, ways, mores have jelled into so-called "community standards." The point that will be explicitly put forward below is that both art and femininity are, like civilization, a breaking away from nature, a dispute with nature. As such, it is civilization, not civil society, that may be the only real channel through which femininity can be told—completely and with absolutely nothing left unsaid.8

Art and the feminine are often loosely associated with the couple instinct/desire. But what is really at stake here? To a liberal, laws and instincts are contending realities perpetually at war with one another. Both the liberal left and the liberal right of the 1980s may appear to hold contrary views on this question. But a closer look will show this to be false. Let us take the recent example of the persistent harassment of gay bookstores by Canadian customs officials. The liberal left might demand: get the laws out of freedoms way!—whereas the liberal right would more likely proclaim: get that loose freedom (homo-eroticism) locked up behind the laws! Left and right may seem to possess irreconciliable views: for the left, homosexuality is natural; for the right, it is unnatural. But in both cases, nature is the ultimate arbitor, the final referent. For a Freudian/Lacanian, nature is neither good nor bad, but indifferent; it is quite irrelevant, since desire is totally alien to nature. To be quite exact, desire—which is not in any way to be equated with "instinct" 9—is what traverses nature, rendering it alien unto itself. Law and Desire are thus intertwined, the one continually arising out of the other. They are not contending realities—on the contrary, Desire is the very text of civilization. For Desire is the Law. This may seem not only paradoxical, but altogether inaccurate. Did not Freud write Civilization and its Discontents to demonstrate that civilization is suppressive of desire? My response is to say that Freud was actually speaking of civil society, not about civilization. One has only to consider that, in Freudian terms, it is the Law of the Father that frees the subject, severing ties with the mother, in order that he/she may become a subject of desire. This is the main axis, the backbone of civilization, with civil society attempting to run counter to the liberating Law of the Father.

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The Freudian/Lacanian intertwining of Law and Desire is already to be found in Kant, for whom Duty and Freedom are linked: to be free is to accomplish ones duty, according to Kant. The Foucault/ Deleuze stream of French thought steers a course away from such views. This is odd, especially considering that both Foucault and Deleuze have groundings in Kant. The early Foucault translates Kant, and the late Foucault returns to Kant to seek inspiration. As for Deleuze, he writes early on in his career a very lucid if a bit stilted account of Kant's philosophy. But the famous Deleuze and Guattari book, L'anti-CEdipe, is quite explicit in its refusal to accept the Law of the Father. For Foucault/Deleuze/Guattari, the Law simply gets in the way of instincts—a view that defines Foucault/Deleuze/Guattari as liberals, but with pronounced leftist leanings. Let us now return to the central question: the synonymity between art and femininity, and the notion that femininity is all in the telling. The recent "politically correct" debate surrounding cultural or voice appropriation is, to my mind, a debate on or against femininity. I would add: a debate on or against civilization. As such, it is a debate in support of liberal civil society. To recall quickly the main points of this debate: in the mid 1980s and early 1990s, it was felt that artists, especially those of European inspiration, must not usurp the sacred cultural images belonging to non-Western cultures. Such usurping is compared, by some, to looting and pillaging, and quite significantly, to rape. That is, the sexual is connoted by the use of the word "rape." The non-Western cultures, it is argued, have for too long been the victims of European imperialism. The complexities of this debate may be reduced to two aspects. (1) An artist is not allowed to appropriate, that is, to make use of certain symbols, pictures, stories, tales, etc., without the authorization of the community or people to whom such symbols or tales belong. For instance, a non-Native artist would not be allowed to stick into a corner of his or her painting the image of a sacred totem without the express permission of the tribe as the totem s true proprietor. (2) An artist or writer is not allowed to make use, in his or her novel, of fictitious characters that do not participate in that writer s own racial origin. For instance, a White Anglo-Saxon male should think twice before choosing a Black woman as the central character for his detective novel. Were he to do this, he would be guilty of appropriating a voice belonging in right only to women, and to Black women at that.

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As in any debate, there is a radical wing and a moderate wing. The moderates, in the debate over cultural appropriation, feel that one can borrow symbols or images belonging to a culture different from our own as long as one shows respect for the symbols and for the culture in question. Lest I appear to be steering off course, I should point out that behind the respect/disrespect dichotomy there lies the pleasure/pain dichotomy (to which I will return). Suffice it to say at this point that disrespect is condemned because it is seen to be painful to a people or a community, while respect is generally considered as pleasurable. The moderate, therefore, wishes to see the artist respect the culture from which s/he borrows creative materials. Such an attitude may appear just, it may seem morally above all suspicion. Yet I will show, by invoking Kant's central theme of Respekt, that the moderates are simply radicals in sheep's clothing—the radicals in this debate are those who would forbid all forms of borrowing, whether or not respect is involved. According to Kant, respect must be accorded to the Law and to nothing else. To be quite specific, Kant maintains that respect for finite realities existing in the sensible or phenomenal world (individuals; communities; objects, sacred or not) must never be the motivating principle behind the creation and the adoption of laws. The sentiment of respect should never precede the Law. Because it is infinite, the Law alone is worthy of respect. At first glance, this will appear very right wing indeed: the unseen or invisible categorical imperative as the sole object of respect. And yet to act in reverence or respect for anything save the Law is to fall prey to what we would now term as "ideology" (falsches Bewusstsein, false consciousness, according to Karl Mannheim).10 There are two manifestations of a society where respect precedes the laws, i.e., where the respect accorded to finite realities becomes the causa efficiens for new laws, decrees, injunctions, etc. The first is hard totalitarianism, where the state invokes the absolute need for citizens to respect or revere certain collective finite symbols or archetypes (the Fatherland, the Family, the Aryan race, etc.); such a state will pass laws to ensure respect on the part of its citizens, often on pain of great sanctions (exile, prison, torture, etc.). The second manifestation is soft totalitarianism, which probably boils down to the everyday, run-of-themill state of suspicion and social surveillance characteristic of even the free and democratic society. In such instances, we are not dealing with actual laws that are passed, citing specific orders of punishment (prison terms, fines, etc.). Rather a subtle and comprehensive process of persuasion will bring the disrespectful citizen or artist to understand that

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her or his actions, for instance a habit of stealing images from another culture, while not overtly illegal, are socially or morally dubious. The citizen/artist is thus brought to interiorize community standards in the well-known process of self-censorship. Should the citizen/artist remain set in her or his free-thinking ways, s/he will without doubt be submitted to a number of oblique pressures, i.e., further appeals to social conformity, and finally veiled threats pointing to a possible loss of professional opportunities, promotions, social visibility, etc. In both cases, hard and soft totalitarianism, the citizen/artist is treated as a means to achieve an end. In Kant's thinking, there is only one Law: treat the individual as an end, not as a means—for to treat an individual as an end is to treat him or her as the infinite incarnate. To treat an individual as a means is, on the contrary, to treat him or her as an object, a finite thing, useful only in the attainment of some other goal. In short, in Kant's eyes, the individual is not your object to do with as you will, but an end in and for her- or himself. This all sounds reasonable, and thus acceptable to most civil persons. Of course, other equally civil persons may feel that this is already too much. They may feel that under some circumstances it is permissible to call on the individual to endure certain sacrifices. The individual may thus be invited to set aside pursuits, thoughts, opinions, creative needs, etc., in order to help foster tribal pride or contribute to the idealization of a community's past or present, etc., all in order to right certain "obvious" historic wrongs. The sentiment is that we can lay aside the infinite, if only temporarily, in order to address certain "clear-cut" finite injustices. But for a Kantian, good intentions are little excuse. If one is to go along with Kant, any move that has us abandon the infinite or universal position in order to favour the finite, even if only temporarily, is sordid because it is, strictly speaking, contradictory. It is not possible to treat an individual an as end only some of the time. Let us see why we must stick to our guns, morally speaking. Kant is particularly gifted at this (sticking to his guns), for in the true spirit of the Baroque, he always takes each of his ideas to its limits. Kant's moral imperative maintains that the individual may do anything s/he wishes, may accomplish any action that s/he sees fit, but only as long as that action is "pregnant" with the universal, "pregnant" with the infinite. This is the core of the famous categorical imperative: always act in such a way that the principles guiding the will could become the basis of a universal law. To many readers of Kant, this indeed has a

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right wing feel to it: the law, the universal, and to top it off, the will— it is all so oppressive sounding. To ask oneself, for every step, whether it is a leap for humankind, is a very tall order. The individual may just choose to go on about her or his business, and let the "invisible hand" (Adam Smith) take care of the rest. A closer look at the inner workings of Kant's imperative will reveal that it is the complete opposite of being oppressive. The imperative says: yesy the individual may do as si he very well pleases (this seems like liberal thinking thus far), but only if what slhe does can bear translation into universal terms (no longer has the ring of liberalism, which rejects all transcendance, save the spontaneous kind: Smiths invisible hand). Yet, any careful reading of Kant's imperative shows that the individual must always treat her- or himself as if he/she were an other, a stranger unto her or himself. Just as the individual is not to treat his or her neighbor simply as a means, a tool to an end, so s/he is not to treat her- or himself as a mere tool. To repeat: the individual must not treat her- or himself as a finite object; s/he is not her or his own (object) to do with as s/he pleases. To do so (treat oneself as though s/he "owned" her- or himself), would no longer be acting as a free agent. Of course, this notion that the individual is somehow "public property" is a very anti-liberal notion. In contractualist terms, the individual does not possess her- or himself, but rather is possessed—by the Other. This is the true depth of Kant's thinking: to seek ones own pleasures or interests, as the liberals would have it, is not to be free, for it is to reduce oneself to the state of a finite object. The contrary: to treat oneself as an end in itself, is to treat one's self as infinite. It is thus to be free—infinitely so. Here, we can witness first hand Kant's intertwining of Law and Freedom: only the Law can "breathe" the universal (the infinite) into you, thus liberating you from the finite. Finally, Kant's moral imperative urges us to treat both oneself and others as Other. To the philosopher of Koenigsberg, "I" is the Other. In short, there is but Otherness in the human world. Again, the infinite is always to be preferred over the finite. One must never be moved by finite injustices—it gives rise to "pathological sentiment," according to Kant—but only by infinite justice. Those who would exercise control in the free trading of images are moved by finite injustices (the historical wrongs), and thus are given to pathological sentiments. It is only if one is moved by infinite justice that one finally treats the other as Other—and thus, as the Law.

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The liberal left fears the free exchange of images or symbols; it fears free trade in the realm of artistic activity. This, of course, is what the debate over cultural appropriation is all about: the putting up of trade barriers of sorts in the field of culture. Protectionism has an old nineteenth century ring to it. It is proof to Pierre Rosanvallon (1979) that, contrary to what is generally held, the liberalism of the eighteenth century did not triumph in the nineteenth. The eighteenth century saw the coming into prominence of liberalism, which in turn preached free trade; the nineteenth century, contrary to this, was proccupied with the raising of trade barriers. That is historical fact, and Rosanvallon is correct in reminding us of it. But I do not agree with his conclusions: the nineteenth century as the temporary defeat of liberalism. To my mind, liberalism and protectionism are not necessarily antagonistic. The pressing question then becomes, "What is a liberal?" If, according to what is set out here, a liberal can be a free trader for one length of time and a protectionist for another, then what is there to distinguish a liberal from a non-liberal? In recent history, the liberal left has, generally speaking, shown itself as anti-free trade, viz. NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement); as for the liberal right, it is quite universally in favour of free trade, even wishing to extend NAFTA to Chile and eventually to the whole of South America. Again, what is the distinguishing trait allowing one to set the liberal off from the non-liberal? For the sake of clarity, I will answer with a brutal axe hewn definition: you are a liberal if you fear civilization, i.e., if you are against it or are in any way suspicious of it. The converse also goes: if you are pro-civilization, you are an anti-liberal. Pope Pius IX s anti-liberal utterances (Syllabus No. 80, 1864) have to be understood in this light: Pius IX saw liberalism as anti-civilization, anti-infinite. And of course as pope it was his job to be the shepherd (Heidegger) of the infinite. Pius IX was not so much against modernity as against the return to nature, which he saw as liberalisms deep unavowed longing. The Catholic mind has always been mistrustful, not so much of nature per se, as of any undue attachment to it—such attachment is simply viewed as a sign of paganism. I have just given a crude definition of liberalism as anti-civilization, and thus pro-civil society. This brings me to state outright what is beneath the liberal left s fear of free trade when it comes to artistic symbols. Behind or beneath the refusal to allow for the free exchange of

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artistic images is the refusal to allowfor or admit to the exchange of women. Anthropologists tell us that civilization—not just civil society—is based on the exchange of women (more on this below). As for art and literature, the Russian Formalists of the early part of this century made much of the role played by the free exchange of symbols, textual devices, etc., in the creation of new writings. A new novel or poem is, according to this school of poetics, not so much a (new) thing in itself as a complex crossroads of previous novels or poems written throughout the history of literature. The new vs old dichotomy does not apply. There is no such thing as a pure, originary text: there are only intertexts. Works of art are the incessant transformation of previous art. Julia Kristeva was to name this process first described by the Russian Formalists "intertextuality." Intertextuality is not just art wittily or intellectually playing off other art; this is not the game of conscious quotation and intelligent cultural references for the elite: it is a deep statement about art as born out of the intricate, unfathomable criss-cross of signifiers. Art arises out of the "many," it comes out of the universal, out of the infinite, only to return to it. Nietzsche's notion of Eternal Recurrence is not entirely foreign to this process. That said, the definition of the liberal vs the non-liberal can be refined—it ought to be, because as it stands (you are a liberal if you are against civilization), it can be somewhat offensive, especially to anyone who thinks of her- or himself as a liberal. Let us consider this: whether one is a liberal or not depends on how one relates to the infinite, i.e., to the signifier. More specifically, it depends on how one relates to the other, with or without a capital "O," especially over the question of liberty. In liberalism, the individual may do whatever s/he pleases as long as his or her actions do not interfere with the actions of his or her neighbour (Locke, Hume). In other words, my liberty leaves off where my neighbour's (the other) begins. But this means that, in the end, my liberty is something that has to be protected against possible encroachment from that other. The other is thus envisaged as the stranger who can impinge on my territory. I will therefore endeavour to keep him/her at bay, at a safe, respectful distance: I will ask, nay demand, that s/he respect my cultural environment, my integrity, my identity, etc. Beyond the debate over cultural appropriation, one right away calls to mind the infamous Bill 101 in Quebec (banning commercial signs in English), as well as the separatist movement as a whole in that province of Canada. The goal of Bill 101 and the movement toward separation is plainly to buttress Quebecois identity, thus protecting Quebecois culture from

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outside encroachments. It is the attempt to consolidate a "we" against a "them" establishing a clear line of division. In short, if I consider that my liberty stops where my neighbour s begins, if this is indeed my (liberal) credo, then I can only end up eyeing the other as someone who can steal my liberty. S /he is thus always a potential enemy. And if not immediately so, s /he will be continually measured or assessed with the dichotomy friend /foe in mind.11 For the contractualist or non-liberal, it is the contrary: my liberty is dependent upon the very existence of the Other, who is neither friend nor foe. Without the Other (the infinite), I would not—I cannot—be free. After all, it is the Other who "speaks" me into existence. It is the Other who makes a free agent of me—by "breathing" the infinite into me, thus freeing me from the finite. For liberty is nothing other than this: freedom from the finite. Liberty has thus nothing to do with finally being allowed to accomplish a number of private individual actions without interference from my neighbour. Liberty or freedom as a concept does not have a specific content. Like desire, it has no object, but is pure act. An immediate question may be to ask: where, in this world, may pure actions exist? Pure actions are not possible in the realm of the finite—which Kant calls the realm of secondary causes (colloquially refered to as "the real physical world"). Pure actions are possible in the realm of the infinite/transfinite alone. Ergo, liberty—the accomplishing of pure free actions—is the state of language (history, everybody) streaming through a person, opening you up infinitely, infusing your "I" with Otherness. To summarize: in liberalism, liberty is the setting off of an "/" from a "you" a "we" from a "them." Identity becomes a crucial matter. The liberal left, especially in the debate over cultural appropriation, will rejoice over the existence of a number of"wes" as it were, dotting the world stage, each "we" remaining at a respectful distance from all of the other "wes." In contractualism, liberty is the result of the Others—the stranger's, the foreigners, etc.—"breathing" the infinite into you, delivering you from the finite. The Other as "all the human subjects, and thus all stangers/foreigners, etc. of time past and time future,"12 is descriptive of the universal perspective as actual infinite (Cantor). In this case, identity is dissipated, literally overwhelmed by the Other; identity is overruled by the Other as the only true Law of the "/." The existence of such a Law has of course been consigned: "Thy will be done."

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This leads us to the following consideration: just as the stranger is he who steals into a family not his own to make away with a daughter, abducting her, so the artist is a "foreigner" who intrudes into a culture not her or his own, abducting symbols and images that do not in right belong to her or him. This puts us right back on track with the theme of this paper: the synonymity between art and the feminine. To many, this will sound violent, evoking images of rape and of poor young women carried off screaming into the night by an aggressor from some strange far off tribe or community. And yet this is the Law. The Law of civilization—what psychoanalysis calls the Law of the Father.

The Law of the Father is what governs the exchange or the trading of women. I would ask that I be allowed to reverse the term and use "trade" and the expression "trading of women," though they appear offensive. I will show that behind these unpleasant or politically incorrect terms there hides the liberty of the feminine. Without the exchange or the trading of women there would be no civilization. This is what anthropologists tell us. What does this mean? I will make use of a naive example. Let us suppose two houses, A and B, built one next to the other. Let us now suppose that there are four people in each of the houses: father, mother and two children (son and daughter). Because of the incest taboo ("thou shalt not sleep with thy mother!"), there is a frustrated son in each of the two houses. The solution to the impasse is the exchange of daughters: the daughter of house A will be given to the son of house B, and the daughter of house B will be given to the son of house A. This exchange or trading of women ensures: (1) that the sons won't die frustrated; (2) that society will come into existence as ties are formed between families, thus extending the social horizon beyond "home base." This is the Law of the Father, which actually contains two diktats: "You are forbidden to sleep with the mother" (which means: it is forbidden to "sleep" with the referent, with nature); and, "You will take a wife elsewhere, in another family, off in some other land or country." One could thus say that the Law of the Father incites to the cosmopolitan attitude. Psychoanalysis teaches us that hysteria is the refusal to obey the Law of the Father. The hysterical stiffening is the refusal to accept oneself as an object of exchange, i.e., as an object of desire13: "I am not that kind of woman!" The hysteric will never cease proclaiming high and wide

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her distaste for sexuality. In actual clinical fact, the hysteric will entertain either an open disgust for sexuality or, as in a mirror image, an insatiable quest for the sexual: she will throw herself into it, willingly offering herself up as an object; either way—love/hate of the sexual— her true and this time constant distaste is for sexuality as driven or crossed by language. Hysteria is the refusal of the feminine. The Law of civilization (the free trading of women) and hysteria are thus in open conflict. They are at war. This war is identical to the one being waged in the realm of art and culture. As already mentioned: behind the refusal to allow for the free exchange or free trade of cultural images there lies the refusal to allow for the anthropological principle of the free trading of women. The "stiffening" of both the moderate and the radical liberal left over the question of cultural appropriation is, strictly speaking, the "stiffening" of hysteria.14 The time has come to play my own devil's advocate. I have just now spoken of "frustrated sons," but—egalite des sexes oblige—should I not also have expressed concern over the "frustrated daughters"? I am acting as though the sexual frustration of women is a negligeable quantity within the grand economy of the Law of the Father. According to my naive scenario, featuring houses A and B, the Law of the Father has first to see to the most pressing (the sexual frustration of the sons), leaving the rest unattended. Second objection—of much graver concern: should I not be called to order for using such politically incorrect expressions as "object of exchange," "object of desire" and "free trade" when speaking of women? I will no doubt be made to understand with scant ceremony that women are not objects! The response to these two objections will take us quite far afield: first to the mystique surrounding la jouissance feminine, and second to the question of women as pure exchange value, and so as pure form, pure act, pure narration. The difference between the sexes is absolute, not relative. A woman is not simply a non-man. She is not mans other, but his Otherness. The femininity of women is a direct result of the Law of the Father, for femininity is not at all rooted in nature: without the Law, there would be no femininity. Femininity occurs when the "female" (the biological state of all women) is traversed or barred by the Law. To grasp this, one must render explicit a third and final diktat contained in the Law of the Father: You, woman, will draw your jouissance from your body, but only as it is named, i.e., as it is barred, or annihilated, rendered indeterminate by me, the Father, who am Language. This "named body"does not

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belong to you. Nor does it belong to the other. It belongs to NO-ONE. You are thus free, and it is from this freedom that you derive jouissance. You will not derive jouissance from your sexual organs (phallicpleasure), i.e., you will not derive jouissance through this or that finite body organ, but from the fact of your body liberated, unfettered, unleashed by the infinite WORD (ton corps sera dechaine par la Parole). It is at this cost of liberty that you will be woman—-for liberty will cost you the finite. You will have to give it up. To be entrenched in one's own (private) finite existence is much easier. To be infinitely open, unlimited, is not easy to cope with, for it is the economy of total spending (see Georges Bataille 1985). If your body does not belong to you, and if it does not belong to the man who is your spouse, it is because it belongs to me as the Father, to me as NO-ONE, to me as EVERYBODY, to me as history.^ You are woman only because there is language, because language demands, it ORDERS the infinite squandering of the finite. The ability to grasp this diktat hinges entirely on how one views language. The diktat will appear forever opaque to those who see "words" as mere tools designed to point to "things" or "ideas." According to this view, words must "define," producing a clear, finite picture of both the real and imaginary worlds. This is the instrumental conception of language where words are but a means to very definite ends: communicating, revealing, informing, "pointing," etc. The opposite view of language has words barring the body (nature), crossing it out, traversing it, and thus "breathing" the infinite into it. Language cracks open the finite. It does not determine but rather indetermines the referent. The hysteric puts up a fight against the invasion of her body by language. The famous "noli me tangere!" (do not touch me!) of hysteria is a resistance to penetration by the infinite Other. And of course, this cry of hysteria also resounds throughout the world of art: "Do not touch my culture, my symbols, my songs, my voice!" To be sure, the politically correct idea, as put forth in the third diktat that a woman belongs to no-one, will be appealing to the liberal mind; but the corollary, that a woman may not even lay claim to her own private self, will appear intolerable. The debate on abortion turns on this very question. The pro-choicers are liberals who feel that women may dispose freely of their bodies because each woman owns her body. The pro-lifers are contractualists for whom women ought to be free from any and all forms of ownership—including selfownership. The liberal will not only find the third diktat politically incorrect but also potentially disruptive of civil peace. For instance, the notion

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of "the spoken body unleashed by the Word, etc." will have liberals wonder whether the third diktat, despite all of its talk about the Law, is not just about free and loose living (erotic excess), the "free love" of the 1960s, and so forth. Of course, it is about nothing of the sort. Bluntly stated, the third diktat is about the much maligned institution of marriage. The Law of the Father, it was said, institutes a break between nature/instincts on one side, and civilization/desire on the other. Marriage turns this initial break into a lasting institution, an enduring proposition. Marriage has thus to do with the persistance of desire. The breaking away from nature/instincts does not mean their repression but their transmutation: when desire gets hold of sexual instincts and behaviour it traverses them, punching a hole in them, i.e., desire renders the sexual strange, potent with Otherness. This is central to the writings of the French novelist and essayist, Georges Bataille (18971962). Yet, it would be wrong to reduce marriage to this: woman "showing her thighs" only to the husband. Desire as the strangely sexual will often manifest itself invisibly: it has to do, not with a show of abandonment (displaying one's thighs), but with total, absolute abandonment, that is, no longer staying on ones guard vis-a-vis the other but allowing oneself to be penetrated by the other. Liberalism, we recall, views the other as a potential foe who may steal one s liberty, who may trespass over one s finite self as though it were some kind of private property. In liberalism the "other" is always guilty of breaking and entering, at least potentially. Similarly, the artist is, in the liberal conception, viewed with utter suspicion, lest s/he "break and enter" into a culture not his or her own. Contrary to this, contractualism views the "other" as cause of the infinite in me. The "other" is the way—the tao—by which the infinite Other enters, penetrating into me. This is the profound meaning of marriage: the infinite or absolute violation of the finite in me. The third diktat speaks throughout of jouissance. What is jouissance^. Is it merely excessive pleasure? Is it ecstacy? Not quite. Ever since Lacan pointed it up in the early 1970s as a theme central to psychoanalysis, countless books and articles have been written on the subject. Despite this mass of commentary, the notion of jouissance feminine remains opaque. The reason for this may be that jouissance is almost exclusively camped as sexual in nature. Even when other components—the signifier, the notion of a "beyond the phallic," etc.—are brought into play, the sexual as erotic always intrudes, clouding the

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issue. In such cases, jouissance is almost alway equated with a heightened enjoyment known only to women. The more sophisticated approach sees jouissance as a mixture of the sexual and the mystical. Here, Bernini's famous sculpture, The Ecstacy of Saint Teresa ofAvila, serves as a point of reference, almost an obligatory rite of passage for any commentary on jouissance. But even this important reference has not had all the hoped-for explanatory effects. I will attempt here to provide a clear rendering of jouissance—starting with this statement: jouissance is political. To be quite exact, jouissance sits at the junction where the political meets the sexual. In jouissance, the political and the sexual are strictly indistinguishable. Cryptically, one might say that jouissance is a pleasure, specific to wo/man as political animal (zoon politikon). Jouissance is in excess of natural pleasure, but not necessarily in the sense of "greater" or "beyond." Rather jouissance is a state of being where pleasure can no longer be separated out from displeasure—nor respect from disrespect. Jouissance is a pleasure/pain experience. But this pleasure/pain mixture is not to be confused with the erotic quest of the masochist. The latter derives pleasure from pain. Jouissance describes a different sort of experience. \^ jouissance, the conscious ego is weakened, invaded as it is by the Other: the experiencing subject is thus no longer in a position to understand or truly grasp the distinction between pleasure and pain. The intellectual capacity allowing one to make such a distinction has, as it were, been suppressed. Understanding has been overtaken, invaded by the Will—or, specifically and politically speaking, by the general will (Rousseau). The feminine has sometimes been compared to masochism. Women, according to this view, are prone to self-sacrifice, self-effacement, etc. One can only agree with feminists in proclaiming such a comparison fallacious. The masochist uses pain as a means to a pleasurable end; he sees the other not as Other, but simply as an instrument dispensing a kind of pain that is productive of a peculiar kind of (private) pleasure. Again, we have the question of means vs ends. The feminine, moving within the realm of the Will, is "confused" about pleasure/pain, for she has fallen away from the (natural) world and as such has no natural, immediate understanding of it: she is too immersed in an "other world," the infinite world of the Will. The result: the feminine treats both pleasure and pain as Other, as the one sure sign that Otherness exists. Pleasure/pain is thus cause for celebration, it is reason to rejoice (Teresa of Avila): "There w OTHER!"

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The true sense of Bernini's sculpture is not so much: I am in a state of ecstacy over God. Nor is it quite: My I is pleasurably dissolving into God, just as He comes into me. Such statements put the accent almost exclusively on the sexual. The meaning of Bernini's work is rather: Because there is pleasure—or is it pain?—the Other is; and I, Teresa, interpret this pleasure!pain sign not objectively (as would a liberal), but subjectively: I am transformed into a pure subject of infinite celebration. The very substance of my subjectivity is celebration. To lay this out: to the feminine, it does not matter—not fundamentally—whether what is perceived through the five senses is pleasure or whether it is pain. Such a distinction, crucial to the liberal, is quite secondary to the contractualist, specifically as compared to what truly matters: pleasure, pain or the mixture of both as a sure (subjective) sign of the existence of Otherness. Pleasure/pain thus become the material, physical sign that God (the Other) exists. And by "God" or the "Other" is again meant other human beings (strangers, foreigners, immigrants, etc.). As proof of the existence of God, jouissance is far superior to the traditional four proofs of Aquinas and Descartes— superior because, as we shall see shortly, it is the only proof to bare inscription in the body. All other proofs hang on a series of arguments; this one is imprinted in the flesh. . Given this, I would propose that the words "rejoicing" or "celebration" be accepted as the English equivalents of that very elusive French word, jouissance. The Italian word for jouissance is particularly suggestive: godimento^ with the word "God" ringing through it for any English-hearing ear to perceive. Barthes (1973) wrote a famous and very beautiful work that pertains to distinguishing pleasure from jouissance. He very skillfully separates the one from the other, occasionally meshing the two. I have no criticism to offer of this slim volume, which represents a true watershed in French intellectual thought. I would only add a short note to its main text to indicate clearly where pleasure can no longer be confused with jouissance. Pleasure is the negation of the political within the sexual; no matter how many participants one can gather—the whole of civil society, if one likes—pleasure remains, structurally speaking, always private: it is the fact of a private "I" set off in his pleasure, separate from a private "you," etc. On the other hand, jouissance or celebration is always public; it describes a state of Otherness "experienced" by the subject of the unconscious. Pleasure is specific to civil liberal society; jouissance is specific to the much wider question of civilization viewed as a whole.

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La jouissance feminine is, to recapitulate, celebration or rejoicing— that is, celebration over the fact that there is indeed Other: it is the subjective—as opposed to objective—inference as to the existence of the Other. In jouissance, the flesh is entirely "subjectified," the physical body as a whole is transmuted into an infinite (political) subject because of the invasive power of the Other. Objection: surely men also possess the ability to rejoice over the existence of others. They do, of course. But their rejoicing is not so deeply, not so directly inscribed in the body. In the physical act of making love, it is after all the woman who is penetrated, and the man who penetrates. It is therefore the woman rather than the man who is all consumed with these questions: How open or closed must I be? To what degree may I be welcoming of the other? To what extent can I or may I abandon myself to the Other? etc. A man may also ask himself the very same questions, but never as inscribed in his body. In the case of a man, such questions will be intellectually and/or socially cast—not physically in his body, and thus not "politically." Very clearly put: men do not have a vagina, and so cannot have the physical experience of welcoming the Other into their body. They must have recourse to art, practising various art forms in order to enjoy, like women, a first-hand physical experience of Otherness. Thus the mystics, poets, writers—artists in general: San Juan de la Cruz, Dante, Moliere, Cezanne, Artaud, Hubert Aquin, Thomas Bernhardt, etc. This is why poets and artists in general are profoundly political—not because they engage in the vain activities of politicking; not because they engage in this or that morally or politically correct agenda; but because their productions are the very condition of civilization. Civil society can do without art; not civilization. Art is not the celebration—the representation—of reality. Nor is it the celebration/representation of a cultures "reality," its distinct identity, etc. Art is an activity celebrative of the penetration of one culture by another—the "violation" of one culture by another. The birth of a third cultural "reality" is the material or physical expression of this celebration. Carlos Fuentes speaks (positively) of the violent interpenetration of the Spanish and native cultures in South America. He deplores the loss of lives, the wars, the bloody conflicts, the extermination of whole tribes, etc., but rightly sees such blood-letting as the inability or the unwillingness to "write out" such a clash. That said, it remains that some violent parts of this clash were "written out": thus the birth of a third "new" culture in South America, strictly irreducible to the two "original" cultures. In the creative clashing of cultures, the

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Spanish and native components do not each enjoy a prolonged existence in the "new" reality born of that clash. The exchange of symbols is not mechanistic; it does not occur in a context of mutual admiration or respect, designed to ensure that symbols, images, etc., retain all of the original sacred purity. Simply, the Spanish/native cultures each die in the clash as they give birth to their Other. The "child" of this clash is the celebration incarnate or the subject of the inter-penetration, the disappearing of the two original cultures, one into the other. Whole societies can experience, collectively, fears that are the utter antithesis of this celebrative experience: the Macarthyism of the 1950s was the fear of communism penetrating, violating U.S. society; the UFO scares of the same decade were similarly a dread of being overrun by the Other; and now the debate over cultural appropriation is nothing more than a sophisticated version of the same fears of the Stranger. Now, if la jouissance as (subjective) celebration of otherness is an experience that, outside of male poets or mystics, remains confined to women, the question then becomes: do women actually experience it as one experiences physical or psychological events such as heat and cold, love and hate, sexual pleasure and sexual pain? The answer is no. Jouissance cannot be experienced by women—that is, not consciously—because jouissance is constitutive of their femininity. Women ^^celebration incarnate. Sexual pleasure can be experienced equally by both men and women; it is felt by their conscious "I" (ego) as a result of stimulation afforded to certain specific organs. But jouissance is always unconscious: it is experienced by no one. It is cause of certain conscious effects, and as such may manifest itself variously, depending on the individual, the culture, even the century (the caring for others, charity, but also, oddly enough, the distrust of others, etc.). But of itself, jouissance cannot be "felt," because it is simply not of the order of the sensible world. It is, however, of the order of the written word. If jouissance cannot be experienced, it can at least be written. Writing is not just one of the many partial effects of jouissance (such as caritative activities), but its complete or total spending. Jouissance is thus style. It is an indefinite way of traversing the text of civilization— literally speaking, that is, entirely in a written form. "Indefinite" is used here in the sense of "no fixed nature," "no fixed address": you belong "nowhere and to no-one," not to yourself, nor to any specific culture, community or people. Femininity is akin to cosmopolitanism.18 The substance of femininity is to have no substance, and so to be substantially indefinite. This, of course, in no way prevents a woman

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from occupying a set, clearly defined position in society: she may be judge, journalist, lawyer, engineer, etc. Simply, such social occupations have nothing whatsoever to do with her femininity. Femininity is a function of civilization as a whole. Where there is (infinite) language, there is femininity, where humans (both men and women) have come to recognize each other mutually as Other, there is femininity. If femininity is the effect of both men and women immersed in infinite language, why do women end up as the sole bearers of it? Why could it not be spread about more evenly, and shared among both men and women, somewhat as Jung would have it (animus/anima)t The answer lies in a basic, straightforward observation: because woman only can bear a child. This very simple fact never occured to Jung. He never took it into consideration. Because only the woman can bear children, only she as feminine can meaningfully be seen to allow the Father (the Other) to penetrate her. Only the man who has died as the son of his mother (i.e., who has left the source of life that is his mother), thus coming to occupy the position of the Father, will be allowed to enter into her, penetrating her, to instill Otherness into her (a child). As Lacan says: there is no Father, save in death (/'/ ny a de pere que morf).^ To repeat: only the man who has dared leave his mother as source of all life (thus giving himself to death) may become a Father. Feminism confuses patriarchy with the domination of men over women. This is a gross misunderstanding, for in true patriarchy both the man and the woman are the subjects of the Law: the man must accept to die as the son of his mother—that is the Law; the woman must allow this man, but only as Father, to enter into her, opening her up infinitely—this also is the Law. Thus far, I have furnished an answer to the first objection that I made when playing my own devil's advocate. This first objection spoke of my not seeming to take into consideration the daughters sexual frustration. The answer brought into play the register ofjouissance (celebration). The second objection—the ill-chosen expressions such as "object of exchange," "object of desire" to describe women—also needs answering. If I have thus far made use of just such expressions to speak of women, it was simply to go along, temporarily, with the accepted terminology. It now has become obvious that such terms are grossly inadequate. Here now are the new terms that I would like to see consecrated: women are not "objects of exchange" but "pure values of

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exchange" with no use value whatsoever. I borrow these expressions (exchange value, use value) from Marx. Contrary to what is widely believed, the Law of the Father is not oppressive because it forbids any and all use value of women. There has always been a misunderstanding over this question of the Law of the Father. Again: the Law of the unconscious (or of the Father) is a Law whose immediate effect is to remove all use value from women—and, we might add, from signifiers alike, i.e., from cultural symbols, images, etc. Once more, I am intertwining concerns over femininity and art (signifiers). The Law of the Father means that it is forbidden for a community to hold on to or keep for its own private use the women/signifiers that have arisen in their midst. The same goes for the community inheriting these women /signifiers (the "other house" of my A and B scenario): the community receiving the women/signifiers must not just utilize these women/signifiers for its own private needs. It (the community) must not utilize the women/signifiers as means to an end. To underscore this very crucial point: one must not "make use" of women/signifiers as means to represent any signified whatsoever: national identity, community pride, tribal idealization, group selfpromotion, etc. That is, symbols, images, etc. must be seen as ends in themselves, and not as means to create or stimultate nationalistic or tribal fervours.20 And of course, what goes for symbols also goes for women, who must be treated as ends in themselves and not as a simple means for the sexual gratification of men. Artistic images are not national or tribal objects; women are not sex objects. That is what the Law of the Father proclaims. Artistic images/women are in the public domain, or more accurately stated: they are the public domain. They are the embodiment of the political. Civilization is exchange; femininity is exchange, pure exchange value. Where there is absence of civilization, women/signifiers are used as objects to achieve a goal. They are not free but are given a use value. I have now answered the second objection. The answer led me to point out that femininity is that portion of a woman /signifier that the Law frees up from any and all possible uses. In the end, the Law of the unconscious says but one thing: never convert the signifier into a signified!

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We know from Lacan that hysteria is a question—in the sense that the hysteric is always asking someone she recognizes as a Master, and thus someone who is supposed to know all the answers (scientist, doctor, priest, teacher, etc.), What is a woman? Of course, the question is never put in so many words: it is acted out, thus drawing attention from those social agents—the "experts"—that society has empowered to provide or produce knowledge. Whatever its clinical manifestations or symptoms (trembling, cries, tears, i.e., great agitation, or the opposite—aphonia, paralysis, etc.), hysteria acts out a question that may be variously stated: Of what "substance" is woman? Is there a universal identity of "woman" that I can copy? Is there a widely agreed upon womanly behaviour on which to model my own? How does a real woman act? etc. It is this question, variously stated, that the Dora of Freud's famous case study asked herself as she watched and observed Madame K. Dora was unconsciously enamoured of Madame K., her fathers lover. It is as if Dora were saying: "Now, since my father loves her, since she is the object of my father's desire, she must be a real woman; I must therefore observe and learn from her." The question of hysteria is thus a question of identity—more specifically, the identity of a subject: Who or what am / ? The parallel is striking in the area of culture. Those who feel that cultural appropriation should be brought under surveillance ask a question that is also one of identity: What is a culture? What elements constitute our tribal or community or national WE? There generally ensues a gathering of distinctive or identifying symbols, images, traits, etc., followed by a peremptory declaration designating such symbols as off limits, untouchable ("Noli me tangerel"). Unlike hysteria in individuals, "hysteria" as it affects a culture will tolerate an answer; social or political "hysteria" can thus obtain satisfaction. A culture will generally be satisfied with the answers furnished by the "Masters" (chiefs, priests, politicians or ideologues, anthropologists, sociologists, media commentators, social analysts, artists, etc.) whose task it is to define a cultures identity. In such instances, the interrogative mode (who are WE?) is followed by the mode of conservation (do not tamper with or borrow anything from our WE!). The hysteric, on the other hand, is never satisfied with the answer the Master will give. History has shown that the supposed Masters have throughout history obligingly offered a number of answers: you are a witch, and so for your own good, I, your priest and confessor, will burn you at the stake (fourteenth century); you are simply imitating

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real illnesses, and so we will cease trying to cure you (Sydenham, seveteenth century); you are a fake, a grand but at the same time miserable actress, and so we may laugh at you (Babinski, student of Charcot, nineteenth century21), etc. Already, this string of answers offers a narrative line of sorts. There is something literary, almost picaresque, underlying hysteria, if only in a secondary sense. Hysteria is to the feminine what the roman de gare is to great literature. After each answer, the hysteric will immediately say: That's not it, that's not what I am—try again! Hysteria always rises again from its ashes. In this sense, hysteria can be seen as the motor of science: the hysteric is continually sending the Master back to the drawing board, ordering him to come up with some new kind of knowledge as to who she is or might be. Thus Lacan's statement: "The hysteric wants to reign over a Master" (I'hysterique veut regner sur un maitre). She puts the Master to work to produce knowledge, an object that will put an end to her quest about her self. Hysteria plays itself out entirely as a subject/object dynamic. She asks: What kind of subject am I? Name my I? The Master responds by saying: Your I is this or that object. The hysteric knows intimately—like Sartre (L'etre et le neanf)—that to be a subject is first and foremost not to be an object. Thus her dissatisfaction, her flight which traces out, if only in the realm of the finite, the path of the subject qua subject. Freud came to realize that it is the hysteric, not the Masters, who actually possesses an unconscious knowledge on the question of subjectivity. In the very same moment as she acts out her question, she also acts out the answer: her flight, her refrain, "No, that is not what I am" is a statement about the subject as that which will tolerate no "objectification," i.e., it will not accept or tolerate assimilation to any reality that is of the order of the finite. Alas, despite her deep knowledge (of the subject as absolute non-object), she will persist, forever trying to obtain some answer in the realm of the finite. Which is to say that she will be "cured" only when she is able to displace her area of inquiry from the finite into the transfinite. This is equivalent to a shift from the faculty of Understanding to the faculty of Willing. Freuds genius lay in not providing any answer—an "object"—to satisfy the hysteric s quest. He knew, intuitively, that she would reject any object: hysteria is not true desire, but the desire to remain dissatisfied. It is thus a form of anti-desire. Rather than providing just another (new) answer, Freud asked the hysterical women who went to see him to lie down and speak. Instead of listening, previous Masters had all

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eagerly provided answers. Freud chose to listen. For the first time in history, hysteria itself spoke. And in speaking, the hysteric spoke the Law, thus freeing up the unconscious knowledge she had held locked up inside her for many centuries. The very first clinical description of hysteria is Egyptian; in 1600 BCE, a forgotten Master consigned on a tablet of hieroglyphs his answer to a mystery he must have witnessed: a woman possessed. This was the origin of the notion of hysteria (from the Greek for uterus) as a disease caused by an animal wildly racing about inside the woman's body.22 This was the first of many answers that were all, in actual fact, attempts to avoid hearing the true message of hysteria. One may thus say that Freud was finally lending an ear to a voice—that of the feminine—that had been reduced to silence for the whole of Western history. What did Freud hear? Which long suppressed knowledge did he hear from the mouth of the hysteric? He heard the hysteric pregnant with the Law of civilization; she spoke of it (the Law) as of a child borne by her. The fake pregnancies prevalent in hysteria are a clear manifestation of this. When she was finally able to speak, the hysteric began by shifting her age-old question from what to where. This imperceptible shift made all the difference: no longer the theatrical What is a woman? but rather Where is there woman? Under which condition is there femininity? The answer she gave: There is femininity in the name of the Father alone; there is femininity in jouissance as (subjective) celebration of the Other, and nowhere else. Femininity does not exist outside the Father. It is not a thing, an object that can be possessed or held onto. It is not a trait, like possessing a large head or square shoulders. It is an event— the event of pure subjectivity. Possessing the object "female sexual organs" does not automatically confer femininity on one. Femininity is cultural; it is neither objective nor organic nor chromosomic in make-up. To say that femininity is in the Name of the Father is to say that it exists only in writing. Femininity is all in the telling. It is, substantially speaking, a literary event. Just as there is no Father save an ironic one, there is no femininity save written. Which means that femininity is entirely transmissible through writing: all novels—all art, for that matter: paintings, poems, music, etc.—are (about) femininity. If asked to indicate or show femininity, one might simply point to a bookshelf. There is femininity when the referent "female" is whisked away and transformed by the ironic power of language.23 Irony is the figure of

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speech allowing one to mean or intend "white" by saying "black." It has the listener understand or hear (correctly) "white," although the speaker has said "black." Infinite language pushes this to its limit, immersing the speaking subject in a general or universal form of irony (see note 23). It is thus infinite language as such—its power of generalized irony—that creates "femininity" out of "female": it abolishes the female referent (nature), crossing it out, infusing it with Otherness. The result: femininity. Woman has often been held synonymous with the indecipherable. According to this view, a woman embodies a mystical reality of sorts, above and beyond words. A kind of ontological fragrance, fundamentally indefinable. The contrary is the truth: femininity is not indecipherable, but rather, entirely cipherable. Psychoanalysis is there to tell us that for a man the other sex is woman, and for a woman, the other sex is also woman. Femininity is totally on the side of women—men have no "feminine side," save as mystics or artists. Popular lore claims that a woman never gives herself up entirely to a man. He cannot have her altogether. This also is not true, for a woman will give herself up entirely, but in writing alone. "Love" or "marriage" are the words used to describe this state of total abandonment—but strictly in writing— known as femininity. Freud asked the question: What does woman want? (Was will das Weib?), pretending not to know the answer. In actual fact, Freud could simply not remember having once given it. Freud was not always his own best reader. Had he read himself carefully, he would have recalled the answer, given to him by the hysterics that came to lie on his couch: Women want to be read—entirely, from head to foot! That is they wish to be read as a text, read by the Father, and not looked at or considered as objects. In closing, I wish to address the epistemological status of my opening statement, which characterizes the pitch of the paper as a whole: in the beginning was Literature, in the beginning was the (actual) infinite, the transfinite—nature or the finite come second. Such a statement has the sound of a religious pronouncement, with its explicit reference to the opening words to the Gospel of John. With the help of Freud's patients, I will however attempt to define the exact epistemological status—the register, the tone—of this paper. Until Freud, the hysteric asked the Master as the representative of Science to furnish an answer to her deep and unanswerable question. Freud, as I have said, was the first to refuse to answer out of his Science.

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He adopted a position of humility, knowing that only she knew. She and only she possessed the required science to solve the centuries-old enigma of woman. Freud limited himself to creating the material conditions—the stretched-out position on the couch, the silence of the analyst, etc.—that would allow all of this locked up science to speak. The result: the hysterics did not speak the pure science of knowledge. They did not speak in terms that one could assimilate to the physical sciences. They spoke the Law (the Will as pure enunciation), and in so doing, they spoke the science of ethics. As I have said (note 14), the hysteric was caught between a rock and a hard place, between civil society and civilization. The hysteric did not find freedom magically just from lying on Freud's couch. She was not suddenly able to speak the Law, without a hitch, from A to Z. Freud's important intuition was to operate a shift from one kind of coupling to another: from hysteric/Master to hysteric/scribe, this latter couple similar to the relationship between the mystic, Saint Teresa of Avila (who was illiterate) and her scribe (whose task it was to write down Teresas visions). Teresa, however, was not hysterical; her scribe thus had an easy chore of it, transcribing passively all her thoughts and visions as these unfolded. The hysteric lying on Freud's couch was not a true mystic but a distorted or botched mystic. In this case, the scribe (Freud) was not merely passive, but had to engage in quite a bit of translation. Which is to say that the Law or ethical position as spoken out by the hysteric is in effect a translation/transcription provided by Freud. Freud thus becomes an easy target for feminists: in their eyes, he can only be another of a long string of males who impose upon women a male view of who and of what they are. But a closer look at Freud's translation/transcription efforts reveals that Freud had actually latched onto the notion of femininity as autobiography: woman is self-made, she is self-written. Femininity is the story, the narration of a pure subjectivity; it is the infinite enunciating of a pure I-—without identity, without content. A kind of narrative flight into openness (die Weite, the Open: Heidegger). To begin with, it is not the Father, as distinct entity from the woman, who names her "woman," magnanimously bestowing femininity on one half of the human race: It is she who names the Father as sole reader of her I. She thus has la totale maitrise d'oeuvre (complete control24). This is the profound meaning of her ethical stance. The Law that she speaks out says: You may enter into me, you may penetrate me,

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but in the name of the Father only, i.e., only if and when I have named you "Father"; to enter into me under any otherform or guise is to rape me! This process is identical to Kant's notion of submitting oneself only to a Law that is of one's own making. Dante says exactly the same thing in the opening verse to the very last Canto of Paradiso\ "O Virgin Mother, daughter of thy son." Mary gives birth to a Son, who in turn will be her Father, i.e., her Law. In short, she is naming her "self" as universal (Father). Femininity is thus an ethics of the self, more profound than Foucault's liberal ethics of the self as esthetic. This is so for two reasons. (1) Foucault's liberal ethics of the self has the self "consist," that is, assume an ego/identity form. Femininity as ethics of the self is something else, since the self does not end up "consisting"; rather it becomes the sign or proof of the universal; it is that through which the universal (the Father) transpires or comes to be. To say that the woman names the Father is to say that she names her "self" as (recurrent) sign of the Other. Femininity is a circuit: it is not the return of the finite, but the return of the infinite. As such, femininity has nothing to do with the great cycles of nature, all of which are finite in cast. Femininity is a coming out of and return into the infinite. Femininity as autobiography must therefore not be construed as the autobiography of an ego: it is the unfurling of the subject of the unconscious, which is, strictly speaking, "subjected to the infinite." More exactly: femininity names the Father, the infinite, everybody, i.e., it actually names the political or public sphere (as opposed to the community or collective sphere of the liberals) as though it were itself or its very own self. Femininity as autobiography is thus, in a very real sense, the autobiography of the world. As has been said, the feminine in a woman is that part of her that proclaims itself to be a function of civilization as a whole. It is that portion of her that would not exist without civilization or without the Other. Strictly said, the feminine is that portion of her that escapes her, because it belongs to the Other. (2) Foucault's liberal ethics of the self simply do not have the far ranging political implications that femininity does. Certainly, Foucault intends his ethics to have political significance, specifically in terms of resistance to oppression (standardization, surveillance, etc.). But in actual fact, his ethics go with, rather than against, the grain of oppression. Femininity is, on the contrary, a way out of oppression; it is not just a counter-oppressive structure, but a real stepping-back (SchrittzuruecK) from oppressive forces such as community standards, to name

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but this one form of oppression. Femininity is the political resistance that "civilization" opposes to "civil society." It says: only those positive laws that have been promulgated in the name of the Father (everybody) may enter into me, i.e., only such laws that do not counter the infinite may govern me as human subject relating to other human subjects. From this (the feminine as a naming of the self "out of/back into" the Other; the feminine as invoking the wider cadre of infinite civilization over and against finite civil liberal society), it can be gathered that the Father does not stand outside the feminine as a seperate entity or person. Rather, the feminine is His only hope of ever saying "I, "i.e, of every transpiring as universal subject (GOD as EVERYBODY, the Word made History2**). One might make use of the famous Moebius strip as a pedagogical tool to picture this Father/feminine relation. A normal strip of paper or ribbon has two sides, A and B. But the Moebius strip is a ribbon that has undergone a double operation: the length of the ribbon has first been given a half-twist, after which the two ends are joined up. The result is a continuous strip or ribbon that has only one side: it is simply not possible to decide where side A becomes side B. The Moebius strip provides the image of a constant longitudinal interpenetration of sides A and B. In our efforts here to picture the Father/feminine relation, one side of the strip may be designated as "Father," the other as "feminine." The half-twist needed to create the Moebius effect can thus be assimilated to the act of writing. The result: as ones finger—or pen—moves, travelling along the strip, it becomes strictly impossible to determine where or when the "other" side has been reached, i.e., it is impossible to say clearly when the Father has disappeared into the feminine, thus becoming an "I" or infinite subject.26 Conclusion: the action of "travelling"—"fleeing" or "flying"—along the Moebius strip is a picture, albeit imperfect, of the process that I've referred to as the "autobiography of the world." The world (everybody) passes through (penetrates) the feminine in the name of the Father, thus inscribing or writing itself bodily as universal political subject.27 NOTES 1. As Jean-Paul Sartre points out, Tintoretto developed a double discourse in his paintings. On the surface, his paintings tell of a still glorious and

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powerful Venice, much to the satisfaction of his patrons. But on another "deeper" level, his paintings tell a quite different story: the truth about sixteenth century Venice, a decadent city that is no longer the economic and political power it once was. 2. The transfinite is a mathematical concept put forth by Georg Cantor (see Sibony 1974). In the 1970s and 1980s, psychoanalysts of the Lacanian persuasion made, if not extensive, at least some use of it to describe the Freudian unconscious. How does Cantor describe the transfinite? He begins by agreeing with Aristotle that it is impossible to actually count to infinity. But he then asks us to suppose that we have succeeded in counting the infinite: let us pretend, says Cantor, that we have "spent" all the rational and irrational numbers, all the finite numbers, finally attaining the infinite. Cantor is thus inviting us, as it were, to go along with him. Having obtained our (temporary) consent, he concludes: we will now dub the first number to come after the infinite the first of the transfinite numbers. What must be underscored here is that Cantor asks us simply to "suppose" that we have spent the finite and have now reached the infinite. It is this act of "supposing" that places the concept of the transfinite squarely on the side of both fiction and the act of writing as such. That is, the transfinite is not the indecipherable infinite; it is rather the ciphered or written infinite. Again, it is not the vague infinite of the Romantics, but the actual infinite of the thirteenth century post-Aquinas theologians (infinitas intensiva of Dun Scotus). One other way to describe transfinite in non-mathematical terms is to see the transfinite as a number that traverses all the rational and irrational numbers, incessantly moving accross the entire surface of finite numeration. This transversal number is thus nowhere to be found, appearing as a hole, an absolute opening, punched into the number system. Cantor sees the transfinite numbers (for there is an infinite series of them) as condition, sustaining the finite numbers. Cantor was influenced by theology, in particular by St. Augustine. He did not equate God with the transfinite. For him, God was the absolute infinite, and as such, a reality beyond both the infinite and the transfinite. This fact would have to be weighed against was has just been said concerning Dun Scotus s infinitas intensiva. I repeat in the aim of clarity that Cantor singled out three distinct mathematical entities: the infinite (impossible to count), the transfinite (comprising itself an infinite series of numbers beyond the infinite), the absolute infinite (God as a reality beyond both the infinite and the transfinite). This said, Lacan and Cantor can be seen to tred a similar ground: for Cantor, the transfinite points to or is suggestive of the existence of God as absolute infinity (see Adam Drozdeks article "Beyond Infinity: Augustine and Cantor," Laval theologique etphilosophique, vol. 51, no. 1,

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3.

