Heterotopic World Fiction: Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje 9781644699966

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HETEROTOPIC WORLD FICTION Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje

Studies in Comparative Literature and Intellectual History Series Editor Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary, University of London)

For more information on this series, please visit: academicstudiespress.com/studiesincomplit

HETEROTOPIC WORLD FICTION Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje

Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps

BOSTON 2022

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022024886 ISBN 9781644699959 (hardback) ISBN 9781644699966 (Adobe PDF) ISBN 9781644699973 (ePub) Copyright © 2022, Academic Studies Press All rights reserved Book design by PHi Business Solutions Ltd. Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon St. Brookline, MA 02446 [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Lesley: to Karin, Liam, and Mary From Marie-Christine: to Bruno and Caroline, the wonders of my life

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Abbreviationsxi List of Figures xv Introduction: Heterotopic World Fiction

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Part I: Biopolitics: Technologies of the Individual Correlating Knowledge and Power Relations: The Birth of Biopolitics  Discipline and Punish: Discerning the Dangerous Mrs. Dalloway: A Dangerous Day  In the Skin of a Lion: Dangerous Yearnings

35 36 45 62 78

Part II: Biopoetics: Technologies of the Worldly Self From Biopolitics to Biopoetics  Concepts   Parrhēsia: Dangerous Truth Telling   Bios/Logos: Living Truth    Askēsis: The Art of Elaborating the Self as a Practice of Freedom    Experience-Books: Altering Truths   Heterotopic Methods    Method 1—Disposing/Transposing the Archive:   Criminal Vanishing Acts      Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur,   et mon frère...      The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems       Flush: A Biography    Method 2—Distracting/Transacting Genealogy: Reading for   One’s Life     Between the Acts     The English Patient     The History of Sexuality, vol. 1   Method 3—Dislocating/Transiting Strategics: Reading   Biopoetic Assemblages 

99 100 102 102 110 113 118 122 123 126 131 139 146 147 159 175 188

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    Foucault 1: The History of Sexuality, vols. 2, 3, and 4 189     Foucault 2: Answering Questions 196      Woolf 1: “very little persuaded of the truth of anything” 200     Woolf 2: Orlando 201     Woolf 3: The Waves 209      Ondaatje 1: “[W]e can’t rely on only one voice” 219     Ondaatje 2: Warlight 220     Ondaatje 3: Running in the Family 226     Ondaatje 4: The Cat’s Table235 Figures239 Selected Bibliography  250 Index273

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful for York University’s continuous support throughout our careers. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, York’s Office of Research Administration, and the York University Faculty Association have provided timely and much appreciated funding for our project. We wish to acknowledge the generous encouragement of Galin Tihanov at Academic Studies Press, and also thank Alessandra Anzani, Stuart Allen and Ilya Nikolaev for shepherding this book so effectively through the production process. The ground-breaking work accomplished by Harvard University’s Institute for World Literature has been crucial both to our project and to the advancement of World Literature studies at York University. We are most grateful to David Damrosch, Director of the IWL, and to Delia Ungureanu, Associate Director. Lively discussions with our colleagues, especially with Elicia Clements, Darren Gobert, Alison Halsall, Susan Ingram, Thomas Loebel, Michele Johnson, Nalini Persram, and George Szanto have been of great benefit. Over the years, our students and research assistants have been engaging interlocutors. Writing this book together has been transformative—for the object of study, our manner of approach and style, and for ourselves. But all of this work would not have been possible without the love and sustaining support of our families and friends.

Abbreviations

Mikhail Bakhtin DI—The Dialogic Imagination Michel Foucault Ab—Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975 ABHS—About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980 AK—The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language BB—The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 BC—The Birth of the Clinic Corps—Le corps utopique. Les hétérotopies “Critique”—“What is Critique?” CT—The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984 Dits—Dits et écrits, 1954–1988, 4 vols. DP—Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison DT—Discourse and Truth and Parrhēsia EF—Essential Foucault EWF—Essential Works of Foucault, 3 vols.: vol. 1: Ethics; vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology; vol. 3: Power FE—The Foucault Effect FL—Foucault Live FS—Fearless Speech GL—On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980 GS—The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983 Her—The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982 HM—The History of Madness HS—The History of Sexuality, 4 vols.: vol. 1: An Introduction; vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure; vol 3: The Care of the Self; vol. 4: Confessions of the Flesh

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IPR—I, Pierre Rivière LWK—Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970–1971 Manet—La peinture de Manet [Manet and the Object of Painting] MPR—Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère: Un cas de parricide au XIXe siècle Œuvres—Œuvres: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols. Order—The Order of Things P/K—Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 PS—The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973 PPC—Politics Philosophy Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984 Psy—Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974 PT—The Politics of Truth Sec—Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 Soc—Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 SP—Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison ST—Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980–1981 WDTT—Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice Herodotus Hist—Histories Michael Ondaatje AG—Anil’s Ghost CTS—Coming through Slaughter CW—The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems Div—Divisadero EP—The English Patient Run—Running in the Family Skin—In the Skin of a Lion TCT—The Cat’s Table War—Warlight Virginia Woolf BTA—Between the Acts JR—Jacob’s Room MD—Mrs. Dalloway O—Orlando Room—A Room of One’s Own TG—Three Guineas

Abbreviations

TTL—To the Lighthouse TW—The Waves VO—The Voyage Out WD—Diaries, 6 vols. WE—Essays, 6 vols. W&F—Women & Fiction WL—Letters, 6 vols.

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List of Figures

Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6

The English Patient 239 The English Patient, Chapter VII, “In Situ” 240 The Will to Know (History of Sexuality: An Introduction)242 The Will to Know (History of Sexuality: An Introduction)243 Chapters of The Waves 246 Interludes of The Waves 248

Introduction: Heterotopic World Fiction

This book focuses on the critique of biopolitics (the government of life through particular individuals and the general population) and the counter-development of biopoetics (an aesthetics of life through the elaboration of self as a practice of freedom) realized in texts by Virginia Woolf, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ondaatje. This book demonstrates that their world fiction produces a transhistorical and transnational chronotope to critique historical domains of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity in order to offer the reader altering experiences. This book argues that their writings constitute a specific kind of world literature— heterotopic world fiction—as epistemological and ethical project enacted through political aesthetic strategies.

The Stakes Biopolitics has gradually become the dominant mode for the exercise of power throughout the long twentieth century, across different political regimes, from liberal-democratic to fascist to socialist and communist. Cradle-to-grave shepherding of individual behaviors (discipline), correlated to population management through security measures concerning health, education, labor and leisure, happiness and pleasure (governmentality), has developed into a normal way of life. The forceful impact of biopolitics is now everywhere apparent, undeniably there, in your face: the world refugee crisis and the state cages and camps built to contain them at the borders; ever-present human trafficking and slavery; the global COVID-19 pandemic, with its new colonialism and vaccine diplomacy differently affecting individuals and entire populations depending on gender, race, class, country, and continent. In these times, our book returns to biopolitics, its critique, and to biopoetic means of elaborating new forms of life. Michel Foucault’s use and development of the concepts of biopolitics and biopoetics are analyzed in conjunction with the writings of Virginia Woolf and Michael Ondaatje to recalibrate the philosopher’s Eurocentric studies with the novelists’ anti-patriarchal, anti-imperial, and decolonizing texts. To the global forces

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of biopolitics, these writers oppose a world “looking forward to an epistemic difference ‘to come.’”1 The task of this book is to world their texts from a perspective attuned to the ethical dimension of its practice, as advocated by Djelal Kadir: “To world and to globalize . . . [should] be parsed in light of their subject agencies and their object predicates. World and globalization, thus, would be imputable actions, rather than anonymous phenomena.”2 Analyzing how texts by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje enact worldly relations, and how a network of relations among their texts can be delineated, allows the recognition of a new kind of narrative: heterotopic world fiction. Operating both as “a site of processes of worlding and an agent that participates and intervenes in these processes,”3 such fiction offers an altered ethico-political horizon to the reader.

World Literature Studies World literature studies has become a hotly contested and polemical field since the turn of the century, both within (as methods and objects of inquiry are proposed, discussed, rejected or pursued) and without (in the field’s relations with comparative, postcolonial, translation, and cosmopolitan studies). Scholars as diverse in their practices as David Damrosch, Wai Chee Dimock, Franco Moretti, and Vilashini Cooppan, however, agree that world literature is “not an ontology but an epistemology, not a known but a knowing. The ethics of reading turns on the moment in which we fail to recognize the familiar and claim that failure as a modality of knowledge.”4 “World literature is not an object, it’s a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method,” insists Moretti.5 It is a “circumstantially derived” outcome, states Dimock, rather than “a class of substantive objects.”6 Citing Mads Rosendahl Thomsen’s useful categorization 1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Rethinking Comparativism,” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, ed. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 269. 2 Djelal Kadir, “To World, to Globalize: World Literature’s Crossroads,” in World Literature in Theory, ed. David Damrosch (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 266. 3 Pheng Cheah, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 2, 5. 4 Vilashini Cooppan, “The Ethics of World Literature: Reading Others, Reading Otherwise,” in Teaching World Literature, ed. David Damrosch (New York: Modern Language Association, 2009): 38–39. 5 Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review ( January–February 2000): 55. 6 Wai Chee Dimock, “Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents,” Narrative 14, no. 1 (2006): 1379.

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of world literature theories, Damrosch notes that “most of the recent debates . . . have focused on scholarship and to a lesser extent on teaching, but little attention has been given to writers’ own ideas.”7 Our book focuses not so much on writers’ ideas about world literature, but on the effects of their practice of positioning their texts in networks of relations among geographically and chronologically distant texts. Drawing histories of the present that dive into deep time as well as operate in a future anterior mode, such texts invite the reader to engage with “a philosophy in, and of, motion” in evocative textual assemblages.8 Heterotopic world fiction looks backward and forward in time, to actualize new potentialities for becoming otherwise. Like any genre, it has ancient concepts, textual strategies, and relations of power sedimenting in its form while virtual projections pull it into the future. Like world literature in general, it is at once “old and familiar,” and yet “always in the process of happening, be it as a promise or a threat, but still without being fully realized,” as noted by Stefan Helgesson and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen.9 Working with/in networks makes some objects and relations dissolve and others emerge. Cooppan notes that in “a network certain things disappear: centers and the discourse of origin and copy associated with them; teleologies and the narratives of progress embedded in them; the all-knowing, centered and central subject before whose gaze the entirety of the world is laid out, ready to be known.”10 Correlating Woolf ’s and Ondaatje’s writings to Foucault’s repositions the philosopher’s work as a node in a network of texts against biopolitics, rather than as origin or center. Moreover, his work offers a toolbox of concepts (biopolitics, heterotopia, parrhēsia, askēsis, experience book) borrowed from wildly different disciplines, often from chronologically distant epochs, retooled to fit new purposes. By analyzing how such concepts are variously elaborated and strategically deployed in texts by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje, we gauge multiple means to apprehend, resist, and alter the forces of biopolitics. We consider how such tactics enjoin the (textual, not empirical) reader to know differently, to participate in tracking forceful relations of knowledge while denying 7 David Damrosch, Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 269. See Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (London: Continuum, 2008), 20. 8 Vilashini Cooppan, “World Literature between History and Theory,” in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir (London: Routledge, 2011), 200. 9 Stefan Helgesson and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Literature and the World (London: Routledge, 2020), 9. 10 Vilashini Cooppan, “Codes for World Literature: Network Theory and the Field Imaginary,” in Approaches to World Literature, ed. Joachim Küpper (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013), 104.

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any claims to universality or ontological necessity. As Shu-mei Shih reminds us, “Comparison as relation means setting into motion historical relationalities. . . . The excavation of these relationalities is what I consider to be the ethical practice of comparison, where the workings of power are not concealed but necessarily revealed. Power, after all, is a type of relation.”11

Heterotopic Methods In “The Genres of World Literature,” Mariano Siskind argues that “the project of a new, cosmopolitan world literary critical imagination requires critical practices capable of illuminating what I have termed the trans-nature [trans-cultural, transhistorical, trans-generic] of aesthetic and cultural phenomena, which makes up the material texture of world literature. We need a new conception of genre as a contingently bound, heterogeneous discursive constellation. . . . Genres as textual assemblages . . . that recreate the field of world literature with every critical intervention.”12 Dimock redefines world literature genres as systems in which “kin is every bit as important as kind. And, by kin, what I have in mind is not necessarily a genealogical relation, but, just as often, a remote spectrum of affinities, interesting when seen in conjunction, but not themselves organically linked. . . . What matters here is not lineage, but a phenomenal field of contextually induced parallels.”13 Our work establishes the kinship existing among works by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje, a kinship determined by their shared heterotopic methods for the critique of biopolitical regimes, and their complementary formalizations and thought experiments, which together oppose the globalization of disciplinary and governmental relations of knowledge and power. We argue that their work produces a new kind of narrative, heterotopic world fiction (more on this below). Consequently, we do not link their works to the usual categories (modernism, postmodernism, French theory, British or Canadian literature), nor do we suggest a teleological development among them. Rather, we track various common threads, reinscriptions, modifications and amplifications, shared tactics and strategies, cognitive dissonances and convergent perspectives. Marcel Detienne 11 Shu-mei Shih, “Comparison as Relation,” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, ed. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 79. 12 Mariano Siskind, “The Genres of World Literature: the Case of Magical Realism,” in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir (London: Routledge, 2011), 354. 13 Dimock, “Genre as World System,” 86.

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argues that to compare the incomparable, one must experiment: “It is simply a matter of seeing what happens, obtaining a reaction that reveals some unnoticed aspect, some unexpected angle or concealed property. One must not be afraid of upsetting history or scorning chronology. The game is certainly worth the candle, for in this way an experimental comparativist acquires the freedom and pleasure of unravelling and reassembling the constituent elements of intellectual operations.”14 Part of our work will be to correlate such intellectual operations among philosophical inquiries, novels, essays, interviews, lectures, and newspaper articles by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje. Thus we will not so much compare as juxtapose, heeding Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s suggestion to “rethink comparativism by pondering how exactly comparative literature does not compare and how that not-comparing can shelter something affirmative.”15 Using techniques found in their fiction, we will correlate through juxtaposition and collage,16 through dialogical encounters, through interruptions and reiterations, through returns and recombinations, with schemas and charts and illustrations. There will be many such borrowings on our part, for a “theory can genuinely help us understand a new body of material only if the material is allowed to exert real pressure on the theory, modifying it in return.”17 But, why three authors after the much-celebrated death of the author in the 1960s and the rise of the scriptor and écriture?18 Our analyses focus on texts as events (not on the author-function) in order to provoke the “proliferation of meaning” made possible by “the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction” (EWF, 2:221). Refusing to seek out or respect a presumed wholeness in each author’s canon corresponds to the impetus of their labors, as outlined by Foucault: “My desire is that this object-event [a book] . . . should recopy, fragment, repeat, simulate and replicate itself, and finally disappear without the person who happened to produce it ever being able to claim the right to be its master, and impose what he wished to say, or say what he wanted it to be. In short, my desire is that a book . . . 14 Marcel Detienne, Comparing the Incomparable, trans. Janet Lloyd (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), xiv–xv. 15 Spivak, “Rethinking Comparativism,” 255. 16 Susan Stanford Friedman, “Why Not Compare?,” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, ed. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 34–45. 17 Damrosch, Comparing the Literatures, 130. 18 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1967), in his Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Fontana Press, 1977), 142–149; Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” (1969), in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 2: Aesthetics, Methodology, Epistemology, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1994), 2:205–222 (hereafter, EWF).

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should have the easy confidence to present itself as discourse: as both battle and weapon, strategy and shock, struggle and trophy or wound, conjuncture and vestige, strange meeting and repeatable scene.”19 This practice is evident, for example, in Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison [Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison], where staged dialogues among various schools of thought and long, unattributed quotations flow into Foucault’s analyses, highlighting their discursive nature. Woolf’s narrated interior monologues in Mrs. Dalloway perform a similar function: ostensibly divulging the private thoughts of singular characters, such passages reveal how impersonal discourses invade individual minds to shape historically contingent subject positions (the heteronormative, middle-aged, upper-middle class white Englishwoman and white male colonial administrator; the lower-middle class shell-shocked veteran). In Ondaatje’s fictional collages, various speech genres collide: in Anil’s Ghost, miners’ folk songs, maps, a list of the “disappeared” prepared by Amnesty International, lines of poetry, sentences from The King and the Corpse, and interview extracts are juxtaposed, and the complex meanings of their refractions must be produced by the reader. Our book adopts a similar practice, one that refuses a totalizing perspective to construct instead an assemblage of texts (often quoted at length and without indentation, as integral elements of our inquiries) provoking a series of Bakhtinian dialogical encounters for the reader. Our book focuses on textual elaboration because that is where thought experiments occur. In order to think beyond biopolitics, the truth regime that sustains it must be exposed; its precarity revealed; its fault lines situated precisely, in individuals and in the power-knowledge matrices that produce them as their vehicle and effect. Experience-books transform the subjects and objects of knowledge, reveal unseen, unthought, unsaid potentialities to actualize them and fictionalize another future. We practice political close readings that track radical transformations in relations to truth: part I focuses on its formidable subjectivizing force; part II on biopoetic techniques that develop the grounds for agency and collective practices of solidarity. We analyze rhetorical tactics allowing multiple, conflicting discourses to flow into heterotopic fictions, through multifarious configurations of direct, indirect, and free indirect discourse. We trace how motifs and leitmotifs accrue and variegate meanings with each occurrence, revealing the limits of racist, sexist, patriarchal, nationalist, and imperialist

19 Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy (London: Routledge, 2006), xxxviii, 8 (hereafter, HM). See Daniel Defert, “Glissements progressifs de l’œuvre hors d’elle-même,” in Au risque de Foucault, by Dominique Franche et al. (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1997), 151–160.

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discourses. We investigate the syntactical means deployed to address and enfold the reader in new apprehensions of meaning. We analyze genre transformations: the fictionalization of philosophical inquiries, the novelization of the epic, the narrativization of poetry, the dramatization of narrative. As genres look backwards and forwards in time, such transformations launch uchronic games drawing new lines of flight in becoming. We uncover networks among texts that constitute and constellate heterotopic world fiction.20 But this approach comes at a cost. Early on in the elaboration of this project, it seemed to us that a choice had to be made: either focus on the scholarship surrounding each of these authors’ works, and each of the major concepts we work with (biopolitics, heterotopia, parrhēsia, askēsis, discipline, governmentality, elaboration of self), or focus on delineating and linking textual experiments by Woolf, Foucault and Ondaatje. We have benefited immensely from masses of illuminating scholarship and we point the reader at every turn to the essays and books that have been particularly crucial to our work, but more often in footnotes rather than in the body of our text. This kind of reorientation is also practiced by Walter D. Mignolo, who explains that in order to focus Local Histories/Global Designs on coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking, he chose to confront Hegel’s “monumental work on the philosophy of history” only indirectly, rather than engaging head-on with its “way of sensing/ seeing”—otherwise, his book would inevitably have been about Hegel and his “monumental fictional narrative.”21 Like Detienne, Mignolo encourages scholars to practice “epistemological disciplinary disobedience”22—what Foucault calls “reflective indocility” (see below). Noting our indebtedness to the works of literary critics, historians, philosophers, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, translators, and cultural theorists, we focus on the conceptual, methodological, and aesthetic strategies of these three writers of world fiction. We analyze their critique of the biopolitical vectors of gender (“the elephant in the room of world literature”23), race, class, and community as drawn and quartered by the forces of global capitalism, imperialism, and ethnic nationalism.

20 A “relational spacetime,” argues Cooppan, “designates a zone of becoming, spinning spheres of motion animated by potentiality. . . . Beneath these time-maps are the grids of empire and the moving terrains of trauma and memory. Beyond them are intimations of other ways of thinking.” Vilashini Cooppan, “Time-Maps: A Field Guide to the Decolonial Imaginary,” Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory 2, no. 3 (December 2019): 397. 21 Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), xi. 22 Ibid., xvi. 23 Helgesson and Rosendahl Thomsen, Literature and the World, 162.

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Our object is not to correct, summarize or showcase traditional paths of expertise on these writers, but rather to learn from dialogical encounters between their works, all the while noting our considerable debts to scholarship. Susan Stanford Friedman rightly maintains that the “dialogic pull of in/commensurability invites a comparative methodology that is juxtapositional, contrapuntal, and reciprocal, thus opening the possibility for a progressive politics of comparison. A juxtapositional model of comparison sets things being compared side by side, not overlapping them (as in a Venn diagram), not setting up one as the standard of measure for the other, not using one as an instrument to serve the other. . . . The distinctiveness of each is maintained, while the dialogue of voices that ensues brings commonalities into focus.”24 Bakhtinian analyses of discourse and dialogism are largely absent from world literature studies, where the link between a particular work and transnational networks is often established through biographical narratives.25 Damrosch’s introduction to What is World Literature?, for example, reveals the impact of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous phrase, Weltliteratur, with an ironic, performative, Proppian tale of Eckerman’s conversion from country bumpkin to subservient, feminized secretary of the dashing, worldly patriarch.26 To theorize world literature as an elliptical space formed by reading between cultures, Damrosch offers a “gallery of cautionary tales” (What Is, 36): theoretically informed narratives of the translation and circulation of world literature texts that connect provocative, luminous close readings with vivid biographical scenes (Rigoberta Menchú at the airport, harassed by customs and immigration officials who see a Mayan face, “my indigenous face,” not a Nobel Prize winner; “two young Englishmen, Edward Mitford and Austen Henry Layard,” recovering the tablets of Gilgamesh on their way to Ceylon (What Is, 253, 39)). Wai Chee Dimock equally privileges authors and texts over systems analysis (as practiced by Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti) while emphasizing the temporal dimensions of world literature. In “Literature for the Planet,” Dimock embeds detailed close readings of poetry within a gripping, emotional story of 24 Stanford Friedman, “Why Not Compare?” 40. 25 Yet, see Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004); Katerina Clark, “M. M. Bakhtin and ‘World Literature,’” Journal of Narrative Theory 32, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 266–292; Gary Harrison, “Conversation in Context: A Dialogic Approach to Teaching World Literature,” in Teaching World Literature, ed. David Damrosch (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009), 205–215; and Galin Tihanov, The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019) for their engagements with dialogism. 26 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 300 (hereafter, What Is).

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the Russian writer Osip Mandelstam always carrying a copy of Dante’s Inferno in his pocket, to have and to hold when he inevitably would be exiled for his performance of a poem satirizing Stalin. Dimock’s fictional-critical essay describes the fateful night of the arrest that blasted Mandelstam’s life asunder (“On the night of 13 May 1934, about one in the morning, came a knock on the door . . .”).27 Using key concepts such as Einsteinian “relativity of simultaneity” and geological deep time28 to argue that literature might constitute a robust planetary “species” that survives when authors and entire civilizations perish, Dimock invokes a “global continuum of words”29—without ever mentioning Bakhtin.30 This absence is all the more striking in that Bakhtin, equally concerned with “great time,” was developing an Einsteinian concept of the literary chronotope and a discursive concept of the word at roughly the same time (1937)31 as Mandelstam was satirizing Stalin, and that Bakhtin suffered the same persecution at the same hands: condemned to exile, supported by a loving wife—his was a very similar story, produced by the same discursive conflicts. For Bakhtin, however, words are inherently historical, material, the site of cultural clashes that not only position but also transform the “I” in discourse. Words come to individuals from the mouths of others. For Bakhtin (and Woolf and Foucault and Ondaatje) singular lives and literary texts emerge in, and are shaped by, discourses—familial, institutional, governmental. Our book contributes to world literature studies by considering fiction through the prism of discourse as praxis.32 It takes into account the means by which individuals are positioned as

27 Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” PMLA 116, no. 12 (2001): 173. 28 See Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); see also Wai Chee Dimock, “Nonbiological Clock: Literary History against Newtonian Mechanics,” South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 153–177. 29 Dimock, “Literature,” 181. 30 Dimock cites The Dialogic Imagination in “A Theory of Resonance.” For her discussion of Bakhtin’s notion of genre, see Dimock, “Genre as World System.” See also Longxi Zhang, From Comparison to World Literature (New York: SUNY Press, 2015); and Harrison, “Conversation in Context,” for their turn to Bakhtin. 31 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff,” in his Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 4–5; Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in his The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258 (hereafter, DI). 32 Discussing the works of Damrosch, Moretti, Casanova, John Pizer, and others (but not Dimock), Pheng Cheah argues in What is a World? that world literature studies are overly focused on space and advocates renewed attention to time. Bakhtin’s discursive concept of the chronotope provides a materialist approach that avoids a binary opposition between spatial and temporal dimensions.

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subjects in discourse, how their modes of enunciation and objects of knowledge are produced in discourse, and how all can be transformed in dialogical encounters. Doing so heeds Simon During’s call in Foucault and Literature for scholars taking “Foucault’s contribution as seriously as it deserves” to use his work to “break down the limits of academic professionalism . . . and that requires real changes in our methods and topics of study.”33 But, you may be thinking, why these three authors, together? Because, to borrow Bakhtin’s term, their texts are transgredient: each of their projects marshals theoretical, critical, and narrative elements that are foreign yet necessary to the completion of the others.34 Novels can trace the effects of power relations on individual lives during the course of a day or several centuries; discursive analyses can make visible institutional forces and their variously distributed impact on the population. It is a difference of focus, not of kind: in novels by Woolf and Ondaatje, gendered and racialized bodies are policed by institutions; the institutional sites analyzed by Foucault produce docile bodies. Fifty years before Foucault developed the problematic of biopower (and its implications for sexuality and race, war and peace), Woolf’s novels documented its experience, its “historical density and affective intensity” in everyday life.35 Ondaatje imagines The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (1970) three years before Foucault connects the memoir and case file of another infamous nineteenth-century murderer, Pierre Rivière, to various discourses of the period.36 Upper-class Londoners in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) advocate the colonies (specifically Canada) as the site for dispatching the unemployed; Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987) unearths the untold stories of working-class Finns, Macedonians, and Italians fleeing war and persecution, imported to build Toronto in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. The experiences that their books enable for the reader do not line up teleologically; each experience “neither progresses nor steps backwards in relation to an other” (HM, 122). Each book writes the history of a different present; together, their texts provide soundings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The objects of one discursive practice serve as grounds for the others; each sheds light on the shadows

33 Simon During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), 22. 34 Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 27. 35 Cooppan, “World Literature,” 196. 36 Michel Foucault, ed., Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère: Un cas de parricide au XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), hereafter, MPR. See also Michel Foucault, ed., I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), hereafter, IPR.