4.

5.

6.

February 1995, pp. 127-40). As for Lacan, he claims (Lacan 1975) that feminine jouissance is God's other face, it is God when viewed from the angle of jouissance. In other words, Lacan is suggesting that God has two sides or two faces: the first is turned away from us, and as such it corresponds to Cantor s absolute infinite; the other is feminine jouissance^ corresponding to Cantor s transfinite. This latter face of God (jouissance] has a definite finality: the bringing forth or the transpiring of political subjectivity. It would be a caricature to claim that the ideas of Adam Smith, to choose but him, may claim victory in the late twentieth century. Not only did Smith believe that some state intervention was necessary, for instance in education, but he was also the author of a moral theory that is worthy of attention, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The savage capitalism of this late twentieth century, with its move toward total deregulation, would probably not have obtained Smith's full support. Schematically said, the American school of ego-psychology which flourished after the Second World War in New York City, conceived the unconscious as a reservoir filled with man's baser instincts. It was thus an entity of great disorder which had to be corrected or brought into line. The lawlessness of the unconscious had to be brought under control by the finite, positive laws of society as accepted or interiorized by the "cured" ego. This is in direct line with the liberalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: nature corrected or "cured" by a few social rules and regulations. Lacan stood this on its head; he saw the unconscious as the realm of infinite Law (not lawlessness). This Law, Lacan thought, supercedes and even overrules the finite or positive laws of society. For Lacan, true Freudian psychoanalysis contains a message that is disruptive of social conformity. Lacan thus accuses ego-psychology of turning Freud into what he was not: a guarantor for the American way of life. J. Lacan, 1975. "Et puis, je me suis apercu que ce qui constituait mon cheminement etait de 1'ordre du^> rien veux rien savoir" (p. 9). This is a good example of psychoanalysis putting the force of willing (mon cheminement) before and above understanding, although one must be careful not to equate this kind of willing with conscious willing. The unconscious knows no "I." Its willing is not an I want but an it wants—or even a "they want." The latter is the case if you consider the force of language as expressive of all of mankind. Chaos theory has in recent years become a piece of arcane knowledge to know something about and to quote, much as relativity theory was some 30 or so years ago. Out of disorder comes order, is one basic tenet of this theory. It has become inspirational not only for mathematicians, but also for social engineers and high-powered adminitrators who feel that here is proof that they still have something of the political left remaining in them.

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I would not so much point my finger at chaos theory itself as at the cult that has formed around it. I see this cult as a symptom of the neoliberal frame of mind. At first glance, it may appear that these two statements are of a similar nature: out of disorder comes order; out of the infinite comes the finite. In truth, these statements express completely opposite stances. They are even at cross-purposes. The infinite is not disorder, but another kind of order, a transfinite or literal order, in the sense that it is an order that can exist only in language. The disorder of which chaos theory speaks can be found in nature; the infinite can only be found in language. 7. J.-J. Rousseau, 1971: "La nature seule fait tout dans les operations de la bete, au lieu que Thornine concourt aux siennes, en qualite d'agent libre. L'un choisit ou rejette par instinct, et 1'autre, par un acte de liberte; ce qui fait que la bete ne peut s'ecarter de la regie qui lui est prescrite, meme quand il lui serait avantageux de le faire, et que rhomme s'en ecarte souvent a son prejudice" (p. 171). 8. It may be useful to signal the necessity for an overall corrective. I am using the expression "a break with nature" to describe the contractualist position. I have done this out of fidelity to Rousseau's text, but also to the terms of the debate between liberals and contractualists in the late eighteenth century. If we are to go more deeply into Rousseau's intuition, one must call upon Freud/Lacan. The psychoanalytical text would have one prefer the idea of a "traversing" of nature to that of a "breaking" with nature. Traversing suggests that nature is not disregarded or repressed but transformed, rendered strange—in short, impregnated with Otherness. 9. To state things clearly if without nuance: the liberals confuse instinct and desire (desire is natural), while the contractualists separate the two out completely (desire in not natural). 10. The Kantian Law is not to be confused with the rules and regulations (the so-called "positive laws") of the liberals. Kant's aim is in this sense similar to Sade's. Both put forth the notion of a world (social, political) that would function without rules and regulations of any sort, and thus solely according to the Law. 11. The conception of liberty specific to liberalism (my liberty stops where that of my neighbour begins) explains why neither term in the free trade/protectionist dichotomy is foreign to the liberal agenda. As I have already stated, nineteenth century protectionism is therefore not the sign of liberalism's temporary defeat. The recent trade battles (May/June 1995) between the U.S. and Japan in the automotive industry, and still more recently (June/July 1995) in the area of photographic films (Kodak vs Fuji) is empirical evidence of this. We have here a liberal based economy—that of the United States—which can move from a free trading to a protectionist position and back again in a matter of weeks if not days.

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12. The Other as all the strangers, foreigners, etc. could also be translated in terms of "all men and women of time past and of time future." Either way, the Kantian flavour of such a notion is obvious. Such totalities are, like the finite infinite, impossible to totalize. It is impossible to canvas all humans who have ever lived, even more so all humans yet to be born. Yet this is the nature of Kant's universal perspective. Like Cantor, he seems to say: "Let us suppose that we have polled all human beings of both past and future times—the first Law to be legislated after such a polling would then be my categorical imperative." In terms of the history of political thought, the eighteenth century liberals made apparent progress when they abandoned the notion of the Common Good as the goal of social and political entities, replacing it with the idea of Common Interests. Liberal civil society is a society of contracts (with a small "c"): you may sign contracts with anyone who shares interests similar to yours. That is, if you seek an object similar to one sought by another social actant, then both of you may freely enter into a partnership. Kant goes one further, speaking of "common disinterests." This, however, is not his expression. But Kant does take great pains to define the moral act as intrinsically disinterested, i.e., an action will be deemed moral only if it is accomplished with no profit in mind for either myself or my neigbour. Ideally, a society should be based on such actions alone. Therefore, in Kant s eyes the goal of social and political entities should not be—not primarily—the pursuit of the Common Good, nor of the Common Interests; it ought to be the pursuit of "common disinterests." 13. More rigorously speaking, hysteria is less a refusal to obey than a simulated obedience of the Law of the Father. The hysteric will adopt sexually provocative poses or attitudes, offering herself as sex object. But when the man steps forward to accept the open invitation, the hysteric reacts—slapping him in the face, for instance—protesting: I am not that kind of woman! That is, the structure of hysterical behaviour is double: seduction, followed by flight. Hysteria is not to be confused with the feminine. Hysteria is the inability to assume the position of the feminine. Hysteria is the flight into the finite (she simply gets up and leaves, just when you thought she was yours). The feminine, as the contrary to hysteria, is the flight away from the finite and into the actual infinite. Thus the paradox: the truly "feminine" woman can be "wholly yours" only if she flees into the actual infinite as the realm of pure writing. 14. The elimination of hysteria as a clinical category from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the most influencial reference manual for contemporary psychiatry) is symptomatic of a liberal bent (see DSM-4 for May 1994). Hysteria poses two inter-related questions: (1) the question of the Law of the Father, and of civilization as a whole; (2) the question of pure subjectivity (with no substance or object to seize it, allowing us to say what or who it is).

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The hysteric thus carries, buried deep within her suffering body, a question about the Law and civilization. To put things in rather blunt terms: the hysteric is caught between a rock and a hard place, between civil society and civilization. Civil society is suppressive of desire, while civilization is, literally or textually speaking, desire—and as such, it is the unfolding of pure subjectivity. Hysteria is the state of a woman—men can also fall prey to it—who is gagged, yet wants badly to speak out (her) desire. Because she is so bound and gagged, her hands tied behind her back, etc., all she can do is emit muffled noises and try and throw her whole body madly about on the floor in a sad, even tragic attempt to speak it out. The hysteric is the prisoner of civil society: one has only to think of Freud's hysterics living in the straight-laced Viennese society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Freud's famous phrase, "hysteria is a botched work of art," can be translated as "hysteria is botched civilization" or "botched subjectivity." As such, hysteria and liberalism have something in common: liberalism is the gagging of the Law of desire; hysteria is the result: the Law of desire finally gagged. 15. Hegel seems to be just around the corner. The real (or effective) is rational, and the rational is real (or effective), says Hegel at the beginning of the Philosophy of Right. This famous pronouncement basically means that whatever history (the "real" or, more accurately, the "effective") has effectively come up with, is to be treated as rational. Hegel's phrase has often been interpreted as an apology for the tyrants—and thus the tyranny—of history itself. For Hegel, history is a process that is, as it were, instilled with itself%$> it moves relentlessly toward its goal. The "history" that is alluded to in the body of the text is quite the opposite, for it is instilled not with itself, but with otherness. This means that it is history as subjected to modern natural law (Occam, Grotius, Rousseau, Kant, etc.) as opposed to modern historical law (Locke, Hume, von Savigny, Puchta, etc.). 16. Rousseau makes an important distinction between volontede tousand volonte generate (1964, Bk. II, Ch. 3). These represent the difference between conscious (liberal) willing of all the individual citizens' egos vs the unconscious (contractualist) willing of the Other, respectively. The notion of understanding overwhelmed by the Will of the Other can be translated in Kantian terms as Understanding over-ruled by Reason (die Vernunfi). 17. The difference between liberalism and contractualism can be seen very clearly here, thanks to Bernini's sculpture. The liberal celebrates the existence of the other objectively, i.e., he is glad to observe the distinctive signs of this or that foreign culture. S/he will even see that such signs not be subjected to any form of tampering. And of course, the liberal will remain at a respectful distance from the other culture, allowing that culture its own Lebensraum (living space). S/he would thus never dream

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of "interfering." Bernini's sculpture brings the contractualist mode into radical focus. It indicates that you can become a subject, a true political subject, only if you are penetrated by the other or the Other. What's more, the resulting sense of celebration is the only proof that may be had as to the political existence of the other: if you have become infinite subject, then there is Other somewhere out there. 18. This fact (woman as cosmopolitan) can shed new light on the question of misogyny. If women have been reviled or placed in an inferior position, it could be because they embody, like the Jewish people, the cosmopolitan position. Neither women nor the Jewish people belong to a particular land or country; neither are rooted in Nature. Rather, both belong to or are rooted in the Book. 19. I have claimed that because it is the women who are penetrated and the men who penetrate, jouissance as celebration over Otherness is intrinsically feminine. Celebration is, strictly speaking, "embodied" in the case of women. An obvious objection would cite the sexual activities of male homosexuals. Does not the practice of anal penetration have homosexuals pose the question of Otherness in a way that is similar to women? They too would ask the questions of "how welcoming must I be of the other?," etc. The difference is that, where homosexuals may be penetrated by the other, they cannot be instilled with Otherness (a child). 20. To clear up a possible misunderstanding: the notion of treating a symbol or image not as a means but as an end in itself has nothing to do with the notion of art for art's sake. Art for art s sake is quite simply art treating itself as a means to art. It is thus contrary to the notion of art as an end in itself. 21. Babinski (1857-1932) had to decide whether the hysterics were clinically ill or simply simulating. He opted for the latter, thus eliminating hysteria from the field of serious medical consideration. Freud, on the contrary was to show great respect for the hysterics who came to see him. He knew that the highly intelligent and sensitive woman was more likely to fall prey to hysteria. He accused the civil society of his time of provoking hysteria in its more exceptional women, for he saw the hysteric as carrying within her a knowledge that no one wanted to hear. To Freud, the hysteric is "pregnant" with the Law of civilization, and as such with the answer as to the true (transfinite) nature of the speaking subject. 22. These are the famous Papyrus Ebers, known as the "greatest Egyptian medical document" (See Veith 1965, 4). 23. Throughout this paper, language as infinite or transfinite covers not only that which is spoken/written, but is inclusive of the arts in general (music, painting, dance, etc.). Language as code, however, is not language as infinite. Language as code covers the daily usage that humans make of

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language in order to communicate, define, analyze, etc. To claim that infinite language is pure irony is to point to the fact that language is not a tool allowing us to communicate. After several million years of language, humankind is still not able to communicate. To be immersed in infinite language is to be immersed in misunderstanding, or in what we may call general irony. As humans, we seem forever condemned to repeat: No, that is not what I meant at all! In other words, we may have been attempting to say quite clearly and plainly "black," but our audience has understood "white." Language thus ensures that we will never have any rest, that we will forever be obliged to engage in discussion, response, repartee, etc. with our fellow humans—in short, that humans will have to continue living and interacting with one another. Misunderstanding has therefore a positive civilizing effect—it is both causa efficient and causa finalis of civilization as a whole—while communication, understanding, etc. are just so many tools (causa efficiens only) for a perfect civil society. 24. A word of caution here. It is critical not to reintroduce the notion of the liberal individual at this stage. It is not the woman as liberal (monadic) individual who has "complete control." It is rather the feminine part of her, which is not to be confused with her social or monadic self. The word "control" itself should be understood with great care, so as not to confuse it with "mastery." It would be more rigorous to invoke Sade's " le desordre des femmes" (the disorder of women), a phrase which he uses for its positive or euphoric connotation (La philosophie dans le boudoir, cinquieme dialogue, Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1976, p. 228). Sade's meaning must not be missed here: he was not so much in a state of amazement over women's (supposed) greater sexual powers as he was, as it were, "looking out" for something else. That is, he saw the feminine as that which instills an Other type of order—the order of civilization—into the finite order of civil society, thus disrupting the latter. Sade, more than any other actor of his day, brings the French Revolution to its ultimate political resolution. 25. Again, we must be wary of "Hegelianizing" our understanding of the word "history" as it is used here. For Hegel, history is the tribunal of the world, in the sense that it is the law. It provides the rules and regulations that fit human activity as it were naturally. A neo-liberal such as Fukuyama can proclaim that history has come to an end, with liberal democracy as the unchallenged victor. In other words, for Fukuyama (who is patently a Hegelian), history has reached it final maturation, providing us now with the ultimate in rules, regulations and freedoms. The contractualist has a different view of history. For him, history, along with its rules, regulations and so-called freedoms, must be perpetually interrupted by the Law (see note 2, and Cantor's transfinite as that which roams perpetually across the surface of finite numeration). For

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the contractuallst, history does not so much come to an end as it has to be forever stemmed, forever held in check by the Law of modern natural law. This means that history must be brought to an end, i.e., a finality representing an order (akin to Sade's "le desordre des femmes") that is not the natural order of liberal civil society. 26. In a 1984 performance piece, the narrator throws out a statement that attempts to capture the feminine/Father relation: "Le Pere est unefemme acceleree" (the Father is an accelerated woman) (Richard 1992, 10). Such a "definition," along with the Moebius strip, is just another "tool" attempting to give image to what is difficult to picture. Interestingly, the feminine/Father close mix offers difficulties in picturing, similar to certain realities described by atomic physicists. For instance, should light be pictured as particles or as a series of waves? Physicists around the turn of this century pondered this question. Heisenberg came up with a solution not unlike the ones proposed here when he coined the word "wavicles." Depending on the angle at which the phenomenon of light is examined, it will appear either as waves or as particles. Similarly, writing is one and the same reality which, when viewed from one angle, is femininity as autobiography, and when viewed from another angle, is the Father as reader. To many, the arguments throughout this paper will appear quite abstruse. While there is a popular acceptance that atomic physics defeats commonsense thinking—the person in the street is able to go along with "wavicles"; with electrons that cease to exist here, only reappear there; with "quirks" and "quarks," etc.—there is no such acceptance when it comes to exploring social and political realities of our world. There is, in these cases, an unwillingness, possibly even a resistance to consider what amounts to a non-Newtonian logic. Freudian / Lacanian psychoanalysis is simply an "Einsteinian" logic of sorts, as applied to the human psyche. 27. Throughout this paper, there is a background reference: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (La declaration universelle des droits de rhomme et du citoyen) of 1789, as read through the works of the Marquis de Sade. See my article, "Sade ou 1'invention de 1'Europe" (Sade or the Invention of Europe) in Carrefour (see below). WORKS CITED Barthes, Roland. (1973). Leplaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil. Battaille, Georges. (1985). "The Notion of Expenditure." Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1934. Ed. and trans. Allan Stooks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 116-29. Dante. (1962). The Divine Comedy. Paradise. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics.

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. (1965). CEuvres completes. Trans. Andre Pezard. Paris: Gallimard/ La Pleiade. Foucault, Michel. (1984). L'usage desplaisirs. Paris: Gallimard. . (1984). Le souci de soi. Paris: Gallimard. Freud, Sigmund. (1954). Cinqpsychanalyses. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Hume, David. (1953). Political Essays. New York: Liberal Arts Press. Kant, Emmanuel. (1943). Critique de la raison pratique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. . (1986). Critique de la faculte de juger. Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin. Lacan, Jacques. (1966). Ecrits. Paris: Seuil. . (1975). Le seminaire: encore. Livre XX. Paris: Seuil. . (1981). Le seminaire: lespsychoses. Livre III. Paris: Seuil. Locke, John. (1993). Two Treatises on Government. London: Everyman. Mandeville, Bernard. (1985). La fable des abeilles, 1714. Introduction, traduction et notes L. Carrier et P. Carrive. Paris: Vrin, «Reprise». Richard, Robert. (1992). L autobiographic du monde. Montreal: Edition Balzac. . (1996). "Sade ou 1'invention de 1'Europe," Carrefour (Sade: lectures plurielles, ed. D.C. Durante and R. Richard) 18(2): 134-64. Rosanvallon, Pierre. (1979). Le capitalisme utopique. Paris: Seuil. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1971). Discours sur rorigine et les fondements de I'inegalite parmi les hommes. Paris: Gamier-Flammarion. . (1964). Du contrat social. Paris: Gallimard/Folio. Sibony, Daniel. (1974). "Le transfini et la castration," Le nom et le corps. Paris: Seuil, pp. 207-57. Veith, Ilza. (1965). Hysteria: The History of a Disease. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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3 SEX, LIES, AND PHOTOGRAPHY: READING DETECTIVE FICTION AS PSYCHOANALYSIS IN TIMOTHY FINDLEY'S THE TELLING OF LIES We are justified in drawing a parallel between intertextuality and the unconscious, since the text plays the role of a screen. Thus the intertext is to the text what the unconscious is to consciousness. Reading, therefore, is not unlike analysis. Michael Riffaterre (1990, 77) Some people do the queerest things. The Telling of Lies

Barbara Gabriel

Though Timothy Findleys The Telling of Lies (1986) announces itself as a "mystery," the preferred British term for detective fiction, it subverts as well as continues many of the classic characteristics of the genre. Following the established conventions of its predecessors, from Poes "Murders in the Rue Morgue" onward, it employs a sleuth outside the regulatory powers of the state, in pursuit of a murderer whose motive and means are out of the ordinary. There is a body, a setting which unites all the suspects under one roof, and an Aristotelian structure of peripeteia (Porter 1983, 331). Like all detective fiction, it sets up a series of false clues in a model case of that "hermeneutic code" which Roland Barthes tells us must promote delays in narrative before it arrests the enigma (Barthes 1974, 119). Traditionally, the detective s method has been to read the known for the unknown, the manifest for what lurks menacingly just beneath the outward aspect of things. Yet in spiralling backward from an enigma to its solution, the mystery also confirms the detective s power to elicit,

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from mere traces, a scene of origins. The language of psychoanalysis is more than incidental here. Freud read Sherlock Holmes as well as Oedipus Rex, and the analytic process repeats the narrative logic of the detective story (Brooks 1984, 313). Jacques Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'" by Edgar Allen Poe reminds us of the affinities between the master detective, hunting clues from the evasions, slips of the tongue, ellipses, and other counterfeiting strategies of the patient, and the dogged tracking required by his literary counterpart (Lacan 1983). The assumption underlying both enterprises is that a rational and coherent ordering is possible. This has typically operated in traditional detective narratives toward a recuperation of social order, suturing a tear in the communal fabric which, despite the outsider status of the detective, restores the norms of the dominant culture. D.A. Miller reminds us that the novel is always, in a Foucauldian sense, about the police (1988). Elements which operate in a transgressive mode are recovered to an ideological as well as narrative closure. Detective fiction, in short, becomes the very model of the disciplinary power of narrative within the social domain—a structure nowhere more apparent than in the cinematic inheritor of the detective story model, Hollywood film noir, where the unlicenced sexuality of woman signifies a second-order level of crime (Kaplan 1980). She is both lawless and a figure of surplus value who must be restored to a semiotic space within a cultural order of patriarchy. Findley's attraction to the form has much to do with the way in which it invariably foregrounds the problem of knowledge, so that the detective becomes a figure for the reader, and detective narratives themselves models for a practice of reading. Michael Holquist has argued that what the structural and philosophical assumptions of myth were to modernism (Mann, Joyce, Woolf), the detective story is to postmodernism (Robbe-Grillet, Borges, Nabokov) (Holquist 1983, 150). Findley continues this line of postmodern experiment which challenges the classic detective narrative. Traditional modes of evidence are seen as both shifting and unstable, knowledge itself inseparable from the mediating category of a subject whose co-ordinates are both history and autobiography. But subversion of the traditional ancestry of the detective novel, playfully signalled throughout The Telling of Lies in a sequence of layered intertexts, extends beyond the epistemological indeterminacy which motivates contemporary experiments in the form. Like a number of recent feminist reworkings of the genre, Findley's fiction overturns the

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Law of the Father in favour of a dissident feminine sphere of justice. On the face of it, what emerges is a stylized gender allegory that repeats the revisionist reading of the biblical Noah story of Findley's previous novel, Not Wanted on the Voyage. Yet a closer look at Findley s narrative uncovers a series of contradictions that deliberately undercuts the novels apparent drift toward parable, confounding criminal and victim, but also love and death, good and evil. Moreover, though The Telling of Lies extends the critique of patriarchal institutions that has been the hinge of Findley's fiction to date, there is also a sexual knot that provides a second-order level of mystery in the novel. In the end, the deepest riddle of The Telling of Lies is located at the heart of the narrator herself. Like the trail that leads to the solution of the murder, the central clues unfold in a tapestry of memory and desire in which erasure and self-erasure play important parts. The drive to narrative truth, in turn, echoes the logic of backward traces which emplots the historical trajectory of the subject. In "Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding," Peter Brooks reminds us: "We can explain what we are only through finding out how we got that way, through plotting that story which traces effects to origins and enchains the events along the way" (Brooks 1979, 74). In the case of Vanessa Van Home, the sixty year old protagonist who is both detective and narrator, what is uncovered is a trail of intertextual clues in which it is the reader who must play analyst as well as sleuth.

It is as if a snapshot of a scene had been taken, but only a few scattered details of it were to be seen: here a hand, there a bit of a face, or a hat— the rest is dark. And now it is as if we knew quite certainly what the whole picture represented. As if I could read the darkness. (Wittgenstein, 1968, I63e)

There is no theory (theorem: to see) of encoding that provides us with automatic entry to the particularity of the codes embedded in a work. Even outside the indeterminacy introduced by the highly personal dialogue each reader entertains with the text, we achieve competency in reading, as in other cultural practices, through a forgotten history, a long apprenticeship, as Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, in what sometimes amounts to a secret club, with its own material apparatus and rules of admission: non-members need not apply (Bourdieu 1993, 256).

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Timothy Findley s complex coding poses particularly interesting problems for readers of texts. As an actor for the first fifteen years of his career and a playwright as well as writer for television and documentary film, Findley s embeddings and intertexts are as often drawn from the world of theatre and cinema as from any traditional literary corpus. This fact has not only served to obscure available meanings in his fiction, but to operate in complicity with strategies which already set up separate tracks of authorized/unauthorized meanings in a structure that belongs to a recoverable history of gay cultural practices. This textual game of hide and seek, in which queer spaces in the fiction are tamed and domesticated, echoes the dialectical movement of the closet itself. As in his detective fiction, subterranean meanings in Findley's fiction are often generated by "authors whose proper names function as codes for homosexuality" (Jagose 1994, 83), along with lesbian and gay texts which cumulatively trace homosexual genealogies. In The Telling of Lies, these submerged codes combine with an already elaborate and playful tissue of references to make Findley's mystery novel a much more complex fiction than it first appears to be. The cover illustration of The Telling of Lies (Findley 1986a) foregrounds a dead body in a beach chair, frozen in a violent gesture, while a series of phantasmagoric figures stare, trance-like, in the direction of the sea and its surreal iceberg in the distance: an image that foregrounds at the outset Freud's favorite metaphor for the unconscious. The murder instrument will turn out to provide a peculiarly fitting nemesis for the victim, Calder Maddox, who is "approaching ninety" at the time of his death. Occupying the room directly above that of the narratorsleuth, he has, like her, been an habitue of the Aurora Sands Hotel since the 1930s. A man who, by his own admission, "owned half the world and rented the other half" (11), he has also been a victim of severe allergies, haunted by death since childhood. Death comes to him one unexpected day on the beach as an event surrounded by whispers about a lifetime of sinister business transactions. All that we know for certain is that, with his vast wealth and mysterious dealings in pharmaceuticals, Maddox has plenty of enemies and a fine penchant for murder himself in the form of small, daily assassinations. Nessa muses that he "needed enemies the way the rest of us need friends and he needed obstacles the way the rest of us need paths" (15). In a direct reversal of the traditional murderer/victim axis, the reader is impelled to ask: Who is this body and what has it done?

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Like all detective fiction, The Telling of Lies operates simultaneously to advance and retard the solution to the mystery in a model case of that narrative structure which Victor Ehrlich has decribed as "deliberately impeded form" (1981, 178). Here, the retarding devices follow the traditional mystery's trail of false clues, which in this case includes ironic citation of other novelistic plots as well as the usual parade of suspects. The Telling of Lies playfully echoes, by turns, Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" and Henry James's What Maisie Knew, Victor Hugo as well as Conan Doyle, with Nessa and Maddox's physician, Lawrence Chilcott, providing a contemporary odd-couple variant on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. But it is Thomas Mann's Death in Venice which provides the most conspicuous intertext. Calder Maddox is found dead on a beach chair like Mann's protagonist, Aschenbach. The bookish Petra, who reads the German novella throughout much of the action, half expects that they "shall all be cast as Thomas Mann's vacationers" (p. 106). While Aschenbach himself is echoed in the hotel's nickname, the "Ash," the name of the beautiful young boy who is the object of Mann's protagonist's desire, Tadeusz, is given to Dr. Chilcott. In turn, Petra concludes: "I'll give you dead men in deckchairs! Wait'll you read the end of Death in Venice!" (254). The use of these embeddings is so flagrant and self-conscious that the reader is almost tempted to dismiss them as comic diversions. But the laughter in Findley's texts is frequently a clue to their epistemological doubleness, a sign that he is making mischief with conventional frames. For the writer Findley is always-already an interested reader in his use of intertexts. This awareness of the inevitably dialogical relationship of all reading is implicit in Lacan's own model for psychoanalysis in a return to Freud informed by a radical critique of traditional ethnography. Against the behaviourist notion that the patient can be read as a human object, Lacan's revolutionary Discours de Rome insisted on the "intrasubjective topography" of all analysis (1984, 69). If the only intermediary the analyst—like the reader—has to work with is the patient's word, "there is no word without a reply" (9). In a similar way, the Death in Venice echoes in The Telling of Lies are inevitably framed by Findley's own situated dialogue with Mann's fiction, one that refuses the Petra/fied meanings of the classic novella in favour of a more dissident text. As always in Findley, cinematic as well as theatrical texts also provide important interweavings. A number of the key scenes in the Japanese prisoner of war camp at Java repeat whole frames of a little

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known Claudette Colbert film, Three Came Home. Much more integral to the thematics of The Telling of Lies, however, is Antonioni's Blow-Up (1971).1 In Findleys own detective fiction, the distinguished landscape architect and amateur photographer, Vanessa Van Home, shoots two rolls of film on the day of the murder of Calder Maddox. As in Blow-Up, all the necessary clues to the murder are there in the photographs, but reading them proves problematic. It will take the whole course of the narrative for Vanessa—and the reader—to sort out their meaning. At the close, it becomes clear that the camera remains obscura in both a moral and epistemological sense. In a novel which repeatedly plays with the theatrical and cinematic concept of "casting," Findley himself directs and casts the central role, with Vanessa Redgrave, Antonioni's filmic protagonist, providing the camp namesake for his own heroine. In the film, a photographer (based on fashion photographer David Bailey and played by David Hemmings), caught up in the hedonistic and destructive London of the 1960s, shoots a peaceful park scene which turns out to be the scene of a murder. After the murder accomplice, played by Vanessa Redgrave, follows him to his studio to retrieve the compromising film, he is enmeshed in the violent turn of events first puzzled together, frame by frame, in successive photographic blow-ups of the original scene. The film closes with an enigmatic theatrical sequence in which the photographer watches a group of mimes in a tennis court. When the improvisational players lose an imaginary tennis ball over the net, the Hemmings character is silently beckoned to retrieve it, thereby joining their game. At this point, he is no longer the amoral voyeur or mere onlooker in life. The photography theme of The Telling of Lies continues Findleys persistent fascination with the medium which most dramatically exposes the myth of transparency, promising unmediated access to reality and truth. Yet despite his postmodern penchant for making trouble at traditional sites of knowledge, Findley's fiction, like Antonionis film, explicitly repeats the injunction to "pay attention" (359), the action of the crime sending out ripples to the larger social domain. Findleys murder mystery, in short, quickly connects up with the larger question of evil itself. In the end, weaving back and forth between the past and the present, and fusing memory with history, The Telling of Lies emerges as a complex lesson on reading the darkness. Though Nessa's commitment to the traditional sleuthing role is a reluctant one, she becomes the inheritor of a long line of literary

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spinster detectives (see Joan Roberts 1995), a close cousin of Agatha Christie s Miss Marple, who shares her fondness for Japanese gardens. But the cinematic crosscutting that structures the novel quickly situates the crime in relation to a wider historical stage. In turn, this spiralling backward is inseparable from the narrator s own retracing of the arc of her personal history. The privileged psychic space in this case is also the scene of wounding in official history, namely the notorious Japanese prisoner-of-war camp at Bandung, Java, where Nessa was interned with her mother for 36 months between 1942 and 1945. The filtering of the novels action through the first person narrator's own memories of this history layers past and present in montage sequences to underline two thematic registers in the novel: the first extends the particular crime at hand to a wider plane of evil; the second moves toward an almost buried subtext of love and lies. Yet evil in The Telling of Lies is as complex as it is palpable, extending its tentacles outward to the whole social field. On the one hand, Findley is concerned to deliberately counter the stylized vision of Fascism implicit in his earlier novels. In The Telling of Lies, evil manifests itself in a peculiarly Japanese duality of beauty and violence. It is the Japanese Colonel Norimitsu, who is responsible both for the death of Nessas father and for her love of gardens, who counters the Manichean allegory: "Even monsters are not always monsters" (203). Yet if evil is deliberately defined here in ways that test and correct the stylizations of the earlier characterizations, it is also drawn in terms closer to home than before. The unfolding plot exposes nefarious American CIA dealings which turn out, on closer inspection, to have a Canadian connection. The novels moral instabilities are inseparable from this radical critique of the sign in a crime narrative which performs Umberto Eco s famous syllogism: The fundamental characteristic of the sign is that I can use it to lie. So that everything that can be used to lie (since everything that serves to tell a lie can also be used, in the right circumstances, to tell the truth). (Eco 1975, 12)

Calder Maddox s mistress Lily lies to the grand matriarch of the Ash, Arabella Barrie, that her lover died of a stroke. In turn, his death is kept from the newspapers so that reporters will not descend on the area where the American president is staying. A pair of strangers, who turn out to be detectives, encourage Dr. Chilcott to say that Calder

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Maddox died in his mistress Lily's arms, the victim of an unnamed plague. In contrast, two young characters, Joe and Judy, refuse to lie, their innocence at odds with the behaviour of the adults, who inhabit a world which increasingly reveals itself to be a tissue of fabrications: "Of course, to say I had seen her was a lie. But what, now, was not a lie?" (278). Government, Nessa conies to understand, consists almost entirely of such people: "I lied in prison; they lied there on Lucy's terrace" (288). What begins to emerge is the unstable reality of a society grounded in collective falsehoods. The ritual decorum expected of public officials is momentarily suspended in a theatrical scene which parodies the real-life "slap heard round the world" of Sondra Gotlieb, wife of the Canadian ambassador to Washington in the late 1980s, a public performance that provided a temporary rupture in the world of diplomatic lies. Yet the plot itself is full of theatrical disguises, with Mercedes Mannheim's Filipino maid "Imelda" dressed as Lily Porter and Lily's own attractiveness revealed as no more than an elaborate feminine masquerade. Finally, the tape recorder played nightly to Lily to erase her memory of the murder rubs out what she knows to be true: "What you have known till now is a lie and what you remember is false" (319). Like the Hollywood cold war film, The Manchurian Candidate, what emerges is a drama of brainwashing and political intrigue in which truth and lies trade places. Realms of value in the novel are structured as gendered spaces which correspond to the two hotels which focus the action of the narrative. Findley dedicates his fiction to "The Atlantic House Hotel/and all who sailed in her." This real-life hotel in Maine, where the author spent his boyhood summers, is transformed in the fiction into the Aurora Sands Hotel, the "Ash." Under siege by developers and scheduled to be razed, it signifies a realm of genteel old-world traditions, but it is also a site of historically feminine values. By contrast, all the political intrigues in the novel, with their trails of corruption in high places, take place in the nouveau-riche Pine Point Inn, the site of masculine power in the text. Nessa's sleuthing takes her in and out of the rooms of Pine Point Inn, in a circle of intrigue complicated by the fact that the American president is secretly meeting there with his top advisors. In the end, American and CIA involvement in the crime will be confirmed, but only at a second remove. Like Atwood in Surfacing, Findley deliberately overturns the Canadian nationalist stereotype of the ugly American in favour of a menacing Canadian connection. It is Nessa's oldest friend,

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Marguerite Riches, who will turn out to have killed Calder Maddox with a chemical from his own medicine bag, in revenge for his complicity in a treacherous series of brainwashing experiments that left her Canadian diplomat husband a wheel chair invalid. But Findley's fictional text has the moral urgency of a real-life series of events. The fate of Michael Riches was shared by at least nine Canadians who filed suits for compensation from the CIA for brainwashing experiments carried out by Dr. Ewen Cameron in the late 1950s and early 1960s (see Collins, 1988). All were patients at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University in Montreal, unaware of the nature of the experiments performed on them, attempts to counter Chinese and Soviet brainwashing techniques involving sleep deprivation, use of hallucinogenic drugs, and a dangerous process of psychic driving aimed at breaking down patients' defences. In Findley's fictional rewriting, the pharmaceutical firm of E.L. Lilly is reflected in the name of Nessa's friend. In turn, Nessa comes to recognize that her unwitting involvement in the solution of this murder and mystery involves larger ethical issues than the crime at hand. In Bandung, as a young girl, she had come face to face with the complexity of evil in a single scene: "My ignorance, until that moment of the truth about human nature, had been as wide as the Sea of Japan; and the Sea of Japan was sand" (203). Confounding traditional categories, The Telling of Lies turns out, like Findley's first novel, The Last of the Crazy People, to be a murder in the service of love. If Nessa is at first ill equipped to understand such a motive, it is because of her own self-imposed prison, one that mimics the external landscape of her earlier years and unwittingly repeats its lesson. Her search involves her in a backward trajectory in time which unites the historical connection between psychoanalysis and the detective narrative, the mystery within as well as the mystery without. What Nessa registers in her diary becomes in the end an important clue to the enigma of the detective herself, in pursuit of which it is the reader who must play sleuth.

The only images I've ever created in all of my professional life—consciously and with a vengeance—have been the studied images of gardens. Nothing, by will, but images of order and space. And in my photographs? What is. But never accidents; never the overturning of reality. Not anarchy. (Findley 1986a, 27)

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The murder of Calder Maddox is followed by a second puzzle early in the novel: the uncanny (following Freud, unheimlich) iceberg, whose huge presence, looming out of the sea, incredulously presents itself to all the vacationers this summer in Maine. To Nessa, it becomes an assault on the careful design she has imposed on her life as well as her gardens. The iceberg becomes in her mind both a bomb, like the murderous explosions at Hiroshima and Nagaski, and the prison of her childhood experience in Bandung. "Meaningless" as well as "incomprehensible," it is terrifying, above all, "because it will not go away, in spite of reason' (28, emphasis added). Though the shape of its huge, white mass presents an eerie likeness to the Capitol building in Washington, this comparison operates only as a false clue in the plot. Far from confirming the importance of the political intrigues around the American president to the crime riddle, the iceberg embodies the deeper enigma at the core of the narrator herself. From the start, the iceberg serves as a theatrical stage set which resonates in multiple ways throughout the narrative. As a surrealist spectre, the iceberg recalls both the themes and imagery of D.M. Thomas's The White Hotel, where the dialectic of subject and object in modes of knowing is extended to Freud himself and his inner circle, Jung and Ferenczi, the history of psychoanalysis itself written over a whole range of private wounds and obsessions. But it fuses more explicitly with a comic subplot that turns on the readers knowledge of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, whose very title signals the final mystery of death. Part of the puzzle surrounding Calder Maddox s death lies in the enigmatic ice trucks which appear at the stable where his body lies, in a playful parody of O'Neills death-haunted drama. Here, the anachronistic iceman who comes turns out to have nothing at all to do with Maddox, who is safely tucked away in a Maytag freezer. Yet this black comedy also has a more serious side. It is the first person narrators own fear of death which haunts the narrative, placing her once more at the centre of the novel's tissue of concerns. Having experienced two heart attacks, Nessa now writes as though under sentence of death. "I fear too greatly the consequence of pushing myself beyond the limits. I make no apology for that. When my chest begins to bind and my arms begin to ache, I hope to stand up and count away the apprehension ... advise myself that I am not going to die" (73). She finds herself waking up in the middle of the night with "Calder Maddox's face juxtaposed against the shape of the iceberg" (81). Calder s death becomes a kind of pretext for an entirely different order

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of sleuthing, one in which she will have to scour her memory for answerable clues to her own buried life. Like Little Terry Fidget, the Williams boy coaxed into drawing icebergs by his mother, she will have to be coerced into exploring unplumbed depths, to be reminded "how much of the iceberg hangs below the water" (83). Yet Nessa is not alone in seeking order and beauty to contain the chaos. Jane Williams redraws the "pretty" mirroring part of the iceberg into a lime green, converting it into her own version of the garden—a protective move that anticipates Nessa s final gesture in the novel. The garden and the iceberg provide the central organizing figures of The Telling of Lies in ways that recall the tension between the forces of the rational and irrational in Death in Venice. Though Manns text is almost an encyclopaedia of decadent codes, with a Nietzschean dialectic of Apollonian and Dionysian that is at odds with Findley s contemporary and often comic tone, there are important structural parallels between the two fictions. Nessa s love of formal gardens with their "studied images" combines with her fear of "anarchy" and chaos to suggest similar impulses to those at work in Manns artist figure. Aschenbach is famed throughout Europe as the author "who had written The Abject, and in a style of classical purity renounced bohemianism and all its works, all sympathy with the abyss" (71-72). Yet his last days in Venice plunge him into a world of sensual beauty that overthrows the lifelong reign of order. Read as a Freudian text, his journey represents the return of the repressed. But the formal elements of Mann's novella also invite us to read it as a queer text, reminding us that the very principle of abjection, named in Aschenbach s title, operates as surplus in an economy of regulated desire, the deviant term that reinscribes the norm.2 In the end, Timothy Findley s The Telling of Lies also provides a transgressive subtext for reading, in a spiralling backward that repeats the trajectory of an analysis. Nessa's first response to the white spectre looming in the background is one of disavowal: "/ have only dreamed an iceberg (28). Yet further on in her journey into the self, she will confess more candidly: "A man has died, there's an iceberg. I'm afraid" (114). At last she comes to recognize her own kinship with the iceberg: "I, too, am cold. I, too, am stranded. I, too, am nine-tenths hidden" (260). But what is hidden from her is also what haunts her in a fear of the heart that provides the central leitmotif in the narrative. While the seemingly frivolous as well as feminine Lily has a "chocolate" heart of gold, the president of the United States seeks to cure his damaged heart

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with a "bypass" operation, a sure, if comic, indictment of him in human terms. In turn, the song that Nessa hears as she wanders in and out of the rooms of the Pine Point Inn punctuates her search for her old friend in ways that layer new meanings in the novel: Some say a heart is just like a wheel When you bend it—you can't mend it And my love for you is like a sinking ship And my heart is on that ship out in mid-ocean. (ISO)3 At the close of the novel, hearing the same refrain once more, Nessa expresses the hope that Lily can hear it, a clue to inchoate feelings that she cannot articulate. In fact, it will take the whole of the narrative to unravel the long history of Nessa's problems of the heart, in a journey that takes her all the way back to her childhood and the wartime prison at Bandung which set the stage for her own self-imposed incarceration of later years. It is Lily's surprise birthday gift of a leather-bound volume, along with a Japanese card of women at court, that impels Nessa to write at all. Providing her with a place to explore her past as well as the mysterious events unfolding around her, it becomes the framing device for the first person narration itself. Nessa's public persona is that of the distinguished landscape architect who has been consulted in her time by the likes of Ludi Mies and Frank Lloyd Wright. But Lily gave "this book," she reasons, "to the other me; the absolutely private me I didn't realize she knew—whose solitude must surely have seemed, for all these years, so self-engrossed, self-satisfied and unnatural because it has been so disciplined" (8). Even at the Ash, she bolts her door more firmly than the others: "My guardian is chains.... Whether to keep this prisoner in or keep the prisoner out, I'll never know" (9). It was at Bandung prison, too, that she first learned to dissemble: "That I can lie to my heart and keep it pumping by telling it I've taken a pill I have not taken is a direct result of my training there. And by such lies, I may yet survive another attack" (36). But Nessa will prove to have lied to her heart in more subtle ways. Lily remembers that the day before Nessa's birthday is the Feast of the Assumption and Nessa muses to herself: "one Blessed Virgin deserves another" (2). In fact, she will later say of herself, "I've never had a love affair—of which I'm aware" (33). Her qualification provides one more clue to the psychoanalytic knot at the heart of Findley's mystery, a

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private drama of repression located in a wider social and historical field. But Nessa's template for reading the crime is inevitably shaped by her own mode of seeing, caught in a tangled web of displacement and desire. As a landscape architect and lover of beauty, her interest in photography reflects an aesthetics rather than a hermeneutics, her search for meaning in events compromised by her intensely formal visual preoccupations. On the very day of the murder, she prepares herself to photograph "images of loons I'd heard as I was dressing. Nothing prepared me for what I found in their place" (18). She is fascinated by the sort of light offered by fog—but this is a distinct disadvantage to the would-be sleuth, who must be guided by precision and clarity of outline. What's more, since her eye is so dominant, Nessa misses the crucial olfactory clues in the crime, the strange smell exuding from Calder Maddox's body, which will turn out to be the murder weapon. Her patrician, old-world values further compromise her readings of people and events. Like her snobbery toward Lily and her mother, Maisie Cotton, she explains Meg's loss of control almost entirely in class terms. Even more limiting for her detective role, she resists photographing Meg's devotion to Michael in her reluctance to expose the raw nerves of pain—yet this would lead her closer to the murder motive itself. Most seriously of all, Nessa's private history bears directly on her capacity as sleuth, severely compromising her ability to read a crime motivated by passion. In fact, it is precisely in registering her lifelong suspicion of love, as well as of men, that she unwittingly stumbles on the true murder motive: "If only Meg were not committed to her devotion. Devotion kills. Who knows better than I? Love is not good to those who love with all their being" (44, emphasis added). Nessa's journal returns her to another scene, one which, far from being a stable site of truth and witnessing, confirms the secondary processes at work in her lifelong habit of repression. As in Findley's earlier novel, The Wars (1978), we are reminded of the unreliability of memory, which takes "all its cues at random.... Memory is also a shield. A form of self-protection. There are things we do not want to know" (132, emphasis added).4 Throughout The Telling of Lies, the riddle generated by Calder's murder and Nessa's subsequent exploration of her past stakes out two separate but parallel thematic clusters in the novel. The first takes her on a journey whose mid-point is the lesson posed by the mime parable at the end of Antonioni's film: "To be a witness is to be accountable" (132). Yet before the end of the novel, she will have travelled even further into the vortex of evil, confronted by a choice in which she will have to abandon

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ethical absolutes—symptomatic of a moral universe no longer drawn in chiaroscuro tones. But it is the second narrative thread that operates as a more classical analysis. Nessas return to the scene of the prisoner-ofwar camp at Bandung becomes a descent into the unconscious in its strict Lacanian formulation as "this subject unknown to the self" (in Felman 1985, 1025). The operation of the censor, which is graphically figured in both the tape recorder which sets out to erase Lilys memories and the "brainwashing" techniques performed on Michael, is already present in Bandung in the scene in which Nessas mother refuses the painful reality of her murdered husband lying in a pool of blood and rainwater. Instead, she preserved "her own secret truth about his death and she kept this hidden in the darkest corner of her heart"—that he had died in her arms of the plague (149). Believing this alternative reality, she also "harboured the fear that because my father had loved her—she had been the cause of his death. And feared that I believed this, too. Love was the disease' (149, emphasis added). Throughout the narrative, Nessas own fear of the dangers of love, keenest with regard to Meg s intense devotion to Michael, suggests her own version of the lying heart. As the result of their marriage, Nessa has become the "last best friend" (40), forever distanced, if not exiled, from the Meg who had once been for her "the paragon of everything a woman ought to be" (143). When she sees Megs contorted face in the encounter with the young boy on the beach, it takes "whole seconds for it to rearrange itself into anything even remotely resembling the face I loved" (137). But in fact, the evidence of Nessas attachment to other women throughout the novel provides an ironic counterpoint to her candid admission that she has never had a love affair of which she was aware. The object of her first experience in loving is the vulnerable and pregnant young Moira Livesay, a fellow prisoner in the camp at Bandung. Nessa struggles to define this love in the same dialectic of truth and lies that informs the novel as a whole. She was such a pretty child; with honey hair and soft blue eyes as pale as flowers. I loved her—I think. Don't lie, Vanessa. You loved her. As a parent loves a child. She became, in the end, entirely your own. (115)

Don't lie, Vanessa. From the start, Nessa has struggled with the winding and duplicitous pattern of her heart: "Why is it Lily reminds me of Moira? And why, I wonder, am I afraid for her?" (117). It is Nessas

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stubborn if equivocal love for Lily which provoked her reluctant sleuthing at all, giving her courage to continue at the dangerous game, even after Lawrence Chilcott insists on giving up. Nessa's narrative informs the reader early on that she was born in the Japanese Year of the Ox, whose sign introduces the diary-like entries which structure the novel. Yet, one element of her horoscope remains unfulfilled: "She is rash when confronted" (118). Nessa remarks that she has never— yet—done a rash thing in her life. But all that will change dramatically as she is impelled by new motives, seeking to protect first Lily and then Meg. "Everyone I loved and everyone I trust appears to be in trouble" (190). Nessa's memory uncovers a similar structure of female friendships, also set against a struggle of good and evil, in the prison at Bandung. In an attempt to save the life of the glamorous actress Dorothy Busch, ill with malaria, her mother sends Nessa to the black market fence to trade her gold wedding ring for quinine and aspirin—a ring that Colonel Norimitsu will secretly return to her in a gesture that extends the thematics of moral ambiguity in the novel. But the important lesson of this initial tableau lies in its anticipation of Nessa's own course of action. She, too, will "go to the fence," breaking the law in the name of female friendship. Nessa's wish that Lily hear the song echoing throughout the rooms of the hotel ("And my love for you is like a sinking ship") becomes, in the end, a secret valentine of sorts, a staged enunciation of a place of desire that proceeds from this subject unknown to the self. Nessa's resolute independence has led her lifelong to refuse both the patriarchal organization of marriage and the alternative naming of "spinster" (see Faderman 1991, 15), historically ascribed to women outside a heterosexual economy.5 Throughout the novel, she registers a persistent suspicion of culturally masculine spheres. Nigel Forestead, the rule-bound Ottawa civil servant, for one, stands for "all that is worst about manhood: vanity, acquisitiveness and misogyny" (209). Yet, as throughout Findley's novels, cultural gender alignments are not innocently connected with biological sex. Nessa's friend Mercedes Mannheim, whose name suggests her masculine affinities, wears overcoats "almost military in cut" (274) which convey "the look of a little general" (329).6 But if Nessa, at one level, understands her allegiance to a realm of traditional female values, she remains a self-confessed expert in lying to her heart. Clues as to the nature and importance of female affiliations

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in The Telling of Lies can be found in Findley's previous novel, Not Wanted on the Voyage, his most allegorical critique of patriarchal relations to date, and one that sets up the topologizing of male and female spaces that informs later novels. Ann Jefferson reminds us that "one of the first moves in any reading is to place a new text in the intertextual context of the corpus to which it belongs" (1990, 111). Jefferson coins the term "sister-text" to describe the relation between novels (or novel and autobiography) by the same author—a particularly resonant concept for two fictions which set out to overturn historically masculine genealogies. But Findleys revisionist Noah story is an important sistertext for The Telling of Lies in more ways than meet the eye. Unlike Hannah and Emma, whose lesbian relationship is explicit in Not Wanted on the Voyage (constituting an erotic as well as loving counterpart to the violent sexuality of Noah and his sons), Nessa has, lifelong, denied any capacity for loving at all/ Within the narrative itself, the traces of her buried life are either disavowed or textually displaced, providing the reader with only the subtlest of markers. The epigraph which provides the novels title suggests one important clue, evoking the "proper name" of American writer John Cheever, whose closeted homosexuality framed his work as well as his personal life on a fault line of "deception." In an introduction to his fathers letters, Benjamin Cheever comments: "And yet it wasn't simple closet homosexuality. It seems to me now that deception was an essential part of his character" (1988,18). In turn, the epigraph drawn from Cheever provides an important gloss on Nessa's self-deceptions: " The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life (emphasis added)." The younger Cheever comments that "When he was an older man, my father would like to refer to the vows of Holy Matrimony as a preposterous but extremely useful lie" (75). Cheever s biographer, Scott Donaldson, suggests that it was in his fiction that the American writer "tried to uncover the secret he was discreetly maintaining in his private life. 'Can't they see?' he asked" (1990, p. x). Yet, how do we read the "life" in the interstices of the "text"? The reader of Findleys detective fiction must, like the analyst, attend to the "not-said which lies in the holes of discourse" (Lacan 1984, 71). Fittingly, it is Nessa's own words—her response to Lily's gift of the diary at the start of the narrative—which provides the most audacious clue to her dilemma: "Somepeople do the queerest things' (2). Hearing the love song which echoes through the halls of the hotel for the second time, she later will be led to recall: "Surely it goes beyond the limits of

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irony that Lily Porter gave me this book in which I write—and that its very first words concern the queer things people do" (357). It is in this rhyming phrase in the text that Nessa's skein of lies comes unravelled, her diary a testament to the silences and ellipses of women's lives historically: "Lying is done with words, and also with silence" (Rich 1979, 186). As the only Findley novel to take the shape of a woman's first person life-writing, it matter-of-factly realizes Hannah's rage for expression in Not Wanted on the Voyage? Conscious of a patriarchal tyranny which forbids her to speak, Hannah is filled with anger at her enforced silence: "Nothing. Never a word, but she was full of words. Sentences and paragraphs. Whispers and shouts. Hundreds of them. Thousands. But she was a woman and could not speak. Aloud. But only think in silence and go mad" (243). Banished from the official archives of patriarchal history, she finds a secret space in its margins: in the letters, diaries, and journals of unauthorized lives and histories. Cloistered with a "handmade book," she copies out in twenty separate margins: "By god ... if women had writen stories, they would have writen of men more wikkednesse than all the sex of Adam may redresse" (288). Though Nessa Van Home's own classbound and patrician history shapes her in a different subjectivity as well as rhetorical mode than her fictional predecessor, she shares Hannah's location in what Adrienne Rich has called a "lesbian continuum" (1980, 648-49)—a structure of female friendships and intensities that have shaped the very pattern of her existence. Her predicament finds a fictional echo in the novel which anticipates the imagery of lies of the heart in Findley's detective novel, Jane Rule's Desert of the Heart (1993). Nessa's own spiralling backward returns her to that scene at Bandung which first taught her the danger inherent in love. But in a further twist of the narrative as well as analytic knot, her diary uncovers those silences in her text which more fully explain her enigma—in a structure of lawless desire that makes her the criminal as well as the detective. In Desert of the Hearty the protagonists journey takes her closer to the understanding of the mother-daughter relationship which remains at the frayed borders of Findley's mystery. In a similar way, Adrienne Rich's reading of lesbian sexuality insists on the return to what Virginia Woolf, writing of her mother, called "the dark core" (1979, 191), the revisionist narrative of mothers and daughters that, like Findley's story, overturns the Oedipal plot of fathers and sons.