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of the others. As Paul Veyne explains: “A [discursive] practice gives rise to the objectivizations that correspond to it, and it is anchored in the realities of the moment, that is, in the objectivizations of neighbouring practices. Or, to be more precise, a practice actively fills the void left by neighbouring practices; it actualizes the potentialities that these neighbouring practices prefigure in hollow form. If these practices are transformed, if the periphery of the hollow shifts . . . the practice will actualize these new potentialities, and it will no longer be the same practice as before.”37 Because they share a common project, which is the effect of their methods of investigation and their modes of writing, the works of Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje can be triangulated and entered “into a different kind of dialogue . . . not one involving identification or mastery but the discipline of distance and of difference” (What Is, 300). But how are these works world literature? By most measures currently used in the field. Written in relation to networks of world texts (major works from various canons over four millennia), fictions by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje have been translated into dozens of languages, adapted to film, and their interviews shared on YouTube and social media. Works by Woolf and Foucault have become crucial for feminism and new disciplines such as gender and queer studies.38 Foucault’s inquiries have been redeployed across disciplines, from criminology to sociology, geography, anthropology, and law; they have also led to the birth of fields such as governmentality studies and Bentham studies.39 The canons of all three have become scholarly enterprises, internationally. Although Canadians claim Ondaatje’s works for “Can Lit,” other critics identify him as a postcolonial or cosmopolitan writer, or a writer of migration or of color.40 Ondaatje’s 37 Paul Veyne, “Foucault Revolutionizes History,” in Foucault and his Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 162. 38 See Brenda R. Silver, Virginia Woolf Icon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Damrosch places Woolf in the category of the hypercanonical (Comparing the Literatures, 226–228). 39 For discussions of governmentality studies, see Colin Gordon, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Fabiana Jardim, “A Brief Genealogy of Governmentality Studies: The Foucault Effect and Its Developments. An Interview with Colin Gordon,” Educação e Pesquisa 39, no. 4 (2013): 1067–1087; as well as the UCL Bentham Project (https://www. ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/); and Michihiro Kaino, “Bentham Studies in Japan Today,” Revue d’études benthamiennes 16 (2019), accessed February 22, 2022, http://journals.openedition. org/etudes-benthamiennes/5633. 40 John Thieme, “‘Historical Relations’: Modes of Discourse in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family,” in Narrative Strategies in Canadian Literature: Feminism and Post-Colonialism, ed. Coral A. Howells and Lynette Hunter (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991), 40–48, insists that Ondaatje is part of the Canadian canon. See Teresa Derrickson, “Will the ‘Un-Truth’ Set You Free? A Critical Look at Global Human Rights Discourse in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” Literature Interpretation Theory 15, no. 2 (2004): 131–152;

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narrative reach extends to four continents. As he states repeatedly, “[I am a] great believer in the mongrel”; “I am a mongrel of place. Of race. Of cultures. Of many genres.”41 Such is the mobile writing of contemporary world literature. Their fictions are also world literature, we argue, in that they cross national and linguistic boundaries to counter a global phenomenon, the rise of biopolitics as the dominant mode for the exercise of power in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries.42 (Other world fictions address global ecological disasters, the human crisis of refugees, world wars). Their biopoetics, moreover, include techniques derived from ancient Greek ring composition and hupomnēmata, medieval Sanskrit slokas, Impressionist brush strokes, jazz rhythms, Cubist collage, archival curation. Their writings work to produce worldly forms of solidarity and resistance: “For the outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’”43 Woolf ’s Society of Outsiders can be correlated to Foucault’s “international citizenship . . . of the governed” (EWF, 3:474) as well as to Ondaatje’s communities Debjani Ganguly, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Nordin Gilsenan, et al., eds., Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013); Lena Khor, Human Rights Discourse in a Global Network: Books beyond Borders (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); and Rosendahl Thomsen, Mapping World Literature, for other categorizations; see Martin Löschnigg, “Reappraising Diversity: Canadian Multicultural Literature as World Literature in English,” in Ideas Crossing the Atlantic: Theories, Normative Conceptions, and Cultural I mages, ed. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz and Christoph Irmscher (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2019), 343–360, for a world literature argument. 41 Catherine Bush, “Michael Ondaatje: An Interview,” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (Summer 1994): 240; Robert McCrum, “Michael Ondaatje: The Divided Man,” The Guardian, August 27, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/28/. Ondaatje’s writings articulate the local (he thanks his neighborhood coffee shop in Anil’s Ghost) to the global in Toronto, where half the population was born outside of Canada. See David Farrier, “Gesturing towards the Local: Intimate Histories in Anil’s Ghost,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 41, no. 1 (2005): 83–93, for intimate histories in AG. 42 Aamir R. Mufti argues that world literature studies should consider “the origins of bourgeois modernity—that is, the culture of capitalist society—within a history of worldwide imperial violence; the persistence into our times . . . of the racial and cultural antagonisms of the colonial world; and the ongoing struggle over the right and the ability to define the contours of human experience.” Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), xi–xii. Heterotopic world fictions by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje address all of these problematics. See also Djelal Kadir, Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011); and Kadir, “To World, to Globalize.” 43 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, ed. Naomi Black (Oxford: Shakespeare Head and Blackwell, 2001), 99 (hereafter, TG). In 1915 the classicist Jane Harrison declared that patriotism “was not an inspiring word. It spelled narrowness—limitations. We aspired to be citizens of the world.” See her Alpha and Omega (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915), 238. Woolf first met Harrison in 1904.

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of “planetary strangers.”44 Together, their fictions produce a chronotope of transhistorical and transnational reach that offers the reader altering experiences. “At a minimum,” Damrosch suggests, “it takes three points to define a plane surface, and perhaps three works, interestingly juxtaposed and studied with care, can define a literary field” (What Is, 299). The field so elaborated by this book is heterotopic world fiction.

Object: Heterotopic World Fiction When engaging in the “historico-philosophical practice” of critique, Foucault insists, “one has to make one’s own history, fabricate history, as if through fiction.” This process allows one to pose questions that dislocate or displace the “objects habitual . . . to historians [and move] towards the problem of the subject and of the truth, about which historians are not usually concerned.”45 When asked about the status of his writing in a 1977 interview, Foucault replied: “I realize full well that I have never written anything other than fictions. I do not want to say that this is outside of truth. It seems to me that it is possible to make fiction work in truth, to induce truth effects with a discourse of fiction, and to work in such a way that the discourse of truth elicits, fabricates, something that doesn’t yet exist, and therefore ‘fictionalizes’. . . . [O]ne fictionalizes a politics that doesn’t yet exist starting from a historical truth.”46 Such fictions open up a future anterior horizon of possibilities. The archaeological epigraphist from Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Palipana, also knows how to fictionalize official inscriptions: “In the last few years he had found the hidden histories, intentionally lost, that altered the perspective and knowledge of earlier times. It was how one hid or wrote the truth when it was necessary to lie. . . . The dialogue between old and hidden lines, the back-and-forth between what was official and unofficial. . . . coming across an illegal story, one banned by kings and state and priests, in the interlinear texts.”47 The disarming narrator in Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own would agree: “when a subject is highly controversial . . . one cannot tell the truth. . . . Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact. . . . Lies will flow from my 44 Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (Toronto: Vintage Books, 1992), 244 (hereafter, EP). 45 Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext[e], 1997), 44–45 (our italics) (hereafter, PT). 46 Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits 1954–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), no. 197 (3:236) (hereafter, Dits; our trans. throughout). See also Philippe Artières, ed., Michel Foucault, la littérature et les arts (Paris: Kimé, 2004). 47 Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2000), 105 (hereafter, AG).

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lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping.”48 Thus heterotopic world fictions relentlessly engage the reader in the processes of truth production. But how are these fictions heterotopic? Because they not only feature spaces that reproduce, reinforce, or counter all other spaces and the existing order of things but also, as this book demonstrates, perform heterotopic processes that generate critique. Drawn from medical science, the term heterotopia has been redefined by Foucault and then picked up across disciplines.49 But for all of its potential, heterotopia is a concept with a curious history in Foucault’s writings— broached three times in close succession, then dropped abruptly. It emerges in laughter: the preface to The Order of Things (1966) claims that the writer was provoked to elaborate his Archaeology of the Human Sciences by an incongruous list

48 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin Press, 1993), 4 (hereafter, Room). 49 For a history of the concept in Foucault’s work, see Peter Johnson, “Brief History of the Concept of Heterotopia (Revised),” Heterotopian Studies (2016), http://www.heterotopiastudies.com. For a history of the concept’s various uses across the disciplines, see Daniel Defert, “Foucault, Space, and the Architects,” Politics/Poetics, in Documenta X—The Book (OstfildernRuit: Cantz, 1997), 274–283; Daniel Defert, “Glissements progressifs de l’œuvre hors d’ellemême,” in Au risque de Foucault, by Dominique Franche et al. (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1997), 151–160; Daniel Defert, “‘Hétérotopie’: Tribulations d’un concept entre Venise, Berlin et Los Angeles,” postface to Le corps utopique, Les hétérotopies [The utopian body, heterotopias], by Michel Foucault (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2009), 37–61; Arun Saldanha, “Heterotopia and structuralism,” Environment and planning 40, no. 9 (2008): 2080–2096, http://www.swetswise.com; Peter Johnson, “The Geographies of Heterotopia,” Geography Compass 7 (11) (2013): 790–803. Hetherington also summarizes the history of the term; his priority is analyzing changes in “social ordering” and their significance, in the eighteenth century, for the emergence of modernity. As Hetherington stresses, heterotopia “can be textual sites just as much as geographical ones . . . they bring together heterogenous collections of unusual things without allowing them a unity or order established through resemblance.” Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (London: Routledge, 1997), 43. See also Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Michel Dehaene, and Lieven De Cauter, “Heterotopia in a Postcivil Society,” in Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, ed. Michel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (London: Routledge, 2008), 3–9; James D. Faubion, “Heterotopia: An Ecology,” in Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, ed. Michel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (London: Routledge, 2008), 31–39; Benjamin Genocchio, “Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference: The Question of ‘Other’ Spaces,” in Postmodern Cities and Spaces, ed. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 35–46; Vincenzo Guarrasi, “Paradoxes of Modern and Postmodern Geography: Heterotopia of Landscape and Cartographic Logic,” in Postmodern Geography: Theory and Praxis, ed. Claudio Minca (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 226–237; Johnson, “Brief History”; Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies (London: Verso, 1989); and G. Teyssot, “Heterotopias and the History of Spaces,” Architecture and Urbanism 121 (1980): 79–100. See Genocchio, “Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference,” for a negative analysis of heterotopia.

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of animals in Luis Borges’s fiction, which caused “the laugh that shakes . . . all the familiarities of thought.”50 At this juncture, Foucault conceives of heterotopia as a property of language that can detach cultural codes from their relations of power by making visible the contingency and variability of accepted truths. Whereas utopias provide “consolation” through idealizing fabula, heterotopias unsettle the grounds of such myths, “desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks” (Order, xviii, 10). Constituting a “median region” between “the already ‘encoded’ eye” of common knowledge and the “reflexive knowledge” of science and philosophy, heterotopias manifest the raw experience of order as such, in “the non-place” of language (Order, xxi, xvii, 12–13).51 By December 1966, however, during a radio broadcast on France-Culture, Foucault reformulates heterotopia to mean actual spaces, counter-emplacements rather than counter-discourses: sites that represent, contest, or invert all others (EWF, 2:178). Again, heterotopias work to destabilize the grounds of established order, but do so now by juxtaposing several spaces and times in a single location. The concept has become so malleable as to include a parental bed that children happily invade at playtime as well as a garden or a cemetery; a theatre, a cinema, a sauna, but also a prison and an asylum. The list is almost as incongruous as that of Borges, yet heterotopia is to be the object of a new science, Foucault insists: heterotopology. Addressing the Architectural Studies Circle three months later, he refuses the status of science for heterotopology but maintains the importance of such a “systematic description” of different spaces that instantiate a “contestation, both mythical and real, of the space in which we live” (EWF, 2:179). Between heterotopias (“absolutely other emplacements”) and utopias, Foucault posits the mixed and median spatial experience of the mirror. In a surprisingly Bachelardian gesture, Foucault describes the mirror as being both utopic (a virtual place “that gives me my own visibility”) and heterotopic (an actual place that affects a return to my position and forces me to reflect on its conditions) (EWF, 2:179).52 Just as Borges’s list destabilizes the grounds and syntax of thought, the mirror troubles the experience of space (and thought and subjectivity). This overly general concept of heterotopia, one which uneasily straddles epistemology, phenomenology, and empiricism, then disappears from Foucault’s 50 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1971), xv (mod. trans.); hereafter, Order. Zhang, From Comparison to World Literature, notes that Borges exoticizes the “Chinese Encyclopedia,” which Foucault does not question. 51 Codes and essences are superseded in the 1970s by the historicized “power-knowledge.” 52 For the use of mirrors to trouble identities in Woolf ’s Between the Acts and Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table, see below.

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texts; even when analyzing the prison, the term heterotopia is never used. Yet its main characteristics (spatio-temporal distribution, visibility, contesting and transformational processes) continued to shape his historically specific philosophical investigations. One could argue, for example, that The Order of Things performs a heterotopic critique of the human sciences—or that Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table performs a heterotopic critique of the bildungsroman genre and the story of consolidating a masculine identity it was designed to reinscribe and circulate. Ondaatje’s novel allows us to illustrate and expand Foucault’s initial sketch of heterotopias as particular arrangements of space and time, with specific modes of access, and two primary functions. It also allows us to demonstrate, at the outset, how a Foucauldian concept is fleshed out in a novel, to provide the reader with affective, cognitive, and emotional experiences of its impact—in other words, how these texts are transgredient. First, Foucault insists, a heterotopia juxtaposes in a singular, actual space several places that ordinarily should be separate. A ship is the heterotopia par excellence for Foucault: a “piece of floating space, a place without place, living by itself, closed onto itself, free in a way, but fatally delivered to the infinity of the sea. . . . [The ship] has been simultaneously the greatest economic instrument and our greatest reserve of imagination.”53 In The Cat’s Table, eleven-year-old Michael is shipped off, like a parcel, from Ceylon to England, to rejoin the mother who left him behind. In 1954, the Oronsay is a luxury liner at the height of its glory, “better lit than any town” in his country.54 Michael’s floating “castle” (TCT, 6) juxtaposes and correlates multiple heterogeneous zones and figures: Sir Hector de Silva, the knight ensconced with his entourage in a palatial suite in Emperor Class, and the convict Niemeyer chained in his small jail, and his guards; elaborate costume balls in first class and performances on deck by a “small rural [Indian] circus” (TCT, 180); a secret garden in the hold, awash in color, fragrance, and poison;55 films about imperial

53 Michel Foucault, Le corps utopique, Les hétérotopies [The utopian body, heterotopias] (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2009), 36 (hereafter, Corps). See Casarino, Modernity at Sea. See also Victoria Burrows, “The Heterotopic Spaces of Postcolonial Trauma in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” Studies in the Novel 40, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2008): 161–177. 54 Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2011), 4 (hereafter, TCT). For an illustrated history of the SS Oronsay, an Oriental Line vessel (1951–1975), see “R.M.S. Oronsay,” https://ssmaritime.com/ssOronsay.htm. 55 For a discussion of floating gardens in selected world literature texts, see Carmen Concilio, “Floating/Travelling Gardens of (Post)colonial Time,” Le Simplegadi 15, no. 17 (November 2017): 162–172. For a discussion of memory in TCT, see Laura Savu Walker, “Rites of Passage: Moving Hearts and Transforming Memories in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 45, no. 1 (2014): 35–57.

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desert adventures; cut-throat bridge games, sports tournaments, and lecture series; scholars and spies, musicians who have “hit the skids” and pickpockets on the prowl (TCT, 8); the officers and privileged few enjoying the Captain’s table and a rag-tag, international group of adults and three boys assigned to the Cat’s Table (invented by Miss Lasqueti, the phrase denotes the least privileged place and alludes to the expression “even a cat can look at a king”).56 Second, Foucault explains that heterotopias accommodate several temporal planes, multiple times in relative simultaneity. Such heterochronic capaciousness marks Michael’s journey from East to West, across international time zones towards Greenwich Mean Time. The narrative constantly shifts backwards and forwards in time: the “now” of the voyage is interspliced with scenes from the past in Ceylon, anticipations of arrival in England, flashforwards to adolescence and adulthood. (Ondaatje’s reader has seen this ship’s fictional future before: in Anil’s Ghost, a book probing the Sri Lankan civil war from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, the Oronsay has become a landlocked vermin-infested makeshift laboratory.) Access to a heterotopia is controlled, Foucault maintains. Michael is consigned to the Oronsay unwillingly. For the boy and his friends, permission to leave the ship while it is docked is hard to come by (Emily de Saram and Lasqueti must disguise themselves as men to disembark at Aden); the desperate prisoner, still in chains, can only escape by jumping overboard. Finally, heterotopias either compensate for the chaotic spaces of everyday life by offering a meticulously planned layout and organization, or provide an illusory environment that denounces as even more illusory all real spaces, all the emplacements into which human life is partitioned (EWF, 2:184).57 The Oronsay does both: spaces strictly controlled along economic and cultural lines are continuously transgressed by Michael and his friends, “the Oronsay tribe—irresponsible and wiolent” (TCT, 61). Creeping along “narrow struts above the false ceiling of the ballroom” (TCT, 61) or crouching in lifeboats with the loot that they pirate from first class, the boys’ activities belie the ship’s carefully enforced decorum yet do so according to colonial scripts fed to them at school.58 But heterotopic world fiction does more than present vivid contestatory spaces. Our book argues that texts by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje provide 56 See Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps, “Becoming Pluricultural in Ondaatje’s Oronsay,” in Pluri-Culture and Migrant Writings, ed. Elizabeth Sabiston and Robert Drummond (Sudbury: Laurentian University, 2014), 383–394. 57 See also Corps, 34, and no. 360, Dits, 4:761. 58 Similarly, Elizabeth Dalloway imagines herself a pirate atop a London bus—but returns home dutifully to attend her mother’s party (see below).

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the means for the reader to know differently through three crucial processes that we identify as key for heterotopias to exist: disposition, distraction, and dislocation. Disposition (dispose to transpose). A ship organizes, disposes all other spaces to transpose them onto a mobile place. The Oronsay’s disposition of spaces, passengers, and activities transposes the boy from his homeland—his familiar cultural environment—to an alien, manifold adult world.59 Simultaneously, the reader experiences multiple, clashing grids of intelligibility: the child’s limited, sometimes fearful, adventures in a world of adults from several classes, professions, religions, races, nationalities, and gendered habits; the mature narrator’s tactical deployment and withholding of information; the significance of the 1950s journey from a twenty-first-century perspective.60 Transposing the reader onto constantly shifting epistemological grounds shakes the foundations of the coming of age story. In The Cat’s Table, the boy begins his voyage unmarked, new, as “green as he could be about the world” (TCT, 3)—or so states the dissembling narrator, who invites the reader to “try to imagine who the boy on the ship was. Perhaps a sense of self was not even there . . . as if he has been smuggled away accidentally, with no knowledge of the act, into the future” (TCT, 4). Yet soon the reader knows otherwise. As the narrative exposes, Michael is the product of middle-class parents who neglect and abandon him to the care of servants, who in turn introduce him to the rich and varied textures of the island and their ethnic community. These “essential and affectionate guides” encourage Michael to “question the world [he] supposedly belonged to. They opened doors for [him] into another world” (TCT, 55). At school, he is subjected to the colonizing forces of imperialist education, examined, judged, and classified on his knowledge of “pounds and shillings,” “how many men were on the Oxford rowing team and who had lived at a place called Dove Cottage” (TCT, 39–40)—and he is punished and caned for the slightest failing or infraction (TCT, 13). At play, commonplace ideas of masculinity and character are instilled by Boy’s Own adventure books and his cousin Emily’s record collection (TCT, 6, 11). Thus, up until the oceanic journey, his subjectivity is compartmentalized, managed,

59 For a discussion of Mynah/Michael as a “third culture kid,” see Antje M. Rauwerda, “Third Culture Time and Place: Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table,” Mosaic 49, no. 3 (September 2016): 39–53. For a discussion of liminality and post-colonial persona, see Alaa Alghamdi, “Navigating Transition: Freedom, Limitation and the Post-colonial Persona in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table,” Transnational Literature 5, no. 1 (2012), http://fhrc.flinders.edu. au/transnational/home.html. 60 Michael’s voyage takes place two years before the variously known 1956 “Suez Crisis” (the second Arab-Israeli war, the Tripartite Aggression, the Sinai War).

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“trained” into a carefully governed docility and “cautiousness” (TCT, 12, 10). Within the heterotopic space of the Oronsay, however, “there was the chance to escape all order” for the youth determined to “do at least one thing that was forbidden” each day (TCT, 25). As the narrator reveals, “I reinvented myself in this seemingly imaginary world” (TCT, 13). Nonetheless, “We were never sure of what we were witnessing, so that our minds were half grabbing the rigging of adult possibility” (TCT, 52). Why would a man silently “move the strap” of a woman’s dress or quietly slit the throat of a tailor? (TCT, 52, 236). The heterotopic voyage transposes and alters the bildungsroman through artfully arranged narrative clashes. Distraction (distract to transact). By removing subjects from their normal habitus, heterotopias allow transactions with multifarious systems of thought. The boy’s normal development is distracted by the ship crossing, in both senses of the verb: the heterotopic experience disrupts his settled sense of identity and derails his projected future by exposing him to alternative ways of life. Happily, willfully, the boys grab hold of every opportunity to embrace the pleasures of knowing, diving into what Bakhtin terms heteroglossia, the irreducible diversity of discursive practices. Mr. Fonseka, who will soon be teaching literature and history to schoolboys in the industrial north of that other island, England, shares his transnational literacy with the boys: “his manner and accent were a product of the island, but at the same time he had this wide-ranging knowledge of books” (TCT, 58). With a surname that recalls both the famous contemporary Ceylonese essayist and a Spanish students’ ballad, “He’d sing a song from the Azores or recite lines from an Irish play” by heart (TCT, 58).61 Miss Lasqueti is “the only one from the Cat’s Table who was able to force us out of ourselves in order to imagine another’s life” (TCT, 74). Mr. Mazappa, “half Sicilian, half something else” (TCT, 29), lavishes stories of love and duels, and regales them “with confusing and often obscene lyrics from songs he knew” (TCT, 9)—then abruptly, without explanation, jumps ship at Port Said. But heterotopias are not utopias. Mazappa’s lessons about the “formal and luxurious tone of a clarinet” or a “surprising and fatal rhyme” also carry lessons in misogyny that go unchallenged and remain “hidden in us like a stone-hard truth” (TCT, 32, 30). When Flavia Prins, the friend of a friend who “promised to keep an eye on” Michael, summons him to the First Class lounge and tells him what to wear for the occasion,

61 Joseph Peter de Fonseka (1897–1948), a Sri Lankan lawyer and writer, produced humorous, incisive essays in the style of his friends G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc (Fonseka was also a Catholic apologist). The folk song laments: “Sad and alone, / Alone remains Fonseca. / Sad and tearful / Remains the University, / And the books, / And the books that we pawned.”

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she is literally teaching him to know his place (TCT, 7). When Baron C. feeds him cakes and delicious tea, it is to lure him into thievery—however goodnatured the game of slipping into cabins is made to seem. When Larry Daniels the botanist guides them through “the hollow and mysterious world of the hold” to experience the garden’s “field of colours” (TCT, 173, 47), he introduces them to the wonders and the dangers of plants, supplying them with betel, the mild narcotic popular in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia that soon inspires new adventures. It is Mr. Nevil, however, the “large and gentle” engineer and ship dismantler, who teaches Michael (and the reader) the vital lesson that “nothing [is] permanent, not even an ocean liner,” yet “anything can have a new life, be reborn. . . . You take that older life and you link it to a stranger” (TCT, 72). The reader’s estrangement from familiar realist reading practices is made possible by the concatenation of such heterotopic transactions. Dislocation (dislocate to transit). Heterotopias dislocate systems of established truths in order to reveal their contingency and transience. Shipboard experiences teach Michael and his two friends, Cassius and Ramadhin, how powerknowledge relations flow and can be reversed: they are disciplined by the captain, exploited by a thief, mentored by a spy, a scholar, and a musician, and they respond variously, breaking as many rules as possible, at times with devastating effects (the dog they smuggle onboard attacks and kills Sir Hector de Silva). Of the three friends, however, only Michael is able to use these dislocating experiences to transit into an outsider’s life. Through the children, the narrative stages three different stances towards identity, each temporally marked: stasis (locked in the present), melancholic nostalgia (turned towards the past), and becoming other (directed towards the future). Seemingly the most transgressive, Cassius, eventually a recognized artist, never alters his youthful pose of rebel without a cause. Although he recalls his school days “with the energy of someone remembering a resistance movement,” the celebrated revolt he led (against the conditions of the lavatories) had no other impact than increasing his reputation as “one of the roughs” (TCT, 38, 145). Years later, when the school seeks his patronage, he, who had taken his act of “scorning, snorting at the pooh-bahs of art and power” on the road, telegraphs the school with the selfsame childish bravado, “FUCK YA! STRONG LETTER FOLLOWS” (TCT, 145). Even his paintings reproduce “the exact angle of vision” experienced on the Oronsay the night they travelled through the Suez Canal—as Michael realizes when he sees them in a London gallery and thinks, “I was back on the railing, watching, which was where Cassius was emotionally, when he was doing these paintings” (TCT, 132). Ramadhin, on the other hand, can never be other than “that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne” (TCT, 139).

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Never able to move on from the country and identity he left behind, as an adult he remains with his parents in a house in London’s Sri Lankan expatriate neighborhood. He becomes obsessed with one of his students—displaced even in his affections—and eventually succumbs to his long-suffering weak heart in his early thirties. Until the end, Ramadhin will have been one of the “many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place” (TCT, 139). Michael’s choice of constantly striving to become other is not easy. At eleven, he is obsessed with the safety and security provided by governmentality—for him, for the ship, for everyone. “Are we safe? . . . are we all right?” he keeps asking adults. His sense of insecurity intensifies after he and Cassius endure the full force of a cyclone while tied precariously to the ship’s deck (like Odysseus) and he realizes that, “What we had witnessed was only what had been above the sea. Now something shook itself free and came into my mind. It was not only the things we could see that had no safety. There was the underneath” (TCT, 97). As an adolescent in London, he stays close to Ramadhin and his family, finding pleasure in the familiar, even marrying Massi, Ramadhin’s sister, after his friend’s death. It is only when the marriage fails that Michael finally abandons a fixed or substantial identity. Instead, he chooses to be a writer at “various Cat’s Tables” throughout his life, learning from strangers “who would alter” him (TCT, 196), and surprised to find that one of them is himself. Narrative dislocations of time, space, and subjectivity demonstrate to the reader the vital need to abandon security, sameness, repetition, and other such “sure destinations” of being through identification (TCT, 243). This autobiographical world fiction is not written to confirm a specified present, but to enable a series of unmapped futures. The bildungsroman is dismantled into episodic experiences that enfold sensations and emotions only to “give them a new role and purpose” (TCT, 253)—neither rebellious stasis nor melancholic nostalgia but self-elaboration in the practice of freedom, the difficult and always unfinished biopoetic process of becoming. Thus Ondaatje’s heterotopic world fiction enacts the lesson of Hugh of St. Victor with which Erich Auerbach concludes his famous essay “Philologie der Weltliteratur” [Philology of world literature]: “He who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his homeland is yet stronger; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is a place of exile.”62 This brief analysis of Foucault’s concept as it is imagined and embodied in Ondaatje’s fiction both demonstrates the transgredience existing between 62 Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur” (1969), rpt. in The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present, ed. David Damrosch et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 138.

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these texts and illustrates how the three heterotopic processes we identify (disposition, transposition, dislocation) perform a critique of biopolitics and elicit biopoetic virtualities.

Object: Heterotopic World Fiction as Critique In the 1978 lecture entitled “What is Critique?,” Foucault defines the process of inquiry through a dialogic encounter with Immanuel Kant’s “Was ist Aufklärung?” [What is Enlightenment, 1784] and attempts by Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt school to rescue the promise of Reason.63 Kant had used critique to establish the limits of reason, and endorsed a fundamental “gap” between knowledge and power (“Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, but obey” [PT, 10]).64 Foucault refuses this gap (with his notion of powerknowledge) and insists that critique’s discernment of limits should lead to their transgression and transformation, through what he calls “voluntary insubordination” or “reflective indocility” (PT, 32; mod. trans.). For Foucault (and as we demonstrate, for Woolf and Ondaatje), to engage in critique is to bring a certain diagnostic attitude to bear on present life—towards what can be thought, spoken, or done; it presupposes an ethics that goes beyond the correction of errors to constitute a dialogic “instrument, a means for a future or a truth that it will not know and that it will not be” (PT, 25; mod. trans.). In practical terms, how does critique function? Not by separating legitimate from ill-founded rationalities, but rather by a historico-philosophical practice of eventalization.65 With this admittedly terrible neologism, Foucault counters the progressive (and colonialist) telos of Enlightenment (and its attempted recuperation by Habermas and the Frankfurt School) to argue that one should study any system of thought or form of identification (madness, delinquency, sexuality) only as a historically determined event, a “singularity” sustained by 63 Foucault jokingly referred to Kant’s brief newspaper essay as his “fetish text.” See PT, especially “What is Critique?” (1978) and “What is Enlightenment?” (1984). 64 As Foucault outlines, Kant assumes a “contract of rational despotism with free reason” (PT, 110); the free use of reason in the public sphere is the best means to ensure obedience to the sovereign and the state, who in turn should respect political principles based on universal reason. 65 Translating événementialisation as “eventualization” in PT implies a fateful or chronological development (eventual) absent from Foucault’s neologism (literally translated here). See MarieChristine Granjon, ed., Penser avec Michel Foucault. Théorie critique et pratiques politiques [Thinking with Michel Foucault: Critical theory and political practices] (Paris: Karthala, 2005), on Foucault’s historico-critical method.