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And because they all have hair of Druid blue we call their court Stonehenge. Dread things are decided and condoned—or so we have always imagined— whenever they lean together, all towards the centre of Arabella Barrie and we see them nod in unison. But they have a pact—and what is decided—what is condoned is never told. (Telling of Lies, 47)

In its refusal of reason and determinate truth, The Telling of Lies challenges one of the cornerstones of the traditional detective plot. Yet no element in Findleys novel more dramatically subverts the generic demands of classic detective fiction than its ending, which rejects the restoration of official order in favour of an alternative—and outlaw— sphere of justice in the Court of the Mothers. The choice location which the families of Nessas own mother's generation occupy on the beach is called The Cockpit, an ironic commentary on traditional gender hierarchies. Every evening, all these women hold their court in the dominant corner of the Hotel lobby. They have sat there as long as human memory can conjure.... The word court may be misleading. I do not speak of Dowager Queens and Ladies-in-Waiting; I speak of Judges. It is a court like that. Supreme. (47)

Before the novel is concluded, it will have become clear that the judicial power of these matriarchs is as real as it is apparent—its meanings bound up with a series of word clusters: stones, Druids, bones, Stonehenge, which operate cumulatively to name the source of their authority. Nessa herself supplies something of the historical research on the "real Stonehenge" (74), and concludes that Arabella Barrie is the pivotal element in the design, the "blue altar block" know as the "Altar Stone." While her name means "beautiful altar," it is also a phonic echo of that of Nessas dead mother, Rose Adella. She is, in reality, a "surrogate mother" (149) to Nessa, her "dreadful authority" (77) inseparable from her mother s ghost. In fact, Arabella made a commitment to her old friend to keep a lifelong eye on her daughter. Arabellas pre-patriarchal court of justice is drawn in a fantasy register in the novel, one appropriate to the mythic resonances of Druid legend. In this iconic theatre, "a lifted eyebrow" is merely an indication of rebuke. But the "shifting of a fingertip—the touching of a pearl—

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may indicate a death sentence" (293). Arabella's critical moment of judgment comes at the end of the novel, when the mystery of Calder Maddox's death is finally plumbed. Nessa is, for the first time, invited to sit in her mother's place to hear Arabellas transgressive ruling. "How sad it would be," the matriarch offers, "if this just and proper death were to be marred by a meaningless injunction, at this point, of justice. Of course, by justice—I mean: the Law as she is writ" (355). The feminine pronoun is deliberate. Arabella concludes her judgment with a ritual which re-writes the patriarchal transfer of power from father to son in an alternative line which extends from mothers to daughters. She gives Nessa the gift of an embroidered pillow, "a single Japanese Iris—rising from a stone" (356). At one level, the ceremony dramatizes the site of women's art (here, embroidery) historically, which has largely been marginalized within the patriarchal museum. But the particular set of meanings produced by the iconography fuse the two seemingly unrelated worlds of Japanese and ancient Druidic culture. The pillow's motif echoes both the duality of the legendary Druids and that of Colonel Norimitsu himself, to whom Nessa dedicates her book: "Who, with one hand, killed my father and with the other made my fathers grave a garden. Death before life. So very Japanese" (8). But if traditional Japanese culture is historically a complex rendering of a heightened aesthetic sense and often ritualized violence, Nessa herself moves closer to Colonel Norimitsu at the end of the novel, in a deliberate blurring of the Manichean allegory. Her love of Japanese gardens, like the pillow given her by Arabella, once more fuses with Druidic history and legend: it is also a love of stones. Nessa's lesson in fierce resolve at the end of this novel cannot be separated from this complex and over-determined site of imagery. In the name of the alternative justice meted out by the Court of the Mothers, she vows to do whatever is necessary to safeguard Meg's secret: "If Lily Porter moves in Meg's direction—I will have to move in hers" (35). This decision involves her not only in a transgression of traditional values and norms but in an even more complex ethical dilemma, choosing one friendship over another. Nessa, at this point, has become something of a Druidess herself: "I admit I have joined my enemies. I admit that I am prepared to do what they have done: even use their weapons. I admit that this is wrong. I would ask whoever questions this to tell me what is right" (35). This challenge to unproblematic moral categories extends Nessa's identification with the Japanese Colonel Norimitsu—in terms that

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almost certainly owe something to Findley's own concern with the demonology of a World War II narrative expunged of Canadian responsibility for wrongs in the internment of Japanese-Canadians.9 But if Nessa's capacity for violence seems at odds with a binary of gender in which women occupy the valorized term of the pair, a closer reading of the novel's layered image-cluster can help us to re-think this contradiction. Despite the pervasive critique of patriarchal institutions in the novels, Findley refuses a reifying of masculine and feminine categories outside of a theatre of gender in which both perform as masquerade (Gabriel 1994a, 244-45). Important evidence for this reading lies in the number of cross-over characters who deliberately break up Findleys gender allegories. In the case of the myth-history of the Druids, Findley uncovered a usable counter text to the idealizing cultural feminism that seemed to dominate his revisionist Noah story. Traces of Findleys research into pre-patriarchal Celtic religions for the writing of Not Wanted on the Voyage spill over in important ways into the Druid figurations in The Telling of Lies. A number of historians have situated the Druids in the larger Celtic social order of their day, one in which women were frequently elevated to supreme positions of power (Piggott 1968, 48). Yet within this Celtic tradition proper, the mother goddess was typically a figure of duality, "whose fertile aspects are paralleled by their corresponding powers of destruction" (Ross 1967, 21). This association of the Druids with cruelty, historically connected with the practice of human sacrifice, echoes in the stern edict pronounced by Arabella at the close, as well as in the course of action that, first Meg, and then Nessa, resolve to take in the novel. But the most important aspect of Findleys analogy relates to the judicial sphere itself, where the Druids have had a controversial but lingering reputation down through the centuries. One source suggests that Roman opposition to the Druids was largely based on the fact that they had considerable power in politics and "the administration of justice" (Cavendish n.d., 88). Yet along with their formidable judicial reputation, this cult, whose women held priestly functions in Ireland, were known in particular for their divining skills. The very etymology of their name suggests an alternative sphere of knowledge: the word "druid," classical scholar Stuart Pigott tells us, "presupposes a Gaulish druvis, from druvids, and probably related to the Greek drus> an oak tree, with the ending cognate with the Indo-European wid, cto know'" (1968, 719). If Nessa's capacity for violent—as well as lawless—action seems to complicate our reading of her, this is in keeping with the novel's

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destabilizing of seemingly unproblematic categories of good and evil in a complex morality play in which Vanessa and her Japanese captor are secret sharers. What Nessa has learned from the alternative juridical sphere of the Court of the Mothers is the self-same lesson which Lucy teaches Noah's son Ham—that "ruthlessness" is sometimes necessary in the world: "ifyou arent going to kill, we aren't going to win' (Findley 1984, 295, emphasis added).10 This lesson, drawn from the revolt of the lower orders, has been Meg's governing principle of action throughout the righting of the wrong to her own wounded Michael. Nessa s journey, too, takes her to the edge of the human heart, as well as the iceberg she has feared all her life. She has learned from Colonel Norimitsu, not only the nature of evil but the necessity of building a garden in its midst. Like Thomas Mann's aesthete, Aschenbach, she has learned to accommodate herself to the iceberg in a narrative trajectory which joins eras and thanatos-—the twin forces at the heart of the human subject.

"L, I know it begins with L." Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass11 Nessa's own analysis in her first-person diary becomes our text for reading The Telling of Lies. Although the official detective plot works toward narrative closure, there is a second-order puzzle here which functions as the place of mystery, marked by elliptical gaps in the text as well as a range of metonymic displacements. Yet, where have we heard something of this story before—about riddles of transgression and buried narratives, crime and what Theresa de Lauretis has called "another measure of desire"? (in Roof 1991, 79). The naming of Freud's own stories from his patients' files as "case-histories" foregrounds the relationship between psychoanalysis and the detective story in a series of names that have entered twentieth century mythology: The Wolf Man, Anna O., Little Hans, and Dora. Like characters in a Pirandello play, they seem to have stepped out of their original narrative frames to urge new stagings. In the context of contemporary revisionings of psychoanalysis, none has been more frequently cited or interpreted than the famous case of Dora, the patient Freud first saw in 1900. At first, Freud figured himself as much burglar as detective, writing confidently

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to Fliess that "the case has opened smoothly to my collection of picklocks" (Marcus in Bernheimer and Kahane 1985, 61). Yet in the end, it was what Charles Bernheimer calls the "productive failures" of this unfinished analysis that "invites us to read Dora as an overdetermined figure in Freud's unconscious, the name for those gaps in his selfknowledge" which require us to read anew (18). Published in 1905 as Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, the Dora case has become, in recent years, almost a topos of feminist discourse around the blind spots of Freudian psychoanalysis. Judith Roof's important reading of Freud's complex and contradictory handling of the case traces a history of self-erasure which "raises questions about the relation of desire, reading, knowledge, and interpretation, and the effects of Freud's identifications and assumptions as he reads Dora's history and motives" (1991, 175). Roof argues that Freud's elision of Dora's lesbian desire for Frau K., in a triangular narrative that instead repeats as Oedipal logic, represses his own earlier reading: "I have never yet come through a single psychoanalysis of a man or a woman without having to take into account a very considerable current of homosexuality" (Freud in Roof, 180). Instead, in his 1905 narrativization of his analysis of Dora, Freud erases the insights that threaten to destabilize his emerging narrative of the family romance, deliberately, in Roof's turn of phrase, losing the key that he had already found. In his own reading of the tortuous history of the case, Lacan suggests that, although Dora was deceived in the hidden object of her desire, "Freud was fooled along with her" (1984, 70). Findley's own text sets out to fool the reader of The Telling of Lies in a layered crime narrative that becomes an ironic and unwitting repetition of his strategies throughout the fiction: a rare self-conscious performance of his own pervasive double coding.13 Foucault reminds us that the very term "homosexual" is a nineteenth century invention, taking its place in a proliferation of medical discourses around sexuality which required one to "detects—as a lesion, a dysfunction, or a symptom" (Foucault 1981, 44, emphasis added). The Telling of Lies becomes, in turn, not only a commentary on the historical relationship between psychoanalysis and detective fiction, but a writing—and a reading—of the criminal nature of desire itself, always in excess of regulated norms and narratives. Yet, though the offical crime riddle moves toward resolution in the novel, Nessa's own analysis (like Dora's) remains unfinished: "You will see that the last word of [wo] man's relation to this discourse which [s]he does not know is—death" (Lacan in Felman 1985, 1028).14

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Nessas journey into selfhood is, finally, stopped short by the single event that forecloses the subject's meditation on her own historicity. Her answer to the iceberg comes in the final mute gesture in which she pulls down the shade ("It is green") to her room, evoking Andrew Marvell and the most famous garden poem in the English language: "Annihilating all that's made I To a green thought in a green shade" NOTES 1. Findley wrote a documentary entitled The Films of Bergman and Antomonifor television in 1964. My source for Three Came Home\s an entirely serendipitous viewing of the old Claudette Colbert movie on late night television, in which astonishingly concrete images from Findleys novel appeared suddenly on the screen (pools of rainwater, a Japanese captor who performs acts of kindness, etc.) For Findleys fascination with Hollywood film, see Gabriel 1995. Findley himself has said more obliquely in an interview: "I was thinking actually of film—how images cross-fade" (1986b, 10). 2. For a recent reading of Mann's fiction as a submerged scene of homosexual desire, see Anthony Heilbut, Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). 3. Findley makes the following acknowledgment in his novel: lyrics from "Heart Like a Wheel" reprinted by permission of Anna McGarrigle, Garden Court Music, Copyright © 1970. Note also the text's quotation of McGarrigle s line: "Only love can take a human heart and turn it inside out" (181). 4. See also Findley, Inside Memory. "If the memory is a bad one, say of pain or of a death—then it's clouded" (1990, 4). 5. In Inside Memory, Findley tells us that Dorothy Warren, a real-life acquaintance at the Atlantic House, "is the very model of the women who solves the mystery" in The Telling of Lies (1990, 255). Having joined the army in 1941, she had been put in charge at one point "of transporting three hundred WACs from New York City to London" (255). Lilian Faderman (1991) reminds us of the pervasive public impression that the Women's Army Auxiliary (WAAC) "was the ideal breeding ground for lesbians and had considerable basis in fact" (120). This connection with the mystery at the heart of Vanessa Van Home may or may not be incidental, since the character is, in any event, such a compendium of real-life, fictional, and cinematic sources. 6. Given Findleys fascination with female stars and Greta Garbo in particular, who figures in both The Butterfly Plague and Famous Last Words, Mercedes' name as well as her gender ambiguity almost certainly echoes that of Garbo s one-time lover, Mercedes de Acosta, who was the first to

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suggest to the Swedish star that she play the title role in Queen Christina (Cronowicz 1990, 315). See Gabriel 1995, 23Iff. for the Queen Christina intertext in The Butterfly Plague. 7. The erotic scene in which Hannah bathes Emma sparked a call to the morality squad when Not Wanted on the Voyage was presented on the stage in Winnipeg by the Manitoba Theatre Centre in 1992. Officers called to the scene of the crime dismissed the complaint after first-hand viewing. Given the prevalence of lesbian eroticism in straight male pornography, it is little wonder they found nothing to police. They were more likely bemused by what was, in all likelihood, their first foray into "legitimate" theatre. 8. The card Lily gives to Vanessa with the journal depicting Japanese ladies at court extends the motif of both The Pillow Book of Sei Shonowagan in the text and suggests a direct parallel to Arabellas Druidic Court. 9. After the suicide of his friend, Japanese-Canadian writer Ken Adachi, Findley wrote an introduction to the new edition of The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians, a study first published in 1976 (Toronto: McLennan & Stewart, 1991). 10. See Anne Geddes-Bailey (1995) for an extended reading of Vanessa as ethically flawed. Lucy's lesson in "ruthlessness" (which anticipates Vanessa's concluding resolution), might also serve to remind us that Findley's vision of the struggles of the natural world is a good deal more Darwinian than is usually allowed, providing a model that spills over into matters of human relations in Lucy's tutelage of the scientist Ham. 11. Judith Roof (1991, 148) quotes this passage from Carroll, reminding us (in a fortuitous line of nonsense verse) that lesbianism, historically, has been that which could not be made sense of outside a patriarchal paradigm. 12. The female detective as lesbian is an emerging new sub-genre in itself (see Barbara Godard, this volume). Mabel Maney has revised the Nancy Drew series, long a favorite with pre-adolescent girls, by turning the heroine into a lesbian sleuth named Nancy Clue. In turn, Amanda Cross (the pseudonym of feminist literary critic Carolyn Heilbron) involves a lesbian commune in the solution of the murder in Death in a Tenured Position (see Jeanne Roberts 1995, 101). Susan J. Leonardi notes the oddly ambivalent attitudes toward lesbianism in Cross's novels (in Irons 1995, 118). 13. For further references to Findley's double coding see Gabriel 1994, 170 and 1995, 229ff. 14. More than one reader has commented on the narrativity of Freud's Dora case-history. Steven Marcus draws the parallels between Freud's recounting of the case of Dora and "a modern experimental novel." Like Findley's The Telling of Lies, for instance, "its narrative and expository course is neither linear nor rectilinear; instead its organization is plastic, involuted, and heterogeneous and follows spontaneously an inner

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logic" (in Bernheimer 1985, 64), whereas Freud himself seems like an "unreliable narrator" of a contemporary meta-narrative which unfolds a "mystery within a mystery" (68). Freud himself reminds us that Dora's dream connects two temporal sequences, an "event during childhood" and an "event of the present day" (74). This is also the structure provided by the montage layering of Findley s The Telling of Lies, in which Nessa, while attempting to solve a present-day mystery, finds herself spiralling backward to childhood. WORKS CITED Alewyn, Richard. (1983). "The Origin of the Detective Novel." The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory. Ed. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stone. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 62-78. Atwood, Margaret. (1972). Surfacing. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Barthes, Roland. (1974). S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Wang. Bernheiner, Charles, and Claire Kahane, eds. (1985). In Doras Case: Freud Hysteria - Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1993). "The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic." The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 254-66. Brooks, Peter. (1979). "Fiction of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding." Diacritics*): 72-81. . (1984). Reading for the Plot. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Cavendish, Richard, ed. (n.d.) "Druids." Men, Myth and Magic: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Mythology, Religion and the Unknown. New York, London and Toronto: Marshall Cavendish, pp. 86-88. Cheever, Benjamin, ed. (1988). The Letters of John Cheever. New York: Simon & Schuster. Collins, Anne. (1988). In The Sleep Room. Toronto: Orpen Dennys. Cronowicz, Antoni. (1990). Garbo: Her Story. New York: Simon & Schuster. Donaldson, Scott. (1990). John Cheever, a Biography. New York: Delta. Eco, Umberto. (1975). "Looking for a Logic of Culture." T. Sebeok, ed., The Tell-Tale Sign: A Survey of Semiotics. Lisse: Peter de Ridder. Erlich, Victor. (1981). Russian Formalism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Faderman, Lilian. (1991). Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in the Twentieth Century America. New York: Columbia University Press. Felman, Shoshana. (1985). "Beyond Oedipus: The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis." Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in

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Narrative Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 1021-53. Findley, Timothy. (1978). The Wars. Harmondsworth: Penguin. . (1984). Not Wanted on the Voyage. Harmondsworth: Penguin. . (1986a). The Telling of Lies: A Mystery. Markham: Penguin. . (1986B). Interview with Suzanne Sandor. Macleans, 27 Oct., 10-11. . (1990). Inside Memory: Pages from a Writer's Notebook. Toronto: Harper-Collins. Foucault, Michel. (1981). The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction. New York: Vintage. Gabriel, Barbara. (1994a). "Performing Theory, Performing Gender: Critical Postscript." Essays on Canadian Writing: The Gender Issue 54:237-60. . (1994b). "Staging Monstrosity: Genre, Life-Writing, and Timothy Findley s Last of the Crazy People." Essays on Canadian Writing. 54 (Winter 1994) 168-97. . (1995). "Performing the Bent Text: Fascism and the Regulation of Sexualities in Timothy Findley's The Butterfly Plague." English Studies in Canada 21:226-50. Geddes-Bailey, Anne. "Intertextual Clues in Findley's The Telling of Lies" Essays on Canadian Writing 55 (spring 1995) 191-213. Holquist, Michael. (1983). "Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Postwar Fiction." The Poetics of Murder. Ed. Glenn W. Most and William Stone. London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 149-74. Irons, Glenwood, ed. (1995). Feminism in Women's Detective Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jagose, Anne-Marie. (1994). Lesbian Utopics. New York: Routledge. Jefferson, Anne. (1990). "Autobiography as Intertext." Intertextuality: Theories and Practices. Ed. Michel Worton and Judith Still. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Kaplan, Ann E., ed. (1980). Women in Film Noir. London: British Film Institute, pp. 108-29. Lacan, Jacques. (1983). "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter.'" The Poetics of Murder. Ed. Glenn W. Most and William Stone. London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 21-54. . (1984). Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Anthony Wilden. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Leonardi, Susan J. (1995). "Murder Academic: Women Professors and Gender Crimes." Feminism in Women's Detective Fiction. Ed. Glenwood Irons. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 112-26. Mann, Thomas. (1963). Death in Venice. New York: Vintage. Marcus, Stephen. "Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History." Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, eds. In Doras Case: Freud - Hysteria Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Miller, D.A. (1988). The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: University of California Press. O'Neill, Eugene. (1947). The Iceman Cometh. London: Cape. Pigott, Stuart. (1968). The Druids. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Porter, Dennis. (1983). "Backward Construction and the Art of Suspense." The Poetics of Murder. Ed. Glenn W. Most and William Stone. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 327-65. Rich, Adrienne. (1980), "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5(4): 631-60. . (1979). On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: Norton. Riffaterre, Michael. (1990). "Compulsory Reader Response: The Intertextual Drive." Intertextuality: Theories and Practices. Ed. Michel Worton and Judith Still. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Roberts, Jeanne Addison. (1995). "Feminist Murder: Amanda Cross Reinvents Womanhood." Feminism in Women's Detective Fiction. Ed. Glenwood Irons. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 94-111. Roberts, Joan Warthling. (1995). "Amelia Butterwoth: The Spinster Detective." Feminism in Womens Detective Fiction. Ed. Glenwood Irons. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 3-11. Ross, Anne. (1967). Pagan Celtic Britain: Studies in Iconography and Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press. Rule, Jane. (1993). Desert of the Heart. Tallahassee: The Naiad Press. Roof, Judith. (1991). A Lure of Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press. Thomas, D.M. (1981). The White Hotel. London: Victor Gollancz. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1968). Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Yingling, Thomas E. (1990). Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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4 F(R)ICTIONS: FEMINISTS RE/WRITING NARRATIVE Barbara Godard

NO FIXED ADDRESS: FICTION/THEORY

The border/play characteristic of contemporary women's parodic re/writing of fictional genres reveals engagement with narrative as a critical strategy designed to expose the positioning of woman as silent other, on whose mutilated body narrative is constructed in dominant (patriarchal) discourse, and to posit alternate positionings for women as subjects producing themselves in/by language. What feminist theory has shown is that strategies of writing and reading are forms of cultural resistance. They work to turn dominant discourses inside out and challenge theory in its own terms, the terms of a semiotic space constructed in language. They do so by unfixing its power, based, as Teresa de Lauretis states, "on social validation and well-established modes of enunciation and address" (1984, 7). The result: NO FIXED mode of ADDRESS. According to Jean-Francois Lyotard, narrative is implicated in the formulation of customary knowledge (1984, 19). Although opposed to scientific knowledge in that it is not sceptical, its truths having no recourse to argumentation and proof, the "return of the narrative in the non-narrative" (27) is part of the language game of modern knowledge, where narratives communicate the "discoveries" of scientific research. Narratives "formulate prescriptions that have the status of norms. They

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therefore excercise their competence not only with respect to denotative utterances concerning what is true, but also prescribe utterances with pretensions to justice" (31). Narratives are modes of legitimation whose own certification is legitimated in the very act of transmission, through "performativity" (41). Narrative modes are "naturalized" differently within different signifying practices and hegemonic discourses. The quest narrative or epic of discovery, characteristic of the historical discourse of modernism, seeks the intelligible in the play of temporalities and in the flow of deliberately constructed intrigue, sequence, and progression (20); it is characterized by surface coherence. Such "grand narratives" of unification have lost their credibility (37) with the recent interest in institutionalized discourses and their representations, that is, with various social technologies, including what Teresa de Lauretis calls "technologies of gender" (1987). Gender here is understood to be a "set of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and social relations ... by the deployment of a 'complex political technology'" (3), that is, political representations and narratives. Today we are confronted with a contesting narrative of delegitimization, characterized by ruptures and dis /placements, by interrogation of the narrating instance when the narrator is cut off from the narratee and the story s/he is telling: in short, the "investigative language game" of the "postmodern world" (41), or the "interrogative text," as Catherine Belsey terms it, with reference to texts which do not smooth over their contradictions to constitute the reader as a unified subject (1980, 90-91). The power of narrative to interpellate the reader and produce her/him as subject in (and of) ideology through the seemingly inevitable and "natural" endings of stories is something that has not gone unnoticed by feminists. As Catherine Belsey points out, women are produced in/by two contradictory discourses, the liberal humanist discourse of freedom and self-determination, and a specifically feminine discourse of submission and inadequacy. Finding a single coherent subjectposition within such contradictory discourses produces tensions or ruptures (65-66). Such investigations of the mechanisms by which narrative participates in the social construction of femininity have been in the forefront of the poststructuralist preoccupation with narrativity and narratology. This exploration unfolds along three lines, which I shall follow: discourse, genre, narrative. Texts are analyzed for their construction of discourses about genre—their reproduction of and/or confrontation with conservative sexist discourses. Generic conventions are analyzed in terms of their ideological implications. As Fredric

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Jameson has pointed out, "genres are essentially literary institutions or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact" (1981, 106). Narrative is examined for its ideological significance and the way it interacts with or influences other meanings constructed in/by the text. For narrative, as feminists have realized, is less a content category, a "story," than a set of relationships by which knowledge is made intelligible to readers (Cranny-Francis 1987, 8). As narrative grammarians have shown, a narrative inevitably involves a transformation. An initial equilibrium is exchanged for a new equilibrium.1 The specificity of narrative is its encoding of a temporal sequence which is perceived as causal (Rimmon-Kenan 1983, 19). Consequently, the new equilibrium appears as the natural or inevitable outcome of the temporal/transformational process. Because of its temporal mimesis, which masks causality, narrative is an effective way of communicating ideological knowledge, that is, knowledge which appears to be self-grounded. Ideology, according to Althusser, is a system of representations (discourses, images, myths) which offer imaginary constructions concerning the real relations in which people live. It serves to reproduce their relations to the dominant mode of production while concealing the productivity of this relation. Such representations abound in narrative.2 Because fiction does not normally deal with "politics" directly, it is ostensibly innocent and therefore available for the representations of the imaginary. A dialectical relationship operates between narrative and ideology. Narratives interpellate the reader-subject into the encoded ideologies of everyday life, defining that life through apparently incontrovertible mimesis. Established (conservative) ideological discourses with which the reader is familiar, comfortable (usually), and to which s/he gives unquestioning assent inhabit the text so thickly that the narrative transformation appears altogether "natural." Since ideological discourses are effective only in so far as the relationships they define appear to be natural or inevitable, the labour involved in their production must be suppressed so that they are seen not as constructs but as "natural reflections" of the world, spontaneous expressions of the authors' beliefs, or as ineffably mystified. Beliefs naturalized as facts within narratives which appear to reflect the order of reality faithfully are a variety of Roland Bardies' "mythologies," secondorder language formations whose historical and political implications have been occluded.3 Sexism as a discourse is effective to the extent that its premise, the unequal distribution of power between women

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and men, appears to be "natural" or universal. However, narratives, like all discursive modes, are determined by the material conditions of the specific society in which they are constructed. Among the most fundamental of these conditions are gender differences. Universal to human societies but not uniform in temporal or spatial distribution, gender differences structure social relationships at all levels and are essential to narrative, whose grammar is grounded in difference and opposition of marked and unmarked pairs. The convergence of narrative and ideology is clearly visible in the European fairytale in the way that familiar genre encodes a conservative ideological discourse about the power relationship between men and women. In Propp's (1968) analysis of the narrative grammar of the Russian fairytales he took as his corpus of study, the sexist commonplace of narrative is recognized in the gender specificity of the narrative functions: there is a hero (implicitly male), the princess (a sought-for-person, the prize, explicitly female), and various subsidiary functions of indifferent gender—donor, helper, dispatcher, etc. The role of the female character, Sleeping Beauty, is to wait passively for rescue by the active male, Prince Charming; the message of plots such as "Bluebeard" is that marriage = death. One function of the fairy tale, a covert one, is to delimit the social role of women by representing their correct place (their "natural" role) in a decidedly patriarchal social order. Narrative encodes ideology and ideology in/forms narrative. GENDER AND GENRE I: FANTASY, SCIENCE FICTION, UTOPIAN FICTION

The linking of gender and genre has been a fruitful concept in feminist literary theory. Beginning with canonical narrative genres of the literary institution, feminists have shown how these encode sexism. But feminists have also scrutinized the master discursive narratives of Western culture and identified a sexism that positions woman as other. Marxist discourse, although it emphasizes production, fails to theorize women's work and the reproductive (see O'Brien 1981). Feminists take issue not simply with the androcentrism of Marxist discourse, but with its totalizing ambitions, its claim to account for every form of social experience—a claim characteristic of all theoretical discourse, hence its phallocratic nature. Similarly, philosophers Luce Irigaray and Sara Kofman have exposed the sexism of psycholanalysis in the way in which the female hysteric was produced by Freud's masculine hysteria

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(Irigary 1985; Kofman 1985). With its focus on the Oedipal complex and the phallus as transcendental signifier, Freudian discourse categorizes woman as lack or absence, forever excluded from subjectivity, perpetually the "Other" posited in the necessary moment of the consolidation of the patriarchal cultural body. The feminist project denounces all such totalizing "phallogocentrism," and through the use of multiple representational systems conveys the fact that there is "no single theoretical discourse which is going to offer an explanation for all forms of social relations or for every mode of political practice" (Kelly in Owens 1983, 64). In doing so, feminist discourse seeks to challenge the totalizing, unified subject (re)produced/ing in the discourse of the selfsame, that is, in the analogical reasoning, the mimetic representation, which is the legacy of Platonic idealism. As Irigaray has demonstrated, this is a discourse grounded in the separation of the intelligible from the sensible, a body/soul dualism, which is indifferent to material signifiers of gender, in spite of the fact that its constitutive metaphors are gender marked. It is patriarchal in that woman is merely a token of exchange in the discursive economy, which makes it, in effect, a discourse among men, a hom(m)osexual discourse. In developing their critique of the totalizing ambitions of theoretical discourse, feminists make visible the distance it maintains between itself and its objects, a distance which objectifies and masters. In so doing, they challenge the claims of representationalism, that the world exists only in and through an originating, authenticating subject who produces its representation or image. Especially suspect in this regard is the classic "realist" novel with its illusionism, its naturalizing of the effetdu reeL> its narrative closure and hierarchy of discourses (Belsey 1980, 92). Such assumptions are undermined by the kind of simultaneous activity on multiple fronts that characterizes feminist—and postmodernist—practices.^ Coming to writing for women involves the deconstruction of the norms and conventions of narrative; it is subversive of received genres. Margaret Homans has described women's agon with the lyric, where the subject position forces the female reader to identify against herself with the silent other addressed or referred to from the position of enunciation, conventionally masculine (1980). Women's problematic and problematizing relation to the epic has been noted by Marjorie Stone in the genre subversion of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's Aurora Leigh (1984). Feminist disruptions in narrative fiction have been more extensively documented, with the issue of "plots and plausibilities" raised by both feminist writers and critics. As Joanna Russ points out

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in "What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can't Write," (1972) narrative plots are grounded in verisimilitude and decorum: the actions of heroines must conform to our understanding of women's roles in a given society. The decorum of the social and literary establishments exert pressure to conform to the image of proper (innate) femininity. The demure young woman with eyes downcast and lips pressed into a faint smile, the "proper lady" (proper: her own? somebody else's?), "guardian and nemesis of the female self," (Poovey 1984, 15) casts her shadow on fiction for and by women. Imagine, Russ asks ironically, "a young girl from Minnesota find (ing) her womanhood by killing a bear." Try "Alexandra the Great," she suggests, or "a young man who unwisely puts success in business before his personal fulfillment, loses his masculinity and ends up a neurotic, lonely eunuch" (3). Novelists do not make up their plots out of thin air but develop them from the mythoi sanctioned by a given culture as intelligible or "natural." Should a woman writer actually develop such a plot into a work of fiction, she would produce not a novel but a parody of a novel, or a work of science fiction or fantasy, narrative modes of the "paraliterary" sort. Plots such as these are not the stuff of serious fiction; they provoke estrangement or laughter. The only plot available to the woman writer, Russ concludes, is the love story told over and over again in the form of romance or bildungsroman. To escape from the double bind in which the heroine finds herself the object in a male quest—Propp's fairytale from the perspective of the princess, who nevertheless sees herself as the focal point of the male gaze, in which she must choose the right husband in order to choose herself-5—women writers of the twentieth century have experimented with the shapeless, plotless (by conventional novelistic standards) forms of the autobiographical life story or with the lyric novel, whose linked images swirl about an empty centre, such as Virginia Woolf s The Waves. There are, however, other options for women who refuse the narrative types which in /form our society with their structuring ideologies. Feminist writers frequently employ highly coded popular genres, such as science fiction, fantasy, Utopian fiction, and the whodunit because these forms free them, and their readers, from the constraints of received conventions to hypothesize alternative realities which implicitly or explicitly criticize the reality constructed by the conventions, and which locate sexist ideologies and practices as structural determinants of that reality. These subgenres accommodate a variety of strategic purposes: to uncover sexist discourses which generate characterizations of

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women as weak, stupid, passive, and receptive; to represent situations of sexual equality which implicitly condemn the inequality of their own society and the practices which structure it; to uncover the fact that sexism is a social pathology and not a behavioural defect of aberrant individuals; and to question the narratives which operate on us from childhood as conduct guides. The writers who employ these nonrealist genres challenge the rules of the generic game. The feminist critics who read them are involved in a complementary strategy, challenging the ideological representation of those rules, the conventions of the genres, and the nature of the reading position which they propose. Above all, they contest the privileging of a single discourse which contains and places all others. In their deployment of discourse and counterdiscourse, their critique of the dominant discourse and affirmation of a feminist alternative, in oscillating between impertinent question and imperious counterstatement, the texts of these writers deny readers the comfort and stability of a fixed subject position. Refusing to smooth over contradictory discourses, such texts invite answers to the questions they raise, producing readers who are active participants in the construction of meaning. To achieve this, they deploy devices that draw attention to their textuality, thus undermining fictional illusionism. Readers are to a significant extent distanced from rather than unconsciously interpellated into the ideological machinery of a conventional fictional world. Writers re-writing traditional genres must, however, subvert narrative conventions in order to deconstruct the role of women. Coded ideologies implicit in the genre will overwhelm the feminist message unless they are explicitly addressed and/or deconstructed by the text. As Cranny-Francis argues, the construction of stong female characters in Anne McCaffrey's feminist science fiction novels, Dragon/light, Dragonsong, and Dragonsinger, and her implicit critique of how women are circumscribed, their talents directed to boring, repetitive tasks which eventually destroy them, while men of mediocre talent succeed, is ultimately subverted by uncritical use of the fairytale narrative structure. Questions about the limited role of women are simply not foregrounded in these texts. Indeed, because the protagonist is successful and active and therefore atypical—a woman granted honorary male status—they effectively deflect the potential confrontation with coded representations of women as powerless and passive (Cranny-Francis 1987, 14-18; 1990, 70-71). By contrast, Cranny-Francis suggests, Joanna Russ in The Female Man confronts directly the ideological discourses

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of sexism while investigating the signifying practices of narrative, in what is basically a dialogue among four women characters (1990, 12940). Her characterization is a composite of conflicting ideologies and so refuses the simplicity of the subject position of the fairytale. Moreover, in its discursive relationship to science, the science fiction text introduces paradigms which limit the conservative tendency of narrative to resist subversion. As "thought experiments," in the words of Ursula Le Guin, science fiction is grounded in hypotheses that differentiate the world of the text from our own world (1979). This is accentuated through temporal/spatial displacement. Through this estrangement effect, science fiction challenges our conception of the real and lays bare the assumptions of the society in which it is written. Successful women's writing in the genre is produced out of a struggle whose traces are textualized in the tension between the estrangement effect, with its opportunities for direct investigation of the ideological construction of "otherness" in which woman is a foreigner in her own society, and the conservative ideological function of narrative, which works to interpellate readers into discourses. Such writing incorporates the marks of struggle in that this tension produces split rather than unified subjects. Such possibilities for disrupting the technology of gender in narrative are also to be found in other modes of "speculative fiction"—as Cranny-Francis suggests, in both fantasy and the Utopian (1987, 28). Fantasy, the "other" of realism, its opposite yet irrevocably tied to it (see Jackson 1981), is characterized by estrangement. In producing representations of other worlds, fantasy implicitly comments on our own. Feminist writers use the non-mimetic nature of fantasy, its construction of alternate possible worlds, its enormous potential for incident and character, to explore imaginatively the oppression of women in society and the stereotypical representations of both women and men which facilitate this oppression, and to experiment with new kinds of social organization that would liberate women. Feminists' textual/political strategy is to use the otherness of the fantastic to deconstruct the illusionism of the real, to realign and reform it and so constitute a critical reading practice with subversive potential. The many shelves of such texts in women's bookstores testify to the appeal of this strategy for writers and readers alike. Here, too, the danger of recuperation of feminist subversion lies in the uncritical use of genre conventions, which overcomes many of the works of a writer such as Marion Zimmer Bradley, for instance. In contrast, there is the success of Margaret Atwood's Bluebeard's Egg, where the signifying practices of

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texts are as much her subject as the stories she tells. Atwood rereads and rewrites the fairytales and fantasies that sustain our society, showing how they carry/embody discourses about power and sexuality, feminity and masculinity. In doing so, she challenges fairytales as ideological guides for good living. By offering simultaneously different versions of the same story, she revitalizes the transformational process and shows its practice (see Godard 1987, 1986). Utopian fiction, like fantasy, is a fiction of estrangement in that it represents an "other" society radically different from the author s own. The to and fro movement between the societies constitutes the disruption in the seduction of narrative. Fredric Jameson identifies this disruption as the political practice of the genre: In the case of the Utopian narrative, the place of the Real ... may be identified by the obsessive references to actuality which seem part of the conventions of such texts, the perpetual play of topical allusion throughout the narrative which, intersecting the more properly diegetic interest, is constantly on the point of fragmenting the text into an anecdotal and discontinuous series of vertical indicators. (Jameson 1981, 281-99)

This insistent referentiality makes explicit the social criticism which is only implicit in the science fiction or fantasy text. Particularly successful as a feminist dystopia in addressing questions of sexual power and configurations of masculinity and femininity is Atwood s The Handmaid's Tale. Incorporating the additional disruptive features of a discussion with a learned historian who knows how the society was constructed and that of the text as an incomplete fragment, The Handmaid's Tale subverts the seduction of narrative by turning an adventure story into a mystery story and foregrounding the discussion of the ideology of the fictional society, a dark mirror of our contemporary world. Rejecting the comfort of closure, the text directs the reader to both the critical arguments it presents and its signifying practice, which seeks to undermine the dominant patriarchal discourse that constructs the feminine. Yet even one 150 years after the era of the sexist Giladean regime, a man has the last word in the novel! GENDER AND GENRE II: DETECTIVE FICTION

One of the major sites of feminist re-visionary activity with respect to fictional genres has been the development of the detective novel.

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Certainly, this has been the primary locus of intervention by Canadian feminist writers in the highly coded anti-realistic genres. Like science fiction, fanatasy, and Utopia, the murder mystery is imbricated in an antagonism between truth and verisimilitude. This is the "law" of the murder mystery, although in establishing this law, Todorov suggests, a double bind is produced: By relying on antiverisimilitude, the murder mystery has come under the sway of another verisimilitude, that of its own genre. No matter how much it contests ordinary verisimilitudes, it will always remain subject to some verisimilitude.... It is not difficult to discover the killer in a murder mystery: we need merely follow the verisimilitude of the text and not the truth of the world evoked. There is something tragic in the fate of the murder mystery writer; his [sic] goal is to contest verisimilitudes, yet the better he succeeds, the more powerfully he establishes a new verisimiltude, one linking his text to the genre to which it belongs. (1977, 86-87)

In the codes of the genre, then, are to be found the subversive potentials of feminist murder mysteries. Challenging verisimilitude, these texts "discover the laws and conventions of the life around us" (87) and expose the sexism of these conventions, even while they are constrained by the constitutive law of narrative discourse to participate in verisimilitude. It is just this fissure of escape that feminist writers exploit, to challenge generic laws through the contesting of social laws, the return behind the "mythologies" to the occluded legitimating institution. The double edge of this challenge is conveyed in one of the major formal changes initiated by feminist writers, the invention of the female detective. Women don't fit well into a trench coat and a slouch hat....The hard-boiled private eye is a special figure in American mythology. It's a staple of the myth that he should be a cynical loner, a man at odds with society and its values. That's not something women normally relate to. Women aren't cynical loners—that's not how they like to work. It seems to me that if they want to go into the profession seriously, women writers will have to change the myth itself, instead of trying to fit themselves into it. (Lawrence Block, quoted in Cranny-Francis. 1988, 69)

Feminist writers have responded to this compendium of "macho" (69) values in a variety of ways, but generally by pointing out the social construction of such norms which then become generic constraints.

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Some, like Eve Zaremba, have challenged the traditional amateur female sleuth of the Miss Marple variety by turning her into a tough professional detective like Helen Keremos. Keremos, in mysteries such as Work for a Million (1987), uses her talents as a private eye to find out who is blackmailing and threatening pop music star Sonia Deerfield, recent winner of a lottery. Helen fits the myth of the typical detective and is at home in this milieu, using her friendship with members of the police force and hotel security staffs to gain information. As a private detective, she holds "a strange job for a young lady" (48). Helen fits the myth in every way but one: she is a loner because she is a lesbian who does not conform to the cultural norms of femininity, a misfit whose isolation is not chosen but imposed by society. However, Zaremba does not make use of this difference to disrupt the detective novel plot so much as using it as a thematic device to open up discussion about this "unnatural" female (71), this "dyke" (110), and the problematic relationship between the sexes produced by the oscillation in male behaviour between oversolicitude and boorishness as women are alternatively idealized and denigrated. Ultimately, the wedge that feminist detective fiction uses for generic subversion is a radically altered definition of criminal activity. The perpetrators of the crime in Work for a Million prove to be Sonia's ex-husband and her uncle, who subjected her to sexual abuse when she was a child, for which her mother held Sonia responsible, thus starting her on a path to delinquency—drugs, alcohol abuse, petty crime. As in other female detective novels, the sleuth in Work for a Million is more interested in the "mental work" of detecting than in the manhunt (141). These novels address ideological issues supposedly irrelevant to narration and confront encoded assumptions of narrative itself. Specifically, they address the ideology of the (male) detective novel through the textual representation of sexual politics. It is a fact that in our society a woman is more likely to die in her home at the hands of a family member than in the street, the victim of a stranger. The conventional murder mystery ignores the sexual politics of death and overlooks sexual difference by presenting the crime as an individual act, thus upholding the established middle class patriarchal social order that consistently and systemically atomizes human behaviour to discrete manifestations of ethical essences. Feminist detective fiction challenges this order by presenting homicide—more accurately, femicide—discursively, as a crime perpetrated within an ideological formation in which the reader is implicated. Consequently, a double transformation

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is effected: the text is transformed from a work of suspense fiction to a political fiction, and the practice of the novel is transformed from one of mystification and revelation to one of investigation and transformation. The detective novel becomes politically committed to detection of ideological discourses and the social practices they produce. Suspense gives way to ratiocination. In this, feminist detective fiction effects certain dislocations within the codes of the genre. As Todorov has pointed out, at the basis of the whodunit is a double narrative: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation, the story of "what really happened" and that of "how the reader (or the narrator) has come to know about it" (1977, 45), story and discourse. The first story is that of an absence that is none the less real, while the second is that of a presence which is "excessive," "insignificant" (46). These two narratives are intersected in various combinations, the traditional whodunit involving a balance of the two, one in which the second story appears as a place where the devices of the first story, the dislocations in point of view, the temporal inversions of the first, are "justified and naturalized" (46). Suspense novels of the thriller or "the story of the suspect-as-detective" type (47), the latter a recent development of the detective novel, accentuate the second story over the first. The mystery becomes merely a starting point, a pretext for concentrating on the milieu and the suspense. Feminist detective stories generally follow this latter mode, with an additional twist. The emphasis is less on the suspense of the outcome as the detective puts her life on the line than it is on her investigation, which probes deeply into the sexism of the social order and compounds the dangers and threats she must confront. For these are not just the product of a single irrational act but are endemic to the social system. Ultimately too there is an emphasis on the new type of activity necessary to solve the crime, activity which includes consciousnessraising strategies and collective action on the part of women mobilizing for social reform. A major dramatic episode of these fictions is the development of friendships between socially heterogeneous women. In this, the feminist detective novel challenges the ideology of the traditional detective novel, implicit in the crime of passion or moral outrage committed by the criminal as romantic individualist and in the sleuthing of his antagonist, the equally individualistic and rationalistic detective. In place of the unified subject, these fictions work to produce a dispersed subject position.

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Further examples of this inversion that exposes the signifying practices of the genre are found in two other recent Canadian detective novels published by feminist presses. Each introduces a woman sleuth who is a serious professional and a challenge to the generic norm. Harriet Croft in Marion Fosters The Monarchs Are Flying (1987) is a criminal lawyer, as beautiful as she is clever. However, in this, as well as because she is a divorcee, she is very much a social misfit and loner, even though her fashionable silk blouses in no way resemble the requisite trench coat. Moreover, Harriet turns detective in order to assure the continuation of her single state and consequent "alienation." She becomes involved in the defence of Leslie Taylor, charged with the murder of Marcie Den ton, her friend and lover. Her initial involvement is at the request of Marcie s husband, who asks Leslie to represent him at the preliminary hearing. Charles Denton hires Harriet to make sure that Leslie is charged. This manoeuvre is also a form of backhanded proposal to Harriet, whom he has admired for a long time. She is suspicious of his request, especially since Denton is not helping his in-laws with the funeral. As she comments, when a woman is murdered, her husband is usually the first suspect. In this case, however, the husband had found an incriminating love letter to his wife from Leslie, which he shows to the police. Harriet switches sides to defend Leslie when she realizes that the lawyer who has been assigned to the accused by the court is weak as well as male. He will follow the lead of the police investigator who, prior to his current position in homicide in the small town where the crime occurs, was with the morality squad in Toronto, where he had gained a reputation for gay bashing. As Harriet says to Leslie: "He genuinely believed [you were guilty]. He was convinced it was you because you're gay and this is the kind of things gays do" (215). Harriet managed to find proof that Charles was guilty of his wife's murder by searching the motel room more thoroughly than the police, once she became convinced that no woman would or could have carried out the murder as it had been executed—a rape with the towel bar, after which the body was shaved. This ritualized violence seemed to Harriet to be masculine, not the act of a disappointed lesbian lover. She is all the more convinced of Leslies innocence in light of the weight required to wrench the the towel bar from the wall. This rape is key to the sexual politics under investigation in The Monarchs Are Flying. It becomes a touchstone of the law's ability to acknowledge sexual difference and consequently of its capacity to

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discern "truth" in a courtroom. Leslie sacks her first, ineffective lawyer when she learns how her lover died. "What do you mean ... symbolic rape?" "The towel rod." "Is that different from the other? To me, as a woman, rape is rape." "That's exactly what I mean" ... "Toyou as a woman. You have to stop drawing a distinction between men and women. It creates a bad impression. We're all just people, when it comes down to it. I have some blank checks [sic] here." (89)

This refusal to recognize sexual difference, if unchallenged, would lead to the condemnation of an innocent woman. That this is a systemic blindness, an incapacity of the symbolic system, the novel conveys through the position of the speaker: the lawyer, in collusion with the police and the prosecution, fails to distinguish between genders with respect to violence in situations where women are generally the victims and men the perpetrators, even when this means denying the very anatomical differences which in other contexts are asserted in order to validate female inferiority. Women have no recourse against men in a legal system that will on one occasion hide difference behind humanist universals and on another foreground them in sexist binaries: "We are all the same"/"Woman is the weaker vessel." Indeed, the novel multiplies examples of women as victims of both domestic and judicial indifference through the women Leslie meets in prison. Harriet, whose career has been flourishing but whose emotional life has been stagnant, literally "comes out of her cocoon" in this novel as she begins to help these women victims find courage, dignity, and independence. First of all, she must work with Leslie to prepare her for the trial which Harriet realizes will not be that of Leslie Taylor but of lesbian rights. When lesbianism is put on the stand, it will be confounded with male homosexuality at its proverbial worst. An attempt will be made to persuade the jury of Leslies innate capacity for violence, grounded in supposed homosexual proclivity for molesting young boys. Once again, the novel points out the difference between men's and women's experience of violence: for women, it is the domestic enclosure, the supposedly secure female space of the private sphere, which is more menacing than the public. Leslie will have to come out in a very hostile place, a courtroom. She must come out first to her family in order to present herself to the jury in a way that will make them accept

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lesbianism as "natural." A counter-narrative will be constructed that stresses loving lesbian relationships in contrast to popular impressions of the sexual violence of lesbians which have been nourished by myths of gay monstrosity. The focus of the novel is thus on the "coming out" story, which is doubled with the transformation of Harriet who, at the end of the trial, is able to acknowledge her love to Leslie. A feminist version of gender collusion is offered in the loving collaboration of Harriet, Leslie, and Leslies mother against the vindictive patriarchal system that would declare such affection inherently guilty and thus would conspire to condone violence. In this narrative, there is almost no suspense, little mystery, no chases and thrilling escapes. Instead, it is given over to discussions between lawyer and client and to the courtroom proceedings. Thus, through foregrounding its own process of research and elaboration, The Monarchs Are Flying presents the construction of an alternative narrative which deconstructs the myths of lesbian phobia on which the patriarchal narrative contract is concluded. Once again, the socially outcast female sleuth has deployed the two discursive topoi of sexual violence and lesbianism against their perpetrators. This is also the case with Elizabeth Bowers' Ladies Night (1988). The title is ironic, indicating the strategy deployed to subvert the generic norms. Ultimately Ladies' Night comes to signify the police raid on the kiddie porn establishment successfully orchestrated by private eye Meg Lacey, her friend Johanna, a whore and a lesbian, and Salal, an Amerindian girl who was a prostitute with Johanna and is now working in the office of the porn king, Haswell. As it is originally presented, however, "Ladies' Night" refers to the women-only strip shows that Haswell runs in his bar, which is situated below his porn kingdom and serves as his legal front. By offering free beer and overlooking the illegalities of serving minors, Haswell attracts pubescent girls to his establishment and then offers them the chance to become film stars. At this point they become veritable captives, living on the upper floor of the building in tiny rooms near the film studio and rewarded with drugs. Addicted, they are completely submissive to his demands. When they grow too old for the films, Haswell passes them on to Cesar, the drug dealer who is also a pimp and dealer in flesh. Any girl who asks questions or becomes independent and "uppity" is simply killed. Meg does not set out intentionally to bring the pornography and prostitution business in Vancouver to a halt. She stumbles into this mission when she goes to the bar with Johanna on a Ladies' Night in

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search of information about Haswell, the former fiance of a young woman who has disappeared and whose parents have hired the detective to find her. During her snooping, Meg meets Salal, who chooses her to act as an instrument of revenge for the violence Haswell and Cesar have done to Salal herself and to her dead brother. Salal reveals necessary information to Meg and opens the doors from the inside so that the police can raid while a film is being made. Meg's role is to use her contacts to convince the police of Haswell's involvement in the pornography business. This is no easy task, for the police are "cautious by nature and addicted to their procedures" (Bowers, 1988, 136). The latter involve investigating anyone offering information, in this case, Meg. A large segment of the narrative concerns the ironic representation of the investigator under investigation. Megs telephone is tapped, she is followed, her office is broken into, and she is subjected to repeated interrogation about the accuracy of her information and the name of her informant. This inversion of the conventional detective narrative serves to position the female private eye alongside the socially marginal whores, in opposition to the police and the pornographers, ironically aligned through their mutual practice of intimidating women. This leads to suspense as to whether Meg will be discovered by the pornographers and killed, as has happened to other uncooperative women, or crack under police pressure. The latter seems the more likely. In this, Meg fulfills the role of the sleuth as loner in a particularly ironic mode, just as the feminist predilection for the investigation of discourse over the suspense of action is ironized through inversion. Like the other novels, Ladies Nightdisrupts the foundational binary of the detective novel, good/evil, displacing it onto a battle between the sexes, thus questioning myths of gender. Specifically, it exposes the hypocrisy of the celebrated male bonding as police and criminals collude in power over women. Through knowledge and persistence, the women manage to win out, convincing the police to follow their plan for the raid. This alternative narrative, of the ironic latent meaning of "Ladies' Night," is in turn disrupted by the conclusion, in which Haswell is brought to trial and Cesar dies by an unknown hand. The final chapter brings together the three main characters involved in the criminals' defeat, along with Margot, Johanna's longtime lover, at a drop-in centre for street kids, financed by Johanna and run by Salal, to help prevent the recurrence of the male criminal system. Such a conclusion offers a more radical revision to the detective novel than does that of The Monarchs Are Flying. Rather than bonding through

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romantic love, a link among women that does little to disturb the myth of individualism on which the conventional detective novel is grounded, the continuing friendship of this heterogeneous group offers a model for social change based on collective action. What draws these women to each other, however, is their common determination not to remain victims of the male violence they have all experienced. In this, Meg s engagement differs from Harriets. Meg continues to investigate Haswells illegal enterprises after she is convinced that she can discover nothing about the girl she is searching for through him. The daughter, she concludes, has fled in indignation that her father should "try to shack [her] up ... with a man that makes porno movies" (51). Meg does so for the reason she has ultimately drifted into the career of private eye, a rape that occurred at knife-point at a shopping centre. The violence done to her by a man turned Meg into a loner: the rape unsettled her emotionally and led her to take Akido classes to defend herself, and gradually to abandon the role of gracious housewife. Her husband subsequently divorced her and she joined the ranks of the socially marginal women earning their own living. However, this marginality, categorized as aberrant in patriarchal narratives, becomes a positive force for change when the female sleuth exposes and challenges the representation of feminine passivity which the detective novel both produces and masks. Meg is not particularly efficient as a private eye. For one thing, she has moral scruples and refuses to take on many of the jobs that she is offered. Then, too, she is quick to terminate a case when she feels she can do no more. While she shares these scruples with other female sleuths, Meg is alone in suffering financial consequences. The considerable narrative attention focused on her moral dilemmas shifts the narrative from action and suspense to investigation of the discourses of criminality and gender. Ironically, Meg is no longer on retainer when she solves most of the missing persons cases she is involved in throughout the novel. A boy whose dog she agrees to find takes things into his own hands by picking up a stray; Joao, a Portugese looking for his twin, finds the brother himself—Meg merely does the telephoning while he directs the search. The encounter with Joao serves to expose the fallacy of yet another myth of sexual difference: contrary to Joao s repeated assertion, women do not make better sleuths than men because of their superior intuition; he is the one with intuitive insights into his brother s whereabouts and condition, not Meg. But this is the ultimate function of the female detective—to decentre the narrative of suspense

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and mystery conventional to the genre in favour of putting the narrative itself in question so as to investigate and expose the patriarchal discourse that in/forms it. In this Meg prevents the easy reproduction of the dominant ideology in a narrative genre known for its conservatism. Instead of being upheld through proof of the focusing of guilt upon a specific individual, the self-esteem of the reader is destabilized by exposure of a general societal guilt in which s/he, especially he, may well be implicated. GENDER AND GENRE III: A RADICAL INSTANCE

In this regard, none of the novels so challenges the convention of the perpetration of the crime as an individual act as does Carol Shields' Swann: A Literary Mystery (1987), which implicates all the characters, and readers, in the carrying out of criminal activities. By disrupting the narrative to expose its construction and so confront the meaningmaking rituals of our society, Swann lays bare the signifying practices of the genre. It is the most disruptive of the detective novels considered here because it directly addresses the politics of identity poetics. It reveals the process of construction of character through analogy with that of the literary text. We become aware of character as the product of social discourses which make our textual encounters into ironic games of the shifting tensions between verisimilitude and truth. This is underlined in the section of the novel focused on Morton Jimroy, the biographer of Mary Swann, whose views on his "subject" do not coincide at all with the woman which her "discoverer," Sarah Maloney, had perceived in Swann s writings. The potential Emily Dickinson of the one clashes with the Shakespeare's sister of the other, and both clash with the Rilke of the editor Cruzzi's stereo typically modernist poet. Shields turns the murder novel upside down by shifting the centre of mystery from the dead to the living. There are no longer firm boundaries between good and evil but an endless series of unstable subject positions intertextually generated. What is mysterious in this novel is not the death of Mary Swann but her life, which defies reconstruction, and the miracle of her poems, which defy interpretation. More precisely, both defy definitive analysis as "Truth." The double plots of the detective novel are both turned upside down, that of action as well as that of investigation, although the second is less dislocated than the first, which has virtually disappeared except for the trace in the subtitle. What has shifted is the absence, no

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longer a present absence but an absence which refuses to be rendered present by a second narrative which, in the conventional detective novel, as Todorov has shown, fills in gaps and naturalizes connections between discrete phenomena as it "justifies" the events of the first narrative. There is no revelation: the solution to the problem of secrets and mysteries expounded is now nothing other than the very exposition of this problem. Death, which makes characters become the absolute and absent causes, is the source of life: the reality of being is displaced by the reality of saying. The narrative of quest becomes the quest of narrative. A horizontal narrative of events, of succession, of contingency is displaced by a vertical narrative of the pursuit of knowledge, of embedding, of substitution. The focus is less on the world of the characters, of the utterance, and more on that of the narrator-narratee, of the speech act (Todorov 1977, 26). This second narrative is a quest for a code and a meaning, the hermeneutic code, the story of reading and writing, the narrative of investigation of how this very book came to be written. What this narrative of another narrative exposes is that "there is no primitive narrative.' No narrative is natural: a choice and a construction will always preside over its appearance; narrative is a discourse, not a series of events ... all narratives are figurative" (Shields 1987, 55). In this, Swann extends the generic dislocations of the feminist detective novel by expanding the already "excessive" and "insignificant" narrative of the investigation of discourse and almost eliminating the narrative of suspense. There is a murder, there are thefts, but no criminals are detected, indeed none are explicitly pursued. Rather, the novel investigates the relations of the other characters to the dead person and the missing objects, exposing the desire and meaning each of them produced in this network of relationships. Swann subverts the genre of the detective novel by "developing" its generic norms in such a way as to disappoint them. So it enters into the dialectical contradiction of the work and the genre as "literature," not as detective fiction. While the literary masterpiece creates its own genre, the masterpiece of detective fiction is "precisely the book which best fits the genre" (Todorov 1977, 43). Shields' novel ultimately subverts the genre by becoming unique and "literature," that is, productive of its own reality. Nonetheless, enough mimetic traces of the feminist detective novel remain for Swann to be considered an ironized example of this type of generic subversion. Key to this is the fact that Mary Swann has been brutally murdered; moreover, she had long been a victim of domestic

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violence. Her death is mentioned early in the novel (Shields 1987, 17) but the facts are withheld until later (43). This failure to develop the murder in the narrative produces the greater mystery. No search is needed for the murderer. Marys dismembered body has been dumped in the silo, a bullet through the head. Everyone assumes that Mary was killed by her husband, who then shot himself. This is a fictional world in which such configurations of gender and power are seen as "natural," not masked as in The Monarchs Are Flying. What becomes the "mystery" is how Swann came to be a writer. How could she escape the limitations of the domestic servitude to which her life seemed outwardly to be confined to take on the assertive position of author? Sarah Maloney phrases this enigma in feminist terms in the opening section of the novel: Mary Swann discovered herself, and therein, suspended on tissues of implausibility, like a hammock without strings, hangs the central mystery: how did she do it? Where in those bleak Ontario acres, that littered farmyard, did she find the sparks that converted emblematic substance into rolling poetry? Chickens, outhouses, wash-day, wood-piles, porch, husband, work-boots, overalls, bedstead, filth. That's the stuff this woman had to work with. On the other hand, it's a legacy from the patriarchy, a concommitant of conquest, the belief that poets shape their art from materials that are mysterious and inaccessible. Women have been knitting socks for centuries, and probably they've been constructing, in their heads, lines of poetry that never got written down. Mary Swann happened to have a pen, a Parker 51 as a matter of fact, as well as an eye for the surface of things. Plus the kind of heart-cracking persistence that made her sit down at the end of a tired day and box up her thoughts into quirky parcels of rhymed verse. (Shields 1987, 31)

The additional element in this mystery, as Sarah goes on to add, is that Marys "schooling [was] limited." Although as a feminist she debunks the myth of the writer as inspired genius, as an academic critic Sarah gives it enough credence to wonder "how Jimroy intends to boil up a book out of this thin stuff" (31). While she opts for the new critical stance that foregrounds the poetic text and excludes the poets biography from consideration, Sarahs oscillation between two different mysteries foregrounds the question of narrative under investigation in Swann. How does the ordinary become extraordinary in the work of

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art? How do we come to know a person, in this case, a writer? What connection, in short, do textual traces have to "referential reality"? This is the fundamental "mystery," the one at least which the literary institution sets out to investigate, as Jimroy rephrases it in introduction to the Swann Symposium which constitutes the final section of the novel: To continue, who really was Mary Swann?... May I suggest further that the real reason we have come here is the wish to travel (pause) that short but difficult distance (pause) between appearance and reality. Who, given what we know, was Mary Swann?... It is a mystery, just as our own lives are mysteries. Just as we don't ever really know that person sitting to our right or left. (Rose and Sarah exchange small smiles at this.) Appearance and reality. (257-58, emphasis added)

Yet once more, Jimroy recites the scanty facts of Mary's life, the absence of documents of any sort, no medical records or social security number, only a card from the local library. There are scarcely any truths available that would serve the occasion of irony that Jimroy promises, defining its rhetorical mode—the confounding of appearance and reality—in his introduction. But the work of irony takes place nonetheless, in an ironic dramatization of the author-effect, as Foucault has termed it. The author, as he points out, is not an indefinite source of significations preceding the literary work, but a functional principle by which one limits the proliferation of meaning. As such, the author is an "ideological figure" (Foucault 1979, 159). Marys total absence from her fictional poetic text, and from Shields s fiction about her, mimetically renders the anonymous text (pace Virginia Woolf, that anon was a woman), the authorless text, the text where discourse circulates unimpeded. For what the death of Swann and absence of information about her permits, and the novel dramatizes, is the construction of Swann within a number of different discourses. The novel circles around an absent centre made present only in the words of others. Mary Swann is a word-being, a discursive construct, produced by the various editors and scholars attending the symposium, and ultimately by the reader of the novel who, like them, is a creative reader. As Sarah Maloney, with more irony than she realizes, announces: "In a sense I invented Mary Swann and am responsible for her. No, too literary that. Better just say I discovered Mary Swann" (Shields 1987, 30). This is a story about reading and writing, about reading and re/writing, as constructions of "the real."

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The complicity of readers in the activity of construction of narrative is emblematized in the final scene of the novel where, in the absence of all textual traces of Swann's work, the participants at the symposium collectively repeat it from memory. A meeting is in session, but there is no one at the lectern and no one, seemingly, in charge. People are seated in a sort of circle, speaking out, offering up remembered lines of poetry, laboriously reassembling one of Mary Swann's poems. Sarah is writing, a clipboard on her knee. (310)

This ultimately is what the work of investigation comes to, the creative rereading/rewriting of the text, "a ceremonial act of reconstruction, perhaps even an act of creation" (311). This scene may also represent a return to an oral tradition of recitation followed by inscription, a frequent figure for collaborative creation. But in this it signifies the undoing of the literary institution grounded in textual analysis. The most subversive feature of Swann is the absence of the detective from the "mystery." None is needed because all the characters have become detectives investigating the meaning of Mary Swann's life as text. Readers are complicit too in this reconstruction: we are all detectives here. There is no longer any narrative of action to be represented: there is only a story of the ongoing process of research and elaboration, as the novel self-reflexively foregrounds its process of construction. Here Shields moves beyond the challenge to verisimilitude that leads, as with the other feminist detective novels, to the discovery of the laws and conventions of life around us (cf. Todorov, 87). She explores instead the process by which these are constructed as a step toward changing them. This narrative is not developed sequentially to a coherent revelation of "truth." Rather, it foregrounds the process of the fabrication of "truth" by a number of different characters. In this way it raises what are for Foucault important questions about the modes of existence and circulation of discourse. Who is speaking? To whom? And whose interests are being served? (1979, 160). The "revelation" toward which the novel moves is the Swann Symposium, organized to canonize the slim, posthumous volume of verse, Swanris Song. All who attend this conference hope to learn the secrets and mysteries of Swanns short, difficult life. But the symposium, as the culminating point in the disappearance of all textual traces of these secrets, frustrates any such synthesis. Swann: A Literary Mystery is constructed around the narratives of four people preparing texts to be read at the symposium, each of whom

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unfolds the story of a relationship with Mary's texts or, in the case of the librarian, with Mary herself. Thus each is writing the "truth" of Mary Swann as s/he engages with it. Sarah Maloney values Swann's "dailiness," as she puts it, which produces in the banal objects of everyday life both the "transparency" into the "mythic heavings of the universe" and "ennui" (21-22). Sarah develops a feminist thesis for Swann, presenting her as a sort of Mrs. Ramsay, an aesthetician of the quotidian, and as Virginia Woolf s prototypical female artist. Preparing to become a mother herself, Sarah reads Swanns work within a perspective of mother-daughter relations. In this, the sexual politics of her textual intervention are diametrically opposed to those of Morton Jimroy, Swanns biographer, who, having made a name for himself with biographies of Pound and Starman, now wants to appropriate Mary Swann in order "to take revenge for her" (87). In contrast to Sarahs synthesis with Swann (her milestone article has been called "Swanns Synthesis"), Jimroy s relationship is antagonistic. He is given to intellectual jousting at conferences. He pursues his quarry relentlessly, interviewing Mary's daughter Frances in California, trying to absorb the details of the dead woman's life. Through this mimesis of the process of writing biography, Shields both displaces the criminal into scholarly investigation and explores the stance of the biographer to his subject. Jimroy dismisses the "popular fallacy that biographers fall in love with their subjects" (83), though this is what he seems to do with Swann, displaying her photo to a fellow airplane traveller as the love of his life. When Swann resists him, however, by leaving so few written documents for him to work with, his attitude changes to "contempt" (83), another potential position for the biographer, as for the thwarted lover. Indeed, Mary ultimately becomes "his enemy" (106) and he feels "defeated" by her when so little material is yielded up that the planned book will at best be an article. "She's bent on punishment. She's a sly one, a wily one. Woman, women. Endlessly elusive and intent on victory... He admits it: for the moment at least, Mary Swann has defeated him" (110). Paranoid, he experiences this problem with material as an earned punishment. For what Jimroy has done is to steal Mary's photograph from the Swann museum and her fountain pen from her daughter. His relationship to his subject has been antagonistic, one of violence and appropriation. The story of the research for and the failure to produce a text, Jimroy's narration is interspersed with narratives of his failed relationships with women and his eroticized correspondence with a fellow scholar, Sarah. As explicitly

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as Sarahs pregnancy, Jimroy s sexual relationships underline the gendered specificity of the construction of literary texts and knowledge. The admiring imitation of the female scholar is contrasted to the contemptuous violation of the male. The remaining two narratives introduce other frames through which knowledge is consructed. But the process is shown to be equally manipulative and transformative and just as self-interested, though more playful. There is none of Jimroy s stooping to theft and appropriation of a "life," nor Sarah's willful destruction of Swann's rhyming dictionary in conscious suppression of facts contradictory to the formers version of the Swann narrative. The distortions here are of enhancement, not subtraction, products of friendship rather than careerism. Surfaces, however, are equally deceptive. Rose Hindmarsh, the town librarian, shared Mary's interest in reading. Through Rose's narrative, we learn of the types of book the library held, popular literature mostly, not the classics to which the literary scholars compare Mary's work. An Edna Ferber novel was the last book that Mary borrowed. Although Rose feels overwhelmed by the forthcoming trip to the symposium, where she expects to be out of place, she too has constructed a narrative about Mary Swann in the Memorial Room that she has created at the library. Hers is a material rendering of the "life." Like the scholars, Rose has found limited resources to work with. There were no family mementoes and only two photographs of Swann, along with a drawerful of crocheted doilies. "And so," the narrative informs us, "Rose was forced to use her imagination when it came to furnishing the Mary Swann Memorial Room" (162). Like the scholars', hers too is a partial and interested representation of Swann, in the materiality and dailiness of her pursuits as the country housewife. The notebooks have been lent to Sarah, the fountain pen sent to Frances. No literary artifacts grace the room which is furnished, moreover, with articles belonging "to the time and the region of which Mary Swann was a part, and therefore nothing is misrepresented, not the quilts, not the china, not even the picture of the cocker spaniel" (163). Rose, we are informed, would have denied that this was an act of "deception." However, the narrative underlines, "The charm of falsehood is not that it distorts reality, but that it creates reality afresh" (163). Representation is inevitably and always misrepresentation, the text selfreflexively proclaims, in its investigation of the ideological inflections of the mimetic arts. This is further underlined in the narrative of Frederic Cruzzi, who edited Swann's poetry. Now 80 and retired from his position as

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newspaper editor, he presents himself as a cultivated and well-travelled man with a host of charming friends. In fragments of autobiographical sketches, reminiscences, and letters, his narrative unfolds as recollections of the December day years ago when he had hit his wife, Hilda, on the jaw and drawn blood. "Something snapped," he describes to himself: "Temporary insanity," as in "crimes of passion" (221). These are the very words used by the community to explain the murder of Mary Swann by her husband on the same winters night. The juxtaposition of the two outbursts of male violence suggests that the events are possibly linked. Moreover, that afternoon Mary had taken her poems to Cruzzi, sick and alone at home. It is implied in the police questioning of Cruzzi (a trace of the detective novel) that Mary's anxiety about getting home on time might have been an indication of fearful anticipation of jealous anger on the part of her husband. Cruzzi was excited by the "beguiling cleanliness" of the lines of verse (215). His anger is provoked when he thinks Hilda has burned the poems, which were left in a paper bag. This turns out not to have been the case: the bag was used to dispose of fishbones from the evening meal. The washable blue ink has run on the manuscript pages. What follows is the "revelation" of the novel's investigation into the mystery of creation and the production of discourse. The Cruzzis spend the rest of the night transcribing. They scarcely touch many poems that become legible as they dry, for "if one or two letters swam into comprehension, the rest followed" (222). But obliterated words, phrases, whole passages require more attention. "They puzzled and conferred over every blot, then guessed, then invented" (223). As time passes, they experience a "reckless permission" and choose, between two possible transcriptions, the one that pleases them better. By morning, a "curious conspiracy" binds them in an effort to "offer [Mary] help and protection" (223). Hilda's transcriptions and not Mary's sodden original is referred to as "the manuscript." Indeed, Hilda feels that she has become Mary Swann: At one point, Hilda, supplying missing lines and even the greater part of a missing stanza, said she could feel what the inside of Mary Swarm's head must look like. She seemed to be inhabiting, she said, another woman's body. (223)

The concepts of both personal and literary identity are put into question in this blurring of conventional boundaries.

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Hilda's alterations, it is suggested, were the product of her unused talent, while Cruzzi was impelled by "his instinct for tinkering" (223). What they have done is to rewrite Swann as a modernist poet, strong on metaphor, so that the second line of the most severely damaged poem changes from "Brightens the day with shame" to "Blisters the day with shame" (223). This is poetry by committee, poetry produced by readers. Even more forcefully than Rose Hindmarsh's museum display, these poems foreground the "charm of falsehood," the art of "misrepresentation" (163). This rewriting of Swann s poems is on the lines of the "phallic editing" executed on Emily Dickinsons poetry by Thomas Higginson and on that of Isabella Valancy Crawford by John Garvin.6 Cruzzi has already demonstrated his power to silence women's creative voices when he describes Hilda's poetic efforts as "moving" but with "no fire on the frontier" (205), his criticism putting an end to her search for an outlet for her strong artistic vocation. That the narrative of the quest for narrative has totally eclipsed the narrative of quest becomes clear in this fourth section of Swann: A Literary Mystery. The greater part of the section is devoted to reminiscence rather than to description of the present moment. Yet an event that would be of major significance in a conventional whodunit took place when Frederic Cruzzi was out: someone entered his house. This information is withheld until the final pages of Cruzzi's narrative, when it is presented in an offhand way, intermingled with memories of the earlier December with Mary Swann, as the retired editor surveys his invaded dwelling. The main door of the house is solid and graceful, and the knocker is the kind that fits the hand and kindles hope. Above the brass housing of the door lock, there are several scratches and a deep gouge; these were made by the Christmas Eve burglar. A clumsy entry, or so the Kingston police constable judged later. Clearly the work of a bungling amateur, yet he succeeded. He would have been assisted in his work by the carnage lamp next to the door. (225)

The proprietorial eye of Cruzzi is the focalizer for the scene. It runs over his belongings, noting that nothing has been touched except his four volumes of Swanns Song and his folder of the manuscript notes. This he discovers on Christmas Day, when he starts to think about composing his opening address for the symposium. The narrative ends abruptly at this point, not expatiating on the police investigation or on Cruzzi's reactions.

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Positioned so crucially at the end of this narrative, just prior to the final section which stages the symposium as a film script, always already read and distanced, the description of the break-and-entry tugs at the readers memory, offering clues for detective work that the narrative itself refuses to elaborate. Sarah has mislaid Swanns notebook and is unable to complete her paper, Jimroy cannot find Swanns pen, while Rose has difficulty locating the second photo. Individually, these accidents have blocked the composition of the respective papers and, consequently, provided gaps that need narrative expansion and ideological manipulation to develop a coherent linear sequence. The conference which had promised to bring all the documents and facets of Swanns text and life into a synthetic whole begins almost immediately with disruption: the lights go off during the opening address and a speakers briefcase disappears. Nevertheless, it takes some 60 pages of conference dialogue—or more accurately, diatribe—and until the middle of the following night before the narrative itself addresses the question of the insistent "pattern" of events (298), and sets about the conventional business of investigating mysterious happenings and "naturalizing" disconcerting secrets. Once again, the traditional thriller is subverted, for the detectives activity takes the form of a private mini-conference among the four main characters in Sarahs hotel room. Jimroy and Cruzzi have both come to the conclusion that the various losses are not coincidence but the deliberate work of a thief—trying to corner the intellectual market for the burgeoning Swann industry, Jimroy suggests, or after extortion money, Rose, who has read a lot of detective fiction, proposes. But if a conference this is, it is as parody. Instead of discussing hypotheses and theories, the four "detectives" rapidly conclude that it is an inside job and run through the list of symposium participants, with appropriate descriptive commentary. The causality of the detective novel has been displaced by the random order of a list. Narrative order, the hope of revelation, breaks down. As the stage directions indicate, "the voices become indistinguishable.... The late hour and the curious impromptu nature of this mini-symposium demand surreal treatment" (301). The next morning it becomes clear that their horrified surmise of the previous night is correct: nobody has a copy of Swanns poems. Not only that, but the speaker for the first session fails to turn up. A search reveals that he is locked into his room, that his paper and copy of the poems have been stolen. He, too, has been reduced to silence. So concerned are the "Swannians" with the

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speaker s situation that they fail to notice the intruder, still in the room. Only Sarah sees him slip out and follows him into the corridor, where she thinks she recognizes him as her ex-lover Brownie, a second-hand book dealer. Again, however, the narrative is displaced from focus on the investigation of events to the construction of discourses. Sarahs observation is ignored. The novel concludes hastily with the symposium participants gathered in a room, (re) collectively composing Swanns poem about "Lost Things." But this is precisely what the directors note to the film-script text of the symposium has promised us in a narrative mise en abyme: "This film may be described (for distribution purposes) as a thriller. A subtext focuses on the more subtle thefts and acts of cannibalism that tempt and mystify the main characters" (231). These are the cannibalisms of ideological appropriation which have turned this novel into the investigation of the productivity of discourses. Shields' novel exposes the operations of narrative within the contemporary literary institution. Literary value requires no textual object, no signified, since it is an endless chain of signifiers. The radical impact of her critique of the conventions of literary identity and of the "originality" of the literary text, which she reveals to be produced relationally within a network of textual practices and discourses, is evident in her choosing to set her narratives of literary appropriation within the structures and institutions engaged in the production, reproduction, and dissemination of knowledge, that is, within the academic institution and the publishing industry. In this she probes further into the signifying practices of the genre, the politics of its relations of production, confronting directly the meaning-making structures of our society. That these are violent, sexist, and capitalistic is clear from the narrative fate of Mary Swann and of her poetic text. Mary is bludgeoned to death by her husband; her text is mutilated by the Cruzzis; it is ultimately silenced completely by the greedy bookdealer who, it appears, has bought the Swann farm as well as all copies of the text in a monopolistic gesture of increasing capital gains. Similarly, the literary women who attempt to create an interest in Swann s work are both a part of this capitalist economy of knowledge even as they are marginalized and silenced within it. Hilda Cruzzi s silencing by her husband leads to her "editing" of Swanns text, but her voice is effaced once again when Frederic is accorded recognition for the discovery of the poet. So too Sarah Maloneys invention of Swanns text is enabled by her feminist aesthetics, which prompt her to seek out a literary mother. But the industry which Sarah has initiated has

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become very much a phallic domain, as evidenced by the dominating editorial practices of Cruzzi and Jimroy's theft of the highly symbolic phallus of the literary phallic mother, her pen. Moreover, Sarah is not much in evidence at the conference. Pregnant, she is resting in her room. However, this room becomes the locus of the collective detecting with which the novel concludes, and hers is the hand holding the pen. Is it this hand that guides the instrument that invents this whole literary world? The novel opens with her claim to invention and closes with her hand on the pen—? In between, we readers explore the discourse on women's writing as writing woman is produced by the literary institution, represented in the symposium participants. The bourgeois myth of the free individual—creative genius or passionate murderer— is disrupted: these positions are discursively produced and we, as readers, are complicit in the symposium participants' self-interested interpretations, where desire is confounded with murder. In fact, we are the ones who have constructed the mystery of the loss of the Swann text, by inference from clues which the narrative refuses to develop. None of us is free from guilt. There are no fixed positions, no stable identities for good and evil. In this, Shields has challenged both ordinary verisimilitude and the verisimilitude of the genre. The "truth" of gender rewrites the "truth" of narrative. NOTES 1. Prince (1973), Levi-Strauss (1968). Prince sees a three-step process with a phase of disequilibrium intervening. 2. Literature itself is an ideological apparatus. Narrative is deployed by other apparatuses such as the educational system, the family, religion, etc., to position the subject in relation to the modes of production. SeeAlthusser 1971, 121-73. 3. See Barthes 1972. The "motivated" sign of mythical fictions, those which in Althusser s terms project an imaginary representation of real social relations, is contrasted with the "arbitrary" character of the linguistic sign. 4. See Owens 1983, 61. Owens, however, overlooks the debate in Quebec and the formulation of feminism as an extension of "la modernite" by Pierre Nepveu and Suzanne Lamy (Lamy 1987, 202). For further discussion of feminism and postmodernism see Godard 1989. 5. See Brownstein 1984. As Nancy K. Miller expresses it in The Heroines Text (1980), women are writers whose texts manifest themselves in an economy in which they are objects of sexual exchange, circulated within

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the limitations of an erotic destiny encompassed by the terms of marriage or death. This phallocentric exchange of women and message has resulted in the repression of women and of the feminine. 6. "Phallic editing" is Nancy Johnsons term for the patriarchal manipulation of women's texts (1988, 19). Ted Hughes' editing of Sylvia Plath's journals would constitute another example of the practice. WORKS CITED Althusser, Louis. (1971). "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books. Barthes, Roland. (1972). Mythologies. Trans. Annette Laver. London: Cape. Belsey, Catherine. (1980). Critical Practice. London: Methuen. Bowers, Elizabeth. (1988). Ladies Night. Seattle: Seal Press. Brownstein, Rachel. (1984). Becoming a Heroine. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cranny-Francis, Anne. (1987). "The Women Men Don't See: Feminist Rewritings and Rereadings of Generic Fiction." Paper presented at ISSSIS '87, Toronto. . (1988). "Gender and Genre: Feminist Rewritings of Detective Fiction." Women's Studies International Forum 11:1. . (1990). Feminist Fiction: Feminist Use of Generic Fiction. Cambridge: Polity. De Lauretis, Teresa. (1984). Alice Doesn't. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. . (1987). Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Foster, Marion. (1987). The Monarchs Are Flying. Toronto: Women's Press. Foucault, Michel. (1979). "What is an Author?" Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Josue Harari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Godard, Barbara. (1986). "Tales Within Tales: Margaret Atwood's Folk Narratives." Canadian Literature 109:57-86. . (1987). "Palimpest: Margaret Atwood's Bluebeard's Egg!' RANAM 20:51-60. . (1989). "Ri/post: Feminism and Postmodernism in Quebec: The Politics of an Alliance." Quebec Studies 9(Fall):131-43. Romans, Margaret. (1980). Women Writers and Poetic Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Irigaray, Luce. (1985). Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. -. (1985). This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Jackson, Rosemary. (1981). Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen. Jameson, Fredric. (1981). The Political Unconsciousness: Narrative as a Social Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Johnson, Nancy. (1988). "Garvin's Crawford: The Editing of Isabella Valancy's Poetry." M.A. Thesis, York University. Kofman, Sara. (1985). The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writing. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lamy, Suzanne. (1987). "Les enfants nes de pere et de mere inconnus." Gynocritics/Gynocritiques: Feminist Approaches to Canadian and Quebec Women's Writing. Ed. Barbara Godard. Toronto: ECW Press, pp. 199-210. Le Guin, Ursula. (1979). The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. Susan Wood. New York: Putnam. Levi-Strauss, Claude. (1968). Structural Anthropology. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books. Lyotard, Jean Francois. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Miller, Nancy K. (1980). The Heroines Text. New York: Columbia University Press. O'Brien, Mary. (1981). The Politics of Reproduction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Owens, Craig. (1983). The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. Poovey, Mary. (1984). The Proper Lady and Woman Writer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Prince, Gerald. (1973). A Grammar of Stories. The Hague: Mouton. Propp, Vladmir. (1968). Morphology of the Folktale. 2nd ed. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. (1983). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen. Russ, Joanna. (1972). "What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Cant Write." Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives. Ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press. Shields, Carol. (1987). Swann: A Literary Mystery. Toronto: Stoddart. Stone, Marjorie. Paper presented at ACCUTE, Montreal, June 1984. Todorov, Tzvetan. (1977). The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zaremba, Eve. (1987). Work for a Million. Toronto: Second Story.

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5 THE (W)RITE OF PASSAGE: FROM CHILDHOOD TO WOMANHOOD IN LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY'S EMILY NOVELS G.A. Woods

The second volume of a series, especially if it deals with a very young girl, is the hardest for me to write—because the public and the publisher won't allow me to write of a young girl as she really is. One can write of children as they always are; so my books of children are always good; but when you come to write of the "miss" you have to depict a sweet, insipid young thing—really a child grown older—to whom the basic realities of life and reactions to them are quite unknown. Love must scarcely be hinted at—yet young girls in their early teens often have some very vivid love affairs. A girl of "Emilys" type certainly would.

This is taken from Lucy Maud Montgomery's journal entry of Friday, January 20, 1924 (Montgomery 1992, 157), a few days after she had finished Emily //, the original working title for Emily Climbs (1983, II, 168; in page references, the three volumes of the series are referred to as I, II, and III respectively). Since they began to appear in the early years of this century, Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne and Emily novels have been read by generations of young people all over the world: Montgomery is Canada's cult novelist. There is no question, however, that the Anne novels have been the more popular of the two series, and that their heroine has served as a role model to thousands of young

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girls. The Emily books were written much later than Anne of Green Gables, almost twenty years later, in fact. * One of the chief reasons for the comparative lack of popularity might be found in the more mature Montgomery's ambivalent attitude toward the transition from childhood to womanhood, and the implications for that developmental stage in a girls life, especially in terms of awakening sexuality. The Emily books demonstrate that this stage is not always entirely unproblematic.2 As is evident not only from the epigraph but also from her fiction, Montgomery is not concerned with early childhood development, a major focal point of psychoanalytic theory from Freud onward. She does not problematize early sex /gender development: an infant born with female sex characteristics will become a female gendered child and adult in her fiction.3 Montgomery does, however, problematize the process of gender construction at the stage of development when the female child goes through puberty. She seems to have an ambivalent attitude toward the transition from childhood to womanhood and the implications of this stage in a girls life, especially in terms of awakening sexuality (referred to as love'm the Journal quotation). In fact, one might even say that in the Emily novels Montgomery has made this developmental step rather traumatic, and that the young reader absorbing this material may receive the subconscious message that female puberty and the first encounter with sexuality are to be associated with rape trauma. The message is stronger than Montgomery herself perhaps realized.4 Today's young readers, who have heard about incest and rape to an extent that earlier generations had not, may consciously recognize Montgomery's "message," notwithstanding the "happy ending" at the close of the third volume of the series, Emilys Quest, which is extraordinarily contrived and unbelievable. There is an additional dimension to the traumatic message: Montgomery seems to indicate that everything will be fine as long as the patriarchal structure is preserved. Moreover, there is a strong hint that there would have been no traumatic experience had Emily not somehow transgressed the norms of female behaviour within the patriarchy. This transgression has very much to do with the heroine's own identity as a developing writer. For a person of Emilys perceptiveness and urge to express herself, this (w)rite of passage in her young life is possibly all the more difficult, inasmuch as there is a sense of prohibition (on the part of Aunt Elizabeth, alias the "phallic mother" and representative of the patriarchal order)5 associated with inscribing one's own feelings in one's own discourse. As we shall see below, the most traumatic episode

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around the "milestones" in Emilys life takes place as a result of her having to retrieve her own subversive discourse from the discourse of the "patriarch" as represented by the Church. Without defining her terms exactly, Montgomery divides the puberty experience into two "milestones." The first is the "step from childhood to girlhood" (onset of puberty), and the second is that from "girlhood to womanhood" (encounter with sexual experience). At the very beginning of chapter 3 of the second book in the Emily trilogy, Emily Climbs, the narrator warns the reader that the "first milestone" is about to be encountered: Some of us can recall the exact time in which we reached certain milestones on life's road—the wonderful hour when we passed from childhood to girlhood—the enchanted, beautiful—or perhaps the shattering and horrible— hour when girlhood was suddenly womanhood—the chilling hour when we faced the fact that youth was definitely behind us—the peaceful, sorrowful hour of the realization of age. Emily Starr never forgot the night when she passed the first milestone, and left childhood behind her for ever. (II, 37)

There have been hints of this event, such as in chapter 13 of the first book, Emily of New Moon, when Emily is 13 years old. On the surface, this chapter deals with Emily's taste for a certain variety of "sweet" apples. She eats such an apple at Lofty John's shop, one which Lofty John, a friend and neighbour of Emily's family, later insists has been contaminated with rat poison, scaring Emily, and subsequently her aunts, out of their wits. There is more, however, to this apple scene than meets the eye. The chapter in which it occurs is called "A Daughter of Eve." We are told certain things about these apples which clearly go beyond the simple enjoyment of eating fruit and harkens back to the biblical association of apples and sin: There was no taboo on any apple and Emily was free to eat all she wanted of each and every kind,—the only prohibition being that she must not take any to bedw\\h her. Aunt Elizabeth, very properly, did not want her bed messed up with apple seeds-, and Aunt Laura had a horror of any one eating apples in the dark lest they might eat an apple worm into the bargain. Emily, therefore, should have been able fully to satisfy her appetite for apples at home; but there is a certain odd kink in human nature by reason of which the flavour of the apples belonging to somebody else is always vastly superior to our own—as the crafty serpent of Eden very well knew. (I, 132, emphasis added)

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The above passage ends with a reference to the serpent of Eden, who tempted Eve into her eating of the apple of the Tree of Knowledge. Montgomery is not talking about ordinary apples, but rather the forbidden fruit of sexual knowledge. The rather severe prohibition against eating apples in bed and the reference to beds messed up with apple seeds connote the sexual act itself. In other words, this chapter really deals with Emily growing up and preparing to leave childhood. In the apple-eating scene Emily is alone; neither the aunts nor Lofty John, in whose shop the scene is taking place, are present. Emily spots a huge apple, "the biggest 'sweet' she had ever seen, all by itself on one of the steps of the stair leading up to the loft." She climbs up and eats it. At this point, Lofty John suddenly appears, and "the shadow of his nose shot upward like a huge spear to the ceiling" (I, 134), as he tells her that this particular apple has rat poison on it. The phallic imagery and the notion of a poisoned apple, i.e., a forbidden apple/knowledge, the consuming of which will poison the eater/deprive her of her innocence, is rather obvious. Having been told of the rat poison (by the male, the would-be "poisoner"), Emily thinks she is going to die and has appropriate stomach cramps. Aunt Elizabeth, however, finds out that the apple had not been poisoned after all, and Emily is physically/morally whole. Emily had not, after all, eaten poisoned/forbidden fruit, merely an apple to which she "was perfectly welcome" (I, 35); she is still a child. The scene lingers with the reader, nevertheless. The topic of awakening sexuality has been broached and is further thematized at the beginning of Emily Climbs, the next volume in the series, when Dean (the older cousin to whom Emily is later engaged, but in the end does not marry) returns from a long absence. We are told through him: "I left a child last autumn—and I find a woman" (II, 26). At this point, Emily will be fourteen in three weeks, and Dean is becoming interested in her as a sexual object. In fact, he gives her "by mistake" a book which, we are told, was "just like a pig-sty" (II, 29) and which makes Emily feel as if my hands were soiled somehow and I couldn't wash them clean. And I have another queer feeling, as if some gate had been shut [author's emphasis] behind me, shutting me into a new world I don't quite understand or like, but through which I must travel II, 30 (emphasis added)

Where is it that Emily "must" travel? Is it one of those milestones which were associated with "the shattering and horrible ... hour when

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girlhood was suddenly womanhood" (II, 37)? The stage is being set for an event of paramount importance in the life of a young girl. Montgomery deals with the transition from childhood to girlhood at length. We are told exactly when Emily turns fourteen, at which point her late father's books are returned to her, because Aunt Elizabeth is "beginning to realize" that Emily is "no longer a child" (II, 33). The most significant passage, however, is chapter 3 of Emily Climbs, where Emily leaves "childhood behind her for ever," a "night of horror and mystery and strange delight" that "ripen [s] her mind and heart like the passage of years" (II, 37). The scene begins at an evening prayer meeting in the church to which Emilys family has belonged for generations, that is, it is firmly situated within the established order of patriarchal society. Montgomery could have had the passage of the milestone take place outside of the confines of patriarchal society, in the deep forest, for example, but she chose not to. We are told "that there [is] something about the night in its mingling of placid, accustomed beauty with the omens of rising storm" that intrigues Emily. Her thoughts begin to wander during the service. She feels she is "committing trespass" because she has the ability to "pass into their [the congregation's] souls and read therein hidden motives and passions that were, perhaps, a mystery even to their possessors" (II, 39). In other words, Emily, the budding writer, enjoys the writer's privilege of god-like insight. Whenever she engages in this activity, she always feels "a sense of power, a sense of the forbidden—a sense even of sacrilege" (II, 40, emphasis added). Montgomery is here cueing the reader to a transgression of some sort. While Emily's thoughts are wandering, the pastor is delivering a sermon about the wise virgins who had sufficient oil with them for their lamps and were "rewarded" (according to the conventional interpretation of this parable) by the bridegroom for whom they had all been waiting, whereas the "foolish" virgins, whose lamps ran out of oil prematurely, missed the bridegroom altogether. Emily admits to herself that she would "rather be outside with the foolish ones trying to help and comfort them, than inside feasting with the wise ones. It would be more interesting, too" (II, 41). Contrary to the intent of the parable, Emily identifies with the virgins who are not part of the bridal feast and who do not even have access to the bridegroom. In addition to the notion of transgression, the themes of "virginity" and non-interest in losing this status have been introduced to the text through the biblical parable. The next notion to be brought to the

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reader's attention through the account of the evening prayer meeting is also related to sexuality: desire. This is introduced by having Emily muse on the possible desires of Teddys mother, to which she has no access. She cannot read Mrs. Kent's mind as she does with all the other people in the congregation: "I can never get a peep into her soul... the door is never unlatched" (II, 41). Is this because the mother desires her son? Emily goes on to reflect on the desires of various people, including those of Mad Mr. Morrison in the gallery: "We all know what he wants ... to find his Annie," his lost young bride (II, 42). Having gone through the notions of the forbidden, virginity, and desire via association, Emily enters the next phase of her quest to reach the milestone of girlhood. It feels hot and smothering inside the church, due to the weather and to the uninspiring sermon, and Emily revolts against the patriarchal structure upheld by people like the Reverend Mr. Sampson: "You make God ugly ... you fat little man" (II, 42). This can be read as Emily's acceptance of the patriarchal structure per se (assumption that there is a non-ugly God), but rejection of the version of it represented by Mr. Sampson. The slip of paper which she inserts into her hymnbook is a testament of her revolt, for it is her own discourse (just a small piece of paper) within the imposing discourse of the patriarchal world (the hymnbook). If her notations on this slip of paper were to be seen "by alien eyes," it would be tantamount to "sacrilege" (II, 43). No wonder that she simply must find this subversive slip of paper again, which she by mistake (?) left behind on her way out of the church. As a result of having to retrieve her own discourse from the established discourse, she is locked up inside the church, even worse and unknown to her, with Mad Mr. Morrison, who is constantly looking for his lost bride. Emily now finds herself "engulfed in darkness—close, hot, smothering, almost tangible darkness," and she is very frightened. Instead of the familiar, homely, and friendly place of her Sunday School lessons, this bastion of patriarchy has become a "ghostly, alien place full of haunting terrors" (II, 44), and instead of "her old dear friend of childhood, the bat-winged, misty 'Wind Woman,'" there is now "a legion of yelling witches" (the storm outside the church) (II, 45). Again, references are made to the comfort, familiarity, and security of childhood as opposed to this, the unfamiliar and disturbing (the storm/the next step in her development). We are not allowed to forget Mad Mr. Morrison. Emily thinks of him, but does not yet know that he is also inside the church. Having almost convinced herself that this is just