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a nexus of elements of knowledge and mechanisms of coercion that renders it intelligible and acceptable.66 Foucault discerns three methods of approach: archaeological, genealogical, and strategic. The archaeological facet of critique provides a grid of intelligibility whereby the event’s commonplace acceptability is situated within an understanding of the power-knowledge relations that make it so. This, we argue, corresponds to the heterotopic process of disposition (dispose to transpose): heterotopias, like critique, shake the familiar to make the visible, visible. Genealogical analysis considers not only the historical necessity of events but also their unstable, aleatory qualities; it examines the factors that could have altered them, or perhaps prevented them from happening: “The identification of the acceptability of a system cannot be dissociated from identifying what made it difficult to accept: its arbitrary nature in terms of knowledge, its violence in terms of power, in short its energy” (PT, 54). Genealogy neither searches for a primary origin nor operates “according to any principle of closure” along the lines of hierarchical and integrated cause-and-effect relations (PT, 57). Instead, it works “within the field of immanence of pure singularities” to locate the complex, mobile, and conflicting forces of which the event is an effect, not a product (PT, 55). This corresponds to the second heterotopic process, distraction (distract to transact): removing from the expected paths of development, from the predictable and verisimilar, to interact with other discursive practices, past, present, and future. Thirdly, the critic must account for how this “game of interactions” on multiple planes is performed by various “subjects, types of behavior, decisions, and choices” (PT, 57), through a facet of critique Foucault terms strategics, the mapping of a “complex interplay between what replicates the same process and what transforms it” (PT, 58). Strategics ensure that interactions never “appear to be primary or absolutely totalizing” (PT, 58); thus denaturalized, disentangled from unwarranted claims of universality, relations among individuals and groups appear in their immanence as fluid historical variances and contingencies. This corresponds to the heterotopic process of dislocation (dislocate to transit): biopolitical norms fostering the life and security of families, governments, and nations are dislocated to reveal the transit of power among conflicting factions and the freedom to intervene, or agency, made possible by such interactions. Foucault insists that archaeology, genealogy, and 66 See Samantha Ashenden and David Owen, eds., Foucault contra Habermas. Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory (London: Sage, 1999); Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, eds., Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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strategics are “necessarily contemporaneous dimensions in the same analysis” (PT, 59), rather than three different stages of a developmental analytical process. Heterotopic world fiction enacts its critique similarly, as we will demonstrate. Our comparative juxtapositions and dialogical encounters reveal how texts by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje deploy such tactics to counter biopolitics and elaborate biopoetics.

Biopolitics and Biopoetics at Work, at a Glance The urgency of governmental action is never more obvious than in times of crisis. Before tracing dialogical relations among various heterotopic world fictions, a summary of watershed events provoked by the licit or illicit transmission of knowledge can serve to illustrate its deadly force when wielded by the state. A critical point in the consolidation of biopolitics in Western Europe occurred in the 1890s with the trials of Alfred Dreyfus and Oscar Wilde, when the urgent need for the conduct of conduct became headline news, internationally. These cases, which examined, criminalized, and destroyed the lives of two prominent citizens, show how common everyday behaviors can be used strategically to fortify the impact of biopolitics. As convictions for treason or same-sex intercourse were relatively frequent, why were these trials infamous, and how can their cases continue to matter?67 Convicting the affluent, German-speaking Jewish French military officer of treason (for passing information to the German military) and the celebrated Irish playwright of “gross indecency”68 provoked transnational debates during which the forces of the state, the law, the media, and public opinion were marshalled in order to 67 Convicted of treason on trumped-up charges in October 1894, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island (then French Guiana). Public protests, including Émile Zola’s open letter “J’accuse” ( January 13, 1898), led to a second trial in 1899. Found guilty again but with “extenuating circumstances,” Dreyfus was subsequently pardoned, and finally exonerated in 1906. The military reluctantly recognized Dreyfus’s innocence in 1995. Ireland decriminalized homosexuality in 1993, the final chapter in Wilde’s case. See MarieChristine Leps, “Normal Deviance: The Dreyfus Affair,” Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 61 (April 2005): 287–301; Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps, “A ‘Complex, Multiform Creature’ No More: Governmentality Getting Wilde,” College Literature 35, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 96–119. 68 For trial transcripts, see Merlin Holland, ed., Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate, 2003). See Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Michael S. Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); and Matthew Sturgis, Oscar: A Life (London: Head of Zeus, 2018).

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secure varied yet integrated goals—common decency, class stability, national integrity, racial purity—realized in part by the vigilant exclusion of nowvisible minorities. In both cases, the survival of the nation and its “race” were at stake. Years of torment on Devil’s Island and in Reading Gaol were apparently justified by what Julien Benda identified in 1899 as “at heart, a biological war,” for it was in “the physiological complexion of the individual that we must seek the ultimate cause of one’s attitude regarding the Affair.”69 Positions taken for or against Dreyfus by emerging groups such as feminists, trade unionists, antisemites, and the revolutionary right had enormous and enduring impacts, for they both dissolved existing coalitions and determined the Left/Right opposition that would dominate subsequent French parliamentary politics;70 these new alliances in turn made possible the 1905 separation of Church and State; Émile Zola’s trials, caused by his public accusations against the state, the judiciary, and the military for falsely persecuting Dreyfus, led to the formation of La ligue des droits de l’homme (The League of the Rights of Man, 1898) as well as the opposing Ligue de la patrie française (League of the French Homeland, 1899); seeing Dreyfus ceremoniously stripped of all military insignia convinced Theodor Herzl of the necessity of Zionism.71 Wilde’s three trials between April 3 and May 25, 1895 iterate the emergence of the homosexual in late-Victorian culture as a sub-species (the object of scientific discourse), as a mode of being (to be rejected), and as a public outcast (beyond the pale of decency and manners). Wilde began the proceedings by suing his lover’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, for publicly identifying him as a “sodomite”; the libel was found to be true, and Queensberry, not guilty. Less than seven hours later, Wilde was charged under the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885, which targeted male-male immorality (“gross indecency” rather than sodomy); that trial, during which Wilde swayed the jury with his defense of “the love that dare not speak its name,” resulted in a hung jury. The third trial finally produced the sought-for conviction and maximum sentence. Through this process, Wilde was transformed: 69 Julien Benda, “L’affaire Dreyfus et le principe d’autorité” [The Dreyfus affair and the principle of authority], La Revue blanche 20 (1899): 195. See Christopher E. Forth, “Intellectuals, Crowds and the Body Politics of the Dreyfus Affair,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 24, no. 1 (1998): 63–91; and N. L. Kleeblatt, ed., The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 70 Léon Blum, Souvenirs sur l’affaire [Remembrances of the affair] (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), 105–109. See S. R. Sulieman, “The Literary Significance of the Dreyfus Affair,” in The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, Justice, ed. N. L. Kleeblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 71 Herzl (1860–1904) established the Zionist Organization in 1897; see Jean-Denis Bredin, L’affaire (Paris: Julliard, 1983).

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from the respectable married man and father who also engaged in multiple same-sex relations that had to be denied and kept secret to the self-avowed “Infamous St. Oscar of Oxford, Poet and Martyr,” imprisoned and then exiled for the cause of homosexuals and their rights. In March 1898 he declared: “Yes: I have no doubt we shall win, but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms. Nothing but the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act would do any good.”72 Private sexual acts between men were not decriminalized in England and Wales until 1967; in the Republic of Ireland, 1993. They remain illegal in dozens of countries, with sentences up to and including death—biopolitics and thanatopolitics (government through death and fear of death) are always intertwined. Further consolidation of biopolitics was realized by the development of information technologies required by espionage activities during and after World War II.73 (Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Warlight fictionalize such activities; see below.) For the first time, the gathering and computation of data necessary for the government of life became possible in practice to a degree previously unattainable. As Foucault summarizes, “In seeing to health and supplies, [governmentality] deals with the preservation of life; concerning trade, factories, workers, the poor, and public order—it deals with the conveniences of life. In seeing to the theatre, literature, entertainment, its object is life’s pleasures” (EWF, 3:321). The effects of this power are double-edged, for by cultivating the lives of the one and the many, welfare states strengthen their own (EWF, 3:322). Expanding surveillance mechanisms have made dreams of policing the entire mesh of personal, regional, national, and international relations technically feasible, and, thanks to the War on Terror, mostly legal.74

72 Rupert Hart-Davis and Merlin Holland, eds., The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 1044. 73 Alan Turing’s contributions to Britain’s war-time efforts to crack the German high command’s cypher codes eventually led to his design of the Automatic Computing Engine, which became a prototype for the digital computer. When the mathematician was found guilty of “gross indecency” in 1952, under the same Labouchere Amendment used against Wilde, Turing chose a twelve-month hormonal “treatment” (chemical castration) rather than imprisonment. He died of cyanide poisoning in 1954. Because of the Official Secrets Act, his exceptional accomplishments went unrecognized for more than fifty years, but his conviction and punishment were public knowledge. After an internet campaign, Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered a public apology in 2009; another e-petition led to a 2014 pardon by Queen Elizabeth II. The 2017 British statute that retroactively pardons men prosecuted for homosexual acts is informally known as the “Alan Turing law.” 74 For a discussion of surveillance enabled by the War on Terror, see Marie-Christine Leps, “Terror-Time in Network-Centric Battlespace: DeLillo’s Later Fiction,” Canadian Review of American Studies 45, no. 3 (Winter 2015): 400–429. Internationally, current battles over the

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Biopolitics and thanatopolitics are always enmeshed, and our analyses show how texts by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje not only critique the necessary connection between biopolitics and war but demonstrate how peace is war by other means. In order to apprehend biopolitics as a global, ongoing process, these texts extend their sightlines in space and time: from the “Wild West” in the United States to Guatemala and Japan and China and Sri Lanka and India and Libya and Egypt and Germany and Italy and so on. Produced in metropoles (London, Paris) and former colonies, both exploitative and settler (Colombo, Toronto), these texts position themselves in networks of others: from Gilgamesh, Herodotus’s Histories, and tales of Diogenes the Cynic to the Granth Sahib and the book of Isaiah; stories of Savitra and Judith Shakespeare and Herculine Barbin; Stendhal, H. G. Wells, Jane Harrison, Henri Matisse, Vanessa Bell, and Fats Waller. Biopoetics is a term that Foucault used only once, in a manuscript footnote for his January 14, 1981 lecture,75 to define “technologies of the self,” the effortful “fabrication of one’s own life” in opposition to biopolitical normalizations that lead to the recognition of “ourselves as a society, as a part of a social entity, as a part of a nation or of a state.”76 In his lectures on Subjectivity and Truth (1980– 1981), he exemplifies this distinction through the problematic of sexuality: whereas biopolitics regulate sexual behaviors in accordance with the perceived needs of the population (the Wilde trials), biopoetics is concerned with the aesthetico-ethical relations that animate one’s manner of becoming (the many stylized lives of Oscar Wilde before the trials). Our book expands the term to encompass the theoretical and methodological tools forged by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje to allow the writer and the reader to think and become otherwise. Their biopoetics function transversally: philosophically, to interrogate and represent possibilities of self-fashioning; aesthetically, to provide transformative “experience-books”; politically, to imagine the present differently and actualize

storing and mining of big data through social media in China, Hong Kong, and the United States, for example, illustrate the reach of biopolitical forces into daily life. 75 The note on biopoetics appears in Michel Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980–1981, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 34 (hereafter, ST). See Brett Cooke and Frederick Turner, Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1999), for a socio-biological approach to biopoetics, and Julieta Yelin, “From Biopolitics to Biopoetics: A Hypothesis on the Relationship between Life and Writing,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 20, no. 4 (2018): 1–9, http:// docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol20/iss4/5, for an approach to the autopoietic work in relation to intimacy and animality. 76 Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin et al. (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 146 (hereafter, TS).

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virtualities hidden or suppressed by totalizing systems of thought. Thus, their world fiction intervenes in the politics of truth to transform practices of subjectivity and to establish different kinds of worldly communities—not groups that consolidate a shared identity, or claim universality, but rather “‘deindividualize’ diverse assemblages by means of multiplication and displacement.” As Foucault maintains, “The group must not be the organic link that unites hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of deindividualization” (EWF, 3:109; no. 189, Dits, 3:136).

Outline Our study of heterotopic world fiction has two parts: “Biopolitics: Technologies of the Individual” analyzes the heterotopic critique of biopolitics realized in texts by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje, while “Biopoetics: Technologies of the Worldly Self ” examines the deployment of biopoetic concepts and methods to develop agency and engage the writer and reader in practices of freedom. Part I studies Discipline and Punish, Mrs. Dalloway, and In the Skin of a Lion in turn, using the three methods of heterotopic critique for each text. To clarify and historicize the concept of biopolitics, it begins with an analysis of the series of theoretical and methodological shifts that led Foucault, during the 1970s, first to articulate domains of knowledge to relations of power, and then to use powerknowledge matrices to study the genealogy and coming to dominance of a disciplinary mode for the exercise of power, one in which “the soul is the prison of the body” (DP, 30). Lectures at the Collège de France, essays, newspaper articles, and activism with the Groupe Information Prison provide the grounds, establish the objects and methods of analysis of Discipline and Punish. Yet soon after its publication, Foucault exposes the limits of his work and develops the concept of governmentality, the fostering of the life of the one and the many, as the necessary counterpart to discipline. Together these modes constitute biopolitics, which extends its reach from the singular individual to the population as a whole.77 Set on the scaffold, in the factory, the barracks, the school, the panopticon, and the penal colony, Discipline and Punish maps the disciplinary power and knowledge relations that shape a carceral society reverberating with the “roar 77 See Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and John S. Ransom, Foucault’s Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).