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another "false alarm" (i.e., she recalls the poisoned apple scene), she calmly decides to leave the "small and narrow" porch which makes her feel smothered and oppressed and walk back into the church proper. She is prevented from carrying out her resolve because "her hand touched—not the stair rail—merciful heavens, what was it?—something hairy—Emily's shriek of horror froze on her lips" (II, 46). At the next flash of lightning she sees that she has touched a "huge black dog," and then "for a moment she saw his eyes blazing redly at her, like the fiends" (II, 47). Montgomery describes Emilys reaction to this frightful encounter: For a few minutes her terror was so great that it turned her physically sick. Then, with an effort that was unchildlike in its determination—I think it was at that moment Emily wholly ceased to be a child—she recovered her self-control. (II, 47)

The narrator steps in with the overt comment that it was at precisely this moment that Emily passed from childhood to girlhood, this moment dominated by the colours red and black, hairiness and physical revulsion. It is clear that Montgomery interprets this important milestone in a girl's life (the onset of the female cycle) as a traumatic experience which takes place within the confines of the patriarchal structure (the church), but is nevertheless rendered unfamiliar (the darkness) and terrifying (the huge black dog). Emily has not yet completed her rite of passage, however. She must also be brought into direct contact with sexuality. The storm has abated; she heaves a sigh "almost of contentment" and thinks that "the worst is over." Then abruptly, in a line that stands alone, the narrator states: "All at once Emily knew she was not alone!" and the narrator continues in the next line: She had heard nothing—seen nothing—felt nothing—: and yet she knew, beyond all doubt or dispute, that there was a Presence in the darkness above her on the stairs. (II, 48)

Although there are no outward signs of anything, Emily knows that there is something else which she must go through, much like her reaction to the book given to her by Dean, which she did not like but which constituted a necessary step in her development. By now, the reader knows that Mr. Morrison is going to play an important role in

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this, the next step toward the second milestone. It is, no doubt, of significance that Mr. Morrison is "mad," that he has a "dreadful, inhuman laughter" (II, 48), and that he is constantly searching for his lost young bride, Annie. The narrator repeatedly stresses Annie s status as bride, a woman about to be, or having just been "deflowered." The narrator explains that Mr. Morrison follows young girls, thinking they might be his Annie, and if he caught them he held them with one hand and stroked their hair and faces fondly with the other, mumbling foolish, senile endearments. He had never harmed any one, but he had never let anyone go until she was rescued by some other person. It was said that Mary Paxton of Deny Pond had never been quite the same again: her nerves never recovered from the shock. (II, 49-50)

There is no doubt that an encounter with Mr. Morrison would have had terrible consequences for Emily. She would "never be the same again," whether or not this should be interpreted as a case of "nerves" or of actual violation. Of course, Montgomery could not in the 1920s include an actual rape in a book intended for young readers, but we are nevertheless, I would argue, faced with rape trauma. When Emily sees Mr. Morrison in a lightning flash, he is crouched five steps above her, with his grey head thrust forward. She saw the frenzied gleam of his eyes—the fang-like yellow teeth exposed in a horrible smile—the long, thin, blood-red hand outstretched towards her, almost touching her shoulder. (II, 49)

Confronted with this phallic image, Emily must hide. Montgomery goes out of her way to emphasize the horror of the situation. The girl feels as if she "were sinking in some icy gulf of coldness." She hides by diving among the pews, crouching in a corner. She is bathed in an icecold perspiration. She is no longer evading Mr. Morrison, but "IT," the blood-red hand, the phallus: "It must not touch her' (II, 49). But "IT" is looking for her in every pew and it is only a matter of time before "IT" will find her. The increasing panic is conveyed in the accumulation of lexemes of flight and escape on her part, and of hunting and seeking out on the part of the pursuer. The church scene is foreshadowed in Emily of New Moon when Emily is locked into the "spare room" because Aunt Elizabeth wants to punish her. This room is dominated by a large bed in which many of

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her ancestors have died. On the walls of this room are portraits of these dead relatives: "Such a large collection of dead Murrays." This room is thus associated with death. Moreover, it is dark, and "ever since she could remember she had had a horror of being shut up alone in semidarkness" (I, 110). A few lines later, the narrator describes the "big canopied bed, jutting out from the wall into the middle of the floor." This bed "was high and rigid and curtained also with dark draperies," and she imagines that "anything might jump at her out of such a bed. What if some great black hand should suddenly reach out of it—reach right across the floor—and pluck at her?" (I, HO).6 While the room and the bed are associated explicitly with death, the ancestral bed also connotes, implicitly, procreation, and it is significant in this respect, I would argue, that something sinister might conceivably "jump out at her." Montgomery's readers could be expected to recall this earlier scene when confronted with the church scene in Emily Climbs. The similarities are striking: Emily is locked into the spare room/church; both are dark and threatening; there is reference to a thunder storm in the first scene as in the second. The most striking similarity, of course, is with something "jumping out" from the darkness, although in the spare room the menacing hand is imagined, whereas in the church it is real. In the latter scene there is no reference to a bed, but there are so many other points of similarity that readers could well supply the bed/sexual act connotations themselves, thus making the church scene even more overtly related to questions of sexual relations. Montgomery, to be sure, does not allow Emily to get caught by Mr. Morrison. Appearing miraculously outside the church, Teddy, whom Emily will eventually marry, saves her by pointing out that the key to the door is hanging on a nail inside the church. This means that it had been available to her all along, only she did not know about it, implying that the strength to avoid the unwanted kind of sexual encounter is within the girl/woman herself. It is interesting to note, however, that the woman does not appear to know this but has to be told by a man. Once informed, however, she is able to use the key: The clouds broke at that moment and the porch was filled with moonlight. In it she saw plainly the big key hanging high on the wall beside the front door. She dashed at it and caught it as Mad Mr. Morrison wrenched open the door and sprang into the porch, his dog behind him. Emily unlocked the outer door and stumbled out into Teddy's arms just in time to elude that outstretched, blood-red hand. (II, 51)

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What is the conclusion to be drawn from this narrative? Montgomery speaks of milestones girls/women must reach. The first one, between childhood and girlhood, is a "wonderful" hour, although not entirely without trauma, as it turns out. There is no doubt that Emily reaches and passes this milestone. Does she also reach the next one? At the beginning of the chapter, Montgomery refers to the second milestone, from girlhood to womanhood, as "enchanted, beautiful—or perhaps shattering and horrible" (II, 37). Emilys experience involving Mad Mr. Morrison is clearly designed to be a sexual encounter which is not completed (Emily escapes from Mr. Morrison). The second milestone is not reached in this chapter, nor in the ensuing scene with Teddy either, which is interrupted by his mother (as rival) right at the moment when it could have been reached. In fact, we never witness Emily reaching the second milestone. Presumably she will reach it at the end of the novel with Teddy in marriage. I have shown how Montgomery problematizes the accepted notions of development in a young girl's life. The question that is difficult to answer is whether, in so doing, she merely warns her readers against undesirable sexual encounters, or really is subverting the conventional wisdom of her time—that the passing from girlhood to womanhood is supposed to be an "enchanted and beautiful" experience—by showing that this step is "really" more related to rape trauma, especially when it comes to a developing young writer such as Emily. If Emily had not trangressed with her mind-wandering and the lost slip of paper, would there have been a traumatic experience? If she had not "forgotten" her own subversive discourse, there would have been no need to go back into the church to retrieve it and subsequently get locked up inside, thus setting the stage for her encounter with unwanted sexuality. Montgomery may problematize and challenge some conventional ideas of patriarchal society's construction of female identity at the time of puberty, but she does not really question patriarchy as such. In the end, patriarchy still prevails and controls,7 and Emily is "rewarded" with Teddy, her soul mate, whose assistance was required for her to find and use the "key" that would enable her to resolve her (w)rite of passage. Nevertheless, in the Emily novels at least, Lucy Maud Montgomery, preeminent author of conduct fiction for girls, brings her heroine, her readers, and herself to the edge of subversion.

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NOTES 1. Anne of Green Gables was first published in 1908, whereas Emily of New Moon appeared as late as 1923, Emily Climbs in 1925, and Emilys Quest in 1927. 2. Judith Miller (1984, 158) points out, with reference to Emily Climbs, that "Montgomery did not have the luxury of direct speech—especially not on issues of the values of a young woman's life. She spoke indirectly. Her novel has the superficial appearance of an idyllic novel of girlhood, but a careful reader will see something else." Miller does not concern herself with the subtext of Emily's intoduction to sexuality (which is anything but idyllic), but rather with Emily's struggle to assert her own voice as a writer throughout this book. 3. As Judith Butler (1990) points out, this pattern of development is not, in fact, as unproblematic as Montgomery portrays it. 4. L.G. Scanlon (1978) does not seem to recognize any such message. All she says about Emily and sexuality is that "Montgomery is unable, in a 'children's book,' to deal openly with the sexuality of her heroines, and she makes use of the 'meaningful glances' ploy, first with Anne and Kilmeny, and now with Emily [in relation to Teddy]" (77). 5. See Jane Gallop's discussion of Irigaray in her chapter "The Phallic Mother: Fraudian Analysis" in Gallop 1982, 113 ff. 6. Elizabeth R. Epperley (1992) convincingly demonstrates the considerable intertextual resonance of the Emily books with Charlotte Bronte's ]ane Eyre. One example is the scene in which Jane is locked up by her aunt in the dark Red Room, dominated by the massive bed in which her uncle died (152f). The terror experienced by Jane in this episode is similar to that of Emily in the spare room of her aunt's house. 7. T.D. MacLulich (1985, 466) observes: "Even Anne and Emily, Montgomery's most talented and self-willed young artists, lose much of their rebelliousness as they grow into womanhood. In the end, they meekly agree to marry the mate Montgomery has created for them." WORKS CITED Butler, Judith. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Epperly, Elizabeth R. (1992). The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass: LM. Montgomery's Heroines and the Pursuit of Romance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gallop, Jane. (1982). The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. MacLulich, T.D. (1985). "L.M. Montgomery's Portraits of the Artist: Realism, Idealism, and the Romantic Imagination." English Studies in Canada^Q (4):459-73.

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Montgomery, Lucy Maud. (1983). The Emily Novels, vol. I: Emily of New Moon; vol. II: Emily Climbs; vol. Ill: Emilys Quest. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart-Bantam. . (1992). The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Volume III: 1921-1929. Ed. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Scanlon, L.G. (1978). Alternatives: The Search for a Heroine in the Novels of Lucy Maud Montgomery. Ottawa: M.A. thesis, Dept. of Comparative Literature, Carleton University.

6 WRITING TOWARD ABSENCE: FRANCES GREGG'S THE MYSTIC LEEWAY Ben Jones

Let me start with cautionary words from Frances Gregg: "So far, in all my life I have met no single Man—though I have done my best to make one of Oliver Marlow [her son]—nor has any man encouraged me, or indeed been willing for me, to be a Woman. Mumbo-jumbo, superstitions, muddled mythologies, have been my fate among these artists and prelates and magicians, these escapists from life—from Life!" (1995, 61). My title attempts to account for Frances Gregg's title. The Mystic Leeway is a writing toward absence.l Leeway itself is a metaphor for absence, absence from the wind, absence from turmoil, violence, from otherness. It is a space in which one may recover: perhaps a private space, but perhaps also a space to re-affirm, re-assert, re-form, ones connections with the world. I shall argue that it is a space for the discovery of subjectivity. Gregg's project here is to use her own life-writing to discover, re-discover, and re-establish, her subjectivity, her speaking voice, and as we shall see, she sums up her enunciation of the subject in these words: "To me all that I am is most necessary" (170). A "leeway" is not just a space. It is also a "way." More exactly, it is a deviation from a set course, a drift. Both these meanings—shelter and drift—are in the text. My discussion is based on ideas of desire and otherness, and I see her text as an attempt, through a recapitulation of her life, to become something other than Other, something other than a Being-for-Others. Midway in the text she says:

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This tale was begun as a record of those people who, in the hurly-burly, the wash and silt of life, seemed to me keen and reputable, not beggars in the mart of their shiningness wrapped all about with the rags and gauds and trappings of other people s thoughts and other people s laws and other people s conventions. These were the people [Pound, Hilda Doolittle, John Cowper Powys] about whom I set out to write, the people whom I knew best, but more and more it is becoming a tale of the one whom I knew least, this baffled, hag-ridden, bewildered I, about whom I shall never come to say she was this, or that, for, by turns I am a grand and wise superhuman being moving with sure and stately tread where truth is, and a scrambling ape tearing their silken woven scarves into idiot tatters, making a mock of their human gestures, chattering ribaldries with my high ape gods. And for the actual living of life I have but one law—I serve. Oh, if I can but find you, strange companion who is I, then I shall know the secrets of life and death, but I shall not find you, neither I nor anyone. (133)

Gregg's comment here, with its uncertainties of movement between assertion and malice, its confessional "I serve," and its awareness that the writing is moving her, not moved by her, sets a pattern for the narrative. William Desmond, in Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness: An Essay on Origins (1987), says: "Desire is desire for something and so already reaches beyond itself. For this reason, lack is not solely negative: it attests to the stirring of an impetuous power through which desire begins to be more than itself. Negatively understood, it is a witness to unfulfillment; positively understood, it may make desire aware of itself and so awaken it to what is more than itself" (18). Looking at Frances Gregg in the context of this remark is not to identify her as "absence" or a "lack." This would be a misunderstanding. My intention, with her cautionary words in mind, is to do the opposite: to show that her writing is from her desire and toward her own subjectivity, writing directed toward the clearing away of fate, her fate which was to have passed all her days "with men who would be gods," and in an arresting way, it is a writing, a narrative, directed against a male engendered Modernism. This narrative, I shall try to show, attests to the positive understanding of lack, or absence. But it is also a "witness to unfulfillment," and so presents the inevitable other side as well. There is one other configuration from Desmond that I want to appropriate for some comments near the end, and this is his placing of desire and absence in relation to an end, or goal, a telos (1987, 19). This appropriation will, I hope, help explain the "Messianic" longing that is repeated so often in the text.

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The Mystic Leeway is life-writing, peripheral perhaps to the great moments of Modernism. But, we can ask, who invented these great moments? And we can remind ourselves that there is always life along the periphery. No claims will be made here for a "great discovery" or an astonishing revelation. It is an uncertain, at times disconcerting, text, unedited and unpublished until 1995, and probably unfinished. It tells parts of the story of a young woman from Philadelphia who went to Europe with her mother and her lover (Hilda Doolittle) to experience what James called "the complex fate." There are some Jamesian twists: Frances Gregg was betrayed by Culture. As a narrative of a woman's life, self-told, with its connections to significant and indeed canonized figures of literary Modernism, The Mystic Leeway provides information, and it could take its place as a footnote in the great text of human experience. Indeed, in the recent spate of books on H.D., footnote status, slightly more or less, is what Frances Gregg receives. Perhaps her status is raised somewhat when we note that she was the model for a major character in at least two classic novels, as Fayne Rabb in H.D.'s HjERmioneand Christie Malakite in Powys s Wolf Solent. Yet, even here, she remains in the closure of another's text. But, because of the particular kind of woman Frances Gregg was and wanted to be, I believe that her text does much more than provide information or anecdotal tracing. As a writing toward absence, toward subjectivity, it provides if not a paradigm at least a scenario for a narrative based on the configurations of gender. The story is written about—for and against, I suspect—her lovers: Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, John Cowper Powys; it is for Amy Hoyt and James Henderson (from Philadelphia days), against her mother, and for her son, Oliver Wilkinson. The text was written between the autumn of 1938 (Frances was 54 at the time) and the spring of 1941. The last of the eleven chapters was completed in February of 1941. Frances was killed, with her mother and daughter, in a bombing raid in Devon in April of that year. Her son, Oliver Wilkinson, found the text. Details of the text, particularly the connections to Powys, could occupy us for many pages, but I shall try to deal only with its salient features. Gregg did tell us something of what she meant by "leeway." Powys had in September 1938 encouraged her to write out her story. She at the time was living in near poverty with her mother, moving from caravan, to winter seaside houses, to occasional modest domiciles. She even set up as a market gardener, on rocky soil, with little knowledge

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of how things grow (the project failed). Powys wrote to her: "O it is absolutely damnable that such unique gifts as you have for description of people and things should not be used or used with 'Frances' signed under them." She soon replied: "It is a lovely idea to write a book for you.... Your book must be written from this flickering, mercurial aura of Frances, [from] the god-forgotten, god-forgetting material world, the world of the shadow of life (or 'death' as they say in the original) ... that is where I shall write your book—in that mystic leeway" (Gregg & Powys, undated typescript, 15 Sept. 1938). The site of the writing is the aura of Frances, which is the shadowed and godless "material world." It is the site of Nothingness, and it is, paradoxically, both mystical and safe. In the sense that the book is written for another (a lover), this is the right place for writing: this is where I shall write your book, out of Nothing. It is not that she had found that place: writing would make it. Her concern is to uncover the memories of how she got there, and by memory to recover herself. It is a narrative of disclosure written out of the remembrance of closures. These closures and disclosures, we shall note, are marked by gender. My approach to the text will be conventional: the marking of events and actors that allow for narrative movement. I acknowledge that the text might lend itself to a more geometrical patterning, to "triangular Desire," as described, and "systemized" by Rene Girard (1965). Certainly, the list of triangles (Gregg, Pound, H.D; or Fayne Rabb, George Lowndes, and HERmione Gart, as they are known in H.D.'s life-writing novel, HERmione\ Gregg, her mother, H.D.; Gregg, H.D., Powys; Gregg, Powys, Gregg's husband Louis Wilkinson; Gregg, Louis Wilkinson, Gregg's mother; Gregg, H.D., H.D.'s companion Bryher (the pseudonym of Winifred Ellerman); Gregg, H.D., Freud—the list could go on), certainly these triangularizations could be used to chart real-life fictional desire and deceit. And, because of the "literary" (and psychoanalytic) consciousness mediating relations between these events and actors, the tracing of mediated desire, external and internal, could occupy us for a long time. There is ample evidence in the text to trace out a design based on Girard s comment, "In the birth of desire, the third person is always present" (21), and his sub-title (in English, "Self and Other in Literary Structure") would seem to support the project. But, Girard restricts his commentary to the "novelistic"; there remains only a possibility—which I do not explore here—for extending his designs to the literary structures of life-writing.

BEN J O N E S

Narration proceeds by repetition, and I want to list five "figures" which make up these repetitions: crossings, sexual difference, matriarchy, gender, particularly as it relates to art, and telos as appearance in the void of a "leader" who will be a woman and a Jew. CROSSINGS

Crossings prevail throughout the text. First, there are the actual journeys which took place during the writing. The family (Frances, her mother, daughter and son) moved six times during the period of the writing. But this, according to her son Oliver's description of their life in his commentaries on the text, was not unusual. These moves, from 1938 through 1940 (when Frances got a job first at a school and then on a military base), are documented in the text. They become part of the narrative structure. But second, these constant moves are part of the larger figure of movement in her life. The narration begins with an episode describing an actual visit by gypsies to Frances's caravan. She is afraid, but they ask only for water, and she makes her own identification with them. She, too, is a gypsy. They have treated her "on terms of dignified equality." "I am a caravanner," she says, and continues: I am like them. I have something in common with Jews, and gypsies. I want to claim no country for my own, and to take the whole world in my stride. I want to move on, and on, and on. No one, but I, knows the tricks, the subterfuges, the safely argued reasons, the elaborate befoolments with which I have uprooted my parent, and my offspring, together with the dogs, cats, fowls, or rabbit of the moment, and moved them on to sate this unconquerable urge. I do not know why I do it, nor what I seek, nor towards what bourn I am eternally pressing. I don't know. Nor do I know who it is who weeps darkly within me, longing for its "home." (Gregg 1995, 55)

Later, as we have seen, she will say "I serve," but here she is Master, using family, and pets, in her project: desire and deceit, as she herself says. The localized journeys of the writing are doubled in the narrative as the obsessive journey of her life, the longing for home (which is not, in this obsession, Philadelphia). A detailed reading of the narration—more than I can offer here— would see the repetitions of journey as forming the constituents of the narrative. I shall mention only one other occurrence of the journey, certainly the most important journey she took, perhaps the most

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important event in her life, and one that is brought into focus repeatedly throughout her narrative: the trip to Europe with her mother and Hilda Doolittle in 1911. There are some contraries in her recording of the trip: the ocean voyage itself she recalls as the "happiest and most exciting adventure of my life," and she wonders why all the other passengers, as she learned at the end of the voyage, were waiting "patiently," and with some anticipation, for her to throw herself overboard (108). (The text is not without a wry humour.) But she knows why her countenance was so sad, and she tells us: I was urban born and bred, narrow streets, straight houses, glimpses of sky, a plethora of people. It is easy to pick and choose philosophies ... in such surroundings, but out there in the vast arena of the unknown, the incomprehensible, there was no possible answer. Such clingings as I had to God snapped like threads.... Alone in the prow of that ship I fought out the dilemma of man. Abandon hope, that was the first step, abandon hope, hope that life had a meaning for me, that I had a personal destiny; give it all up, the precious I. I can still feel that awful emptiness, loneliness, grief, of those hours of struggle. It had to be and I had to face it. I remember the feelings of my sharp chin pressed down upon my cold salt hands that clasped the rail, just that frail barrier of flesh between me and nothingness. This left me with an awful tenderness for the flesh, the pitiful poor thing. (114-15)

This, then, was the context of the voyage into exile, taken with her mother and her lover. So from the multiplicities of eventful crossing, we move to figures of sexual difference. SEXUAL DIFFERENCE

The Mystic Leeway was written for those whom Frances Gregg loved, and she names these people: Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), James Henderson, who while courting Frances talked about the girl he really cared for, Amy Hoyt, and John Cowper Powys. Each of these lovers offered something different to her, and each failed her, but no failure was so complete as her relation to Hilda. On one level, we trace the paths between her love for a woman and her love for (several) men. Sexual difference repeats itself throughout the narration, and there are incidents of revelation, moments of intensity, particularly in her discovery of (her discoveries with) Hilda. Hilda has written about the

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relation in much more detail in HERmione, in which the triangular desires of Frances, Ezra and Hilda are delineated. Certainly, although Hilda saw herself and Frances sharing a special world, they really were different. (Frances's seeming occult powers added to the difference.) This was what the trip to Europe revealed to them. Frances recalls a special moment of revelation: the two of them are travelling by train at night in France, looking out the window, seeing themselves reflected in the glass, against the darkness. It was a moment of "mystic communication of beauty." She stares at Hilda's head and sees, like a "second medallion," her own: To that was added the mysterious excitement of being borne on and on through space while the eyes of those phantom girls met, out there, where no thing was. I remember ... the tragic, unstressed melancholy of their gaze upon each other. We were beautiful, and we were doomed—as indeed, in a sense, we both were, for life was to deal harshly with each one of us in many ways. Dauntless and untried, as we were then, I think that we knew, for those few peerless moments, all that we were ever to know of the meaning of life. Afterwards we elaborated upon the theme, and tried it out upon the lovers of our choice who, with marked unanimity, and painful regularity, deserted us. (57)

There are other moments of intense involvement, but her memories are mixed. "Hilda was entrancing. /Hilda was ridiculous. /Hilda was exquisite. Hilda was hideous" (65). In her remembering, after the relation had broken (not completely, it did revive at times), she can still say: "My heart turns over in my breast as I remember her, and how, in my loneliness I brooded and brooded upon that face, reading it and rereading it, like a thrilling endless book" (65). One event is Hilda's "rescue" of Frances from a suicide attempt, taking her back to the house. It may only be a coincidence that the episode took place in the woods where they had found wild hyacinths, a hyacinth garden (67-68). (The scene reminds us of the hyacinth garden passage in Eliot's "The Waste Land," and it is an example of the Modernist intertextuality that occurs repeatedly in The Mystic Leeway.)2 This scene provides the text's only incident of physical contact (caressing and comforting), and to counter whatever intensity it arouses the narration ends comically, with some talk about "woolen" nether garments. Hilda is astonished that Frances wears woolen combinations. "Why not?" Frances blurts in response to Hilda's wonder. After this event, the narration leaves Hilda and returns

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to time-present, the hardships of the winter of 1938-39. And in this chapter, which was supposed to be Hilda's, Frances counters with a generous portrait of Oliver's wife: Margaret is all woman, wise as the deathless ones themselves in certain woman matters that have not yet been bruited in literature and so are unknown to life. One day a woman will rise up and laugh to scorn all man's analyzing and invention. But the time has not come yet. We women still ape that failure, man, and are still dominated by his colossal bluff of knowing us, we, who do not know ourselves. (77-78)

As Frances concludes the chapter, she remembers her original design, but instead of returning to Hilda, she moves to "that brighthaired poet who first kissed the lips of Frances," Ezra Pound. The details of the relation to Pound give way to an enigmatic comment she makes at the end of the chapter, a comment that makes it clear, at least in memory, that Pound was no passing fancy: Mr. Pound, explain yourself. I have raged enough. For your sake I have torn my lovers from dithering limb to limb. You had something—in those first kisses you scattered so widely like stars upon a cerulean field of flowering maidens, you had something of which your poetry has been no more than a dim and vapid echo. Believe me, we have been faithful to you, lover Micawber, though, in very truth I forgot you years ago. So much I know, that a woman has but one lover, one only, one whom she is destined never to know, never to find and to whom she is to be forever faithful. (91)

There is no sense in this text of her recovery either from love of woman or love of man, nor is there any sense that she should have tried to recover. But there is a strong sense that she remained Other to all lovers. As she has told us already, no man ever allowed her to be a woman, nor did any woman, except, perhaps, Amy Hoyt: flat body, angular hips, little sculptured hands. She is entitled to one short paragraph that ends: "I have known no other woman who was good" (100). I do not think that we read confusion into her recitation of her sexuality. Confusion is grounded in the narration. She admits her own, and everyone else's, bewilderment. Early in the text, it is an acceptable bewilderment: "Male and femaleness in sexual matters is remarkably inconclusive and fluid; male and female characteristics weave and intertwine, and run the gamut of a dual expressiveness bewildering to

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the protagonists" (94). Within a year of her return from the trip to Europe with Hilda, she found (was found by?) a male lover (the already married John Cowper Powys), she married (to Louis Wilkinson), and she committed herself to motherhood. The remembrance of Hilda remains. As late as 1934, she writes to Hilda: "I wanted the original woman who poked her head through the womb of time. You are it, and I am your still born twin" (quoted in Guest 1984, ISO).3 Nor did Hilda forget.4 How is this taking place in the narrative? Chronology has given way to conflict, and we move from past to present, often not too skilfully. There is no attempt to be "artistic," to move toward stream of consciousness or to interior monologue. But the losses are counted out: Ezra, Hilda, and John Cowper Powys. And she is said even to have given away a lover to Hilda. ^ What might be expected to compensate for such losses? A mother? MATRIARCHY

The figure of the mother is constantly before us in the narration, and as an overview, we can say that we have a counter-Persephone myth: instead of Ceres searching out the lost daughter, we have the lost daughter unable to escape from the perennial Mother, indeed, lost because of the Mother. Frances is something of a "Jest of God," in Margaret Laurence's term. The mythic pattern is told with resentment, with, it seems, an unsparing bitterness. What could life have been without her? I think I shall be able to make a case that gender identification is impaired to a considerable degree in Frances Gregg's case by the matriarch, Julia Vanness Gregg. This is not my analysis, but, I believe, Frances's own. The intrusions of the mother set out a pattern in the narrative, and the intrusions are not without strangeness. There is bitter rivalry between Julia (the mother) and Hilda. The trip to Europe, which, of course, was made possible by Julia, was one long argument. Frances remembers it as a struggle between her deep devotion to Hilda and her necessary obedience to Julia (Frances was 27 at the time, Hilda 25). "Needless to say," Frances records, "my mother wept, wailed, and gnashed her teeth across two continents, accusing Hilda of robbing the widow of her orphan, destroying its morals, besmirching its innocence, leading it to betray the sainted duties of daughterhood" (109). Several hours later, after recording her mother's accusations that Frances's

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conversation "is abominable and filthy," learned from her friends, Frances moves immediately into one of the most lyric descriptions of Hildas beauty in the text: "Her heavy-lidded eyes, her chiselled lips, that something glaucous and yet flowerlike that was her very essence, and the mystic light that glowed within her like a flame globed in alabaster" (66). But one of the most devastating comments on her mother is Frances's two-page treatment of Julias own lovers, Rowena, Harriet and Katy. "Once I came upon her and my mother locked in passionate embrace" (44). She adds: "Had I hissed 'Lesbian' at her, she would have yelled the house down" (99). Each one is given a repulsive end: Rowena "trundled towards her tomb, ranting in jangled imbecility"; Harriet died by starvation; an aged Katy became the object of the mother's scornful laughter because of her pathetic love gestures. There is no evidence to validate Frances's reporting, but her own malice is obvious enough. Immediately after this scene, she invokes Amy: "My own friend, Amy, was not like any of these" (99). The record of motherhood that Frances leaves of Julia exposes a dark side of Otherness. In one of the final statements about her, Frances does not mince words: By one of the freakish elements in my mother s character I had grown up to these years of over twenty in complete ignorance of the phallic in life. I had grown up, too, in a morbid isolation that she had imposed upon me. I was the solitary stamping ground for that centaur-lady of the blue and fiery eye, the limpid moist eye, the lascivious languishing eye. Upon me she poured out all the phials of her perversity, of her thwarted sex, of the hot flight of her blood.... What it [sex] was all about came as, first, a ludicrous anticlimax, and then as a menace, a terror in life, a thing by which everything had to be re-stated and revalued, but worst and most fatal of all it robbed man [she means, the male] of his dignity, and [robbed] life of freewill and real personality. (155-56)

The passage goes on to show how the three lovers (Ezra, Hilda, herself) had had no chance: Hilda "came out of the nothingness with a message that none could read"; Ezra and Hilda together remained "just out of the range of [her] comprehension." "I, too, was attracted to them, either, each, the sex made no matter" (156).

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GENDER

Gender made no matter, either. Elsewhere Frances argues that, for an adult, it gets in the way (139-41). It is to be overcome. The real opposition is spirit-body: "Know yourself as dual, the parting of the ways" (141). Adults should be intelligent, beyond sexuality, asexual. These comments on her own cursed sexuality are followed immediately by recollections of her visit, with her mother and Hilda, to galleries in Manchester and Birmingham to look at Pre-Raphaelite art. The "Rossettis and the Watts and the Burne-Joneses," formerly admired, had become "cheap sentiment," and because of this experience—a "revolution" she calls it—her life turns round: "I ceased, at this point, to be a nice woman. I was bitter, scornful of my betters, and determined to be a spy. Myself was my nearest quarry. For better, for worse, I determined to follow where the wind of my desire listed, denying nothing, formulating nothing, but knowing, at least, one woman naked as Eve" (156-57). In this search for knowledge, albeit a drifting with desire, all art, in her estimation, fared no better than the Pre-Raphaelites: it was "wishful thinking," and "cheap sentiment." It was made by men, who were soft, or women who imitated men. She had already said: "The male is only capable of a terrific, short-lived effort mentally and emotionally. After that he repeats himself for what it is worth. Take any man that you know, he exhausts himself in the first effort, whatever it may be, a life pose, or an art" (145). And somewhat more maliciously, "He becomes an old poseur clinging to his youthful fancies, as Ezra clung to his beret and his velvet jacket and the flowing tie when a round paunch and a ruddy countenance made them pathetic—to those who loved him, and just ridiculous to the young who saw him for the first time in his age" (145). As for women artists: "Show me a young woman artist and I will show you a stealer of some man's thunder" (145). That she has a project in mind, and not just a release of spleen, becomes clear in her assertion: "I am probably the first real woman artist" (146). But that is qualified immediately: "If they ever have a beginning, they die young, like Emily Bronte. Not Charlotte. Any man could have written her stuff. But could aught but a woman have conceived WutheringHeights!" (146). Frances's writing has taken her to an increasingly hostile position in relation to her mother. She sees her mother's obsessiveness, and possessiveness, countering her own attempts to be a free person in the

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world. These attempts—journeys, lovers, friends—were wasted. Among the wastes, art revealed itself as illusory, having nothing to do with life, a product of male weakness masking as power: "Artists did not seem to me the vanguard, but the rear-guard in life.... They were the cosmic journalists, a noble profession but, as far as creation went, they were sterile and impotent" (121). Art was Joyces "sewer," the Cult of the Entrails. Hildas art was only the display of her Narcissism. Difference became perpetual bickering and betrayal, Otherness a failure. Sexuality, and gender, must be overcome. If this overcoming were to take place, then art might be tried again, and in this re-ordering of the human she is "probably the first real woman artist" (the tone is, I think, ironic). As for the present, she cannot conceal her malice toward a world that had ruined itself and still, in the winter of 1940-41, would not give up trying: "Never has the world struggled in such contagion as this" (110). But where has her writing taken her? "I am alone in a void. Here, incorporeal, stripped of the phantasms of the senses, reft of imagination, knowing that I know nothing, here I find the thing that I am. It is cold, hollow as a mask, with sightless eyes" (163). This is the absence—not without its price—to which her history had brought her, and which her writing revealed. TELOS

Working from the idea of absence in The Mystic Leeway, I have tried to show how the narration takes form through journeys, large and small, and through encounters of unresolved sexual difference within the group of Frances Gregg's friends and lovers. Gender and art are both to be overcome. I have had to omit many passages of great interest: character sketches (of the writer May Sinclair, for example), strange encounters (including a beautifully comic ouija-board session with Mr. and Mrs. W.B. Yeats, and a mystifying occult experience with Hilda and Walter Rummel, the pianist), the figure of the androgyne that is only implicit in this text but elsewhere explicit (particularly in the Powys relationship), some vituperative comments on the literary world to which she was sometimes invited, her arguments (when she departs from narrative) privileging mind over body, and, as a continuing motif, her proselytizing for her idea of Jesus (a Jesus best typified for her by a Jacob Epstein wood sculpture that she had seen in London). To close, we can recall some of Desmond s words on absence: "Negatively understood,

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it is a witness to unfulfilment; positively understood, it may make desire aware of itself and so awaken it to what is more than itself" (1987, 18). Which way out of absence does Frances Gregg take? Why, we may ask, isn't she content with the open and free space of absence, desiring desire? We ourselves may opt for that, but she did not. Nellie Furman, in her article, "The Politics of Language: Beyond the Gender Principle?" refers to Derrida's space of innumerable differences, all in love, beyond binary oppositions, beyond masculine/feminine, bisexuality, homosexuality, beyond heterosexuality, and beyond "the gender principle" (Furman 1985, 75-76). Yet Derrida's suggestive alternatives, a space of innumerable differences and a "multiplicity of sexually marked voices," might not pass Frances Gregg's test. Such a multiplicity is, perhaps, a male illusion. Furman's own conclusion, less visionary than Derrida's, connects to Gregg's vision of an end to her torment. Such an end would have to be political, and somewhere there must be a leader. Of this leader Frances says: "I believe that it is again to the Jews that we must look for a leader, and I would hope that that leader may be a woman" (Gregg 1995, 169). To trace Gregg's arguments toward an ending, as set out in her final chapter, is outside my purpose here, particularly because she departs from narrative and chooses polemic. But there are some problems to settle. First, the absence she discovers, or makes for herself, is uncanny: "cold, hollow as a mask, with sightless eyes" (163). Is this her subjectivity? The answer must be, for her, yes. Second, does her turning away from narrative have a larger dimension? Is narrative, connected as it is to sexuality and gender, and revealing itself through Art, any longer necessary, wanted, or even possible? Third, does the turn to argument, and then to prophecy, indicate that the text had come to its conclusion (there is no external evidence that she considered the text finished)? We cannot be conclusive about the ending to the text. We can speculate that the coming of the war, finding herself and her family in a war zone, made impossible any sense that life actually was going somewhere, that life had a narrative worth telling. Fourth, her sense of an ending, which would begin a "Jewish-matriarchy" (172), is hastily drawn. The ground of the argument is clear enough: the history of Judaism and the history of woman run parallel lines—both have been betrayed by a master lover, a tribal god proclaimed as patriarch. Women have been betrayed and they have betrayed themselves. That betrayal must be overcome. But in this final chapter there are deeply disturbing elements, particularly in Gregg's discussion of Judaism.

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Interpretation here, as throughout the text, is wanted: the text deserves interpretation. But Frances Gregg will have the last word here, a last word directed against a male "rummaging" through her narrative to find another male, and a last word that sets out what she thought a woman's narrative should be: Indeed, a youthful friend of mine ... rummaging through these pages for scraps of memories of his hero, Ezra Pound, told me, with that eldrich admonition of the young for the old, "Some of this is brilliant, but much of it is so unnecessary." He referred to certain references of mine to "woolen combinations" and all that I said of Christ. And I am moved to say many spiteful things to this young Merlin—(for whose memoirs are these anyway? and to me all that I am is most necessary). (170) NOTES 1. Who Frances Gregg was is the subject of this paper, so it seems inappropriate to write it in out in a note. However, several comments will provide a context. Frances Gregg grew up in Philadelphia where she met Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, who were her contemporaries, and other literary notables such as John Cowper Powys (at the time a noted travelling lecturer on literary topics). In 1912 she married Louis Wilkinson, writer, lecturer and friend of Powys, and she spent most of the rest of her life in England. At the time of her death (in a bombing raid in April 1941) she was working on an autobiography entitled The Mystic Leeway. Her son, Oliver Wilkinson, has kindly provided me with the text. This paper was my first "reading" of the text, and some material in it has been used in the introductory commentary to the published text of The Mystic Leeway. In addition to the publication of The Mystic Leeway, the first volume of the correspondence between Frances Gregg and John Cowper Powys has been published, and a second volume is forthcoming. 2. For an explanation of the sign of the "hyacinth," I quote Cassandra Laity's note in her edition of Paint It Today (Doolittle 1992): "For H.D., as well as a tradition of Romantic/Victorian poets, references to hyacinths or to Hyacinth often encode homo-eroticism. In Greek mythology the beautiful boy Hyacinth was slain by Apollo accidentally during a discus-throwing contest. Apollo mourned his beloved Hyacinths death by creating a flower out of the boy s blood. References to Hyacinth and hyacinths appear frequently in H.D. s poetry and prose"(94). Here is H.D. s hyacinth poem for Gregg, included in End To Torment: "O hyacinth of the swamp-lands,/Blue lily of the marshes,/How could I

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know/Being but a foolish shepherd/That you would laugh at me" (quoted in Writing For Their Lives, 19). 3. Barbara Guest's Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World provides a sympathetic and informative view of Frances Gregg's relation to H.D., but it can be usefully supplemented by the work of Susan Friedman, Janice Robinson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Deborah Kelly Kloepfer, and Dianne Chisholm. There are still works by H.D. to be published in which we can assume the relation to Frances is explored. 4. Hilda Doolittle remembered Frances not only in such works as HERmione, in which she played a quasi-fictional role, but in her analysis by Freud. H.D.'s sessions with Freud in the mid-1930s were significant events both for him and for her. Freud told H.D. that she would never have been happy with Frances: "Biologically, no" (Doolittle 1974, 152). Guest, Friedman and Chisholm can be read for H.D.'s relation to Freud. Interestingly enough, it was Frances who introduced Hilda to the reading of Freud (in German) back in their Philadelphia days, before the 1911 trip to Europe. 5. "In 1926, she sent Kenneth Macpherson to H.D." (Friedman & DuPlessis 1981,25n.). WORKS CITED Chisholm, Dianne. (1992). H.D.'s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Desmond, William. (1987). Desire, Dialectic and Otherness. New Haven: Yale University Press. Doolittle, Hilda. (1974). Tribute to Freud, rev. ed. Boston: David R. Godine. . (1981). HERmione. New York: New Directions. . (1992). Paint It Today. Ed. Cassandra Laity. New York: New York University Press. Friedman, Susan. (1981). Psyche Reborn: the Emergence of H.D. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. . (1990). Penelopes Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, Susan, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. (1981). " £ I HAD TWO LOVES SEPARATE': The Sexualities of H.D. s Her.* Montemora 8:7-30. Furman, Nellie. (1985). "The Politics of Language: Beyond the Gender principle?" Making a Difference. Ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn. London and New York: Methuen. Girard, Rene. (1965). Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gregg, Frances. (1995). The Mystic Leeway. Ed. Ben Jones. Intro. Oliver Marlow Wilkinson. Ottawa: Carleton University Press.

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Gregg, Frances and John Cowper Powys. (Undated typescript). Francis and Jack: Letters of Frances Gregg and John Cowper Powys, 1912 to 1941. This typescript is the source document for the correspondence between Gregg and Powys. The first volume has been published (see the next item), covering the years 1912 to 1929. . (1994). The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Frances Gregg. Ed. Oliver Wilkinson and Christopher Wilkinson. Vol. 1 [1912 to 1929]. London: Cecil Woolf. Guest, Barbara. (1984). Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

7 PARSIFAL AND SEMIOTIC STRUCTURALISM / Iain Prams

Psychology as religion implies imagining all psychological events as effects of gods in the soul, and all activities to do with the soul, such as therapy, to be operations of ritual in relation to these gods.... It is not a question of religion turning to psychology—no, psychology is simply going home. James Hillman, Re-VisioningPsychology1

The legend of Parsifal and the quest for the Holy Grail has been one of my favorite stories since boyhood. The many versions I have encountered have never failed to fascinate and ignite the imagination. The long acquaintance with the story and the personal cultural tendrils that take me into the Celtic world are sufficient (though perhaps not necessary) to recognize an adequate treatment of the material when it is presented. Such a recognition was not forthcoming in my reading of Levi-Strauss s discourse on the myth (1985, 219-34). But my respect for Levi-Strauss s immense contribution to scholarship remains constant. It is the inspiration for this essay. I would simply like to provide an alternative reading of this myth that Levi-Strauss may find is a more appropriate homology for the symbolic significance of Parsifal's wanderings. In the first section of this essay I outline the axioms inherent in Levi-Strauss s structuralism and I mark their inadequacy for a full treatment of myth and symbol. An alternative viewpoint is presented to introduce a phenomenological basis to interpret the transformative

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power of symbols described by myth. Then with two major assertions I place the Parsifal myth within the context of the male quest for Christ Consciousness in Western civilization; I argue that access to this form of consciousness lies through experience of the symbolic complex of the feminine archetype. (A synopsis of the Parsifal myth is given in the appendix.) A number of the ideas of Carl Jung are developed and then applied to the Parsifal story to demonstrate an eight hundred year insistence, through the many variants of this legend, that the species shift into a higher consciousness. The final threads of argument are drawn together by contrasting two different interpretations of Wagners opera on Parsifal—one by Levi-Strauss and one of my own, drawing on Hans Jiirgen Sybebergs 1981 film of the opera for supporting evidence. LEVI-STRAUSS AND PARSIFAL

Levi-Strauss proposes a universal model of "Parsifal"-type myths which he claims have an inverted symmetry with another universal model— the "Oedipal" myths. Levi-Strauss argues that The Oedipal myths pose the problem of communication that is at first exceptionally effective (the solving of the riddle) but then leads to excess in the form of incest—the sexual union of people who ought to be distant from one another—and of plague, which ravages Thebes by accelerating and disrupting the great natural cycles. On the other hand, the Percevalian myths deal with communication interrupted in three ways: the answer offered to an unasked question (which is the opposite of a riddle); the chastity required of one or more heroes (contrary to incestuous behaviour); and the wasteland—that is, the halting of the natural cycles that ensure the fertility of plants, animals and human beings. (1985, 231)

He later adds: These two types illustrate the two complementary solutions that human beings have devised for two problems of communication. One problem is excessive communication, too direct, too rapid and therefore fatally virulent; the other problem is an overly slow, if not interrupted communication, which causes inertia and sterility. (233)

These kinds of conclusions are to be expected once we understand the structure inherent in Levi-Strauss s work. The argument developed

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in his writings is that categorization of phenomena in the external world follows similar universal patterns, as the segmenting and classifying of stimuli is ordered by the structure of the apparatus through which humans do their apprehending—the human mind (1962). The nature of this ordering system (and therefore of the process of thought) can only be understood through a consideration of the systems that it generates. Of the systems analyzed—kinship, totemism, myth—by far the most important is myth (1962; 1968). Levi-Strauss claims that myths provide, in an encapsulated and coded form, documentation of the very beginnings of humanity, of the crucial period of transition from Nature to Culture. In his analysis of myth, Levi-Strauss seeks to reconstruct a dejh vu of human consciousness and find the roots of our own identity (1964; 1966; 1968; 1969). In observing how relations which exist in a persons conception of nature are used to generate cultural products which incorporate the same relations, Levi-Strauss argues that cultural products are ordered in time and space in the same way that products of nature are perceived to be ordered and segmented (1962). This process of analytical correlation with its attendant transformational power implies that the vast variety of cultural forms are simply transformations of universal structural characteristics of the human mind. Thus any particular set of materials from any one culture is a structure of relations which is an algebraic transformation of other possible structures (Levi-Strauss 1962). The emphasis throughout Levi-Strauss's work is upon identifying those significant relations that belong to a common set, which in turn reflects attributes of the unconscious models in the human mind (Leach 1970). In the semiotic structuralist approach that Levi-Strauss has developed, categories are identified in order to gain intellectual access to relations between phenomena, thence proceeding to an examination of relations between sets of relations (d'Aquili, Laughlin, & McManus 1979, 388). Structuralism attributes meaning to signs and categories not in any absolute sense but in terms of relations of mutual dependence. In rejecting the primacy of the subject in language and by concentrating on langue at the expense of parole, structuralism has evolved to a preoccupation with, and identification of, states of the linguistic system. All signs are attributed to a closed system and their meaning is to be interpreted in terms of a system of relations which ignore whatever the sign may have initially referred to. Culler has pointed out that structuralism's point of departure is to locate meaning entirely within

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this notion of relation (1973, 35). Paul Ricoeur contends that structuralism "involves a view from without; it is not concerned with the relation of the subject to phenomena but only with the relations among phenomena themselves" (1967, 801). For these reasons, LeviStrauss's interpretation of the Parsifal myth takes on a fairly predictable form. Although I think he is mistaken in his reading of it, my main objection has to do with the limited kinds of conclusions to which his method of inquiry inevitably leads. His decoding of the myth and proposed inversion to Oedipal-type myths relegates the symbolic richness of this story to the cutting room floor and, in my opinion, totally misses the purpose of the myth. To understand the Parsifal story one has to explore the symbolic richness within each category and metaphor, as well as between categories, and recognize what this story has to say about and for our civilization. It is no accident that the Grail story has inspired and confused poets, iconographers, scientists, scholars, literati, opera and film makers since it was written by Chretien de Troyes in the twelfth century. Variants of the twelfth century text include Wagner's nineteenth century opera, Sybeberg's twentieth century film, and Wolfram von Eschenbachs elaborate medieval poem. Reference to any one of these reconstructions requires that one take both an internal view that considers symbols as vehicles of personal transformation and an external view that places this phenomenon within a set of reference points. In other words, eight hundred years of attention to this story demand more than an external view that finds the significance of the Parsifal myth in a structural inversion of Oedipal relations. MYTHOPOETICS AND PARSIFAL

My starting point in presenting an alternative view is the unconscious, not from a Levi-Straussian source, but through the development of a number of ideas on symbolism inherent in the work of Carl Jung2 and also through my personal experience of the transformative power of symbols.3 This latter consideration is difficult to communicate precisely, but does lie in the domain of what Husserl meant by "bracketing" (1960; 1970, 29Iff). Bracketing assumes (1) the recognition that there is a reciprocal feedback relationship between cognition and perception (Merleau-Ponty 1962); (2) that the events/texts/realities a scholar engages are perceived within the framework of that scholars particular

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state of conscious awareness (Tart 1975); and (3) that an understanding of perceived reality requires a "suspension of disbelief" so that one may bracket one's self from the phenomena under consideration and—in so far as it is possible—prevent ones own conditioning from interpreting the reality in axioms that may well be inappropriate. This phenomenological dimension is an attempt to determine the significance of phenomena from within and accepts Husserls idea of intentionality which defines the subject as a "bearer of intentionality giving him not a Nature but placing him as a maker of meaning" (Ricoeur 1963, 600; 1969, 12). This is particularly important in any analytical discourse in the domain of myth and symbol. I have noted elsewhere that "at a simple level there is the notion that if anthropologists study someone else's symbolic language and do not attempt to put it in a comparable symbolic language of their own then the sense perceptions of the sensuality, color, pathos and tragedy of field observations are deleted and the necessary 'clicks' of comprehension are not there. What is actually communicated can be an arid and erroneous reckoning of reality" (1985, 274). What this amounts to is an argument that conceptual clarity in reading and analyzing texts calls for the scholar to be able to code and understand symbolic transformation phenomenologically. This has the possibility of providing a clarity that permits the scholar to see through the false intellectualism of analytic formulas that have little or nothing to do with the direct experience of the scholar as subject or his/her experience of the observed as object. A mythopoetic analysis requires an amalgam of such experience and the facility to suspend disbelief sufficiently to enter into and comprehend phenomenologically someone else's symbolic system (Laughlin, McManus, & Shearer 1984). So that the reader may directly anticipate my argument and then respond critically to the direction I am proposing, let me state in two blocks of assertions what I think the Grail story is fundamentally about. I will then proceed to provide conceptual support for these assertions. (1) The Grail symbolizes a transcendental consciousness (Ring 1974) that can be translated into a culturally and historically specific concern with Christ Consciousness, specifically that of twelfth century Europe. The term Christ Consciousness does, in the twentieth century carry a value-laden reaction which must simply be anticipated in this essay. From the perspective taken in this work, both transcendental and Christ Consciousness are to be regarded as energy forms. Furthermore, I assert that particular symbols (or complexes of symbols) provide

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entry gates to the experience of these energy forms. Finally, encounters through symbols with the energy form carry with them incipient transformative experiences for individuals. These assertions are basic to a mythopoetic unravelling of what the Parsifal story is all about. In other words, the experience of Christ Consciousness is a state of perception and cognition that can be arrived at by integrating the self with particular symbols. Archetypes, meditation mandalas, and initiation rites all provide symbolic gateways to a differing state of perception and cognition once self and symbol achieve integration. This can occur spontaneously and also be intentionally induced (Stephen 1986, 14). The significance of symbol and integration is that unconscious structures can be penetrated and brought up to conscious awareness (D'Aquili, Laughlin, & McManus 1979; Webber & Laughlin 1979; Webber 1980; Prattis 1984; Laughlin et al. 1986; Laughlin, McManus, & Shearer 1986). The particular symbolic complex used will of course vary from culture to culture, but I must emphasize that there is much more to it than Geertz (1975) would advocate with his thesis of cognitive coherence of a perceived system of meanings (see Stephen 1986, 40). There is a common process whereby integration between self and symbol produces a coherence between unconscious truths, which are universal and ritual procedures which are culturally specific (see Govinda 1960; Eliade 1964; Bourguignon 1968; Hilgard 1977; Peters & Price-Williams 1983). The complex cognitive process that obtains between ritual procedures and unconscious imagery brings us to a different understanding of symbolic systems—myth, art, totemism—in both primitive and modern society. People in primitive society populated their immediate universe— visual, aural, tactile—with narratives, mandalas, totem poles, masks, art, and so on, that functioned as symbolic guides or reminders of parts of the collective unconscious that had been recorded by past masters and shamans. This symbolic environment functions to provide an implicit awareness that specific ritual sequences then trigger into explicit conscious awareness. Thus totemism, myth, art, and narrative are part of a constant, ongoing preparation for specific ritual stimuli to evoke elements of the unconscious in an ongoing process of reconstruction and healing. This is what I refer to as "the construction of coherence out of chaos" (1984: 201). Krackes (1986) work on the dialectics between self and cultural symbols among the Kagwahiv and Tedlocks (1986) views on cultural symbolism and dreaming have latent similarities with this approach.

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(2) The Parsifal story speaks not only to a particular time/space conjunction but to trajectories and evolutions beyond it. The significance of this theme will be elaborated on later. The reader is alerted for the moment to the insight that perhaps Chretien de Troyes was anticipating by eight hundred years the holistic teachings of Jung, new age philosophy, and the Age of Aquarius. The story establishes that for the male in Western civilization the most important initial gateway to Christ Consciousness is through the feminine archetype (C.G. Jung 1959; E. Jung 1957), which can be symbolized in many different ways and was referred to by Jung as the anima. This is what the Parsifal story is about—the male quest for Christ Consciousness through encountering and integrating with different levels of the feminine archetype. There are many manifestations of this symbolic complex in the various Parsifal stories—Blanche Fleur, maiden who laughs, female chalice bearer, damsels in distress, the old hag, the seducing maidens, Kundry, and so on. For the sake of brevity and clarity, I will deal extensively with only one manifestation of the female archetypal complex in this story—that of Blanche Fleur, who is relegated to several lines in Levi-Strauss's treatment of the myth: "He rescues the lady of a manor which is being besieged, delivers her from her enemies, and forms a tender bond with her.... He puts off his marriage plans... a wild goose that has been wounded by a falcon lets three drops of its blood fall upon the snow. This contrast reminds Percival [Parsifal] of the fair complexion and vermilion lips of his beloved" (1985,222,223). As I hope will become clear in a moment, the significance of these sentences is not something that can be fully drawn out by Levi-Strauss's conceptual preferences because his methodology necessarily displaces the experience of both subject and object. This is part of my contention that Levi-Strauss has misread the myth. His method of semiotic structuralism takes him past the keystones inherent in the story. JUNG AND SYMBOL

Before I examine the myth, let me introduce some strategic concepts from Carl Jung's work. Jung assumed that the human psyche was androgynous, being composed of both masculine and feminine elements. He distinguished three major levels of the human psyche: (1) conscious awareness; (2) the personal unconscious; and (3) the collective unconscious, and

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one major process: individuation. Individuation encourages the emergence of a balanced psyche through an ever-increasing dialogue between conscious awareness and the personal and collective unconscious (Jung 1959,283-342; 1971, 35ff). The personal unconscious, according to Jung, "consists firstly of all those contacts that become unconscious either because they lost their intensity and were forgotten or because consciousness was withdrawn from them (repression), and secondly of contacts, some of them sense impressions, which never had sufficient intensity to reach consciousness but have somehow entered the psyche" (1959, 283-342; 1971, 38). Jung argues that as a human being matures individuation takes place whereby a public mask or image is constructed. This public mask is known as the persona, and Jung labelled repressed functions and attitudes as our shadow. Laughlin, McManus, and Webber point out that, "because adaptation to the environment necessitates a measure of selectivity, the consolidation of the ego requires the exclusion of many aspects and relegation of them to a repressed, unconscious state within our being" (1979, 6). The shadow, therefore, is the sum of all the qualities that were repressed while the ego was being built up (Jacobi 1968, 38). Repression occurs because of cultural conditioning due mainly to sexual categories which are defined in an ambiguous and contradictory way (Jung 1959). The personal unconscious thus refers to the domain of repressed, conditioned material that is culturally specific (see Prattis 1984, 198). Of particular importance in this domain is a culture's definition of sex categories and the assertion made by Jung about the androgynous nature of the human psyche. It provides a clue as to why Parsifal in the Holy Grail myth is so thick, such an unaware clod, and as such represents the state of male awareness in Western consciousness. Let me elaborate on this. Every culture, including our own, subjects its members to specifics of sex role education which then become entrenched through social mores and cultural conditioning. To conform to these constraints and to develop the appropriate social mask—the persona—males are required to repress the female energy within their psyche and females the male energy within theirs. Given Jung's assumption that the psyche is composed of both male and female energies, social and cultural conditioning produces a repression that has to be reversed if individuation is to produce a healthy and balanced psyche. Also given that the feminine element relates to intuition and feeling while the male element is

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referred to in terms of logos, individual males in their development of a socially appropriate persona repress and relegate aspects of intuition and feeling that constrain their transformation or change to a more conscious awareness. In other words, they are severely restrained in integrating the separate parts of their androgynous psyche, simply because the properties required for such integration have been repressed. Jung felt that the point of individuation was to bring about an increasing dialogue between conscious awareness and the full potential of being human through an incorporation of ever-increasing amounts of the repressed unconscious into the domain of conscious awareness. For the male this implies an incorporation of those feminine elements repressed in the personal unconscious and furthermore with that complex of feminine symbols to be found in the collective unconscious— the anima. The collective unconscious according to Jung is "the ancestral heritage of possibilities of representation ... it is not individual but common to all men ... and it is the true basis of the individual psyche" (1959, 1971, 38). He goes on to state that "the collective unconscious—so far as we can say anything about it at all—appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact the whole of mythology could be taken as a projection of the collective unconscious" (1971, 39). The distinction to be drawn between the personal and collective unconscious is that the former refers to repressed material that is culturally specific while the collective unconscious describes material that is species specific. This brings me to archetypes which are thought to be "primordial images" that express material primarily derived from the collective unconscious. Jung argues that archetypes manifest themselves in primordial images through the phenomenology of dreams, trance, myths, art, and fantasy (1959, 443). The implication is that the ego (conscious awareness) engages with the unconscious through the experience of archetypes. This can occur under two kinds of circumstances. The first where the archetype spontaneously "announces" its existence by providing images and symbols that the ego then experiences; the second where the calculated and deliberate use of symbols is designed to prod or activate the archetype (Webber 1980, 34; Laughlin, McManus, Rubinstein, & Shearer 1986). Jung suspected that experiences of the collective unconscious (i.e., archetypes) are accelerated and structured by particular symbolic ritual

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systems which then become powerful tools to isolate repressed material and thus bring an enormous array of unconscious images to conscious awareness. His distinction between "natural" and "artificially" induced individuation is important here. The former occurs as part of the maturing process and the individual may be unaware of what is happening. The latter, however, occurs consciously and takes the form of deliberate and structured communication (through symbol and with the aid of a therapist, shaman or guide) with the unconscious and is designed to heal potentially dangerous splits in the psyche (McManus 1979; Webber 1980, 34; Prattis 1984, 198). The most dangerous of all the potential splits is the separation of male and female energies. And here lies the significance of myth, particularly the one that sustains the writing of this essay. In the genesis and telling of myths there is a process of natural individuation. Myths are spontaneous presentations from the unconscious of psychological and spiritual truths, rich sources of psychological insight, and a special kind of literature (Johnson 1977, 2). While mythmaking clearly belongs to the domain of "natural" individuation, the understanding and communication of the inner meaning of a myth belongs to the category of "accelerated" individuation whereby we learn the lessons of the myth, the directions indicated and incorporate those lessons and directions within our everyday lives so that our conscious awareness grasps and acts upon the deeply unconscious spiritual questions of life. BLANCHE FLEUR, CHRIST CONSCIOUSNESS, AND PARSIFAL

Recall my assertion that the Parsifal story is about the male quest for Christ Consciousness in Western civilization and that the path for this lies through integrating self (conscious awareness) with the feminine archetype. The legend of the Grail outlines how individuation takes place in a man's psyche and the important emphasis throughout is that the emergence or transformation of the male occurs through the struggle to integrate consciously with his inner femininity—the complex of symbols in the archetypal pattern labelled as anima by Jung. An integral part of this pattern is occupied by the figure of Blanche Fleur in the Grail myth, and here I deal with the same passages referred to by Levi-Strauss in an attempt to demonstrate what can be seen through a mythopoetic lens rather than "A View from Afar"—Levi-Strauss s semiotic structuralist focus (1985, 222,223).

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Parsifal encounters Blanche Fleur in the story when her castle is besieged and she appeals to him for succour; he responds, defeating her enemies and providing her with freedom. He then spends the night with her in a chaste union. Chretien de Troyes portrays a touching gentleness in how they lay in an embrace head to head, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, knee to knee and toe to toe (Johnson 1977, 29). This gentleness is a guide for maleness—a direction that access to the inner feminine is through the Parsifal nature in a man, the naive foolishness that is manifested through gentleness and tenderness. These characteristics are a prerequisite for the inner encounter with this part of the female archetype, and provide the most important narrative in the entire myth. It is also a most difficult lesson and therefore very easily and conveniently forgotten. The forgetting, however, prevents an integration between the masculine and feminine elements in the male psyche. Carol Pearson has pointed out that "men appropriately have asserted their own truths in the world, but the suppression of the female voice leaves the culture dangerously lopsided" (1986, 90). The overemphasis on the male principle and the neglect of the female prevents individuation, which is the process whereby the recognition of the androgynous nature of the human psyche is secured by being brought to conscious awareness. This permits clarity, balance, and further transformation (144). The Parsifal story illuminates this clearly as Parsifal forgets about Blanche Fleur and descends into a grimness that prevents him from finding his path to the Grail. His access to the Grail is through the feminine and this he abandons as he roams the countryside doing what knights in armour are socially and culturally constrained to do. He is basically stupid, a clod in terms of awareness of his task. He has forgotten entirely about Blanche Fleur and his Parsifal nature—gentle naivete—until a falcon attacks three geese in the air and wounds one of them. Three drops of blood fall from the wounded goose onto the snow and put Parsifal into a trance of reverie as he remembers his encounter with Blanche Fleur. He is released from his trance when two of the drops of blood melt in the snow, and one remains. He can now function again and is hailed as a hero at King Arthur's court for his deeds in battle; but once again he loses touch with and forgets the significance of his encounter with Blanche Fleur. The anima when neglected turns ugly. It was insistent through Blanche Fleur that Parsifal lift the siege to her castle, break the constraints and conventions of life's conditioning, and approach his inner

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femininity through his gentle, naive, and foolish nature. He did this once and was then on track for the Grail, but he lost it by being unaware of the significance of his encounter with Blanche Fleur. At King Arthurs court, where he is being lionized for his deeds in battle, it takes the dreadful old hag riding a crippled mule—a darker manifestation of the anima complex—to harangue him in front of the court about his misdeeds, his stupidity, cruelty, lack of awareness of his deeds, and the neglect of his quest for the Grail. The hag sends all the knights of the Round Table, including Parsifal, out once more to quest the Grail—to experience Christ Consciousness. But once more Parsifal and the other knights lose it, alienated from the encounter with their internal femininity. Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz refer to the multi-level meaning of Parsifal's encounter with Blanche Fleur (1960). Blanche Fleur personified the "oppressed beauty in need of deliverance," specifically a "mans own individual feminity, the anima" (64). The ability to integrate with this symbolic reminder of the internal feminine is not highly developed in the male and this is what the story repeatedly alludes to. Emma Jung is quite insistent that the anima for males is the designated mediator between conscious awareness and the unconscious (1957, 56). Parsifal forgets the significance of his anima encounter, remains in unawareness, and loses sight of his quest for the Holy Grail until he is set on track again by the anima turned ugly—the hideous hag on the crippled mule. Jung and von Franz note of Parsifal's leaving Blanche Fleur that He did not realize the emotional suffering that he was thereby imposing both on her and on himself. His real offense lay in the primitive unambiguousness of his behaviour, which arose from unawareness of the inner problem of the opposites. It was not what he did but that he was not capable of assessing what he did. His one-sided attitude accords with an identification with the masculine logos principle, whereby the emotional and feeling side of the anima, the conflict and suffering which result from such an attitude, are not given sufficient consideration. (1960, 183)

The authors interpret the wounded goose and the drops of blood in the snow as the image of the suffering anima, and this is what brings Blanche Fleur back to Parsifal's memory. But since he does not recognize the significance of his encounter with her, preferring to be lionized by King Arthur s court for his adeptness in violence, the suffering anima turns ugly at his neglect and unawareness and appears to him as the hideous hag who confronts him with all his failures.

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Despite the hag's strictures and directions, Parsifal wanders for years in a fog of disarray until close to the end of the poem, when he once more remembers Blanche Fleur and the Grail and receives absolution from a hermit who provides direction to the Grail castle. And here the poem by Chretien de Troyes stops, because, I feel, there was nothing more to be said at that time (Johnson 1977, 72). Now there is more. This myth contains a directive for our civilization of logos and masculine structures: access to Christ Consciousness is through the integration of male selfhood with the feminine archetype. But eight hundred years later we may be no further toward this achievement than when the Parsifal myth first appeared. If we wish to examine the inner meaning of this myth from the perspective of accelerated individuation, the lesson is to understand our Parsifal nature, the gentle naive fool within males, as this is the only avenue that may engage with the symbolic complex of inner femininity. This is the theme explicitly explored in the Parsifal myth. The chaste union between Parsifal and Blanche Fleur is a reminder that the human psyche is androgynous, composed of male and female elements. Transformation of the individual is through a progressive process of individuation that integrates male and female energy in the psyche and then provides access through the feminine gateway (archetype) to the Grail-Christ Consciousness. This twelfth century poem thus still provides us with a story for our times. We no longer talk about Holy Grails and castles but we are concerned with consciousness and the madness inherent in many of the structures that encase our world. Perhaps it is a male madness that requires a Blanche Fleur and allied representatives of the feminine archetype to tutor it, but the story clearly identifies that such a tutoring requires a particular aspect of maleness to come to the fore—gentleness, naivete and foolishness. In this way the Parsifal myth anticipates by eight hundred years an insistence that the species evolve. The transformation of masculine energy and the fine tuning of feminine energy to this transformation is what the story is about. It could just have easily been written by a contemporary radical scholar—Bohm (1980) in physics, Sheldrake (1981) in chemistry, Toulmin in theology (1982) or Hillman (1975) in psychology—anticipating that new relationships based on unconditional love and support require that masculine and feminine not be regarded as antagonistic and separated energies but as facets of the same unity.

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LEVI-STRAUSS AND PARSIFAL: A DRAWING TOGETHER OF THREADS

Levi-Strauss's interpretation of the Parsifal myth as a symmetrical inversion of the Oedipus myth is, from this perspective, unconvincing and incomplete. It is the only interpretation, however, that his methodological and conceptual preferences allow. The semiotic structuralism of Levi-Strauss provides only a partial explanation for the meaning of symbolic systems, particularly of myths. One cannot understand the anima with intellect and logos alone. It is insufficient to demonstrate a contiguous logic in myth, totemism and cross-cousin marriage in order to identify common characteristics of elementary structures. The logical structure of the unconscious, which is where Levi-Strauss starts and ends, excludes the possibility that symbolic metaphor has an intentionality, that the creativity of modelling located in the unconscious accepts coherence and completeness as the natural ordering of things rather than the en tropic future portrayed in Levi-Strauss's "L'Homme Nu" (see Prattis 1984, 19Iff.).4 In other words, the generating base of duality—the binary oppositions fundamental to Levi-Strauss's thought—can be thought of as the separation of the conscious from the unconscious. Mythology, especially the example used in this essay, provides key guidelines for the reintegration of conscious and unconscious domains in order that dangerous splits in the psyche can be healed. Once we decide that coherence and integration of the human psyche lies in a dialectical link between these parts of the mind, and that mythology provides an effective guide for such integration, then we may be discovering something enormously significant with respect to our own civilization.^ In Levi-Strauss's treatment of the Parsifal myth, it is clear that something crucial is missing: an exploration of the symbolic richness within categories as well as a different conceptualization about the significance of relations between categories. The male awareness (ego)anima (archetype) relationship and transformation permits comprehension of an evolving state of affairs and a credible reading of the Parsifal myth. The ongoing dialectic in sexual symbolism found in myth, ritual, and symbolism everywhere directs our attention to a separation of masculine and feminine components in conscious and unconscious domains respectively. Jung's concepts of the collective unconscious and individuation permit us to address a constant crosscultural process that Levi-Strauss's conceptual preferences do not.

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As Culler points out, "If structural analysis is to make sense as an intellectual enterprise it must specify clearly what are the facts about human experience which it attempts to explicate" (1973, 61). Such a sense involves coming to grips with the experience of the Other— myth maker, native informant—and transmuting that experience with the phenomenology of self so that a credible text of interpretation may emerge. WAGNER In his analysis of the Parsifal myth, Levi-Strauss devotes a great deal of attention to Richard Wagner's treatment of the legend in his opera Parsifal. It is only proper that I do the same, to work with the same material but to provide a more credible interpretation. My source of inspiration is different and also internal and subjective to the Germanic myth motifs used by Wagner. The source I draw on, as mentioned previously, is that remarkable interpreter of German myth making, Hans Jiirgen Sybeberg. I introduce Sybeberg's film of Richard Wagners opera partly because Levi-Strauss makes so much of Wagner's exegesis of the Parsifal myth, but mostly because Sybeberg is able to interpret German myth making from the inside, both as subject and object—a privilege that Levi-Strauss s semiotic preferences does not permit. Levi-Strauss alludes to Wagner's interpretation of the Parsifal story in laudatory terms: "His solution to the problems posed by the mythology of the Grail is powerfully original.... Wagner had intuitively grasped a scheme that he rethought, reorganized and transformed in the course of time" (1985, 225). Wagners motif is that Communication is assured or re-established not by an intellectual operation but by an emotional identification. Parsifal does not understand the riddle of the Grail and remains unable to solve it until he relives the catastrophe at its source. This catastrophe was a rupture; and because the hero feels it in his flesh, the rupture is located no longer only between the natural and supernatural worlds, but now between the emotions and the intelligence, between suffering humanity and other forms of life, between earthly and spiritual values (1985, 231). This concern with communication axioms is misplaced. Levi-Strauss's analysis does refer to the phenomenological resolutions of Parsifal as object—Parsifal "relives," "feels it in his flesh." But this concern with experience is at odds with his own axioms.

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The alternative reading of Wagner's opera, Hans Jiirgen Sybebergs 1981 film of Parsifal, adds yet more richness to an already overloaded symbolic feast. One of Sybebergs major innovations was to have two Parsifals—one masculine (Parsifal I) played by Michael Kutter, and one feminine (Parsifal II) played by Karin Krick. Neither performer was an opera singer or an actor and, moreover, each knew very little about Wagner. Sybeberg met them at a dinner party at the home of some friends in Switzerland and promptly engaged them. The heldentenor Reiner Goldberg sings both their roles to dramatic effect. In the second act, the female Parsifal (II) first appears at a most critical juncture in terms of my reading of this opera. The male Parsifal (I) has resisted the temptations of the seducing flower maidens. He is stopped by Kundry's voice calling him by his name, Parsifal, the first time he recognizes his own name and identity. Kundry embraces him and is then thrust away by Parsifal. Her kiss brings him to self knowledge and it is at this point that he understands everything: the mysteries he has witnessed and the sense of his mission to quest the Grail. At this point of realization the Parsifal played by Karin Krick, looking like a young Joan of Arc, walks up behind the young innocent boy Parsifal of Michael Kutter. They are both singing but it is one voice that comes through, the heldentenor of Reiner Goldberg. Karin Krick steps in front of Michael Kutter and his Parsifal slowly steps back and fades out of the film. Karin Krick's Parsifal then holds sway for the remainder of this remarkable production. The resistance to seduction, the turning away of violence (Klingsor s Sacred Lance), the presentation of the males Parsifal nature through self knowledge permits the inner feminine to be accessed. The inner feminine can only be reached through a gentleness hitherto not portrayed by the male Parsifal. The anima complex has been released to conscious awareness once the male ego/anima relationship is chaste, gentle, and tender. Sybeberg makes this point brilliantly in the film by introducing Karin Kricks Parsifal to replace Michael Kutter s. The male Parsifal reappears briefly and follows the female Parsifal at the end of Act II as she brings Kundry back from the underworld—a Kundry who has become humanized once she bowed down, acknowledged the feminine in the Parsifal role, and saw her own transformed role as service to the Grail. In the long third and final act of the opera, Sybeberg has the female Parsifal in sole possession of the Parsifal role. She sings with a male voice (the heldentenor) and it becomes explicitly apparent that access to the Grail is through her. When the male Parsifal joins his female

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counterpart at the very end of the film, Sybeberg has them first of all singing sequentially with the same voice; then brings them side by side singing together but with one voice, a male voice influenced, tutored by, and integrated with the feminine experience of Parsifal II. As they sing together the mountainside that conceals the path to the Grail sepulchre opens, giving out great bursts of light. The two Parsifals enter the mountain, embrace chastely and gently, and the film ends with the promise and expectancy of access to and experience of the Grail. This remarkable film is consistent with the interpretation of the Parsifal myth offered in this essay. Sybeberg demonstrates transformation in masculine energy and an adjustment of feminine energy to it, showing in convincing detail that these energies are not separate in individual human beings—male or female—but are different facets of a single, undifferentiated consciousness and energy. His film thus makes the novel statement that the sense of separation between that which is defined as "masculine" and that which is defined as "feminine" has to be replaced by a unity of expression. The messages from the twelfth century to the present day have all been the same in the many variants of this myth: "transform or perish." It is evident that Sybeberg has enhanced the richness of the Parsifal myth with his employment of the two Parsifals, whereas Levi-Strauss's communication axioms, the necessary end product of a semiotic structuralist approach, reduce and lose the symbolic richness of this myth and fail to deliver the message. To Wagner, Parsifal was not an opera like any other. It was a "Buhnenweihfestpiel"—a sacred scenic action akin to a liturgy. In "Religion and Art" (1966), Wagner defines what is at stake in Parsifal: "One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion by recognizing the figurative value of mythic symbols which the former would have us believe in their literal sense and revealing their deep and hidden truth through an ideal presentation" (213). Semiotic structuralism and inverted symmetries are clearly inadequate for this task. The mythopoetic genesis implicit in Wagner's conception of Parsifal can only be understood through an analogous mythopoetic understanding. This has been provided in my reading of this legend.

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APPENDIX Synopsis of the Grail Legend (according to Chretien de Troyes6)

The Holy Grail, the chalice of the Last Supper, is kept within a castle. The king of the castle has been severely wounded and suffers continuously because his wound will not heal. The entire country and its people are in desolation. The king had been wounded early in his adolescence. While wandering in a forest, he had reached a camp that was empty except for a spit on which a salmon was roasting. He was hungry, so he took a bit of the salmon. He burned his fingers horribly. To assuage the pain, he put his fingers into his mouth and tasted the salmon. He is called the Fisher King because he was wounded by a fish. He was also wounded in the thighs, so he is no longer productive, and his whole land is no longer productive. The Fisher King lies on a litter and must be carried everywhere, but he is sometimes able to fish, and only then is he happy. The Fisher King presides over the castle where the Grail is kept, but he cannot touch the Grail or be healed by it. The court fool has prophesied that the Fisher King would be healed when a wholly innocent fool arrives in the court. In an isolated country a boy lives with his widowed mother, whose name is Heart Sorrow. At first the boy does not seem to have a name; much later he learns that his name is Parsifal. His father had been killed while rescuing a fair maiden, and his two brothers had also been killed as knights. His mother had taken him to this faraway country and raised him in primitive circumstances. He wears homespun clothes, has no schooling, asks no questions. He is a simple, naive youth. Early in his adolescence, he sees five knights riding by on horseback. He is dazzled by the knights, their scarlet and gold trappings, their armour, and all their accoutrements. He dashes home to tell his mother that he has seen five gods and wants to leave home to go with them. His mother weeps. She had hoped that he would not suffer the fate of his father and his brothers. But she gives him her blessing and three instructions: he must respect all fair maidens; he is to go daily to church, where he will receive all the food he needs; and he is not to ask any questions. Parsifal goes off to find the knights. He never finds the same five knights, but he has all kinds of adventures. One day he comes to a tent. He had only known a simple hut, so he thinks this is the church his

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mother had told him about. He sees a fair damsel wearing a ring on her hand, so he obeys his mothers instructions by embracing the damsel, taking her ring, and putting it on his own hand. He sees a table set for a banquet and, thinking it is the food his mother had told him he would find in church, he eats it, not realizing it is prepared for the damsel's beloved knight. The damsel begs Parsifal to leave, because if her knight finds him there he will kill him. Parsifal goes on his way and soon finds a devastated convent and monastery. He cannot restore them, but he vows to return and raise the spell that has been put on them when he is stronger. Then he meets a Red Knight who has come from King Arthur's Court. Parsifal is dazzled by the knight and tells him that he too wants to be a knight. The Red Knight tells him to go to Arthur's court, which he does. In this court is a damsel who has not smiled or laughed for six years. A legend says that when the best knight in the world comes along, she will smile and laugh again. When she sees Parsifal, she bursts into laughter. The court is impressed. Arthur knights Parsifal, gives him a page, and tells him that he may have the horse and armour of the Red Knight if he can get them. Parsifal finds the Red Knight, kills him, and takes his armour and puts it on over his homespun clothing. He finds his way to the castle of Gournamond, who trains him to be a knight. Gournamond gives him two instructions: he must never seduce or be seduced by a woman, and when he reaches the Grail castle he must ask, "Whom does the Grail serve?" Parsifal goes off and tries to find his mother and help her, but he finds that she died of a broken heart. Then he meets Blanche Fleur. From this time on, everything he does is in her service. She asks him to conquer the army besieging her castle, which he does, and then he spends the night with her. After travelling all the next day, he meets two men in a boat. One of them, who is fishing, invites Parsifal to stay at his house for the night. When Parsifal reaches the house, he finds himself in a great castle, where he is royally welcomed. He learns that the young fisherman is the Fisher King. He sees a ceremony in which a youth carries a sword that drips blood constantly and in which a maiden carries the Grail. At a banquet the Grail is passed about and everyone drinks from it. The Fisher King's niece brings a sword, and the King straps it to Parsifal's waist. But Parsifal fails to ask the question Gournamond had told him to ask. The next morning Parsifal finds that all the people of the castle have vanished. Then the castle itself disappears.

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He goes on and finds a sorrowful maiden. He learns that her knight had been killed by the jealous knight of the maiden of the tent, so the death was really his, Parsifal's, fault. When the maiden learns that he has been in the Grail castle, she berates him for all his sins and tells him that the land and its people will continue to be desolate because he failed to ask the right question. Later he again finds the maiden of the tent. She reiterates all his misdeeds and tells him that the sword he had been given will break the first time it is used in battle, that it can only be mended by the smith who made it, and that after that it will never break again. In the course of his journeys, Parsifal has subdued many knights and sent them back to King Arthur's Court. When he had been there before, they had not realized who he was. Arthur sets forth to search for Parsifal so the court can honour him. Parsifal happens to be camping nearby. A falcon attacks three geese and wounds one of them. Its blood on the snow reminds Parsifal of Blanche Fleur, and he falls into a trance. Two of Arthur's men see him and try to persuade him to return to the court, but he unhorses them. A third knight, Gawain, gently persuades him to go to the court with him. Parsifal is received in triumph at the court. But the rejoicing ends when a hideous damsel on a decrepit mule enters and recites all of Parsifal's sins. Then she points a finger at him and says, "It is all your fault." She assigns tasks to all the knights. She tells Parsifal to search for the Grail castle again and this time ask the right question. Parsifal goes on through many episodes. Some versions say that he travels for five years; others say twenty years. He grows bitter and disillusioned. He does many heroic deeds, but he forgets the church, Blanche Fleur, and the Grail castle. Then one day he meets some pilgrims who ask him why he is armed on Good Friday. He suddenly remembers what he had forgotten. Remorsefully he goes with the pilgrims to a hermit for confession. The story ends as the hermit absolves him and tells him to go immediately to the Grail castle. NOTES 1. This quotation is not an original find. It was used by Carol Pearson (1986) to introduce her fascinating book on archetypes, The Hero Within, and I hope it will set the stage for this work as it did for her compelling reading of unconscious structures.

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2. It is interesting to note that Levi-Strausss commentary on psychoanalysis (1985, 220) invokes only Freudian notions—the bleeding lance as phallic symbol, the Grail as female sexual symbol, etc. Hopefully my development of Jung's ideas in this reading will not be so readily cast to one side. 3. The author has for the past decade engaged in a process of artificially induced, i.e., accelerated, individuation; so that symbols have more than intellectual allure, they are part of the author's own phenomenology. 4. Jung's notion of individuation and the evolutionary structuralism of Piaget (1971), McLean (1973), Laughlin and d'Aquili (1974) address the processual qualities of human potential emerging from the dialectic between consciousness and the deep-rooted symbolic patterns of both the personal and the collective unconscious. 5. To put a Jungian angle to Levi-Strausss motifs, myth can perhaps be viewed as a homology generated by the unconscious for the conscious to integrate with and thereby be effectively changed, i.e., individuated. This means making an analogy between Nature as both concrete model and generating base and the notion of the unconscious as the anchor of truth and awareness. (Nature: Culture) : : (Unconscious: Conscious) There is of course a deeper level yet; (Nature: Culture) : : (Brain: Mind) which invites the evolutionary structuralists to the table with their developmental and neurophysiological concerns (Count 1973; MacLean 1973; Piaget 1971; Laughlin and D'Aquili 1974). 6. This synopsis of the Grail legend is taken from Johnson 1977, 78-81. WORKS CITED Bohm, David. (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourguignon, Erika. (1968). "World Distribution and Patterns of Possession States." Trance and Possession States. Ed. R. Prince. Montreal: R.M. Bucke Memorial Society. Count, Earl W. (1973). Being and Becoming Human: Essays on the Biogram New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Culler, John. (1973). "Phenomenology and Structuralism." The Human Context 5:34-42. D'Aquili, Eugene, Charles D. Laughlin, and John McManus, eds. (1979). The Spectrum of Ritual. New York: Columbia University Press. Eliade, Mircea. (1964). Shamanism: Archaic Technique of Ecstasy. Princeton University Press. Geertz, Clifford. (1975). "Religion as a Cultural System." The Interpretation of Cultures. London: Hutchinson, 87-125.

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Govinda, Anagarika B. (I960). Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism. New York: Weiser. Hilgard, Ernest R. (1977). Divided Consciousness: Multiple Controls in Human Thought and Action. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Hillman, James. (1975). Re-visioning Psychology. New York: Harper Colophon. Husserl, Edmund. (1960). Cartesian Meditations. The Hague: Nijhoff. . (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Jacobi, Jolande. (1967). The Way of Individuation. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Johnson, Robert A. (1977). He: Under standing Masculine Psychology. New York: Harper and Row. Jung, Carl G. (1959). The Collected Works ofC.G.Jung. Princeton: Princeton University Press. . (1971). The Portable Jung. New York: Viking. Jung, Emma. (1957). Animus andAnima. New York: Analytical Psychology Club of New York. Jung, Emma, and Marie-Louise von Franz. (1960). The Grail Legend. A C.G. Jung Foundation Book. New York: G.P. Putnam. Kracke, Waud. (1986). "Dream, Myth, Thought and Image: An Amazonian Contribution to the Psychoanalytic Theory of Primary Process." Dreaming: Anthropoligical and Psychological Interpretations. Ed. B. Tedlock. Albequerque: University of New Mexico Press. Laughlin, Charles D. (1985). "Transpersonal Anthropology: Some Methodological Issues." Unpublished manuscript. , and Eugene D'Aquili. (1974). Biogenetic Structuralism. Columbia University Press. , John McManus, and John Shearer. (1984). "Dreams, Trance and Visions: What a Transpersonal Anthropology Might Look Like." The Journal of Transpersonal Anthropology 7( 1 /2): 141 -59. , John McManus, Robert A. Rubinstein, and John Shearer. (1986). "The Ritual Control of Experience." Part A. Symbolic Interaction. Ed. N.K. Dengin. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. , John McManus and Mark Webber. (1979). "Neurognosis, Individuation and Tibetan Arising Yoga Practice." Banff, Alta: Paper presented to Canadian Ethnological Society. Leach, Edmund. (1970). Levi-Strauss. London: Fontana. Levi-Strauss, Claude. (1962). La Pensee Sauvage. Paris: Plon. . (1964). Mythologiques I: Le cm et le cuit. Paris: Plon. . (1966). Mythologiques II: Du miel au cendres. Paris: Plon. . (1968). Mythologiques III: Lorigine des manieres de table. Paris: Plon.

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Levi-Strauss, Claude. (1985). "The View From Afar." From Chretien de Troyes to Richard Wagner. New York: Basic, chapter 17. McLean, Paul D. (1973). A Triune Concept of the Brain and Behaviour. University of Toronto Press. McManus, John. (1979). "Ritual and Human Social Cognition." The Spectrum of Ritual. Ed. E.G. D'Aquili, C.D. Laughlin, and J. McManus. New York: Columbia University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pearson, Carol S. (1986). The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Peters, Lawrence G., and Douglas Price-Williams. (1983). "A Phenomenological Overview of Trance." Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review 20:5-39. Piaget, Jean. (1971). Biology and Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Prattis, J. Iain. (1984). "Man and Metaphor: An Exploration in Entropy and Coherence." Communication and Cognition 17(2/3): 187-204. . ed. (1985). Reflections: The Anthropological Muse. Washington: American Anthropological Association, Special Publication. Ricoeur, Paul. (1963). "Structure et Hermeneutique." Esprit30. . (1967). "La structure, le mot, 1'evenement." Esprit^. . (1969). Le Conflit des interpretations: Essais d'hermeneutique. Paris: Editions du Seuil. . (1981). "Interpretation Theory." Critical Hermeneutics. Ed. G.B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ring, Kenneth. (1974). "A Transpersonal View of Consciousness: A Mapping of Further Regions of Human Space." Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 6(2): 125-55. Sheldrake, Rupert. (1981). A New Science of Life. London: Blond and Briggs. Stephen, Marilyn. (1986). "Culture, the Self and the Autonomous Imagination." Paper presented to the American Anthropological Association. Philadelphia, December. Tart, Charles T. (1975). States of Consciousness. New York: Dutton. Tedlock, Barbara, ed. (1986). Dreaming: The Anthropology and Psychology of the Imaginal. Albequerque: University of New Mexico Press. Toulmin, Stephen E. (1982). Return to Cosmology: Post Modern Science and the Theology of Nature. Berkely: University of California Press. Wagner, Richard. (1966). "Religion and Art." Prose Works, vol. 6. Trans. W.A. Ellis. New York: Broude Brothers, 211-89. Webber, Mark. (1980). "Ritual, a Model of Symbolic Penetration." Unpublished M.A. Thesis, Carleton University. Webber, Mark and Charles D. Laughlin. (1979). "The Mechanism of Symbolic Penetration." Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Working Paper. Ottawa, Canada.

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8 ANDROGYNOUS REALISM IN HEINRICH VON KLEIST'S "DIE HEILIGE CACILIE ODER DIE GEWALT DER MUSIK (EINE LEGENDE)" Arnd Bohm

Relatively neglected by critics in comparison to others of his works, Kleist s story with the elaborate tripartite title, which can be approximately translated into English as "Saint Cecilia, or the Power of Music (A Legend)," has begun to attract increasing attention. To some extent, this is due to the fact that the other works have been examined and reexamined with such exhausting intensity that a turn to lesser-known texts is inevitable. But it is also the case that, among Kleist's puzzling prose, this story stands out for its strangeness. What is it about? What is its "message"? In this case, we are confronted by a text which was quite avant-garde in its time, and which has had to wait for the advent of theories able to make sense of its problematic. Helpful though they are in establishing discursive contexts, positivistic studies, such as Rosemarie Puschmanns report on possible sources and influences, Heinrich von Kleists Cacilien-Erzdhlung: Kunst undliterarhistorische Recherchen (1988), have not been able to get beyond the surface of the text. The most sophisticated analysis to date, that of Donald P. Haase and Rachel Freudenburg (1969), disappoints, despite its deployment of contemporary theoretical categories, because the authors restrict themselves to a narrow consideration of questions of power and interpretation. In particular, they truncate analysis by overstressing the idea of "power,"

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insisting that "Truth and power are the driving forces of Kleist s narrative" (102). That Foucault is invoked as an authority for the reading of power in the text is odd in so far as one might have expected that his work would have led Haase and Freudenburg to consider the participation of questions of identity, subjectivity, and gender in the constitution of "power." My analysis will attempt to redress this imbalance by arguing that the driving forces of Kleist s narrative are not only truth and power but also a crisis of gender, which manifests itself textually as androgynous realism. The category established by the intersection of androgyny and realism must be elucidated by reference to both gender and narration. In this theoretical calculus, the difficulty is that neither of the axes is fixed and unchanging. Gender is neither innate nor immutable, whether as a concept or as an institution. What masculine or feminine represent must now always be considered within specific historical contexts and must be described in terms related to the language of the participants within a specific historical discourse. Similarly, realism is one of those concepts which, by its very nature as a shifting strategy and evolving praxis, has precluded an ultimate, final definition. Very much against the awareness of this dynamic situation, any analysis must nevertheless proceed by freezing the action, as it were, in order to have a ground for further elaboration. It can and must be heuristically proposed that at a certain point in time, under certain circumstances, certain identifications and conditions have prevailed, with contingent relations of power and subversion. There is no way for a theoretical discussion to convey process without first postulating a stasis which is known a priori to be a misrepresentation of the state of things. The concept of androgyny has been predicated upon the existence of the categories "masculine" and "feminine." Specifically, androgyny is defined as some combination of the masculine and the feminine. Sara Friedrichsmeyers The Androgyne in Early German Romanticism (1983) refers to the ideal of union as marking the mythological onset of androgyny as a possibility: The longing for totality and its ensuing harmony which in its extreme form is a desire for perfection on earth, has been experienced in many ages. Variously articulated as a desire for oneness with God, as a compulsion for unity with nature, or as the need for the "back to the womb" security of which contemporary psychologists speak, this yearning has also been expressed as a penchant for the completion accompanying the union of male and female. (9)

A R N D BOHM

Almost immediately, the gender triad masculine-feminine-androgynous threatens to be biologized into male, female and bisexual, rather than remaining gender concepts. Friedrichsmeyer inclines to give in to the arguments of the Romantic writers whom she is studying, in observations such as: "It should not be inferred that the Romantic generation contributed to a definition of the essence of maleness or femaleness; in fact, the majority of their systems worked precisely because they did not doubt the validity of the stereotypes upon which those systems were premised" (53). This suggests that there might be somewhere an "essence of maleness or femaleness" to be discovered, but it is not so. The best that can be discerned is any one group's understanding of either masculinity or femininity and how that understanding shaped behaviour. Only in that way can one avoid a contradiction, which Friedrichsmeyer hardly considers. For it is surely unusual that masculine writers and philosophers were, judging by the evidence, most concerned about androgyny. Or rather, they were concerned about the intrusion of what they understood to be feminine traits and characteristics into themselves, into the domain of masculinity which constituted their identities. Typically, it was Schelling who wrote about Caroline Bohmer that she was a person of "masculine greatness of soul, of the sharpest intellect combined with the gentleness of the most feminine, most tender, most loving heart" (111). Formulated more provocatively, it could seem that in the period between 1770 and 1830 androgyny may have been primarily a masculine concern. However, this oversimplifies matters. Once the texts by women writers are taken into account, it would emerge that androgyny was also a problem for them—but a rather different one, as Inge Stephan (1986) has pointed out. Always to be kept in mind is that masculine and feminine were related to distributions of power and authority, wealth and poverty, fame and oblivion, freedom and restriction. All too slowly this has been acknowledged in politics, in family relations, and in the production and reproduction of culture. These distributions have penetrated all institutions, including the self, through and through. There can no longer be any dispute that these distributions have also determined the shape of the literary canons and the careers of men and women writers. What remains in dispute, or has come into disputation, is how masculine and feminine are distributed within textual systems. There is not room here to review the extent and complexity of the discussion of whether masculine/feminine differences are present in

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texts and how they might be recognized. The more limited question here concerns a theme which has become fairly orthodox in feminist literary criticism: that a characteristic of writing by women is a multiplicity of voices in the text, as opposed to the single, unitary, solitary voice of the masculine narrator in a masculine text. Referring to Bakhtin, Susan S. Lanser hears: The polyphony of all voices and, certainly in visible ways, of the female voice in many women's narratives. For the condition of being woman in a male-dominant society may well necessitate the double voice, whether as conscious subterfuge or as tragic dispossession of the self... A narratology adequate to women's texts (and hence to all texts, though polyphony is more pronounced and more consequential in women's narratives and in the narratives of other dominated peoples) would have to acknowledge and account for this polyphony of voice, identifying and disentangling its strands as recent studies by Graciele Reyes and Michael O'Neal begin to do. (Lanser 1986, 349-50)

Most of the effort consequent to these insights has indeed gone into a study of women's texts, although as Lanser parenthetically concedes, there is nothing precluding the study of polyphony in texts by men. Indeed, once we begin to listen for them, we shall hear the repressed voices, the muffled echoes, the agonistic dialogues in the masculinist tradition no less than in the feminist. Linda M. Shires has examined Tennyson's "Maud" and found there tremendous complexity: Maud holds to fixed gender roles, relying on the metaphysical binaries of male/female set up by the patriarchal system to keep women in place; yet that binary opposition is also collapsed. First, the code of masculinity is in transition. So, although men and women in the poem are typed traditionally according to patriarchal norms, Maud sings of the death of men and the speaker s voice is feminized. On the level of form, history and plot, associated with the male notions of progress are persistently halted and disrupted by the lyric.... The male voice itself, try as it might, cannot escape the traces of the female. And the entire notion of a unified, stable sexual identity is thrown into question. (Shires 1987, 287)

In Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville and Hawthorne, Leland S. Person, Jr., has tried

ARND BOHM

To demonstrate that none of these authors wrote automatically "in the masculine," inscribing nineteenth-century masculine ideology and using women to satisfy a desire for power.... If they do not themselves deconstruct that masculine ideology, they encourage readers to recognize the destructive as well as self-destructive effects of phallocentric discourse by consistently depicting the failure of male efforts to control women through language, imagery, and larger artistic forms. And at their best, in Pierre, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun, for example, they explore the possibility of an alternative poetics—a feminized masculine poetics characterized, not by the assertion of male power over women, but by male identification of power with women or by male surrender of power to women. (Person 1988, 174)

Resonating through these feminist-inspired readings is an unfortunate ahistorical sense that it always would have been, always was, easy for men writing to "opt out," to surrender the power and prestige of the masculine voice and position. Of course, it is just in the nature of power that domination is enforced as rigorously as subjugation. As the example of Kleist s text reveals, the possibility of simply yielding to the feminine was threatening and liberating at the same time, for where would the man abandoning his masculine role "go to"? For Kleist, as for his Romantic contemporaries, the mingling of the feminine as a role with the masculine could only be construed as a threat of androgyny, not as a new masculinity. Nor was it easy to abandon the authorized masculine voice and style, especially for the adherents of realism, which was the exemplary masculine narrative mode. Realism was a narrative strategy carried on by writers who were conscious of themselves as adhering to a normative masculine way of controlling the world. To be masculine was to possess property, to dominate, to extend dominion, to defeat male rivals, to master in every sense of the word, including the production of the master-piece. As Sally Robinson has pointed out, the characteristics of the realist text are antifeminine in their implications, denying polyphony, imposing uniformity: In the realist text, unity of character and an intelligible story are not only the factors that allow us to understand the "meaning" of the text but are also the criteria on which critics have traditionally judged the aesthetic and literary value of it. As long as the text presents an intelligible history, we can understand it by "sharing" its "meaning" with the author. The realist text works under the assumption of transparent, functional language, a

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communication model that depends on the unified, consistent subjectivity of both author and reader. (Robinson 1988, 120)

Observe that negating these criteria or tampering with them would and does produce texts which are incomprehensible, which defy understanding, which block communication, which invite critical rejection. What author would voluntarily subject himself to the attacks of baffled readers? Who would readily give up doing what he believed to be successful and acceptable practice, unless driven to do so by extraordinary circumstances? That Kleist did just that makes him both remarkable and disturbing. The dimensions of the difficulties in sorting out Kleist's realism are indicated in Joachim Kortegast's detailed review of the nineteenth century reception of the issue (Kortegast 1979). Kortegast is able to show how the interpretation of Kleist s style was contingent upon extratextual concerns, such as the status of Germanistik as a discipline and the triumph of the Prussian option in the centralization of the German states. Given what we have just observed about the congruence of realism and masculinism, it is not surprising that it was imperative for the advocates of Prussian nationalism, which may be taken as an apotheosis of a specific rigid masculinism, to find in Kleist and in his style a confirmation of their premises. As a "Prussian" writer, Kleist should have been the ideal candidate for heading a new national pantheon of German literature, reflecting and anticipating in his writings the pragmatic Realpolitik of Bismarck. Ironically, however, Kleist's texts were not readily available for such co-opting. Again and again, as Kortegast relates, the commentators and critics were forced to ignore, explain away, or even erase those moments in Kleist's works which were patently antirealistic. At all textual levels—edition, form, content, plot, and theme—traces of any opposition to realism were categorized as flaws, which only the overall value of Kleist's contribution could excuse. As Heinrich von Treitschke, an apologist historian for the Prussian option put it: "Kleist's mistakes will not tempt anyone today; somnambulist dreams are hardly dangerous in these days of sound human reason. However we can learn from him the affectionate immersion in the richness of real life, which is what the newest literature quite rightly requires" (cited in Kortegast 1979, 87). Even Kleist's language was subjected to "correction" according to the implicit precepts of a state-sponsored program against non-realistic (weak!) public language (89-90).