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of battle.”78 We examine how heterotopic processes are marshalled to situate the prison within a network of discursive practices established concurrently with the rise of industrial capitalism. Through disposition, Foucault’s fiction transposes archival materials onto systems of thought that defamiliarize truths sustaining sovereign and disciplinary modes of power. Through distraction, the text repositions the prison in a historical network of transactional relations among multiple institutions using disciplinary technologies to produce normalized behaviors. Through dislocation, Foucault’s analyses demonstrate how the strategic transit of power and knowledge between the judiciary and the penitentiary produces the non-space where delinquency emerges, a hybrid form combining law and nature, a set of profitable abnormalities in need of control. Set in post-World War I London, Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway gives an intimate portrait of these networks of relations on an ostensibly personal level, thereby completing Foucault’s institutional analyses. We demonstrate, however, that narrative techniques show transnational economic and political forces flowing through somatic singularities to normalize behaviors, ambitions, and desires until, with identities fixed by gender, class, race, and nationality, virtually all outcomes are predictable, impersonal. The text’s archaeological critique defamiliarizes normalcy to reveal its blunt force, and the depths of human suffering it creates. Its chronotopic disposition (its precise determination of the time-space dimensions shaping characters’ choices and mobility) transposes urban meanderings onto a global geopolitical stage. It demonstrates how the privilege of an upper-middleclass woman (the effect of capitalist and imperialist exploitation) is inextricably related to the suicide of a lower-middle-class, shell-shocked veteran. Through the process of distraction, the now of the unfolding narrative is spliced with past events extending across millennia that continue to reverberate in the present and shape the future. We trace how Woolf ’s genealogical critique of the various transactions among Londoners reveals their many experiences (shell-shock, religious or political fervor, thwarted ambition, madness, love, and hate) to be the material correlatives of disciplinary and governmental strategies. Finally, the narrative repeatedly stages moments when strategic flows of power are dislocated, made visible for the reader to elicit its cooperation in analysis. Unlike the characters, the reader, left stranded in a party celebrating the leaders of a glittering yet still carceral city, is enjoined to think, act, and transit differently. Looking back to the same period from the 1980s, In the Skin of a Lion switches focus and location: not upper-class patriarchal relations in imperial London but 78 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 308 (hereafter, DP).

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the struggles of working-class immigrants in Britain’s Dominion of Canada. In tunnels and tanneries, in logging camps and on bridges, the forces of transnational capitalism exploit and attack workers. Through this disposition of the conditions of the working classes, the narrative supplements and redresses archival records that exclude references to the lives and deaths of workers (exclusions that also mark Woolf ’s novel). In the Skin of a Lion performs a genealogy of Canadian multiculturalism in the 1970s and 1980s, throwing new light on that turbulent present, by foregrounding stories of early twentieth-century dissent by trade unionists and anarchists and thereby distracting the reader from the anodynes of conventional history lessons. The Canadian bildungsroman reveals that no individual or community can claim a nation built from transnational demographic, economic, political, and cultural transactions. Self-reflexively, the novel also positions its method and perspective within a world network of texts (Gilgamesh and the letters of Joseph Conrad), art (murals and Cubist paintings), and music (Italian opera and African American jazz). Finally, through a dislocating series of confrontations, struggles, and dialogical encounters of love and friendship, Patrick Lewis is transformed. Throughout, Ondaatje’s text recognizes subjugated knowledges and dismantles totalizing histories, taking the form of multiple fragments that must be assembled rather than consumed by the reader, opening up future possibilities. Whereas Woolf ’s acerbic irony exposes the violence of everyday life in polite patriarchal society, Ondaatje lionizes the working classes and endows them with a richness of emotion, physical pleasures, political commitment, and potential for change. Whereas Ondaatje’s prisoners survive incarceration and forge arresting after-lives, Foucault’s delinquents are an “institutional product” and “delinquency, solidified by a penal system centred upon the prison, thus represents a diversion of illegality for the illicit circuits of profit and power of the dominant class” (DP, 301, 280). Together, these three texts critique biopolitics from a worldly perspective, providing the reader with transformative experiences. We compare these texts through juxtapositions highlighting the transgredient nature of their perspectives. Part II, “Biopoetics: Technologies of the Worldly Self,” begins by tracing the series of shifts and displacements that led Foucault’s inquiries from biopolitics to biopoetics. We then consider four interrelated concepts marshalled by Foucault for the effortful practice of freedom in new relations to truth: parrhēsia (dangerous truth-telling), bios/logos (how to live in truth), askēsis (the elaboration of self), and the experience-book (as experimental process that alters knowledge and mobilizes the reader). Foucault elaborates these concepts in books, lectures, interviews, and several courses at the Collège de France in the early

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1980s; we investigate how in Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, and in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and The Cat’s Table, such concepts are fleshed out, embodied by characters and plotlines opposing and transforming methods of regulation and control. Their experience-books use parrhēsia and askēsis to counter the interconnected forces of patriarchy and imperialism, which remain largely absent in Foucault’s work (squarely ensconced in what Mignolo terms the “colonial matrix of power”79) yet are vital for the completion of his project of delineating agency in the practice of freedom. We then turn to biopoetic methods by returning to the three heterotopic processes examined in Part I—disposition, distraction, and dislocation—but this time with a special interest in the narrator/reader relations established through aesthetic tactics and the transformative ethical experiences they enable. The first section focuses on disposition, and examines how archives of nineteenthcentury crimes are mined to transpose the reader onto shifting epistemological grounds. “Disposing/transposing the archive” analyzes Moi, Pierre Rivière, Foucault’s dossier on the infamous murderer, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Ondaatje’s prose-poem on the gunslinging pretty-boy, and Flush: A Biography, Woolf ’s satirical account of the dognapping that empowered Elizabeth Barrett to become Mrs. Browning. These heterotopic fictions of violence irrupting into normal, everyday lives read transgression otherwise; they not only reposition but multiply subjects and objects of knowledge; they actualize possibilities of knowing differently and ask the reader to join the struggle, to play new games of truth. The following section turns to the process of distraction, and shifts from private murders to state-sanctioned, transnational murder, in novels set just before and towards the end of World War II, as well as Foucault’s analysis of the government of life in a century of genocides. We analyze how Woolf ’s Between the Acts, Ondaatje’s The English Patient, and Foucault’s La volonté de savoir [The will to know, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality] detach the reader from everyday values that inevitably lead to war, to imagine and inhabit a different future anterior. “Distracting/transacting genealogy” begins with Woolf ’s relentless satire of both the British way of life and its glorification through historical pageants. An analysis of Ondaatje’s novel then demonstrates that collective attempts at resisting normalization are often ruined or thwarted by the power relations they oppose—that warring forces prevail where gendered and racialized identities 79 Walter D. Mignolo, “On Comparison: Who is Comparing What and Why?,” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, ed. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 114.

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are cherished. Foucault’s introduction to the history of sexuality rewrites the usual tale of repression to uncover a proliferation of discourses through multiple power-knowledge matrices, which together constitute a dispositif of sexuality that cannot simply be overturned by stories of sexual liberation. Provocatively, this heterotopic fiction maintains that through sexuality, tactical interventions culminating in the government of the life of the population make racism and genocide vital, inevitable. Finally, the third section examines biopoetical experiments in life-writing that require the reader’s ethical engagement to produce meaning, shape transformative truths. “Dislocating/transiting strategics” examines textual assemblages that probe the manner and impact of living/telling the truth about oneself in volumes 2, 3, and 4 of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, as well as in lectures and interviews; in Woolf ’s Orlando and The Waves, her most radical experiments with characterization; and in Ondaatje’s autobiographical variations, Warlight, The Cat’s Table, and Running in the Family. These texts explore the birth of the modern subject of desire, from the sixteenth century to the present, all the while positioning the reader on the shaky grounds of negative theorizations: the yearning need to discover or avow one’s inner being is exposed as the great wound of biopolitical practices, to be rejected in favor of non-identitarian, collective aesthetics of becoming. Heterotopic World Fiction: Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje does not have a formal conclusion, for it would be theoretically and methodologically inconsistent to do so. Rather than ending, dialogical practices proceed elsewhere, carried by worldly, aesthetico-political networks. Although texts by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje extend to four continents and four millennia, our book focuses on what Galin Tihanov would term a particular zone of world literature: the United Kingdom, France, and two of their former colonies, Canada and Sri Lanka. (Future work on post-World War II biopolitics and biopoetics could focus on other zones, other heterotopias: for example, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Irina Ratushinskaya and the Soviet gulags; Gao Xingjian and Ma Jian and Tiananmen Square; Ben Rawlence and the Dadaab refugee camps or Sophie Ansel and Kutupalong; Malala Yousafzai and educational institutions.) Thus, our study attends to “the interaction between historically shifting and zonally organized participants, whose outreach to other zones proceeds at different paces.”80 We outline the shape and dimensions of

80 Galin Tihanov, “The Location of World Literature,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 44, no. 3 (September 2017), 473. Similarly, Spivak advocates the articulation of comparative literature with area studies in order to approach literature in terms of zones. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

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heterotopic world fiction, trace its methods and objects, as well as its politics and ambitions. Scholars of world literature, Tihanov argues, define their object in one of three ways: as a network of texts (catalyzed by globalization, the book trade, canon formation), as a prismatic mode of reading, or as “an intellectual discourse with clear ideological subtexts, frequently liberal and cosmopolitan.”81 To this triumvirate Tihanov adds a fourth, more concrete grid of intelligibility, based on the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope. Our work considers a network of texts; it constitutes a mode of reading discourses that emphasizes textual tactics and formal characteristics; it engages with intellectual discourses on biopolitics in order to define and explore a chronotope that fosters a slant, biopoetic perspective that is feminist, materialist, anti-racist, and anti-war—heterotopic world fiction.

See also Weigui Fang, ed., Tensions in World Literature: Between the Local and the Universal (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 81 Tihanov, “The Location of World Literature,” 468.

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Par t I

BIOPOLITICS: TECHNOLOGIES OF THE INDIVIDUAL

Part I focuses on three texts to demonstrate how heterotopic world fiction counters biopolitics. Each text is analyzed from the perspective of the processes defined in the Introduction and correlated to components of Foucault’s critique: disposition (dispose to transpose; archaeology), distraction (distract to transact; genealogy), and dislocation (dislocate to transit; strategics). We begin with an overview of the activism, research, and teaching that generated Foucault’s theorization of biopolitics, then analyze Discipline and Punish. Turning to Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway and Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, two novels that transgrediently portray the power-knowledge relations that produce docile bodies in war and in peace, reverses the gaze and makes visible biopolitics from below.

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Correlating Knowledge and Power Relations: The Birth of Biopolitics Foucault elaborates the concepts of discipline and governmentality (biopolitics) during the 1970s, when prisoner insurrections, hunger strikes, and suicides were flaring up in Europe and North America.1 Some of the French uprisings were directly related to activities by the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (Group for Information on Prisons, GIP), which was co-founded by Foucault, Jean-Marie Domenach, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet in 1971, and included a wide range of participants, from physicians, lawyers, and journalists, to prison and social workers, philosophers and families of inmates. The GIP strove to open communications between inmates and the general public because, in sociologist Daniel Defert’s words, “Information is a struggle. This also meant that obtaining information from detainees—where the law, discipline, and secrecy forbade it the most—was to accredit the veracity of their speech and, finally, to give the status of an event to their speech” (Groupe, 324). Initially, family members and friends waiting in line to visit their loved ones were approached by Foucault and his GIP colleagues and asked to smuggle in questionnaires to establish firsthand from inmates their actual living conditions and grievances—answers to be sent to Foucault’s home.2 Press conferences were organized to publicize the results and convey the precariousness of life behind bars. Conversely, the GIP won the right to provide inmates with newspapers. Access to information meant that French inmates now knew about prison uprisings in North America and Italy, and grasped the transnational political nature of their immediate, day-to-day struggles. Public demonstrations led to the detainment of many participants, including Foucault.3 In a piece of political theatre that Ondaatje’s Alice Gull, from Skin of a Lion, would have appreciated, Ariane Mnouchkine (of the Théâtre du Soleil [Theatre of the Sun]), Foucault, and 1 A partial list of prison uprisings would include: in France (1970–1972)—Paris, Toulouse, Aixen-Provence, Grenoble, Clairvaux, Ney de Toul, Amiens, Loos-lès-Lille, Fleury-Mérogis, Nancy, Dijon, Nice, Saverne, Melun; in Italy (1969–1972)—Torino, Milano, Monza, Treviso, Napoli, Genoa, Trieste; in North America (1971)—in Attica, San Quentin, Rahway, and Kingston penitentiaries. See Le Groupe d’Information sur les prisons: Archives d’une lutte, 1970–1972 [Group for Information on Prisons: Archives of a struggle, 1970–1972], ed. Philippe Artières et al. (Paris: IMEC, 2003), 91–104, 105–124, 327–341 (hereafter, Groupe; our trans. throughout). 2 A completed questionnaire and prisoners’ letters are reproduced in Groupe, 45, 55–62, 64. 3 In an interview, Foucault established the following timeline: “In December 1971, that is two months after Clairvaux, two and a half months after Attica, four months after the authorization of newspapers, one year after the foundation of the GIP, a revolt exploded at Toul [prison], the likes of which had not been seen since the XIXth century: an entire prison revolts, prisoners climb to the roofs, they throw down tracts, deploy banners, call out through megaphones and explain what they want” (no. 125, Dits, 2:427).

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Gilles Deleuze co-produced a short play that reenacted the trial of Nancy prison revolt leaders, with Foucault and Deleuze playing the cops—a carnivalesque inversion of Enlightenment “theatres of punishment” imagined by reformers to inspire submission to the law (Groupe, 237).4 Such practices of resistance and mobilization—direct encounters with police and penitentiary forces and the individuals whom they controlled, as well as with the media and politicians—provided the grounds for Discipline and Punish, usually recognized as the first book in which Foucault correlates relations of power to the elaboration of knowledge.5 Yet such work had begun much earlier with his lectures at the Collège de France (beginning in December 1970), which significantly reconceptualized previous discursive investigations, first by considering discourses as material practices, and then as forms of struggle and war. From the start, the Lectures on the Will to Know (1971; five years before the publication of the similarly titled book) insist on the materiality of discursive practices by demonstrating how they are embodied (prennent corps) in “technical ensembles, institutions, schemas of behavior, types of transmission and circulation, and in pedagogical forms which both impose them and maintain them.”6 Discursive practices determine the subjects and objects of knowledge, the modes of legitimate enunciation, the fixation of “norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories” (LWK, 224)—all propelled by a general will to know, “anonymous and polymorphous, susceptible to regular transformation” (LWK, 225; mod. trans.). The Lectures’ distinction between the will to know (in classical metaphysics) and the will to truth (in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science [1882]) prepares the grounds for Foucault’s later investigations of the politics of truth, as does his distinction between connaissance, knowledge that can be accumulated without affecting the subject performing the inquiry, and savoir, knowledge that transforms the subject engaged in its elaboration.7 (This anonymous will to know will later be historicized with fine-grained 4 For an account of Foucault’s activism, see Daniel Defert, “Chronologie” in Dits, 1:13–64, and Didier Eribon, Foucault et ses contemporains [Foucault and his contemporaries] (Paris: Fayard, 1994). 5 Foucault did not limit his intervention to France: he visited Attica (New York), debated about prisons in Montréal, and intervened with authorities in Tunisia. Le Groupe, 327–341. 6 Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 225 (hereafter, LWK). 7 In a 1978 interview Foucault explains: “I target in ‘savoir’ a process by which the subject undergoes a modification through what it knows, or rather through the work that it does in order to know. [Savoir] is what allows one both to modify the subject and to construct the object. ‘Connaissance’ is the work that allows one to multiply knowable objects, to develop their intelligibility, to understand their rationality, but while maintaining the fixity of the inquiring subject” (“Entretien avec Michel Foucault” [Interview with Michel Foucault], no. 281, Dits, 4:57; EWF, 3:256; mod. trans.).