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Twentieth century critics have been just as uneasy about how to localize Kleist s realism. In the prose works, the problem centres on the ambiguities which continually preclude easy readings and ready solutions. As Use Graham has put it, "The fabric of Kleist s plots is spun, as it were, of a dense web of ambiguities some though not all of which are experienced as such by the reader no less than by the characters themselves" (Graham 1977, 136). She lists four major kinds of incomprehension encountered in Kleist s texts: "First, an inexplicable fact or event; second, the concealed motivation of another character or characters; third, his own character which is, or becomes, problematic to him; and fourth, the meaning of his total experience" (136). Of Heists story "Das Erdbeben in Chili," John Ellis (1979) has written: Throughout, the narrator struggles to understand the story, forming one view of it after another, and visibly abandoning each in turn. He is worried by it, and evidently emotionally involved in it. He does not know the ending of the story while he is telling it, and since he is not omniscient he clutches at what looks like a reasonable inference and so makes mistakes; but he becomes more cautious as a result of these mistakes. (70)

Ellis's summation is an apt portrayal of a narrator who would not conform to the standard confident, knowing, distanced masculine narrator, even though the subject matter—an earthquake—remains within the sphere of a masculine sublime. Indeed, this description could almost be moved into a feminist analysis as an account of the condition of the feminine narrator: struggling with the narrative and the world, emotionally involved, limited in opportunities, without recourse to closure. But Kleist was no feminist, just as he was not a woman and not a member of an oppressed minority. Quite the contrary. He was born into a Prussian aristocratic family which had a strong tradition of military and government service. Kleist was originally destined to pursue a career as an officer, but at the age of 22 he decided to leave the army in order to continue his studies at university. The full implications of this decisive break with his family tradition may not have been obvious to him at the time, for he was never to succeed in returning to a career in state service. Instead, he made various attempts to establish himself in the literary world, attempts which were hampered by the interruption of the Napoleonic Wars and the defeats of Prussia, and

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by Kleist's difficult literary politics, including his rivalry with Goethe. Nonetheless, in a remarkably brief time, he wrote several works which are still central to the German canon, in a range of genres: the dramas Prinz Friedrich von Hamburg, Der zerbrochne Krug and Penthesilea\ the novella Michael Kohlhaas\ and a number of stories and anecdotes. On November 21, 1811 he ended this brilliant literary career at the age of 34 by carrying through a rather bizarre murder-suicide pact with Henriette Vogel. In the outer life marked by a public career in the military and in writing, there would seem to be few indications of an opening for an awareness which was not authorized by the institutionalized masculinism of the late eighteenth century. And yet the possibility of tensions resulting from a sundering of the unitary masculinist ego are indicated everywhere in Kleist's biography. The presence of these tensions is sometimes so blatant that only a rigorous refusal on the part of critics could have kept silent about them. There is the well-known scene in the essay Uber das Marionettentheater: I was bathing, I related, about three years ago with a young man, over whose form was spread at that time a wonderful grace. He might have been approximately in his sixteenth year, and only very distantly could the first traces of vanity be noticed in him, evoked by the favour of women. It happened that we had just seen in Paris the youth who is pulling a sliver from his foot; the copy of the statue is well known and is in most German collections. A glance which he threw into a large mirror at the moment when he put his foot up on a stool to dry it off reminded him of the statue. He laughed and told me what discovery he had made. Indeed, I had made the same discovery at that moment. (Kleist 1982, III, 343; translations from Kleist 1982 are mine.)

And, closely related, the passage in Kleist's letter of 1805 to his friend Ernst von Pfuel: "You restored the age of the Greeks in my heart, I could have slept with you, dear lad, so much did my whole soul embrace you. I often viewed your beautiful body with truly maidenly feelings when I saw you going into the lake in front of my eyes in Thun" (IV, 749). The problem with such a passage is how it is to be integrated into an understanding of Kleist's life and works. Richard Exner has proposed that the theme of androgyny in Kleist should be seen in the context of the Prussian state, which stressed an ideal of masculinism

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represented by the Prussian military. Though this is sympathetic to the present argument, Exner s claim that androgyny is the underlying essential human element left when masculine and feminine roles are stripped away serves to obscure Kleist's historical situation. Instead of the Prussian realist, Exner is looking for the humanist: "To be proposed is the thesis that the shock effect of reality suddenly breaking in levels the gender differences. In extreme fear of death and in great joy these Kleistian figures are no longer men and women who play the roles imposed upon them by their era and tradition and their biological givens, but only human beings" (1979, 60; my translation). Just how Exner concludes with the emergence of the human need not concern us, except as another instance of the strength of certain literary critical traditions. Rather more interesting and considerably more nuanced is Lilian Hoverland's essay on Kleist, informed by the work of Luce Irigaray. Hoverland's comments on the essay Uber das Marionettentheater give an important insight into the conjunction between gender and textuality in the case of Kleist: Kleist, with his masculine ability to wield the laws of algebra and his feminine artistic penchant, apparently sees himself related to the God who manipulates the puppet along the straight lines of algebra while dancing himself and producing the curved lines of the puppet's graceful movement. Both Kleist and the essay s God thus possess what is required of a being in total harmony and union with himself: masculine and feminine traits and abilities (1980, 69).

The second sentence needs to be qualified: "Both Kleist and his God would like to hem harmony with their masculine and feminine traits." The essay Uber das Marionettentheater in fact recounts the loss of harmony and laments the irretrievability of grace during the course of history. Worth noting is that the grace of the nude youth is not ruined only by the mirror, which Hoverland interprets in straightforward Lacanian terms, but also by the presence and the gaze of the other male, when that male looks with feminine interest. One should be circumspect about imposing Utopian expectations on Kleist's texts. The essay on the puppet theatre remains an essay about disjointedness and the complex tensions of masculinism versus feminism, so that it is by no means an unequivocal proclamation of androgynous being. In order to see why harmonization through androgyny was blocked for Kleist, one can look at Kleist's remarkable correspondence, replete

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with instructions to women. In May 1799, he wrote to his sister Ulrike that someone could not be considered a person without a plan for life: Yes, it is inconceivable to me how a person could live without a life-plan, and I have such heartfelt feeling, in the certainty with which I use the present and the calm with which I look to the future, what a priceless good fortune my life-plan grants me. And the condition of being without a lifeplan, without firm determination [Bestimmung^, always teetering between unsure wishes, always in conflict with my duties, a toy of chance, a puppet on the wire of fate—this undignified condition seems to be so contemptible, and would make me so unhappy, that death would be much more desirable. (Kleist 1982, IV, 490)

Of course, it was much easier for a man to assert his own plan for life in 1800 than it could be for any woman. From the next paragraph of Kleist s letter, we can tell what Ulrike s objection must have been to her brothers pronouncement denying personhood to those without such a plan: "You say that only men possess the unlimited freedom of will,—that your sex is bound indissolubly to the relations of opinion and reputation.—But do I hear this from your mouth? Are you not a free girl, as I am a free man? To what authority are you subordinated other than solely to the authority of reason?" (Kleist IV, 490). Ulrikes efforts to draw his attention to the actual situation of women met with Kleist s non-understanding. In the name of personhood, which Ulrike could only have identified as something available at that time to men, Kleist imposed the doubled authority of masculine rationality. That is, the woman would become a person according to the degree in which she imitated Kleist s strategy for his own life, avoiding chance, disorder, or subordination. Implicit in Kleist s instructions to Ulrike is a plan to contain and ultimately defeat those traces of life which actually were the core and substance of women's experience at the time. Even more extreme manifestations of the contradictions of gender relations in Kleists life and thinking are found in his letters to Wilhelmine von Zenge. For several years, he corresponded with her in the hope of persuading her to marry him. In order to convince her of the necessity of this step, he felt that she first had to be "educated" to rationality, and he sent her detailed instructions on how to learn to think. For example, in a letter late in 1800, he sent her numerous examples of problems with which she should exercise her reason. Even

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the most mundane housekeeping tasks could become the stuff of genuine thought: When you drop a stitch from the needle while knitting and you, before you knit further, carefully pick up the stitch, so that the one undone knot does not undo all the other knots and thus destroy the whole artful fabric—what useful lesson does that give you for your education, or to what does that point? When you pour boiling hot water into a cooler container in the kitchen and the bubbling liquid, as it warms the container somewhat, is itself cooled off, until the temperatures (degrees of warmth) in both come to an equilibrium—what exemplary hope is there in that for us two, and especially for me, or to what does that point? (Kleist 1982, IV, 595)

This passage is remarkable in its complex gender relations. Kleist sets up examples of women's work as he conceives it to be: utterly trivial and prerational. Then he suggests that what would give this work by women a meaning would be the addition of reasoning, which, however, has to be learned from the man. The content of the work as such is not considered by Kleist to be in and of itself a useful contribution to the social order until it is integrated into the discourses of masculinism. However, this passage is cited here less to condemn Kleist for his limited vision of women's work and more to underscore that the entire imaginative act was unilaterally his. The shift to the (imaginary) vantage point of the woman and then the superimposition of a masculinist order upon the (imagined) feminine prerational condition are processes internal to Kleist's consciousness. And this is ultimately what strikes one about these letters to Wilhelmine von Zenge: they are hardly to a real woman and mainly a lengthy dialogue of Kleist's masculine role with an intrusive feminine presence. What "Die Heilige Cacilie" will present is Kleist's account of what happens to men when such a feminine presence overwhelms them. The plot of "Die Heilige Cacilie" is, as in so many of Kleist's stories, both simple and yet baffling. The setting is in Aachen in the sixteenth century, at some point during the Reformation. Four brothers, three of them students and the fourth a preacher, decide to disrupt the Corpus Christi celebration of the sisters of the Convent of Saint Cecilia and to engage in some unprovoked iconoclasm. The rowdies assemble with a riotous mob; there is no one to protect the nuns as the troublemakers assemble in the church, determined "not to leave a single stone standing"; and—nothing happens. Or, more correctly,

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something does happen, but it is not what the brothers had planned. The music for the mass begins and During the whole performance not a breath could be heard from the aisles and pews; especially when the salve regina and still more when the gloria in excelsis rang out, it seemed that everyone in the church was dead, so much so that, in spite of the four accursed brothers and their following, not even the dust on the floor was disturbed, and the convent remained untouched even to the end of the Thirty Years' War, when, however, it was secularized by virtue of a clause in the Peace of Westphalia. (Kleist 1965, 22)

The careful, almost pedantic historical account thus far is pronounced in its realism and its orderly sequential narration, from the troubles in the Reformation to the middle of the seventeenth century. The story breaks at this juncture and jumps ahead six years, when the boys' mother has come to Aachen to look for them, since they have vanished. Much to her distress, she finds them in the madhouse: "The wardens added: 'The young men have been leading this ghostly existence for six years now and sleep and eat but little; no sound comes from their mouths; only once do they arise from their places—at the stroke of midnight, and then with one voice, which shakes the windows of the house, they chant the gloria in excelsis " (16). Then the mother seeks out one Veit Gotthelf, who was also supposed to be a participant in the riot. He has no explanation for what transpired: "The precision with which every possible preparation was made to carry out this attack was truly infernal. I cannot understand how it was prevented: Heaven itself would appear to have taken the convent of these pious ladies under its holy protection" (17). Finally, the mother has an audience with the Abbess, who also claims that God must have intervened, even though this cannot be explained, certainly not to a Protestant: "On that remarkable day, God Himself protected the convent from the wantonness of your sons who were so sadly led astray. What means He used to this end will be a matter of indifference to you, as you are a Protestant. Also, you will find it hard to understand any explanation I could give you" (22). Especially perplexing is a fact which the Abbess reveals to the mother just before the end of the story. It turns out that nobody knows who directed the music which had such a profound effect on events. Sister Antonia, who had been originally scheduled to do the conducting, had been immobilized with a serious illness the entire time. The identity of the female figure who did conduct remains a mystery:

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From a testimony taken down the following day in presence of the steward and several other men and deposited in the convent archives, it became clear that Sister Antonia, the only person who could have directed the performance, was lying in a corner of her convent cell, sick, distraught and without the use of her limbs during the entire time in which the work was being played. One of our sisters who was sent, as a blood relative, to look after her bodily comfort, did not move from her bed the whole morning while the Feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated in the church. (22)

Clues to interpreting the story must lie in the region to which the title points, the power of music. Yet how could the causal connections between music and its effects be rationally explained? This has troubled critics, who have offered various positivistic explanations, such as Gordon Birrell's (1989) argument that we can understand how the music was intended to have an influence through a re-examination of contemporary theories of electricity and magnetism. But such an approach neglects the other dimensions to this music, especially its inscription under the sign of the feminine. The music is to be performed in a convent dedicated to a female saint, one specifically associated with both feminine virtue and with music. The performers are all to be women and, with the exception of the intruding public, the primary audience would be the nuns. The narrator, in one of the few comments upon the events, expressly links music to the feminine: "In convents, as is well known, nuns who are skilled in playing all kinds of instruments perform their own music; often with a precision, understanding and sensitivity that are lacking in male orchestras (perhaps because the mysterious art of music is essentially feminine)" (Kleist 1965, 14). The anonymous figure who appears instead of Sister Antonia further emphasizes through her address that the performance is by women: "To the astonished questions of the nuns who asked where she had come from and how she had recovered so suddenly, she replied: 'Never mind, dear sisters, never mind!'" (15). Multiply determined by feminine authorizations, the music is totally overwhelming in its influence. The women performers have evidently penetrated to that mystical core of the "feminine essence" of music alluded to by the narrator. The unique ability of women to respond to this musical essence is confirmed in an important incident later in the story. When the mother is visiting the Abbess, she spots a musical score lying open in the room:

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She went over to the music stand and gazed at the incomprehensible, magical signs which seemed as if made by a fearsome spirit secretly tracing out its spell; when she found the score opened exactly at the gloria in excehis she felt ready to sink into the ground. It seemed to her as if the dread terror of the art of music which had ruined her sons was visibly present and passing by above her head. She believed she might lose her reason at the very sight of the music; when she had quickly pressed the score to her lips with a movement of infinite humility and submission to God in his omnipotence, she sat down on her chair once again. (22)

The passage is crucial as a demonstration of the affinity of women for music. Haase and Freudenberg read in this incident a hermeneutics of power: It is upon seeing the score and the unfamiliar musical notes, which she construes as magic signs and imagines powerful enough to have affected her sons, that she loses her own sense. Completely impressed by the "gottliche Allmacht" that she imagines present in these signs, and overcome by a feeling of "Demut und Unterwerfung," the mother kisses the Partitur, a sign of her own submission, a display of her imbuing the score—and the Church— with meaning and power over her. (1969, 101)

But this reading is mistaken. The mother does not lose her own senses, it only seemed to her as if she might be overcome. Instead of reeling from the tremendous influx of the sublime, she is able to gather herself and to act. Her "submission" is a declaration of faith, after which harmony is quickly restored. It should be stressed that the music has a positive influence over her at two removes from performance, since no one is playing the score and since she cannot read the notes. The situation imitates the paradigm of inspiration in Protestant hermeneutics, whereby the meaning of Scripture is energized by divine inspiration. Here, however, that paradigm has been elevated beyond the rational plane, for what hermeneutics admit of understanding without semiotic deciphering? It could be a hermeneutics predicated on a feminine sublime not hindered by the struggle to overcome the blockages of ego. In this space encompassed completely by feminine authority—the office of the Abbess in the convent, with only women present—the feminine energy of the music is sufficient to enthuse the hapless woman whose life is being wasted in pursuit of the four men and their history.

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To a male observer, what transpires between women and music would be incomprehensible. Furthermore, any males who came under the fullest influence of a music absolutely feminized would be permanently dislodged from their masculine consciousness. This is what has happened to the four brothers who had been completely enveloped by the remarkable performance and who were immediately spellbound. The intensity of their experience is so great that for the rest of their lives they attempt to imitate the performance, without success. At midnight in the madhouse, the four break out in a hideous, discordant noise: Your four sons, having listened attentively for a moment to the muffled sound of the bell, at once arose together from their places, and, while we laid down our table-napkins and looked at them fearful of what might follow so strange and embarrassing a beginning, with horrible and hideous voice they began to chant the gloria in excelsis. They sounded like leopards and wolves baying at the sky in the depths of an icy winter; I swear that the very foundations of the house shivered, and the windows, on feeling the breath visibly expelled from their lungs, rattled as if handfuls of gritty sand had been flung at them, and seemed near to breaking. (Kleist 1965, 19)

The four men are possessed by the urge to replicate the feminine performance in the church, but the slight trace of the feminine in them does not suffice to let them give true voice to the music. What the description stresses is the uncontrolled surge of the sublime characteristic of masculine discourse: being awesome without control or direction. Their attempts to produce harmony have the exact opposite effect to the performance in the convent, for they bring disordered madness into the world: This terrible occurrence sent us rushing out, all reason lost, panic-stricken; we ran here and there, abandoning our cloaks and hats, through the neighbouring streets, which within a short time—we having gone—were filled with more than a hundred people frightened from their beds; they burst open the door and poured over the steps to the hall to search out the source of this atrocious and shocking din, which rose as from the lips of sinners in eternal torment in the lowest regions of the fires of hell, forcing a doleful plea for mercy to the ears of God. (19)

This is among Kleist's most amazing sentences, as it mimetically enacts what it relates. There will be no redemption for the brothers.

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They live out the remainder of their now utterly useless lives and die "a serene and joyous death in old age, but not before they had yet again, as was their practice, sung the gloria in excelsis" (23). The consequences for having transgressed against the sanctity of the feminine domain are, in the terms of the masculinist culture, lives spent quite fruitlessly. The attentive reader will recognize in the reference to "leopards and wolves" an important element in the argument around the legend of Saint Cecilia. This context is also referred to by Dryden, for example, in "A Song for Saint Cecilia's Day, 1687": Orpheus could lead the savage race; And trees unrooted left their place, Sequacious of the lyre; But bright Cecilia rais'd the wonder high'r: When to her Organ vocal breath was giv'n, An angel heard, and straight appear'd, Mistaking earth for heav'n. (Dryden 1953, 74)

As the bringer of heavenly, harmonizing music, Saint Cecilia competes for primacy with the figure of Orpheus, the singer-poet whose music tamed wild animals. Reading this competition along gender lines, we see that Kleist s story inverts matters. Rather than taming wild animals, the remnant of masculine song sounds like snarling and baying. Rather than civilizing the community, it drives people wild. Rather than rescuing them from the underworld, the singing of men rises "as from the lips of sinners in eternal torment in the lowest regions of... hell." The coming of Saint Cecilia ushers in a new order, one which is no less powerful than the one created by the Orphic voice, but one which will render masculine utterances senseless. The identification of music with poetry which the allusion to the tradition of Orpheus introduces is substantiated in turn by Kleist s comments. In a letter in 1811, Kleist explained that music was the fundamental art for him: In this case I would perhaps leave art be entirely for a year or longer and concern myself, with the exception of some sciences in which I must still catch up, entirely with music. For I consider this art the root, or rather, in order to express myself correctly, as the algebraic formula of all the others and ... so I have, from my earliest youth on, related everything which I

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thought generally about poetics to musical notes. I believe that in the general bass all the most important concepts of poetics are included. (1982, IV, 974-75)

One ought then to be able to follow the logic exposed by Kleist's account of what music does on the parallel literary planes of narration and text. That is, structures could be expected to reveal masculine/ feminine tensions similar to those thematized in the story. The narrator whose voice is heard at the beginning is never identified. The only circumstantial evidence available that this is a masculine narrator is that the first section, until the arrival of the mother, is spoken with the authoritative, orderly voice characteristic of realist prose. The overall organization of this section adheres closely to the models of "logical" narrative, proceeding from the setting of time and place to provide a neat chronological account. The language is vivid and realistic, replete with details. But the control displayed by this narrator begins to be undermined with the mother's arrival. As a kind of detective figure, her motives and investigative strategies begin to direct and limit the narrative viewpoint. The readers now proceed through Aachen with the mother, a character within the text, no longer from the viewpoint of the omniscient gaze. And we soon discover that the mother had a document relevant to the story, a letter which she had received from one of the brothers the day before the crucial events, a document of which the narrator had made no previous mention. Subtly but surely his authority begins to yield to increasing scepticism on our part. We begin to worry about curious incongruencies in the narrator s position. How did he come to know what he claims to know about the events? Was he present in the church together with the untrustworthy and duplicitous Veit Gotthelf, who is introduced as a prototypical male reporter? Did the narrator interview the mother? How did he come by the privileged knowledge of what happened in the interview between the Abbess and her? Ultimately, the narrator who began so assertively in presenting facts ("Near the end of the sixteenth century, when the iconoclastic riots in the Netherlands were at their height, three young brothers ...") is unable to offer any reasoned explanation of what took place. The best he is able to do is to quote at length from the Abbess, who has made no pretense of going beyond the surface events. The "fact" that Sister Antonia could not have been in the church on the fateful day, a detail which is absolutely central, was completely unknown in the narrator's report of the opening section! Not until

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the woman speaking to another woman reveals "the fact" do we realize, in retrospect, that either the narrator had been lying or he did not know the story he was purporting to tell. All efforts to identify, to stabilize, and to comprehend the narrator are frustated by such contradictions. What has happened is that the narrators role has been subverted and irreparably distorted by the introduction of feminine aspects (music, the Abbess, the mother), with their respective voices. In whatever manner the narrator came to be present at or aware of the performance of the nuns' music, he can neither unravel its mystery nor set it into a coherent historical narrative. No less than the four brothers, who are heard in public only as incomprehensibly distorted renderings of a lost feminine performance, the narrators public voice is now garbled and, from the vantage point of masculinist discourse, is nonsense. The panic of the listeners who hear the brothers "singing" is reproduced in the publication of this story, as generations of critics have been unable to sustain rational interpretation in the presence of such a self-contradictory text. Once the solitary masculine voice unfolding a straightforward realist narrative is intermingled with feminine otherness, this story has become undecipherable. Or to put it another way, the emergent disclosure or even the possibility of a feminine sublime has destabilized the conventions of masculine narration upon which a conventionalized reading is contingent. Such an end was already foretold by the involved three-part title, "Saint Cecilia, or the Power of Music (A Legend)," which signalled the generic problematic of the text. Critics have noticed that "legend," cited parenthetically, is rather at variance with what follows. As Wolfgang Wittkowski has observed, the ironies of narration correlate poorly with hagiographic requirements (1972, 20-21). A plain account of the saints life would be subsumable under the rules of realist narrative. A genuine faith would require that there be no difference between the realistic account of a miracle and the realism of, for example, a weather report. The legend, on the other hand, is suffused with inexplicable causalities and unbridgeable gaps. Once again, the oppositions are overlaid with the gender relations mapped thus far. Conflicting with the masculinist realist pretending to tell (hi) story, there is the legend derived from the mysterious life of a woman saint. The legend does not answer to the demands of realism. Essential facts are missing, spurious details have been preserved. Deftly, the text refers to just these incommensurabilities by citing how masculine writing has already begun to appropriate and distort the events in the church: "Also, the Archbishop of Trier, to

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whom the incident was reported, has already given it as his opinion— and this alone explains the happenings—that Saint Cecilia herself performed this terrible and at the same time joyous miracle; and I have just received a brief from the Pope himself in which he confirms this"

(KIcist 1965,23).

The male figures of authority have "made sense" of the event, but only by surrendering history completely to the dominion of legend. They are wholly unwilling or unable to question the premises of the inexplicable events, not least because their authority is itself grounded in other legends. Having yielded to legend, it proves impossible to restore realism to the text. The final paragraph begins by declaring, "Here the legend ends" (Kleist 1965, 23). But as Edmund Edel has pointed out, this assertion is not true, for the brothers end their lives within the framework of the entire text, including the legend (1969, 113). The law of genre has again been vindicated in violation. Perhaps Kleist had hoped that it might be possible to avoid the consequences of mixing legend with history, feminine with masculine discourse. He had indeed usurped legend for fictional history (there was no convent in Aachen dedicated to Saint Cecilia; these events "did not take place"), the imagined origin of a legend of feminine power moving through art. The strategy is familiar from the letters of instruction to Wilhelmine von Zenge. But the imagined otherness of the feminine turned upon the text, upon the narrator, and upon Kleist himself, asserting its own requirements. Even the deaths of Sister Antonia and the four brothers cannot undo the dire consequences. Given his historical situation, Kleist could not apprehend the mingling of genre or the mingling of gender as anything other than a collapse of the established order. Having imagined already that a masculine voice, tinged with the feminine, would be something akin to the howling of wild animals, would be the voice of the tormented damned, Kleist drew a dreadful conclusion. He committed suicide on November 21, 1811; Saint Cecilia's day, of course, is November 22. WORKS CITED Aurnhammer, Achim. (1986). Androgynie: Studien zu einem Motiv in der europdischen Literatur. Koln/Wien: Bohlau. Birrell, Gordon. (1989). "Heist's 'St. Cecilia and the Power of Electricity." The German Quarterly 62(1):72-84. Derrida, Jacques. (1981). "The Law of Genre." Trans. Avital Ronell. On Narrative. Ed. W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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Dryden, John. (1953). Selected Works of John Dryden. Ed. William Frost. New York: Holt. Edel, Edmund. (1969). "Heinrich von Kleist's 'Die heilige Cacilie oder die Gewalt der Musik. Eine LegendeV Wirkendes Wort 19:105-15. Ellis, John. (1979). Heinrich von Kleist: Studies in the Character and Meaning of his Writings. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Exner, Richard. (1979). "Androgynie und preussischer Staat: Themen, Probleme und das Beispiel Heinrich von Kleist." Aurora 9:51-78. Fischer, Bernd. (1988). Ironische Metaphysik: Die Erzdhlungen Heinrich von Kleists. Mtinchen: Fink. Friedrichsmeyer, Sara. (1983). The Androgyne in Early German Romanticism. Bern: Lang. Graf, Giinter. (1969). "Der dramatische Aufbaustil der Legende Heinrich von Kleists Die Heilige Cacilie oder Die Gewalt der Musik: Ein Interpretationsversuch." Etudes germaniques 24:346-59. Graham, Use. (1977). Heinrich von Kleist: Word into Fleshy A Poet's Quest for the Symbol. New York: De Gruyter. Haase, Donald P. and Rachel Freudenburg. (1969). "Power, Truth, and Interpretation: The Hermeneutic Act and Kleist s Die heilige Cacilie. " Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift fur Litterawissenschaft 60:88-103. Heine, Thomas. (1980). "Kleists St. Cecilia and the Power of Politics." Seminar 16:71-82. Hoverland, Lilian. (1980). "Heinrich von Kleist and Luce Irigaray: Visions of the Feminine." Gestaltet und Gesaltend: Frauen in der deutschen Literatur. Ed. Marianne Burkhard. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 57-82. Kleist, Heinrich von. (1982). Sdmtliche Werke und Briefe in Vier Bdnden. Ed. Helmut Sembdner. Munchen/Wien: Hanser. . (1965). "Saint Cecilia, or the Power of Music." German Narrative Prose 1. Trans. J.F. Hargreares and J.G. Gumming. Ed. E.J. Engel. London: Oswald Wolff, pp. 13-23. Kortegast, Joachim. (1979). "Realismus und Stil: Ein Beitrag zum Verstandnis der poetischen Sprache Kleists im 19. Jahrhundert." Text und Kontext: Quellen undAufidtze zur Rezeptionsgeschichte der Werke Heinrich von Kleists. Ed. Klaus Kanzog. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, pp. 83-116. Lanser, Susan S. (1986). "Toward a Feminist Narratology." %^20(3):34l-63. Mehigan, Timothy J. (1988). Text as Contract: The Nature and Function of Narrative Discourse in the Erzdhlungen of Heinrich von Kleist. Frankfurt: Lang. Person, Leland S., Jr. (1988). Aesthetic Headaches: Women and Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne. Athens GA, and London: University of Georgia Press. Puschmann, Rosemarie. (1988). Heinrich von Kleists Cdcilien-Erzdhlung: Kunst- und literarhistorische Recherchen. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag.

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Robinson, Sally. (1988). "The 'Anti-Logos Weapon': Multiplicity in Women's Texts." Contemporary Literature 29(1): 105-24. Shires, Linda M. (1987). "Maud, Masculinity and Poetic Identity." Criticism 29(3):269-90. Stephan, Inge. (1986). "'Die Musen gehoren zu den himmlischen Gestalten, die Mann und Weib nicht kennen.' Zur AndrogynitatsaufFassung in Kunst und Wissenschaft." Kontroversen, alte und neue: Aspekte des VII. International Germanisten Kongresses Gottingen 1985. Ed. Albrecht Schone. Vol. 6: Frauensprache—Frauenliteratur? Fur und Wider einer Psychoanalyse literarischer Texte. Ed. Inge Stephan and Carl Pietzcker. Tubingen: Niemeyer, pp. 119-26. Wittkowski, Wolfgang. (1972). "Die Heilige Cdcilie und Der Zweikampf: Kleists Legenden und die romantische Ironic." Colloquia Germanica 6:17-58. Yaeger, Patricia. (1989). "Toward a Female Sublime." Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism. Ed. Linda Kauffman. London: Basil Blackwell, pp. 191-211.

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9 CLOUGH, CLAUDE, ARNOLD, AND MARGUERITE: MALE HETEROPHOBIA IN VICTORIAN POETRY Barry Rutland

The poems that Matthew Arnold addressed to Arthur Hugh Clough in life and death, most notably "The Scholar Gipsy" and "Thyrsis," make these poets the dioscuri of nineteenth century English literature, as securely twinned as Castor and Pollux. There is, of course, a conventionally acknowledged difference: Arnold is major-canonical, while Clough, until recently at least, has been regarded as minor, generally no more than a footnote to his younger friend.1 In 1849, the year of the composition of the majority of Arnold's "Switzerland" lyrics and Clough's epistolary novel in verse, Amours de Voyage, they were pretty much on a footing in terms of obscurity as far as the larger world was concerned, although objects of considerable interest within the Victorian intellectual establishment: contemporaries had sad misgivings about the dandyish Arnold, high hopes of the earnest Clough. Consideration of "Switzerland" and Amours de Voyage m terms of the axes of class and gender identity yields constrasting narratives of gender that are symptomatic of opposed discourses of subjectivity and culture, and raises questions concerning the received evaluations of the writings of the two authors. At issue are nuances of the power-gender ratio as male heterophobia or fear of the feminine Other in the context of expectations of masculine leadership within the class to which Clough and Arnold

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belonged. The orientations toward the gender-power ratio taken by the poets are indicative of the contrary directions that the discourse of culture would take within the English intellectual leadership in the second half of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth. The class credentials of the two poets are impeccable. Arnold s father was the illustrious headmaster whose reforms at Rugby in the 1830s, widely imitated throughout the public schools, were intended to mould the sons of the English ruling class as a moral aristocracy, entitled to authority and privilege by reason of superior virtue (Bamford 1960). Thomas Arnold was a key figure in the movement to reshape the traditional English intellectual elite, connected directly or indirectly with the "establishment" in the original meaning of the term, "the Church of England as by law established," a body which Coleridge, one of Arnolds principal precursors, had aptly named the "clerisy" in his On the Constitution of Church and State (1830; Coleridge 1972). This body was "traditional" in Gramsci s sense, a separate endowed estate of the realm, and the ideological support of an obsolescent agrarian social order (1971, 5-23). The task undertaken by Thomas Arnold and others of what would come to be called the "liberal," or "Broad Church" party can be understood as the realignment of the clerisy with a new hegemonic order that resulted from the political empowerment of the religiously pluralist industrial middle class through the constitutional reforms of 1832. Clough, grandson of an Anglo-Welsh squire, was a pupil at Rugby from 1829 to 1837. When he went up to Balliol College as an undergraduate it was with the avowed intention of working with Rugbeians aleady at Oxford, such as A. P. Stanley, to reform the university along Arnoldian lines, and through the university, the nation (Clough 1957, I, 49). In the event, Clough failed to measure up the promise assumed of him, notoriously achieving only second class honours in the B.A. examinations instead of the brilliant first universally predicted. That was in the spring of 1841. A year later he redeemed himself through a Fellowship at Oriel College and the beginnings of a successful academic career; but he gave it all up in 1848 when he declined to enter the Anglican priesthood, having lost any active Christian faith (Biswas 1972, 120-45). Matthew Arnold arrived at Oxford in the autumn of 1842 and was one of the circle of undergraduates gathered about Clough as a leader of advanced opinion at the university (Biswas 1972, 146). Arnold went

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on to a career in the public service, eventually becoming an inspector of schools with the Education Office of the Privy Council, predecessor to the Ministry of Education. After a period of false starts following his departure from Oxford, Clough, too, joined the Education Office. Thus both were involved in the events that led to the Education Act of 1870 that established universal elementary education throughout England, although neither had anything approaching a decisive influence upon it.2 The careers of these sons by the flesh or the spirit of Thomas Arnold is indicative of the "rediscursivization" of the clerisy in its conversion from a clerical to a lay body. Matthew Arnold s writings on education and society, most notably Culture and Anarchy (1869; Arnold 1946), are significant documents in this respect. The latter effectively picks up where Coleridge's Church and State leaves off, defining the clerisy as custodians and propagators of a secular literary culture, instinct with perennial moral truth. This discourse, passed down to the twentieth century through the critical writings of T.S. Eliot and ER. Leavis, has been central to the conception of culture and the role of the intellectual in the English-speaking world, at least until recently. There is an alternative rediscurvization that descends through John Ruskin, Frederick Dennison Maurice, and William Morris to (in Great Britain) the late Raymond Williams and contemporary Marxistpoststructuralist theorists of cultural politics.3 Clough's writings relate to this tendency, initially oppositional, now challenging for dominance in the institutionalized study of culture in general and the literary in particular. The incipient divide between the tendencies and their discursive realizations can be detected in the differences in treatment of the gender problematic in the poetic texts of 1849—uncritical and "mainstream" in Arnold's "Switzerland," critical and revisionary in Cloughs Amours de Voyage. The period from the summer of 1848, when he began seriously to consider leaving Oxford, to the autumn of 1850 were for Clough very productive poetically. At the beginning of 1849 he published a selection of the verse he had written during the Oxford years in Ambarvalia, a joint volume with his old schoolchum, Thomas Burbidge. More important, he wrote his two hexameter narratives, The Bothie ofToberna-Fuosich (it was subsequently altered to the more familiar "Tober-naVuolich") in the autumn 1848, which he published immediately, and Amours de Voyage in the spring of 1849. In the autumn of the following year, Clough composed the unfinished but essentially complete

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DipsychuSy a verse drama for two voices modeled on the popular burlettas of Dion Boucicault. On the face of it, The Bothie is a story of heteromania rather than heterophobia. It tells of an Oxford reading party in the Highlands and especially of Philip Hewson, whose sexuality is characterized by a pronounced distaste for women of his own class and a corresponding attraction to farmers' daughters, one of whom he marries. Women for Hewson are positive or negative ideological signs pertinent to his own identity as a rebel against class privilege. The narrative situation of the love of a young gentleman for a working class girl recurs in Cloughs poetry like a compelling fantasmatic. It appears first in the lyric "Natura Naturansy" written in 1847 (Clough 1974, 35-38, 587). Here, the speaker chances to take a seat beside a pretty unmarried young woman in a second class railway carriage and speculates on her private thoughts and future life, particularly as to whether she experiences a sexual stirring complementary to his own. "The Lawyers Second Tale," one of the stories in Mari Magno, the set of narrative poems that Clough was working on at the time of his death in 1862, presents another version of The Bothie plot (426-39). Here the Oxford student seduces the Highland girl. Finding herself pregnant, she emigrates to Australia with relatives, leaving her lover to remorse and eventual marriage to a woman of his own class. Many years later, the wife of a successful colonial entrepreneur, she encounters the father of her illegitimate son in London society: all is explained and forgiven on both sides. Attitudes toward the feminine and toward the sexual act are ambivalent throughout the narrativizations of this recurring situation. Philip Hewsons relationship with Elspie in The Bothie is compounded of anxiety and guilt as well as ardour. The eponymous protagonist of Dipsychus is terrified of women and his own sexuality—the action consists of his interlocutor, called simply "The Spirit," manoevering the hypersensitive young moralist into the bed of a Venetian prostitute. All these instances centre on the question of male sexuality in relation to that of the feminine Other: the first cannot be fulfilled without violation of the second; the allure of the second violates the first. The double bind can be avoided, if at all, only in sublimation from the body to the spirit, and/or from the personal to the social, from indulgence to duty. In Amours de Voyage the protagonist s difficulties arise within a relationship to a woman of his own class. Claude—he is given no other name—meets and falls in love with Mary Trevellyn. His wooing is tentative and eventually botched by misunderstandings. He

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attempts to retrieve the situation but further adverse circumstances frustrate him and he gives up. The narrative encourages reader expectations of classic romantic-comedy closure, all misunderstandings overcome and wedding bells, only to dash them in an anatomy of masculine aphanisis. Amours thus poses the problematic of male heterophobia in more complex terms than the other texts. At the heart of male heterophobia is the problem of knowledge and potency. Bourgeois masculine identity is bound up with selfsufficiency: the male is autonomous and originary. Confidence in the imputed comprehensiveness of knowledge that supports isolated autonomy is threatened by the feminine, not least because of a suspicion that masculine knowledge is not only deficient but entails loss of "nature," a fall from primal wholeness. It is a matter of career and success, the arduous path of the bourgeois individual to gain the payoffs of financial security, class esteem, and masculine fulfilment as paterfamilias, in tension with inner imperatives to personal authenticity, a condition demanded by the double inheritance of evangelical Christianity and Romanticism, a True Self issuing from the hands of God and the bosom of Nature. Authenticity seems to demand a feminized/infantilized mutualism which, from the perspective of the ego-ideal of selfsufficiency, figures as castrated dependency. At every turn, the male will to wholeness and steadiness in autonomy is challenged by androgyne desire to completion in complementarity, which the former reads, panicstricken, as surrender to the heteronomous condition of the woman. This tension is expressed poignantly in a series of short poems that Clough produced during his undergraduate years at Balliol. Clough selected from these to constitute the sequence entitled (from Wordsworth) "Blank Misgivings of a Creature wandering about in Worlds not realized" for Ambarvalia. Subsequent editors have followed this practice, publishing other items in the series as isolated poems (many did not appear until the Clarendon Press editions of 1951 and 1974).4 This body of verse is usually read as dramatizing the religious crisis through which Clough passed while at Balliol, generated by a conflict between Arnoldian Broad and Tractarian High Church discourses that was resolved ultimately in the critical agnosticism that obliged Clough to resign the Oriel fellowship. Read in chronological sequence, however, and in the context of the private journals and correspondence of the same period of the poet s life, another narrative emerges. In the letters and journals Clough complains of a chronic paralysis with academic studies that he was at loss to understand (Clough 1957, 64-111;

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1990 passim). The poems suggest that the notorious second class degree was effectively a rejection of the identity that Clough had assiduously elaborated at Rugby under the eye of "the Doctor." The narrative is one of a crisis of masculine subjectivity. Throughout the Balliol poems there is conflict between forces imaged in explicitly gendered terms, a paternal principle as high-dwelling all-seeing judge with a host of avengers at his beck, a maternal principle as concealing darkness or sheltering water: O kind protecting Darkness! as a child Flies back to bury in his mother s lap His shame and his confusion, so to thee, O Mother Night, come I! within the folds Of thy dark robe hide thou me close: for I So long, so heedless, with external things Have played the liar, that whate'er I see, E'en these white glimmering curtains, yon bright stars, Which to the rest rain comfort down, for me Smiling those smiles which I may not return, Or frowning frowns of fierce triumphant malice, As angry claimants or expectants sure Of that I promised and may not perform, Look me in the face! O hide me, Mother Night!5 • • • Sweet streamlet basin! at thy side Weary and faint within me, cried My longing heart,—In such pure deep How sweet it were to sit and sleep; To feel each passage from without Close up,—above me and about, Those circling waters crystal clear, That calm impervious atmosphere! There on thy pearly pavement pure To lean, and feel myself secure. (24)6 These are lines 1 to 10 of the poem as published in 1849; a further 16 lines remained in manuscript until 1951: So when the sense of some deep fall Lies in black shadow over all, When plain day-duties seem to sin

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Against what once was lord within; Each petty deed perforce a lie To a strange lingering memory— So speaks the sick heart's weary feeling And knows not where to turn for healing. Wouldst thou be healed? go then and find For body it may be, or mind, Some poor mechanic task, nor grudge Some short sad while to play the drudge: In carefulness and toil endure, And at the last will come, be sure, The bliss whose loss thou mournedst then 'Like to a little child's again.' (580)

The dynamic evident in these poems operates across the entire corpus, a chaotic system swirling between two unstable states, longing for a lost primordial authenticity and bondage to an imperious factitiousness, the one identifed with the mother and the feminine, the other with the father and the masculine. The recuperation of self-esteem through election to the Oriel fellowship was followed by the sudden death of Thomas Arnold in June 1842. The latter event seems to mark the end, in an Oedipal resolution, of that phase of Cloughs life revealed cryptically but insistently in the undergraduate verse. New, more tractable variations of the problematic of identity—of authenticity vs factitiousness—displaced the struggle with the all-powerful Father. In the poetry of the Oriel years (1842-48), gender emerges explicitly and centrally in the question of the ontological validity of heterosexual attraction, touched on above in terms of the recurring narrative situation and to be taken up again shortly. It is even more central to the principal works of the postOxford period, The Bothie, Amours de Voyage, and Dipsychus. In Amours de Voyage the conflict of gender principles is treated within the context of an immediate historical event. The Oxonian Claude, cadet of a ruling class family, intellectual dandy and ennuyant, arrives in Rome in the spring of 1849 just before the French army commanded by Oudinot begins its siege of Mazzini s liberal republic. His object, to the extent that he has one, is to study ancient monuments; he ends up in love with an upper middle class English girl making the grand tour en famille with papa, mamma, and several sisters.

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This leads in turn to a fascination with certain philosophical implications of the art of classical antiquity and the high Renaissance, and to emotional identification with the cause of the Italian people. Sudden precipitation into involvement with life challenges Claude's habitual sense of assured self-sufficiency. The successive dactyllo-anapaestic hexameter cantos that develop the narrative of the poem are linked by stanzas that echo Goethe's Roman Elegies: Alba, thou findest me still, and, Alba, thou findest me ever, Now from the Capitol steps, now over Titus s Arch, Here from the large grassy spaces that spread from the Lateran portal, Towering o'er aqueduct lines lost in perspective between, Or from a Vatican window, or bridge, or the high Coliseum, Clear by the garlanded line cut of the Flavian ring. Beautiful can I not call thee, and yet thou hast power to o'ermaster, Power of mere beauty; in dreams, Alba, thou hauntest me still. (I, 271-78)

Here as throughout the poem, the distant Alban hills, seat of the feminine principle, draw the male gaze. The masculine principle is epitomized by the colossal statues of the "horse-tamers," Castor and Pollux, that overlook the city from the piazza of the Quirinal Palace: Ye, too, marvellous Twain, that erect on the Monte Cavallo Stand by your rearing steeds in the grace of your motionless movement, Stand with your upstretched arms and tranquil regardant faces, Stand as instinct with life in the might of immutable manhood,— O ye mighty and strange, ye ancient divine ones of Hellas ... (I, x)

Like Matthew Arnolds Sophocles in the sonnet of 1848 "To a Friend" (i.e., Clough), these embodiments of the high classical spirit— the statues were believed to be originals from the hands of the Athenian masters, Phidias and Praxiteles, near contemporaries of the dramatist— "[see] life steadily, and [see] it whole" from their commanding height (Arnold 1965, 105; all citations of Arnold's poetry are to this edition). Swerved from his male course by the attraction of Mary Trevellyn, Claude looks to the ideal these represent as a prophylactic. But I am in it for it now,—laissez faire, of a truth, laissez aller. Yes, I am going,—I feel it, I feel and cannot recall it,—

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Fusing with this thing and that, entering into all sorts of relations, Tying I know not what ties, which, whatever they are, I know one thing, Will, and must, woe is me, be one day painfully broken,— • • • But I have made the step, have quitted the ship of Ulysses; Quitted the sea and the shore, passed into the magical island; Yet on my lips is the moly, medicinal, offered of Hermes. I have come into the precinct, the labyrinth closes around me, Path into path rounding slyly; I pace slowly on, and the fancy, Struggling awhile to sustain the long sequences, weary, bewildered, Fain must collapse in despair; I yield, I am lost and know nothing; Yet in my bosom unbroken remaineth the clew; I shall use it. Lo, with the rope on my loins I descend through the fissure; I sink, yet Inly secure in the strength of invisible arms up above me; Still, wheresoever I swing, wherever to shore, or to shelf, or Floor of cavern untrodden, shell-sprinkled, enchanting, I know I Yet shall one time feel the strong cord tighten about me,— Feel it, relentless, upbear me from spots I would rest in; and though the Rope sway wildly, I faint, crags wound me, from crag unto crag reBounding, or, wide in the void, I die ten deaths, ere the end I Yet shall plant firm foot on the broad lofty spaces I quit, shall Feel underneath me again the great massy strengths of abstraction, Look yet abroad from the height o'er the sea whose salt wave I have tasted. (I, xii)

The gender problem is obvious in this passage: woman as seductive sea-cave and salt wave, Calypso and Siren, dangerously attractive; man as centred in intellect, descending into the feminine danger zone yet confident of ultimate security. One notes, however, the ambivalence of the cord, which is both Ariadne's thread and Hermes's herb: gift of a woman against the masculine principle as Oedipal ogre, gift of a god against the phallic feminine as enchantress and de(hu)man(iz)er. Claude and Mary have an oblique relationship to the speaker and Marguerite of Matthew Arnolds "Switzerland." First published as a sequence under that title in the 1853 volume Poems. A new edition [sic], these were with one, possibly two, exceptions composed within a period extending from the autumn of 1848 to the early months of 1850 (see below), that is, either before or after the initial draft of Amours de Voyage, within a context that embraces both works. The Arnold-Clough correspondence (Arnold 1932) suggests that the "Switzerland" poems

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have an autobiographical basis. On September 29, 1848 Arnold wrote to Clough from Switzerland, "Tomorrow I repass the Gemmi and get to Thun: linger one day at the Hotel Bellevue for the sake of the blue eyes of one of its inmates: and then proceed by slow stages down the Rhine to Cologne, thence to Amiens and Boulogne and England" (91). Park Honan categorically identifies Marguerite as Arnold s friend from childhood, the beautiful and talented Mary Sophia Claude, of Huguenot extraction and German birth, about two years his senior (Honan 1981, 144-67). A translator and an author in her own right— she had published three slim volumes of verse and prose by 1848— Mary Claude was well known to the whole "Clougho-Matthean circle," not least for her slender figure, blonde hair, pale complexion, and dark blue eyes. In 1848-49, Arnold seems to have been conspicuously in love with her, to the amusement of his family and friends, who referred to the lady as "the Cruel Invisible." According to Honan, in the autumn of 1848 Mary Claude was visiting relatives in Geneva, and it was she with whom Arnold had arranged a one-day rendezvous at Thun, perhaps with a view to proposing marriage. In the event she did not turn up—she was invisible indeed. Almost a year after the above-quoted letter, September 23, 1849, Arnold wrote again to Clough from Thun: "I am here in a curious and not altogether comfortable state: however tomorrow I carry my aching head to the mountains and to my cousin the Bhunlis Alp" and quotes from an early version of "Parting." The letter continues, "Yes, I come, but in three or four days I shall be back here, and then I must try how soon I can ferociously turn towards England" (Arnold 1932, 110-11). On October 1, 1849 Clough sent the manuscript of Amours de Voyage to John Campbell Shairp at Rugby with the note "You and Walrond may read this, but don't show it to others, nor name it, as if you do they'll importune" (Clough 1957, 274). "Others" obviously and especially includes Matthew Arnold, who with Shairp and Theodore "Todo" Walrond constituted the core of the circle. Clough may have excluded the man who had some right to be considered his closest friend and brother poet because of Arnold's cold reception of The BothieznA arch criticisms ofAmbarvalia (Arnold 1932, 94-95, 98-99). But an immediately compelling motive was the narrative matter of Amours as treading so closely on Arnold s actual situation. Indeed, if the Marguerite-Mary Claude identification is correct, the names of the chief characters suggest a roman a clef with the key left conveniently in the lock. That identification has been disputed, however, with

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sufficient force to give one pause (Harris 1989). The original of Marguerite may have been another woman altogether, or entirely fictional. At all events, whatever the basis of Arnold's emotional and, one might say, ontological condition, the two friends must have discussed the matter during the months between the visits to Switzerland, for the tone of the letter of September 1849 suggests that Clough was familiar with a context within which Arnold s remarks about his state of mind and the quoted fragment of verse were to be interpreted. There is no evidence whatsoever in Cloughs extensive surviving correspondence from Rome that there was an autobiographical basis for Claude s lame affair with Mary Trevellyn. If not pulled from the air, the narrative situation could have derived only from what Clough knew of Arnold's story. If that involved Mary Claude, "Switzerland" tells a story that did not happen—in other words, it is fictional as to objective events. But literary-critical interest in a "Switzerland'Y^^^ro de Voyage relationship is directed properly to subjective events, here, specifically, to a problem of gender identity within a particular socio-historical context. Thus, the precise biographical antecedents are irrelevant and I will proceed without further reference to possible originals of Marguerite.6 There is no question of Arnold and Cloughs having written their poems in direct response to one another. The intertextual relationship is one of thematic parallels or, more precisely, the thematizations of a common problematic. That Clough was given to employing poetry dialogically to debate abstract problems is evident from his interchanges with Thomas Burbidge during the 1840s (see Clough 1957,1). Burbidge, Anglican chaplain in Palermo, courted and married a Sicilian girl during this period. Cloughs letters indicate that he, too, was seeking a wife, and may have entered into an engagement with a young woman possibly, like Elspie of The Bothie, of humble origin (Biswas 1972, 183-85). The poem "NaturaNatumns" about the girl in the second class car, cited above, is one of a set of texts in Ambarvalia dealing with the spiritual validity of sexual attraction. Others are the lines beginning "Ah what is love, our love, she said" (Clough 1974, 4-5), and, "Oh, ask not what is love, she said" (12-13). Perhaps the most interesting is, "When panting sighs the bosom fill," when its development over a series of letters between Clough and Burbidge is followed by means of the extensive notes in the 1974 edition (6-8, 567-72). In a lively colloquial manner, Clough debates the question of mutual physical attraction between a man and woman as either, on the one

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hand, "Prelusive to the strains of love / Which angels sing in heaven above," or, on the other, "but the vulgar tune, /Which all that breathe beneath the moon /So accurately learn" in accordance with their fleshly nature. A similar but more complex dialogic relationship, in terms of the claims of heterosexual attraction as an adequate basis to a life of ethical and practical commitment, can be discerned between Amours de Voyage and "Switzerland." "Switzerland" has a complex publication history (Baum 1958, 5884). Nine pieces altogether were at one time or another assigned to it, although none of the six different selections and combinations includes all. These are, in the order of composition established by Allott (Arnold 1965): (1) "A Memory Picture," composed between October 1848 and January 1849, first published in The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems, 1849; (2) "Meeting," probably written in late September 1849, first published in Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems, 1852; (3) "Parting," of the same probable date of composition and also first published in the 1852 volume; (4) "Isolation. To Marguerite," probably written in September-October 1849, not published until 1857 in Poems (third edition); (5) "To Marguerite—Continued," September-October 1849, published in 1852; (6) "A Farewell," probably composed in early October 1849, also included in Empedocles on Etna-, (7) "Absence," probably written early in 1850, after Arnold had met Frances Lucy Wightman, whom he was to marry in June 1851, first printed in the 1852 volume; (8) "A Dream," perhaps written as late as 1853 and published in that year as part of the first version of "Switzerland"; and (9) "The Terrace at Berne," composed in the spring of 1863, first published in 1867 in New Poems, and added to "Switzerland" in the two volume collected Poems of 1869. The sequencing of these items and the titles of several of them underwent changes through the successive editions of his poetry that Arnold supervised during his lifetime.7 The first sequence (1853) consisted of (1) "A Memory Picture," as "To my Friends, who ridiculed a tender Leave-taking [sic]" a title which persisted to 1869; (2) "Meeting," as "The Lake" (to 1869); (3) "A Dream"; (4) "Parting"; (5) "To Marguerite—Continued," entitled "To Marguerite, in Returning a Volume of the Letters of Ortis" in 1852, as "To Marguerite" (until 1857); and (6) "Absence." In the second arrangement, in Poems (second edition), 1854, repeated in Poems (second series), 1855, "A Farewell" was introduced as 5, displacing "To Marguerite" and "Absence" to positions 6 and 7. In Poems (third series), 1857, "Isolation. To Marguerite" was

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introduced to sixth place as "To Marguerite," pushing the poem that had hitherto appeared under that title to seventh place as "To Marguerite—Continued," and "Absence" to a new eighth position. The 1869 collection assigned the current titles to "A Memory Picture" and "Meeting," dropped "A Dream," displaced "Parting" and "A Farewell" to positions three and four respectively, moved "Absence" to fifth place, and added "The Terrace at Berne" to fill the eighth. The two-volume collected Poems of 1877 established the final and familiar seven-poem "Switzerland," repeated in the 1881 and 1885 editions and generally accepted since as canonical, by excluding "A Memory Picture" and shifting "Absence" to sixth position. Arnold evidently had difficulty making up his mind about "Switzerland," which is in effect a set of narrative elements that can be shuffled to yield different syntagms. "Marguerite" would seem to be a more appropriate collective title, since she and the speaker's relation to her rather than the setting is the centre of interest. "Switzerland" directs attention to the poet's topographical symbol of the life of solitude and sentimental reverie epitomized for him in the figures of Obermann and his creator Etienne de Senancourt, subjects of a major poem of the same period (Baum 1958, 69-71), and away from heterosexual attraction/revulsion. As we shall see, the "Switzerland" poems operate in terms of opposed thematic attractors, one of which aligns with the quietism and, one might say, implicit onanism of "Stanzas in Memory of the Author of'Obermann'" (Arnold 1965, 130-38). The problem of narrative sequence was that of accounting for an ambiguous and ambivalent state of mind. In order to elicit pertinent narrative possibilities and effects, this paper takes as its text all nine poems in the order of composition determined by Allott (Arnold 1965). "A Memory Picture" (108-09), when accorded the initial position it held until it was banished from "Switzerland" in 1877, provides a narrative context for the poems that follow. Stanzas 2 and 3 read: Once I said: 'A face is gone If too hotly mused upon; And our best impressions are Those that do themselves repair.' Many a face I so let flee, Ah! is faded utterly. Ere the parting hour go by, Quick, thy tablets, Memory!

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Marguerite says: 'As last year went, So the coming year'll be spent; Some day next year, I shall be, Entering heedless, kissed by thee.' Ah, I hope!—yet, once away, What may chain us, who can say? Ere the parting hour go by, Quick, thy tablets, Memory! (9-24)

The rest of the poem, following the model of this lyric sub-genre of the day, the memory portrait of a beloved person (or place), provides a blason of Marguerite against which the allusions of subsequent poems can be measured. Paint that lilac kerchief, bound Her soft face, her hair around; Tied under the archest chin Mockery ever ambushed in. Let the fluttering fringes streak All her pale, sweet-rounded cheek ... (25-30) Paint that figure's pliant grace As she tow'rd me leaned her face, Half refused and half resigned ... (33-35) Paint those eyes, so blue, so kind, Eager tell-tales of her mind; Paint, with their impetuous stress, Of inquiring tenderness, Those frank eyes, where deep I see An angelic gravity ... (41-46)

The antithetical qualities connoted by Marguerites physical features—blue eyes at once grave and mocking, seconded by the mobile lips, the pallour of the Victorian feminine ideal and the archness of the coquette, establish ambiguity of meaning and ambivalence of response—virginal innocence at the point of passing over to Medusan fatality. The speaker fears that he may forget the girl in the course of the coming year; the poem itself, "these feeble lines" in the imputed opinion of friends to whom it is addressed, "Show ... my love declines"

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(stanza 7). Marguerite, however, knows otherwise (stanza 2, quoted above): she is assigned the wisdom of a Circe or Calypso. In the event Marguerite proves correct. The first two stanzas of "Meeting" or "The Lake" (116-17) deal with the speaker's recognition of her, sighted at a distance, presumably a year later: Again I see my bliss at hand, The town, the lake are here; My Marguerite smiles upon the strand, Unaltered with the year. I know that graceful figure fair, That cheek of languid hue; I know that soft, enkerchiefed hair, And those sweet eyes of blue.

The second pair deals with the speaker's spontaneous response, and the immediate check to that response: Again I spring to make my choice; Again in tones of ire I hear a God's tremendous voice: 'Be counselled, and retire.' Ye guiding Powers who join and part, What would ye have with me? Ah, warn some more ambitious heart, And let the peaceful be!

This is one of the most unintentionally risible moments in English lyric verse—it as if the slightly cross-eyed portrait of Dr. Arnold in the National Portrait Gallery, London, were to give voice.8 The significant point, however, is that the speaker has been through this before—an amour de voyage revisited: "Again I see ... I know ... Again I spring ... Again in tones"; the speaker's attitude of the first poem is decidedly problematized. Caught in a double bind, he seeks the excuse the third poem offers. "Parting" (118-21), with its three interspliced contrasting stanza forms, is structurally the most complex of the group. The first stanza apostrophizes the Alpine storm winds, the third and fifth declare the

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speakers intention to follow their summons to the high glacial peaks. These are in opposition to the voice and body of Marguerite in stanzas 2 and 4. Stanzas 6 and 9 are addressed to Marguerite, renouncing her, 7 to 13 again to the winds as the voice of maternal Nature. The thematic attractors, then, are sexual fulfilment and sexual ascesis. The first is in terms of the woman, presented initially as innocent, virginal, and familiar (stanza 2): But on the stairs what voice is this I hear, Buoyant as morning, and as morning clear? Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn? Or was it from some sun-flecked mountain-brook That the sweet voice its upland clearness took?

but also as vivacious and seductive (stanza 4): But who is this, by the half-opened door, Whose figure casts a shadow on the floor? The sweet blue eyes—the soft, ash-coloured hair— The cheeks that still their gentle paleness wear— The lovely lips, with their arch smile that tells The unconquered joy in which her spirit dwells—

In stanzas 6 to 9, the speaker rejects Marguerite because she is compromised: she has known the embraces, the kisses, of other men. Their "spirits" have sprung in alien soils: "What heart knows another?" the speaker asks; "Ah, who knows his own?" In the concluding four stanzas, a child of pristine Nature, he commits himself to the mountain winds: Ah! calm me, restore me; And dry up my tears On thy high mountain-platforms, Where morn first appears; Where the white mists, for ever, Are spread and upfurled— In the stir of the forces Whence issued the world.

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Repelled from the sullied Marguerite he turns to the Eternal Mother. Where the one is faithless in opening her arms to any and all, the other is fidelity and constancy itself. Nature, moreover, is authorized by the Father; to be absorbed into her white mists is to return to the seminal origin point of world and self. The speaker claims the role of the child and the virgin, obedient to paternal law and dependent upon maternal love. Marguerite's sin enables the speakers repentance, his acquiesence with the "counsel" to "retire." "Isolation. To Marguerite" (121-22) reviews the year of separation during which the speaker strived to maintain fidelity of love and chastity of heart—to touch and retouch the memory picture—believing Marguerite to be following the same course (stanza 1). His knowledge of her perfidy betrays his confidence in love: ... I might have known, What far too soon, alas! I learned— The heart can bind itself alone, And faith may oft be unreturned. • • • Thou lov'st no more;—Farewell! Farewell! (stanza 2)

The speaker apostrophizes his "lonely heart" as a heavenly body swayed momentarily from its lofty orbit "To haunt the place where passions reign—" (stanza 3); this is identified (stanza 4) as the virgin moon-goddess Artemis, struck with shame at her infatuation with the mortal Endymion. The goddess, however, "Wandering in Heaven, far removed" (stanza 5), could never know what he, a mortal male, has learned: "This truth ... /'Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.'" This emphatic absolute statement is followed by a qualification (stanza 6) that trembles on the brink of the comical: "Or, if not quite alone ...," and a catalogue of metonymies of nature that metaphorize the speaker— "unmating things—/Ocean and clouds and night and day;/Lorn autumns and triumphant springs ... ," nothing less than the cycle of nature itself. The speaker contrasts his experience with that "of happier men" who (stanza 7) "Have dreamed two human hearts might blend/ In one ..." and were thus mercifully deluded of knowledge of their loneliness. "To Marguerite—Continued" (124-25) is generally regarded as the most effective of the "Switzerland" lyrics (it is certainly the most frequently anthologized). The vigour of the language, the clarity and

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aptness of the imagery, suggest that this may have been, in fact, the earliest poem of the autumn of 1849 and the starting point for the others, composed to provide a context for its abrupt dialogic opening. Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.

From this unfolds a complex and compelling conceit of sundered islands yearning for continental wholeness under the spell of the song of the nightingale, perennial poetic symbol of desire. Who ordered, that their longings fire Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled? Who renders vain their deep desire?— A God, a God their severance ruled! And bade betwixt their shores to be The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.

The participants in the narrative are elevated from petty novel status to tragic proportions. The headmaster of "Meeting" is replaced with an authentic if malignant God. The denial of desire is not a moral choice but an inexorable fate. The isolation of the lovers is the condition of humanity in general. Within "Meeting" and "Parting," solitude assumes opposed values. In "Parting" it is valorized positively and absolutely through association with the elemental forces of nature and the high Alpine glaciers, "the ice-cumbered gorges / The vast seas of snow" where "the torrents drive upward / Their rock-strangled hum" and "the avalanche thunders ..." This arena of violence is at once barren and generative, "the stir of the forces / Whence issued the world"—a primordial chaos. It is the paternal principle, the essential masculine, self-sufficient and originary. The poet identifies with this in panic flight from Marguerite of the valley, the lake, the town, the hotel—with sociality, contingency, and compromise, the feminine principle as the mundane. In the "Isolation" lyrics and the conclusion of "Meeting," solitude is valorized negatively, the accursed universal fate willed by an arbitrary inscrutable god, the father of the Oedipal severance from the maternal and primal oneness.

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The paternal is both homeland and diaspora; the masculine is both mastering panoramic overview from a remote peak and disordered scatter of a morcellated continent. "A Farewell" (125-28) recasts the narrative in Byronic terms. The lover approaches on galloping steed, "Led by thy tapers starlike beam." The encounter and aftermath is an encapsulation of a romance fiction plot: I came! I saw thee rise!—the blood Poured flushing to thy languid cheek. Locked in each others arms we stood, In tears, with hearts too full to speak. Days flew; ah, soon I could discern A trouble in thine altered air! Thy hand lay languidly in mine, Thy cheek was grave, thy speech grew rare. (1, 9-26)

In fact, this tells a quite different story from both "A Memory Picture" and the "Meeting"/"Parting" pair—a full-blown affair of midnight trysts in private chambers rather than decorous public encounters in hotel dining rooms and lakeside promenades. Here there is no equivocation on the speaker's part, no Nobodaddy thundering, "Be counselled, and retire." The course the relationship takes is a result of the nature of things in general and of the lovers as gendered individuals. She behaves as a typical woman, passive and conventional; he as a male, active and originary, but frustrated from self-realization. I blame thee not!—this heart, I know, To be long loved was never framed; For something in its depths doth glow Too strange, too restless, too untamed. And women—things that live and move Mined by the fever of the soul— They seek to find in those they love Stern strength, and promise of control. (17-24)

The stereotypes of the feminine and masculine are enunciated in pure culture. At the same time, the speaker suggests a more profound masculinity that involves, paradoxically, identification with the feminine, even to denying participation in the phallic:

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I too have felt the load I bore In a too strong emotions sway; I too have wished, no woman more, This starting, feverish heart away. I too have longed for trenchant force, And will like a dividing spear; Have praised the keen, unscrupulous course, Which knows no doubt, which feels no fear. (33-40)

"The world" teaches, however, that "will" and "energy" are "rare," and "love" even more so. If will and energy are the essence of the masculine principle, then love is the essence of the feminine—that which divides, reduces, hierarchizes opposed to that which unites, enhances, equalizes. The problem is that cultural gender roles—and it is interesting that the poem seems to recognize gender as a matter of role-playing— inhibit the lovers from realizing their potential authentic selves: We school our manners, act our parts— But He, who sees us through and through, Knows that the bent of both our hearts Was to be gentle, tranquil, true. (45-48)

The cruel arbitrary God of "To Marguerite—Continued" is replaced with a wise, concerned but passive and ineffectual, therefore feminine, father who watches his children journey to transcendental understanding along the via dolorosa of inevitable gendered experience (11, 49-64). The knowledge the lovers will gain—"Clear prospect o'er our beings whole"—is of an essential androgyny, impossible in this world. They will be sublimated to spirits communicating in an asexual sibling relationship: How sweet, unreached by earthly jars, My sister! to maintain with thee The hush among the shining stars, The calm upon the moonlit sea! How sweet to feel, on the boon air, All our unquiet pulses cease! To feel that nothing can impair The gentleness, the thirst for peace—

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The gentleness too rudely hurled On this wild earth of hate and fear; The thirst for peace a raving world Would never let us satiate here. (77-88)

The sixth "Switzerland" poem, "Absence" (138-39), introduces a "fair stranger." The difference between the two women is marked by their eyes: the others are "grey," against the blue of Marguerite, as recalled from earlier lyrics. The new woman is aligned with the "petty dust" of quotidian existence that chokes the soul with an enforced forgetfulness. Passion is not displaced by a "calmer train / Of wiser thoughts and feelings" but the exigencies of (respectable bourgeois) existence. Marguerite—"my love"—becomes the talisman of the rejected opportunity for a passionate, integrated, and authentic life, an absence that devalues the present as empty: I struggle towards the light; and ye, Once-longed-for storms of love! If with the light ye cannot be, I bear that ye remove. I struggle towards the light—but oh, While yet the night is chill, Upon time's barren, stormy flow, Stay with me, Marguerite, still. (16-24)

"A Dream" (345-46), which held third position after "Meeting" in the first three sequencings, sustains the narrative situation of "A Memory Picture," specifying the generalized sociality of that poem in terms of a cast of two couples, the speaker and Marguerite, and Martin and Olivia. In the dream, the men are in a boat on an Alpine river that passes under the balcony of a chalet from which the women observe and comment upon them as they sweep by. They saw us, they conferred; their bosoms heaved, And more than mortal impulse filled their eyes. Their lips moved; their white arms, waved eagerly, Flashed once, like falling streams; we rose, we gazed. One moment, on the rapid's top, our boat Hung poised—and then the darting river of Life

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(Such now, methought, it was), the river of Life, Loud thundering, bore us by; swift, swift it foamed, Black under cliffs it raced, round headlands shone. Soon the planked cottage by the sun-warmed pines Faded—the moss—the rocks; us burning plains, Bristled with cities, us the sea received. (26-37)

The dream situation is no more than a device to motivate the allegory, which sets out the terms of a recurring pattern traced by Dwight Culler (1966) in his study of Arnold's poetry—a journey downstream from high mountain sources, past the Cities of the Plain, to the sea of final enlightenment and eternal rest. Here it serves to justify masculine renunciation of the feminine as inexorable destiny. The ninth poem, "The Terrace at Berne" (479-81), was not written in the context that embraces both "Switzerland" and Amours de Voyage and need not concern us at this point except to note that it is only here, belatedly, that Marguerite is identified as French (see below). Altogether, the "Switzerland" lyrics chart a chaotic dynamic of contradictory and contending gender identities and valuations: Oedipal fear, Oedipal identification, abasement of/submission to the feminine, hypervaluation of physical and emotional intimacy on the one hand, of ascetic solitude on the other. They participate in a gender fantasmatic played out across the corpus of Arnolds verse, from the strayed reveller who, besotted with Circe s wine, beholds the vanity of all male striving, to the quietism of Senancourt/Obermann and the Scholar Gipsy, self-exiled from the masculine agon, to the angst in the face of history of the speaker of "Dover Beach," who reprises the final plea of "Absence." Throughout, the "tremendous voice" of the Oedipal father reverberates and represses. Images of paralysis alternate with images of enforced action ("Obermann," "Obermann Once More," "The Scholar Gipsy," "Thyrsis"). Commitment, evasion, ascesis, sublimation ... the contradictory options are reshaken kaleidoscopically. It is in Claudes relationship to Mary Trevellyn that Amours de Voyage approaches most nearly to the "Switzerland" sequence, in spite of the differences in characterization between the English girl and the French and between the general quality of the two affairs, not to mention the numerous and important differences attendant upon disparity of scale and kind. In respect of the latter, whereas Arnold s uncertain narrative is confined to the two actors of lyric, male addresser/female addressee, the Claude-Mary courtship takes place within the novelistic

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setting of the English tourist community in Italy and the historical event of the siege of Rome. In many respects, however, Claude is an elaborated version of the type sketched in the "Switzerland" speaker, in that the setting objectifies for the former determinate forces which are wholly internalized with the latter. Cultural gendering is identified as the enemy of Marguerite and the speaker in "Parting" and "A Farewell": he lacks sufficient "force" to play the male part, she is too well versed in feminine weakness. Claude, too, feels inadequate before Mary; he condemns his own amorous conduct— Oh, 'tisn't manly, of course, 'tisn't manly, this method of wooing; 'Tisn't the way very likely to win. For the woman, they tell you, Ever prefers the audacious, the wilful, the vehement hero; She has no heart for the timid, the sensitive soul ... (II, xiv)

Mary confirms this: I could pronounce him simply a cold intellectual being.— When does he make advances?—He thinks that women should woo him; Yet, if a girl should do so, would be but alarmed and disgusted. (Ill, i)

In Amours de Voyage, convention is militant in the person of Mary's elder sister Georgina, whose fiance, George Vernon, an old schoolfellow of Claude's, is the latter s link to the Trevellyn family. She plays aggressive matchmaker, determined to yoke Mary with a young man of rather odd and maladroit manners but impeccable social connections. (Claude stresses the differences between his own vaguely intimated status and the commercial Trevellyns: "Middle-class people these, bankers very likely, not wholly/Pure of the taint of the shop" [I, vi.]) Her inquiries through Vernon regarding the meaning of Claude's attentions to Mary jeopardizes the relationship. Mr. Claude, you must know, is behaving a little bit better; He and Papa are great friends; but he really is too shilly-shally,— So unlike George! Yet I hope that the matter is going on fairly. I shall, however, get George, before he goes, to say something. Dearest Louisa, how delightful, to bring young people together! (II, xv)

Claude reacts characteristically:

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I was to go, as I told you, I think, with the people to Florence. Only the day before, the foolish family Vernon Made some uneasy remarks, as we walked to our lodging together, As to intentions, forsooth, and so forth. I was astounded, Horrified quite ... How could I go? Great Heaven! to conduct a permitted flirtation Under those vulgar eyes, the observed of such observers! (Ill, xiii)

Of course, in the eyes not only of the Trevellyns but of respectable folk generally, Claudes behaviour was much more than flirtation, a point insisted upon by the friend in England with whom the young man corresponds: "Terrible word, Obligation! You should not, Eustace, you should not, / No, you should not have used it" (III, ix). Where the "God's tremendous voice" of "Meeting" counsels the speaker of "Switzerland" to desist, the voice of Society advises Claude that he has implicated himself as a sign in the conventional text of bourgeois courtship and so must follow through. The message, however, is really the same—it is a matter of social status, satisfactory in the instance of the Claude-Mary relationship, unacceptable in that of the "Switzerland" couple. In "Parting," the "Switzerland" speaker offers as the reason for breaking with Marguerite "our different pasts," specified in terms of sexual conduct. The late addition to the sequence, "The Terrace at Berne," suggests a "past" for her indeed in terms of a possible future following their aborted relationship: Or hast thou long since wandered back, Daughter of France! to France, thy home; And flitted down the flowery track Where feet like thine too lightly come? Doth riotous laughter now replace Thy smile; and rouge, with stony glare, Thy cheeks soft hue; and fluttering lace The kerchief that enwound thy hair? (Arnold 1965, 480)

This reduces the Marguerite of the earlier poems to little more than a demi-mondaine adventuress hanging around Alpine resorts frequented by rich English gents and completes the story of "Parting" with priggish self-satisfaction. There is nothing similar where Claude and Mary are concerned, she being as virginal and respectable (barring

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her mercantile antecedents) as could be desired. In both cases, however, social conventions override individual predilections, foreclosing putative authenticity of relationship, and therefore of the masculine self, through assertion of gender roles. Claude identifies in Mary qualities that complete his deficiencies: It is a pleasure, indeed, to converse with this girl. Oh, rare gift, Rare felicity, this! she can talk in a rational way, can Speak upon subjects that really are matters of mind and of thinking, Yet in perfection retain her simplicity; never, one moment, Never, however you urge it, however you tempt her, consents to Step from ideas and fancies and loving sensations to those vain Conscious understandings that vex the minds of man-kind. No, though she talk, it is music; her fingers desert not the keys; 'tis Song, though you hear in the song the articulate vocables sounded, Syllabled singly and sweetly the words of melodious meaning ... (II, x)

Here is woman as nature blended and balanced with culture, rather than Marguerite of the wet, bird-haunted lawn on the one hand and the town, the promenade and interiors on the other, in opposition to the pure mountain heights. Claude rejects her because of the conflict within himself between desire for authenticity and social conditioning, the latter reinforced by that of the Trevellyns and therefore preponderant. Mary is the woman as complement to the man in androgynous reciprocity. Claude realizes too late what he has lost. It was attraction to her that snapped him out of the ennui he bore with him from London to Rome (see I, i) and led him to search for significance in the architecture and art of the city's past and to identify with its modern citizens in their struggle for political freedom and cultural renewal. Alone in Rome after Mary's departure, Claude finds that art does not sustain him and the futility of the republican cause depresses him. With the cessation of hostilities he hastens to Florence, only to find that the Trevellyns have moved on. Claude pursues them as far as Milan and the lakes but loses the trail. He does not learn that Mary is in Switzerland, at Lucerne, anxiously awaiting him, although "The mountains seem to demand me,— / Peak and valley from far to beckon and motion me onward" (IV, v). The topography that for the speaker of Arnold's sequence represents the tension between antithetical states and ways of life is here adumbrated as the site of reconciliation and fulfilment. However, like the speaker of "Switzerland," Claude fails to follow

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the promptings of desire: he turns back to Florence and Rome, now empty of meaning, the latter city occupied by Oudinot s army that has smothered the dangerous republic and reinstated the Pope as "custode of Vatican marbles" (V, x). He attempts to resolve his plight first by a tactic opposite to that of "A Memory Picture," cultivated amnesia, then by sublimation to the asexual transendental ideal, as in the closing stanzas of "A Farewell": Let me, then, bear to forget her. I will not cling to her falsely: Nothing factitious or forced shall impair the old happy relation. I will let myself go, forget, not try to remember; I will walk on my way, accept the chances that meet me, Freely encounter the world, imbibe these alien airs, and Never ask if new feelings and thoughts are of her or of others. Is she not changing, herself?—the old image would only delude me. I will be bold, too, and change,—if it must be. Yet in all things, Yet if I do but aspire evermore to the Absolute only, I shall be doing, I think, somehow, what she will be doing;— I shall be thine, O my child, some way, though I know not in what way. (V,iv)

The crucial difference between this and Arnold s poem is that here the resolution is rendered in a dialogic novelistic rather than lyric monologic terms as elegiac plangency qualified with irony. Not surprisingly, Claude quickly abandons as vain "this attempt at the Absolute": "I, who refused to enfasten the roots of my floating existence /In the rich earth, cling now to the hard, naked rock ..." (V, v). Claudes fate, nevertheless, is identical in result with that of the speaker of "Switzerland": that of the male wedded to the cultural masculine, doomed to suffer the fading of desire. The space of Amours de Voyage between the break with the Trevelyns and the abortive attempt to re-establish the relationship is given over to a debate between Claude and Eustace on the question of the discovery of one s authenticity through devotion to conventional notions of responsibility (we have only Claudes side of the correspondence, of course; Eustaces s emerges through dialogic implication). At one point Claude poses the problem succinctly in Pascalian terms: "Action will furnish belief" and immediately calls that principle into question "—but will that belief be the true one?" (V, ii). At an earlier point in the narrative, it is posed concretely and satirically in the young mans speculations

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on how he will/ought to behave if and when the besieging armies break into the city. Am I prepared to lay down my life for the British female? Really, who knows? One has bowed and talked, till, little by little, All the natural heat has escaped from the chivalrous spirit. Oh, one conformed, of course; but one doesn't die for good manners, Stab or shoot, or be shot, by way of graceful attention. • • • Ah, for a child in the street I could strike; for the full-blown lady— Somehow, Eustace, alas! I have not felt the vocation. (II, iv)

A passage such as this reminds us that the poetry of both Arnold and Clough and their exchange of letters in 1848-49 occurred within and was deeply coloured by the great political events of Europe's Year of Revolutions. Arnold's letter from Thun of September 1849, quoted above, continues, in vivacious vein: My dearest Clough these are damned times—everything is against one— the height to which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle, our own selves, and the sickening consciousness of our difficulties. (Arnold 1932, 111)

The lyric mode of the "Switzerland" poems divorces the personal from the political. Arnold s narrativizations of his sexual response to the unhappy condition set out in the letter remain inchoate. The final version of 1877 desocializes and dehistoricizes the Marguerite story altogether. Amours de Voyage, in contrast, novelizes and historicizes the condition in a sustained double narrative plotting asymptotic curves, a conventional bourgeois romance of courtship that arouses reader expectations of resolution in marriage and an account of the failure of bourgeois liberalism in self-betrayal and bad faith. The envoi defends the boldly anticlimactic result with appeal to the historical conditions of composition: So go forth to the world, to the good report and the evil! Go, little book! thy tale, is it not evil and good? Go, and if strangers revile, pass quietly by without answer.

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Go, and if curious friends ask of thy rearing and age, Say, £ I am flitting about many years from brain unto brain of Feeble and restless youths born to inglorious days; But,' so finish the word, 'I was writ in a Roman chamber, When from Janiculan heights thundered the cannon of France.' (V, 217-24)

When Claude and the speaker of "Switzerland" are brought together, there can be no mistaking the historical identity of the "feeble and restless youths." Arnold's and Cloughs mutual circle did not like Amours de Voyage. The poem remained in manuscript until 1858, when Clough revised and published it in the first four numbers of The Atlantic Monthly. Arnold s response was as follows: "We will not discuss what is past any more: as to the Italian poem, if I forebore to comment it was that I had nothing to special to say—what is to be said when a thing does not suit you—suiting and not suiting is a subjective affair and only time determines, by the colour a thing takes with the years, whether it ought to have suited or no" (Arnold 1931, 131-32). The "not suiting" was probably based on the same objections that Arnold had raised some ten years earlier to The Bothie and that he developed as a critical position in the preface to the 1853 volume of his poems, that poetry should manifest a high seriousness that cannot be achieved in dealing with modern subjects (Arnold 1965, 654-71). The "past" he refuses to discuss undoubtedly includes the relation of Cloughs narrative material to a painful passage in his own life. Be that as it may, both the critical position and the life experience as textualized in "Switzerland" are of a piece with the doctrine of culture and society that Arnold was well on his way to elaborating at the time of this letter. It is, one might argue, the very ground of that doctrine: a life of the body governed by conventional assignment of gender roles and relationships, an art that sublimates these roles and relationships in terms of seeing life steadily and whole from an Olympian height. Clough, in contrast, lets down his guard as a male and relaxes his practice as a poet to the indeterminacy and unfinalizability of sexuality, art, and history. The orientations taken up by the two poets toward narratives of gender indicate the contrary directions that the rediscursivization of the clerisy was to take with respect to culture generally in the long aftermath to 1848. With Arnold, in spite of the importance that he assigns to "sweetness and light," it would be in terms of Hellenism,

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patrician and male-gendered, conceived in opposition to an equally male Hebraism—an ideal of perpetually accomplished Being (Arnold 1946). Clough holds this Hellenism up to critical examination, positioning it in relation to an acknowledgment of process—sexual, historical, and aesthetic: an androgyne state of Becoming. The difference may be mapped in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of language, discourse, and text.^ Specific discursivity and textualization is monologistic, centred and bounded within fixed parameters of meaning; but all such generically determined semiotic precipitates occur within the ongoing open dialogistic process of semiosis. Conventional gender identities—masculinity, femininity—can be regarded as monologistic discourses, and conventionally gendered individuals as monologistic texts. Like all discourses and their textual realizations, they are always at risk, subject to dialogistic invasion, breakdown, and redistribution into alien patterns of meaning. Arnold s "Switzerland" operates at the boundary of resistance/collapse of the gender norms, just as the sequence itself, considered from a Bakhtinian literary-theoretical point of view, juggles uneasily with lyric closure and novelistic openness—that is to say, attempts to resist novelization. Arnold virtually turned from poetry in 1853, denouncing much of his own practice and holding up a decidely monologistic standard for his contemporaries. His notion of the function of criticism and of the role of the intellectual likewise partook of a centred monologistic ideal. In contrast, Clough was far more receptive to historical shaping. His poetry, consequently, is radically novelized, just as his thought on questions of society, culture, and politics is more fluid than Arnolds. Clough is also prepared to look at gender identity as a problem rather than a given. In the perspective of a gender-conscious poststructuralist criticism, the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough complements that of Matthew Arnold. Unlike the horse tamers of the Monte Cavallo, these dioscuriaxz not identical twins: like them, however, they are equal in stature. NOTES 1. Matthew Arnold did not emerge as one of the Big Three with Tennyson and Browning in the academic canon of Victorian poetry until well into the twentieth century. In the nineteenth, he and Clough were pretty much on a par as important secondary figures. Clough virtually disappeared from view when cultural upheaval attendant upon World War I rendered marginal the problem of religious faith in terms of which his work had been received. The post-war generation revalued Arnold in the

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

perspective of its own ideological and ontological angst, responding to the pervasive elegaism of his verse. There are some indications that modern readers are attracted to Clough's wry anti-elegaism. See Isobel Armstrong ed., The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations (London, 1969), where Clough is treated along with the Big Three and Hopkins. Arnold, whose career with the Education Office extended from October 1851 to April 1886, at which time he was Chief Inspector of Schools, was opposed to the policies of Sir Robert Lowe, who oversaw the reforms. See Peter Smith and Geoffrey Summerfield, eds. Matthew Arnold and the Education of the New Order (Cambridge: University Press, 1969, 1-39). Clough joined the office in 1853. At the time of his death in 1862 he had recently been appointed secretary to Lowe, and might have been able to influence events had he lived longer (Biswas 1972, 456-57). This group, the post-Williams generation, includes among others Terry Eagleton, Catherine Belsey, Stuart Hall, Tony Bennett, and Anthony Easthope. The 1951 edition of The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough ed. H.E Lowry, A.L.P. Norrington, and EL. Mulhauser, omitted much of the material in manuscript and proved unsatisfactory for scholarly purposes; the so-called "second edition" of 1974 edited by Mulhauser, cited here, although not without serious errors, rectifies the omissions. The "Blank Misgivings" sequence includes ten poems, not in chronological order; see Clough 1974, 28-34. See also "Come back again, my olden heart!" (10-12), "Sweet streamlet basin! at thy side," quoted here, also in Ambarvalia, and "Oh, I have done those things that my soul fears" (138), "Whence com'st thou, shady lane," "So I, as boyish years went by, went wrong," "Enough, small room,—tho' all too true" (146-48), and "Here have I been these one and twenty years" (156). Clough 1974, 31. All citations from Clough's poetry are from this edition, with page and/or line references given in round brackets after each, except for Amours de Voyage, where Canto and Letter numbers are given in large and small Roman numerals respectively. Many scholars have noted relationships between Amours de Voyage and "Switzerland." See Eugene R. August, "Amours de Voyage and Matthew Arnold," The Victorian Newsletter 60 (Fall, 1981), 15-20. See Baum 1958, 79-84, but note that Baum differs in details from Allott, whom I follow. The portrait is reproduced in Bamford 1960, facing p. 56, and Honan 1981, facing p. 194. Bakhtins theory of language and discourse is developed in the writings of his circle, notably M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

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1984); M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), and V.N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986). The interpretation of Bakhtin's dialogic/monologic dyad applied here is outlined in Barry Rutland, "Bakhtinian Categories and the Discourse of Postmodernism," Mikhail Bakhtin and the Epistemology of Discourse, ed. Clive Thomson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 123-36. WORKS CITED Arnold, Matthew. (1932). The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough. Ed. Howard Foster Lowry. Oxford: Clarendon. . (1965). The Poems of Matthew Arnold. Ed. Kennth Allott. London: Longmans. . (1946). Culture and Anarchy. Ed. J. Dover Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bamford, T.W. (1960). Thomas Arnold. London: Cresset. Baum, Paull F. (1958). Ten Studies in the Poetry of Matthew Arnold. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Biswas, Robindra Kumar. (1972). Arthur Hugh Clough: Towards a Reconsideration. Oxford: Clarendon. Clough, Arthur Hugh. (1957). The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, 2 vols. Ed. Frederick L. Mulhauser. Oxford: Clarendon Press. . (1974). The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, 2nd ed. Ed. Frederick L. Mulhauser. Oxford: Clarendon. . 1990. The Oxford Diaries of Arthur Hugh Clough. Ed. Anthony Kenny. Oxford: Clarendon. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. (1972). On the Constitution of Church and State, According to the Idea of Each. Ed. John Barrell. London: Dent. Culler, A. Dwight. (1966). Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Gramsci, Antonio. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Eds. Quinton Hoare, Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. Harris, Wendell. (1989). "The Lure of Biography: Who Was Marguerite and to Whom Does It Matter?" The Victorian Newsletter 16, 28-31. Honan, Park. (1981). Matthew Arnold: A Life. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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CONTRIBUTORS Arnd Bohm teaches German in the School of Modern Languages, Literature, and Comparative Literary Studies at Carleton University. His research interests include German literature of the eighteenth century, German-English literary relations, and literary theory. Barbara Gabriel teaches English at Carleton University. She has published on drama, Canadian literature, and gender issues. She is co-editor of Postmodernism and the Ethical Subject, volume 4 in the TADAC series (Carleton University Press, 1997). Barbara Godard is Professor of English at York University, Toronto. She has published extensively on Canadian writing and feminist subjects. She has recently contributed to and co-edited Intersexions: Issues of Race and Gender in Canadian Women's Writing. Ben Jones has recently retired from the Department of English at Carleton University. He has published on eighteenth century subjects and edited The Mystic Leeway, Frances Gregg's autobiography (Carleton University Press, 1995). J. Iain Prattis is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. He has carried out extensive research on Canadian-Celtic relations. Robert Richard is a writer living in Montreal. He has published several scholarly books on literary, general cultural, and psychoanalytic subjects—most recently a work of fiction, A Johnny Novel (Mercury Press, 1997). Barry Rutland teaches in the English Department at Carleton University and is Director of the Centre for Textual Analysis, Discourse, and Culture (TADAC). With A.W. Halsall, he edited Text and Ideology/Texte et ideologie, volume 1 of the TADAC series (1988). John Verdon is a sociologist with the Federal Government.

Gurli Woods teaches in the School of Modern Languages, Literature, and Comparative literary Studies at Carleton University. She is a former editor of the Canadian Journal of Scandinavian Studies, and edited Isak Dinesen: Reassessments for the 1990s, volume 3 in the TADAC series (Carleton University Press, 1994). She has published on Scandinavian and Canadian literature.

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INDEX Althusser, Louis 117 androgyny 14-15, 170, 200, 202, 206-07, 225, 240 androgynous 14, 181-85, 200-02, 207, 225, 240 anima 182-88

Antonioni, Michelangelo 92, 99 Blow-Up 92 archetype 176, 180-85, 187-88 Aristotle 50-51 Arnold, Matthew 221-49, 250n Culture and Anarchy 223 "Switzerland" 221-23, 229-44 Correspondence of Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough 229-30, 247-48 Arnold, Thomas 222-23, 235 Atwood, Margaret 94, 122 autopoiesis 20-22, 27-28, 30 Bakhtin, M.M. 11-12, 15, 202, 249, 251n Bamford, T.W. 222 Barthes, Roland 65,87, 117 Bataille, Georges 62 Bateson, Gregory 25, 43 Baum, Paull F. 232-33 Belsey, Catherine 116, 119 Bernheimer, Charles 108 Bernini, Gian' Lorenzo 64-65, 81-82nn binary 8, 130, 188, 202 biogram 23-24,26,34,43 biological 7-9, 19, 21, 33, 44n, 207 Birrel, Gordon 211 Biswas, Robindra Kumar 222, 231 Bohm, David 43, 187 Bourdieu, Pierre 89 Bourguignon, Erika 180 Bowers, Elizabeth 12, 129, 130 Ladies Night 129 Brady, LA. viii, 41 Brooks, Peter 88-89 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 119 Butler, Judith 2, 8, 10, 157n Byatt, AS. 14

Cantor, Georg 10, 47, 59, 77n, 80n Cavendish, Richard 106 Cheever, John 102 Chodorow, Nancy 33 Clough, Arthur Hugh 221-49, 250n Ambarvalia 223, 225, 230-31 Amours de Voyage 221-24, 227-32, 242-43, 247-48 TheBothie 223-24, 227, 230-31, 248 Correspondence 222, 226 cognition 3, 19-21, 27-28, 30-32, 3435, 180 cognitive 3, 8, 20-22, 28, 36-37, 41-42 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 222-23 Collins, Anne 95 consciousness 179-81, 184, 186-88, 191,209,213 contractualist 48-51, 56, 59, 63, 65, 83 Corbett, Greville 3 Count, Earl Wendell 24-26 Cranny-Francis, Anne 117, 121, 124 Culler, Dwight 242 Culler, John 177, 188 Dante (Dante Alighieri) 50, 75 deconstruction, deconstructive 12-13, 16, 119 DAquili, Eugene 177, 180 Dawkins, Richard 9 De Lauretis, Teresa 107,115-16 Deleuze, Gilles 53 Derrida, Jacques 19, 171 DeSimone, D. 29, 35-36 desire 10, 13-14, 52-53, 71, 81, 89, 97,

99, 103, 108, 133, 143, 152, 15960, 162-63, 169, 171, 238, 245-46 detective 12, 87-90, 95, 99, 104, 107-08, 124, 130, 141,215 dimorphism 19, 22, 24-27, 32 discourse 11, 13-16, 47, 50, 115-21, 124, 130-35, 139, 142, 148-49, 200, 209, 213, 217, 221-22, 225, 249 discursive, discursivity 1, 4, 9, 11-12,

118, 135, 143,223,249

256

G E N D E R A N D NARRATIVITY

Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.) 160-61, 16470, 172n Dora 70, 107-08, 110-1 Inn druid 104-06 Dulaure, Jacques-Antoine 33, 35 Durden-Smith, Jo 29, 35-36

gender 1-17, 19, 42, 118, 130, 143, 161-61, 167, 169, 171, 200-01, 208, 216-17, 221, 223, 227, 229, 240, 245, 249 genderization 2, 13, 16 generic 124-25,216

Eco, Umberto 93 ecology 24, 26 Edel, Edmund 217 Eliade, Mircea 34, 180 Ellis, John 205 Erlich, Victor 91 ethics, ethical 74-75, 95, 99, 105 evolution, evolutionary 12, 23-26, 42, 131n, 181 Exner, Richard 206-07

Genesis 4-5, 11, 149-50 genre 12, 87, 116-19, 122, 124, 127, 132, 142-43, 217 Gilligan, Carol 37-39 Girard, Rene 162 Godard, Barbara 4, 12, 123 Goethe, J.W. von 206,228 Govinda, Anagarika B. 180 Graham, Use 205 Gramsci, Antonio 222 Gregg, Frances 13-14, 159-72 The Mystic Leeway 13, 159-72 Gregg, Julia 167-68 Guattari, Felix 53

Faderman, Lilian 101 father 74-76, 227, 237, 240 Felman, Shoshana 100, 108 female 1, 2, 9, 19, 27, 32, 73, 101, 166, 182, 184-85 feminine 2, 10-15, 32, 61-66, 89, 181, 190-91, 200-03, 207, 209, 212-13, 215-17, 224, 227-29, 238-40, 242 femininity 10, 13, 47, 67-69, 73-76, 110, 120, 187,249 feminism 68, 74, 106, 182, 207 fiction 4, 12 Findley, Timothy 87-111 Not Wanted on the Voyage 89, 102-03, 106-08 The Telling of Lies 87-111 Foster, Marion 12, 127 The Monarchs Are Flying 127, 129, 130, 134 Foucault, Michel 3, 48-49, 53, 75, 135-36, 199 Foucaultian 88 Freud, Sigmund 6, 9, 50, 52, 71-74, 79, 87, 90, 96, 107, 162, 173 Freudian 9, 14, 52-53, 79, 97, 119 Friedrichsmeyer, Sara 200-01 Freudenberg, Rachel 199-200, 212 Furman, Nellie 171 Gabriel, Barbara 12, 106, 110 Geertz, Clifford 180

Haase, Donald P. 199-200, 212 Harris, Wendell 231 Hegel, G.W.F. 8In, 83n Henderson, James 161,164 heterophobia 221, 224-25 Hilgard, Ernest R. 180 Hillman, James 175, 187 Homans, Margaret 119 homosexual, homosexuality 82, 90, 108, 119, 128 Honan, Park 230 Hoverland, Lilian 207 Hoyt,Amy 161, 164, 166, 168 Hume, David 48-49, 58 Husserl, Edmund 178-79 hysteria, hysteric, hysterical 60-62, 7072, 74, 80-8Inn, 119 identity 20-22, 38-39, 59, 70, 75, 132, 139, 148, 200-01, 224-25, 227, 231, 249 ideology, ideological 7-8, 11, 13, 16, 54, 116-26, 132, 138, 141-42, 203, 224 intertext, intertextuality 11, 16, 58, 87, 91, 102, 165

INDEX

Irigaray, Luce 118-19,207 Irons, Glenwood 110 Jackson, Rosemary 122 Jacobi, Jolande 182 Jagose, Anne-Marie 90 Jameson, Fredric 117, 123 Jefferson, Anne E. 102 Johnson, Nancy 44 Johnson, Robert A. 184-86 jouissance 10, 61-68, 72, 78n, 82n Jung, Carl 14, 33, 69, 96, 176, 178, 181-84, 188 Jung, Emma 186 Kant, Emmanuel 53-56, 59, 74, 80 Kantian 55, 79-80nn Kleist, Heinrich von 199-217 Saint Cecilia, or the Power of Music 199-217 Kofman, Sara 118 Kortegast, Joachim 204 Kracke, Waud 180 Kristeva, Julia 10, 58 Lacan, Jacques 9-10, 50, 63, 68, 71, 77-79nn, 91, 102, 108 Lacanian 9, 10, 15, 52-53, 77, 100, 207 language 48-51, 83, 177, 249 Lanser, Susan K. 202 Laughlin, Charles D. 27-28, 30-31, 41, 177, 179, 180, 182-83 Law, Name of the Father 52, 60-63, 67, 72, 80n, 89 Le Guin, Ursula 3, 122 Leonardi, Susan J. 110 lesbian, lesbianism 90, 102, 108, 11 In, 125-29 Lever, Janet 37 Levi-Strauss, Claude 14, 31, 175-77, 181, 184, 188-91 liberal, liberalism 50-51, 57-58, 63, 247 Locke, John 51, 58 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 4,115 Mackie, Marilyn 1, 8 Mandeville, Bernard 49

Mann, Thomas 91, 97, 107 Death in Venice 91, 97 Mahler, Margaret S. 39 male 1,2,9, 19, 27, 32, 43n, 166, 181-82, 184-85,212,248 Manturana, Humberto 20-22 Marx, Karl 69 Marxism 118 masculine 2, 14, 32, 101, 191, 200-03, 207, 209, 213-17, 222, 225-28,

238-42, 245-46 masculinism 12, 204, 206-09, 214, 216 masculinity 10, 14-15,249 maternal 226, 236-37 May, Robert 38 McCaffrey, Anne 121 McManus, John 177, 179-84 menstruation, menstrual 26, 32-35 meiosis 9 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 178 Miller, D.A. 88 Modernism, Modernist 160-61, 165 Monick, Eugene 33-34 Montgomery, Lucy Maud 147-56 Emily of New Moon 149,154 Emily Climbs 147-56 Emilys Quest 148 mother 28, 30-31, 167, 221, 215-16,

227, 237 motherhood 31, 168 mystery 87, 90, 95, 124, 216 myth, mythology 40, 90, 95, 124, 130, 175-80, 182-86, 188 mythopoetic 178-80, 184, 189 narrative, narrativity 1, 3-4, 7-9, 11-15, 71,98, 115-19, 131-43, 156, 16063, 167, 171-72, 205, 215-16, 22425, 233, 239 narratology 116, 202 narrator 89,205,211,215-16 Neuman, Erich 33-35 O'Brien, Mary 118 Oedipus, Oedipal 6, 87, 103, 108, 119, 176-78, 188,227,238,242 O'Neill, Eugene 96 Ormiston, Gayle 4

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258

G E N D E R AND NARRATIVITY

Other, Otherness 49-50, 56, 58-59, 6168, 72-73, 75-76, 159, 166, 170, 216-17, 221, 224 Ounstead, Christopher 29, 36 Owens, Craig 119 paternal 239 patriarchal, patriarchy 13, 68, 89, 10105, 115-19, 125, 129, 131, 148, 156 Pearson, Carol S. 185 Person, Leland S., Jr. 202 Peters, Lawrence G. 180 phallus, phallic 7, 32-35, 62, 119, 140, 143, I44n, 148, 154, 168,239 phenomenology 21-22, 27, 32-33, 36, 44n, 175, 179, 183, 188 Piaget,Jean 31,37 Pigott, Stuart 106 Pine, S.F. 39 postmodern, postmodernism 16, 88, 92, 119 psychoanalysis, psychanalytic 9, 13, 50, 60, 73, 87, 95-96, 98, 148, 162 Poovey, Mary 120 Pound, Ezra 160-61, 164, 168-71 Powys, John Cowper 160-62,164,167 Prattis, J. Iain 180, 182, 184, 188 Price-Wiiliams, Douglas 180 Propp, Vladimir 118, 120 Puschmann, Rosemarie 199 queer 90, 97 rape 127-28, 131, 148, 154, 156 realism, realistic 119, 122, 200, 203, 205,215-16 reality 19-20, 138, 179 Redgrove, Peter 32-33 Rich, Adrienne 103 Ricoeur, Paul 178-79 Riffaterre, Michael 87 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 117 Ring, Kenneth 179 Roberts, Jeanne Addison 110 Roberts, Joan Warthling 93 Robinson, Sally 203 Roof, Judith 107-08 Rosanvallon, Pierre 57

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 47-48, 51, 64, 79,81 Rule, Jane 103 Russ, Joanna 119, 121 Sanday, Peggy Reeves 40 Sartre, J-P 71,76 Sassower, Raphael 4 sex, sexual 1, 2, 21, 24, 42, 125, 224 sexuality 11, 15, 32, 42, 45n, 61, 102, 148, 153, 166, 169, 171, 224 Shearer, John 179-80, 183 Sheldrake, Rupert 187 Sherfey, Mary Jane 29,40 Shields, Carol 12, 14, 132-35, 142 Swann: A Literary Mystery 12, 14, 132 Shires, Linda M. 202 Shuttle, Penelope 32-33 Smith, Adam 48-49, 56, 78n Stephan, Inge 201 Stephen, Marilyn 180 Stone, Marjorie 119 structuralism, structuralist 175, 177-78, 181, 188, 191 subjectivity 13, 159, 160, 161, 171, 200, 203, 221, 226 subversion, subversive 152, 156 Sybeberg,J. 176, 178, 189-91 symbol 24, 27, 34, 40, 175, 178-80 Symbolic 10 symbolopoesis 25 Tart, Charles T. 179 Taylor, David C. 29,36 Tedlock, Barbara 180 text, textual, textuality 13, 67, 125-26, 132, 136, 138, 142, 160-61, 171, 199,215,244,249 Teresa of Avila 64-65, 74 Todorov, Tzvetan 124, 126, 133, 136 Toulmin, Stephen E. 187 transfinite 10, 77n, 82n trope 8, 12, 14, 43 Vangaard, Thorkil 33-34 Varela, Francisco E 20-22

INDEX

Wagner, Richard 176, 178, 189-91 Webber, Mark 180-81, 183-84 Wilkinson, Louis 167, 172 Wilkinson, Oliver 161, 163, 166, 172 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 87, 89 Wittkowski, Wolfgang 216 Woolf, Virginia 103, 120, 135, 137 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth 6-7 Zaremba, Eve 12, 125 Work for a Million 125

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