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analyses of specific, localized matrices of power-knowledge.) But this first course at the Collège already maintains the interrelation between knowledge and power by analyzing the technology of measure in the ancient polis as it relates to both political and epistemological practices. Penal Theories and Institutions (1971– 1972) focuses on the medieval technology of inquiry to produce knowledge, and The Punitive Society (1972–1973) investigates the examination as it relates to methods of sorting and controlling individuals in industrial societies. Historically, these techniques are “the effect and instrument” of political power to order, centralize, select, exclude (EWF, 1:17–18).8 The Punitive Society conceptualizes power as a form of civil war. Without mentioning Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, Foucault states that “civil war is the matrix of all power struggles, of all strategies of power. . . . And if it is true that war against external enemies is the prolongation of politics, then one must say, reciprocally, that politics is the continuation of civil war.”9 Civil war does not trouble established power intermittently; it is the permanent state of affairs: it “occupies, traverses, animates, and invests power through and through,” and penality is a “privileged” example of its most successful tactics (PS, 31, 13). In fact, “one could show how civil war is, on the contrary, what haunts power, haunts it not in the sense of a fear, but in the sense that civil war inhabits, traverses, animates, invests all parts of power” (Soc, 33). (In later investigations, Foucault will repudiate the notion of a singular “power” or “society” to adopt instead a nominalist approach to multiple relations of power diffused across myriad matrices.) In the early nineteenth century, Foucault notes, there was a clear recognition that laws were made by some, to be applied to others; that social war pitted “the rich against the poor, holders of property against the propertyless, bosses against the proletariat” (PS, 22)—as the reader of Mrs. Dalloway and In the Skin of a Lion is enjoined to feel and apprehend. Obvious connections could be made by those attending Foucault’s public lectures to the exceptional laws passed by the government after May ’68: the April 1970 loi anti-casseurs (“anti-rioter law,” article 314 of the Penal Code), for example, established collective responsibility for the first time: anyone participating in a 8 See Stuart Elden, Foucault: The Birth of Power (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), for a discussion of measure, inquiry, and examination. See also Colin Jones and Roy Porter, eds., Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine, and the Body (London: Routledge, 1994); Rudi Visker, Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1995). 9 Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 15, 34 (hereafter, PS). See Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz, vol. 1: L’âge européen, vol. 2: L’âge planétaire [To think war, Clausewitz, vol. 1: The European age, vol. 2: The planetary age] (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), who similarly reverses Clausewitz’s formula and sees peace as a force of the soul.

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demonstration during which crimes were committed shared criminal responsibility, whether or not they participated or were even aware of the infractions. The imprecise language of the law led to innumerable arrests of trade unionists and political activists.10 On December 2, 1970, while Foucault was delivering his inaugural lecture, there was a police clamp-down in the Latin Quarter while the Court of Appeal confirmed the sentence of Alain Geismar, convicted leader of the Gauche Prolétarienne (Proletarian Left, a political group dissolved by order of the Council of Ministers on May 27). The GIP was founded a few weeks later, on February 8, 1971; Foucault, Domenach, and a dozen members of the GIP were detained by the police on May 1 of the same year, for distributing pamphlets advocating the abolition of criminal records at the doors of the Fresnes and Santé prisons.11 The Punitive Society lectures on nineteenth-century civil war thus also constituted a history of present-day conflicts, one that could potentially serve a different kind of politics of truth, as Foucault explained in a later interview: “Tell the truth so that it can be open to attack. Decipher strata of reality in such a way that lines of force and fragility, possible points of resistance and attack, marked paths and byways emerge from it. It is a reality of possible struggles that I try to make appear.”12 In Psychiatric Power (1973–1974), previous investigations of the history of madness and the birth of the clinic are altered by the inclusion of power relations—a development only possible after May ’68, according to Foucault, because of the “daily struggles at grass-roots level, among those whose fight was located in the fine meshes of the web of power,”13 including the antipsychiatry movement and members of the Groupe Information Asiles (Group for Information on Asylums, GIA), and the Groupe Information Santé (Group for Information on Health) modeled on the GIP.14 Such struggles threw a new light on Foucault’s work, even for him: “When I think back now, I ask myself what else it was that I was talking about, in Madness and Civilization or The Birth of the 10 The law was abrogated by the Socialist government in 1981; the Sarkozy government developed a new version on March 2, 2010 that some considered more nefarious, because it criminalized the intention to commit group violence (Loi sur les violences en bande [Law concerning group violence], nos. 2010–201. 11 This confrontation led to Foucault’s newspaper article, “La prison partout” [The prison everywhere], no. 90, Dits, 2:193–194. 12 Michel Foucault, “Clarifications on the Question of Power,” in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966–84), ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. John Johnston (Paris: Semiotext[e], 1989), 189 (mod. trans.; hereafter, FL). The original translation mistakes attaquable for acceptable. See also “Questions on Geography,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Harvester, 1980), 64 (hereafter, P/K). 13 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” P/K, 116. 14 See Groupe Information Asiles, http://groupeinfoasiles.org/. Both groups are discussed in Elden, Foucault.

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Clinic, but power? Yet I’m perfectly aware that I scarcely ever used the word and never had such a field of analyses at my disposal” (P/K, 115). The course on the Abnormal (1974–1975) analyzes the emergence of a new form of power from the confrontation between medical and judicial discourses: the power of normalization, and its particular yet multifarious object of knowledge, the abnormal. Discussing Georges Canguilhem’s book, Le normal et le pathologique [The normal and the pathological, 1966], Foucault states that the norm “lays claim to power. The norm is not simply and not even a principle of intelligibility; it is an element on the basis of which a certain exercise of power is founded and legitimized. . . . [It] is always linked to a positive technique of intervention and transformation, to a sort of normative process.”15 In other words, five years of political activism, research, and teaching shaped Discipline and Punish; living the inextricable links between relations of power and knowledge forged Foucault’s method of investigation and its object. In January 1976, Foucault announced that whereas the preceding five years had been spent researching disciplinary technologies of power, the following five would explore war. Both the course, “Il faut défendre la société” [Society must be defended], and the programmatic book La volonté de savoir(translated as History of Sexuality, vol. 1: Introduction) initiate this project. Foucault critiques the work of Discipline and Punish, noting that new processes of control operating through rules and norms emerging with the rise of industrial capitalism cannot be understood only as a swarming of disciplinary tactics gradually saturating social space. This explanation, he estimates, is only “a first, and insufficient, interpretation of a society of normalization,” and cannot account for the state coordination of security mechanisms devised to govern the population in peace.16 To examine the value of using war as a model for everyday power relations, Foucault first traces its genealogy in the revolutionary political discourse of the “war of the races,” which considers that the legitimacy of any state is no more than a translation and consolidation of one people’s violent domination over 15 Michel Foucault, Abnormal, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 50 (hereafter, Ab). 16 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: London: Picador, 2003), 253 (mod. trans.; hereafter, Soc). Security mechanisms were studied in Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1973, hereafter, BC), with the emergence of both the population and a medical gaze that was “to outline chances and risks” (BC, 89). Military physician and member of the Conseil d’État (Council of State) F.-M.-C. Richard de Hautesierck detailed four “unlimited series: the study of topographies (the location of milieux, the terrain, the water, the air, the society, the temperaments of the inhabitants), meteorological observations (pressure, temperature, the regime of winds), an analysis of epidemics and common diseases, and a description of extraordinary cases” (BC, 28–29; mod. trans.).

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another, achieved through war: “Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even the most regular. War is the motor of institutions and order; peace, in the smallest of its cogs, is silently waging war” (Soc, 50; mod. trans).17 This counter-historical discourse (one devised to attack rather than laud the sovereign state) requires a subject necessarily positioned in battle: a warring subject (sujet guerroyant) fighting for the specific rights and the particular truths of a people or race, not the abstract, universal, juridical or philosophical subject (Soc, 54). This discourse also transforms the method of truth production: rather than finding a lofty “permanent and fundamental rationality” linked to “the just and the good,” it looks low, just above the “weft of bodies, chances and passions,” to construct “an increasing rationality, that of calculations, strategies, and ruses” (Soc, 54–55; mod. trans.). Drenched in the historical, such discourse bears no truck with the absolute. It does, however, bear many similarities to Foucault’s Punitive Society and Discipline and Punish, in which conflicts are described in terms of a civil war, and resistance as local, historical, and partisan, growing from below. But do such correspondences enlist the work of the genealogist in the infernal cycle of war, leading to peace as war, leading to war? In a March 1975 interview for Les Nouvelles littéraires [Literary news], Foucault readily describes his writing in bellicose terms: “Writing only interests me to the extent that it is incorporated into the reality of a combat, as instrument, tactic, lighting [éclairage]. I would like my books to be like lancets, Molotov cocktails or underground mine galleries, and that they carbonize after usage like fireworks” (no. 152, Dits, 2: 725). Less than a year later ( January 1976), however, Foucault adumbrates the need to develop a different mode of resistance, through altered forms of knowledge: “Truth to tell, to struggle against disciplines. . . . the way to go is not to turn to the old right of sovereignty; it would be in the direction of a new right that would be anti-disciplinary, but would also be emancipated from the principle of sovereignty” (Soc, 39–40). Foucault’s genealogy of the discourse of “the war of the races” notes a shift occurring in the early to middle nineteenth century, when historical-materialist revolutionary discourse reinterprets the battle as class warfare, and counterrevolutionary discourse redraws the conflict as a biomedical struggle for life (Soc, 78–84). From the latter will emerge late nineteenth-century state racism, as a necessary part of the governance of life (as evident in the Dreyfus and Wilde trials); when regulatory and normalization technologies take the life of a purportedly unified national race in charge, Foucault argues, the only way to differentiate lives and 17 The influence of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals is obvious; see EWF, 2:361–9. See Yves Charles Zarka, ed., Michel Foucault: De la guerre des races au biopouvoir [Michel Foucault: From the war of the races to biopolitics] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000).

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distribute death in both the literal and larger sense of promotion and exclusion (in employment, segregation or imprisonment) is through racism (Soc, 258–60). Nazism and Stalinism therefore find their principles and technologies in the normal power-knowledge relations of industrialized societies around the world—as Woolf had argued of patriarchy, imperialism, and fascism in Three Guineas (1938). In his last lecture of the year and in vol. 1 of History of Sexuality (completed in August 1976), Foucault both amplifies and specifies these analyses, identifying two poles for the government of life, or the exercise of biopolitics, complementary ends of interconnected technologies and procedures of normalization: at one end, an elaborate anatomo-politics applied to individual bodies through disciplinary techniques that direct aptitudes, compound forces, and extract labor, strengthening docility; at the other end, a biopolitics of the species-body, overseeing mortality and death rates, social hygiene and morality, and applied through regulatory controls of the population (HS, 1:139).18 Foucault demonstrates that a “normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life” (HS, 1:137). With this entrance of life into history, genocides become regular: “It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars” (HS, 1:137). Sexuality is a correlative of this new form of normalizing power, as it is deployed at the level of the individual as well as the population, tying the one and the many to the state through multifarious links. A “whole web of discourses, special knowledges, analyses, and injunctions” (HS, 1:26) infiltrates a sexuality that is now of public and national interest. Foucault now insists that one must be nominalist where power is concerned, for it is exercised rather than owned; power relations are intentional (tactically deployed for specific objectives) and yet also non-subjective, for “loquacious tactics” are enmeshed in overall anonymous, almost mute strategies that no one seems to have conceived, and that very few can formulate (HS, 1:94–95). Innumerable forms of resistance are equally exercised. And if the state results from the articulation of multiple power relations such that the usual suspects end up in positions of authority, so too must the alignment of resistances result in revolution (HS, 1:94–96). As early as 1977, Foucault’s thought shifts again, as he begins to express doubts about the value of war as a model for the study of relations of power: “Are force relations in the political realm war relations? Personally, I do not feel 18 Luca Paltrinieri, “Biopouvoir, les sources historiennes d’une fiction politique” [Biopolitics, the historical sources of a political fiction], Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 60, nos. 4–5 bis (2013): 49–75, discusses how Foucault appropriates the term “biopolitics” from then-contemporary history and sociobiology in order to redefine both the concept and its political force. See also Julian Reid, “Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault,” Social Text 24, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 127–152.

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ready for the moment to answer in a definitive manner, with a yes or no” (P/K, 164; mod. trans.). In February 1978, he theorizes a third mode for the exercise of power, alongside sovereignty and discipline, and names it governmentality, a term which, in Defert’s words, “was as new to him as to his auditors” (Dits, 1:52–53). Governmentality is first defined as “the ensemble formed by the institutions, the procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and the tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its principal target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument.”19 All three modes for the exercise of power have been co-present since the sixteenth century, but with one form dominating the others at any given time: first sovereignty, then discipline (from the second half of the eighteenth through the nineteenth century), and finally governmentality (late nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries).20 Each mode is distinguished by its site of operation, object, method, and purpose, as illustrated by this chart: Mode Sovereignty

Discipline

Governmentality

Site

Object

Method

Purpose

Territory (inhabited or not) Built environment (school, hospital, factory, prison) Operates on a given milieu (political, geographic, demographic)

Subject of law (with rights) Individual bodies (rendered docile) Population (all and each)

Extraction (taxes, crops, unto life) Surveillance and punishment (Panopticon)

Maintain power (circularity) Produce behaviors following norms Foster life (biological continuum)

Security measures, based on past and future trends (statistics and modelling)

19 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 108 (hereafter, Sec). 20 Focusing on the rise of the population as an object of knowledge and power relations allows Foucault to return to his previous archaeological analyses of biology, linguistics, and political economy in The Order of Things to weave them seamlessly and retroactively into his later works, in which domains of knowledge are inextricably linked to power relations. He concludes ironically: “There you are, all wrapped up and loose ends tied” (Sec, 76–79). See Thomas Lemke, Bio-Politics: An Advanced Introduction, trans. Eric Frederick Trump (New York: New York University Press, 2011); and his Foucault’s Analysis of Modern Governmentality: A Critique of Political Reason, trans. Erik Butler (London: Verso, 2019).

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His course on governmentality distracts the history of the modern state from the usual approach that considers it as an independent, exponentially expanding, almost automatic mechanism imposing itself over society (the “cold monster” view of the state). Instead, his investigations determine the ratio of government by investigating the multiple transactions among strategic relations and technologies of power, to discern “a ‘governmentality’ that would be to the state what . . . techniques of discipline were to the penal system” (Sec, 120). State reason, delimited within converging economic (mercantilism), political (diplomatic-military apparatuses), and governmental forces (the Police), brings the infiltration of power-knowledge relations into every aspect of everyday life, the government of the population as a whole and of each individual, from cradle to grave (Sec, 299–306). Through instruments such as “the regulation, the ordinance, the interdiction, the instruction,” governmentality operates as a “permanent coup d’État” (Sec, 340). Yet freedom remains a primary objective. Shifting the grounds of his model once more, Foucault states that while he was not completely wrong in asserting “somewhere” (in Discipline and Punish) that eighteenth-century rights and freedoms were proclaimed so loudly because disciplinary mechanisms were there to produce docile bodies throughout the social fabric, “what is at stake is something altogether different . . . this freedom, which is both ideology and technique of government . . . is nothing other than the correlative of the deployment of apparatuses of security” that require freedom to function: freedom to circulate, to work, to change, and exchange (Sec, 48; mod. trans.; see also Sec, 352–353). In Naissance de la biopolitique [The birth of biopolitics, 1979], Foucault corrects an earlier explanation for the reformers’ “gentle way of punishment” (as formulated by Beccaria) presented in Discipline and Punish: if “one wanted to analyze it better than I have done,” one would state that “between crime on the one hand and sovereign authority that has the right to punish it, eventually to punish it by death, on the other hand,” what has been interposed is “the thin phenomenal layer of interests, which is henceforth the only thing on which governmental reason can have a hold. . . . Government will now be exercised on what one could call the phenomenal republic of interests.”21 Civil society is now conceived as a “transactional and transitory” reality, emerging “at the interface of the governors and the governed,” as a correlative of liberalism (BB, 296–297; mod. trans.). Provided months in advance, the title of the following year’s course seemed to promise further studies in biopolitics, yet Le gouvernement des vivants [The 21 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008), 46 (mod. trans.; hereafter, BB). See Sawyer and Steinmetz-Jenkins.

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government of the living, 1980] does nothing of the kind, turning instead to the notion of the “government of men by truth” in order to “displace things in relation to the now worn out and hackneyed theme of knowledge-power.”22 This latest shift, Foucault states, really only amounts to “giving a positive and differentiated content to these two terms of knowledge and power” (GL, 12). The move to “government by truth” brings Foucault to forge the “fictional word” alethurgy to refer to “the manifestation of truth correlative to the exercise of power” (GL, 6–7) and thereby begin the discernment of greater individual agency through a larger displacement from the government of the living to self-government and truth-telling: for it “is the movement of freeing oneself from power that should serve as revealer in the transformations of the subject and the relation the subject maintains with the truth” (GL, 77). To mark the distance between his previous analyses and the new attitude to be adopted in The Government of the Living, Foucault proposes the pun anarcheology, to denote a form of analysis that first refuses any “intrinsic legitimacy of power”: to the series “universal category— humanist position—ideological analysis and reform program,” anarcheology opposes another, “refusal of universals—anti-humanist position—technological analysis of mechanisms of power and, instead of reform program: further extend points of non-acceptance” (GL, 79–80). On January 30, 1980, Foucault shares with his auditors “something like a sort of confidence: for me, theoretical work does not consist of . . . establishing . . . a system. My problem or the only theoretical work that I feel is possible for me, would be to leave the trace, in the most intelligible outline possible, of the movements by which I am no longer at the place where I was earlier. . . . Once again, it is a matter of a line of displacement . . . by which my theoretical positions continually change. After all, there are quite a few negative theologies; let’s say that I am a negative theorist” (GL, 76). Thus it took a decade for Foucault’s work to shift from an abstract and general will to know to the embodied knowledge-power relations of discipline, governmentality, and biopolitics, to the agency exercised in alethurgy and anarcheology.

Discipline and Punish: Discerning the Dangerous Liberal-democratic regimes are also carceral archipelagos; the free, autonomous individual endowed with rights and freedoms is also the vehicle and effect of power relations that subjugate bodies and souls; far from failing to reform 22 Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 11 (hereafter, GL).

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prisoners, penitentiaries provide key services for the dominant classes by producing delinquents—such are some of the reversals performed by Foucault’s heterotopic fiction, which works as a place that counters and questions all others.23 We will trace the movement and method of each process in turn. Disposition (dispose to transpose): the art of archival analysis. Foucault begins Discipline and Punish with a showy, and now famous, disposition of two “penal styles” (DP, 7): the 1757 extended torture, dismemberment, and burning of Robert-François Damiens, the so-called “regicide” who wounded Louis XV with a pocket knife, and Articles 17 to 28 of an 1838 prison schedule project determining every moment of a prisoner’s existence. In a book propelled by hundreds of questions, the main ones are, how could such radically different methods of punishment make sense within the same culture, and how could the switch from one to the other take place so easily? Foucault’s analyses cover three modes of retributive justice: the sovereign’s spectacular display of limitless power over the subject of law; the reformers’ plans for the certain, measured, and dramatic dispensation of penalties equivalent to the crimes, in multiple sites; the disciplinary translation of transgressions into time served by docile bodies. It is difficult to imagine how these types of retribution could all be considered valid in such a brief timespan; furthermore, while it may be easy to understand the relation between regal excess and penal reform, how did visionary plans for varied forms of penalty come to be supplanted by the general adoption of imprisonment as the near universal means of punishment? Foucault’s answers do not follow the usual story of the simultaneous evolution of humanitarian ideals and penal codes. His work radically transposes the problematic onto a different plane, that of a history of systems of thought that analyzes the rationality sustaining methods of punishment (no. 272, Dits, 3:803). Rather than measure the relative rationality of various practices as they relate to a putative absolute Reason, however, a history of systems of thought identifies “two axes: on the one hand, that of codification/prescription (how it forms an ensemble of rules, procedures, means to an end . . .), and, on the other, that of true or false formulation (how it determines a domain of objects about which it is possible to articulate true or false propositions)” (EWF, 3:230). Foucault’s archaeological investigation of these opposing penal styles and the discourse of reform that emerged between them proceeds along these axes, by two methods of approach. First, archival materials are arranged through all the resources of fiction to allow the play of truth production to be staged—through 23 For further analyses of criminality in heterotopic world fiction (Pierre Rivière, Flush, Billy the Kid), see part II.

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both realist techniques (direct and free indirect discourse, addresses to the reader, detailed descriptions that let “the facts speak for themselves,” causalchronological narrativization, short stories or nouvelles as historical testimonies) and modernist practices (juxtaposition, montage, temporal expansions, narrated interior monologue). Second, from the evidence provided by such discursive performances, rules of procedure and verification are induced, listed, and authoritatively described. The overall effect of this double method is engaging, in the literal sense of the word: the textual reader is never told the truth of history by an omniscient narrator, but rather is plunged into three different regimes of truth by a text that constantly foregrounds its own fabrication and historical position. In dialogue with Nietzsche, Foucault had previously described such writing as “effective history”: one that is inscribed on the body, that provides a slanted viewpoint focusing up close, only to refocus from a distance, and that uses parody, the dissociation of identity, and the destruction of the transcendental subject of knowledge, to reveal the politics of truth (EWF, 2:385–9). Consider the book’s opening, in which the role of the narrator is reduced to a handful of words: “Damiens had been condemned, on 2 March 1757, to,” followed by a seamless montage of direct quotations from three discursive practices: the program of torture and execution as proclaimed in the trial proceedings, a newspaper account from the Gazette d’Amsterdam, and a first-hand account cited in a 1937 biography. Then follows a quick introduction to something entirely different, a mechanical form of punishment: “Three quarters of a century later, here are the regulations set out by Léon Faucher ‘for the House of young detainees in Paris’” (DP, 6; mod. trans.). From the beginning, a realist narrator pretends merely to let the archive “speak for itself ”; yet the juxtaposition of the judicial plans of exquisite, all-powerful torture with eyewitness and press reports of the actual, serial inefficiencies of their execution (the pincers did not pull off the flesh; the four horses were unable to quarter Damiens, and even when two more were added, one fell over; dismemberment required a knife; no confession was obtained) alert the reader that more is at play—that the limits of power and knowledge are being exposed through the analysis of the discursive practices’ objects, subjects, and modes of enunciation. A series of rhetorical techniques is used to achieve a simultaneity of multiple effects, through which the book can be “both true and strategically effective,” presenting “a historical truth which could have a political effect” (P/K, 64). The following are the most salient. Direct discourse and free indirect discourse. Reading Discipline and Punish is like diving into the archive: the reader is immersed in the words, the syntax, and the rationalizations of others flooding the page in torrents of quoted or

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ventriloquized passages. The constant turn to free indirect discourse enables Foucault (like Woolf and Ondaatje) to present and at the same time critique anonymous systems of thought at work through myriad statements, arguments, and questions. (The novelists, however, unlike Foucault, mainly focalize discursive practices through characters’ minds with narrated interior monologues, letting the reader feel their experience.24) The following substantial passage from Discipline and Punish displays a proliferation of contradictory points of view in free indirect discourse while parodically undermining their truth claims: The eternal game has already begun: the torture of the execution anticipates the punishments of the beyond; it shows what they are; it is the theatre of hell; the cries of the condemned man, his struggles, his blasphemies, already signify his irremediable destiny. But the pains here below may also be counted as penitence and so may alleviate the punishments of the beyond: God will not fail to take such a martyrdom into account, providing it is borne with resignation. The cruelty of the earthly punishment will be deducted from the punishment to come: in it is glimpsed the promise of forgiveness. But, it might be said, are not such terrible sufferings a sign that God has abandoned the guilty man to the mercy of his fellow creatures? And, far from securing future absolution, do they not prefigure imminent damnation; so that, if the condemned man dies quickly, without a prolonged agony, is it not proof that God wishes to protect him and to prevent him from falling into despair? There is, therefore, an ambiguity in this suffering that may signify equally well the truth of the crime or the error of the judges, the goodness or the evil of the criminal, the coincidence or the divergence between the judgement of men and that of God. (DP, 46) Relentlessly, free indirect discourse follows every reasonable argument to the wall of non-sense; the accumulation and juxtaposition of contradictory truths makes all of them insecure—even more so because of the interrogative mode.

24 Imperialism speaks through Peter Walsh, Lady Bruton (Mrs. Dalloway), Bart Oliver (Between the Acts), Kirpal Singh (Kip), Lord Suffolk, and Geoffrey Clinton (The English Patient); religion, through Miss Kilman (Mrs. Dalloway), Rev. G. W. Streatfield (Between the Acts), Nārada (The Cat’s Table); medicine, Dr. Holmes, Sir William Bradshaw (Mrs. Dalloway), Dr. Linus Corea, Dr. Gamini Diyasena (Anil’s Ghost).

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Thus, the reform movement’s rationality is staged by the narrator (as intermediary between the reader and the archive) and performed in free indirect discourse. The conclusion is then presented as inevitable: “The reform of criminal law must be read as a strategy for the rearrangement of the power to punish” (DP, 80). Suspense grows as scenes of torture proliferate in an unnerving mixture of horror and entertainment. Example after example is given in the words of contemporaries, artfully arranged, highlighted through anaphora: “There was the man who survived ‘six hours on the wheel, and did not want the executioner, who consoled and heartened him no doubt as best he could, to leave him for a moment’; there was the man who died ‘with true Christian feeling, and who manifested the most sincere repentance’; the man who ‘expired on the wheel an hour after being put there; it is said that the spectators of his torture were moved by the outward signs of religion and repentance that he gave’; . . . or again the woman who ‘had preserved her calm up to the moment when the sentence was read, but whose wits then began to turn; she was quite mad by the time she was hanged’” (DP, 46–47; our italics). Yet, whereas direct and indirect discourse in realist fiction serve to cover up the narrator’s role in the production of meaning, to simulate direct access to reality as it is, Foucault’s narrator exposes the archive, not the real; systems of thought in full force, not positivist Truth. Strategic anastrophe is repeatedly used to emphasize the forceful impact of emotion or relations of power: “For it is these shadows lurking behind the case itself that are judged and punished. Judged, they are indirectly as ‘attenuating circumstances’. . . . Judged, they are also by the interplay of all those notions. . . . Punished, they are by a chastisement . . .” (DP, 17–18; mod. trans.; our ital.).25 Staged impersonal dialogue. Throughout Discipline and Punish, the third-person singular on (an impersonal pronoun that in French indicates discursive position—grammatical subject, never individual subjectivity) is used in the future construction on dira [it will be said] both to indicate the ways in which relations of power and knowledge are impersonally emplotted in discourse and to register the fatally never-ending, repetitive debate on crime and punishment: “Certainly the ‘crimes’ and ‘offences’ on which judgement is passed are juridical objects defined by the Code, but judgement is also passed on the passions, instincts, anomalies, infirmities, maladjustments, effects of environment or heredity. . . . It will be said: it is not them that are judged; if they are invoked, it is to explain the facts to be judged, and to determine to what extent the subject’s will was involved 25 This syntactical arrangement is repeated throughout the book, to reinforce an argument or highlight its logic; see DP, 77, 211.

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in the crime. Insufficient answer” (DP, 17; our trans.; see also 22, 296).26 Such dialogues strategically transpose Discipline and Punish within an ongoing battle for truth—discourse as praxis, not representation. Anonymous discourse. In a text renowned for its expansive prose and its seemingly endless sentences that string together voices, facts, serial synonyms, and examples with no more than semicolons and parentheses, the reader suddenly falls upon stringent, precise, synthetic summaries that register—absent any personal pronouns—the anonymous force of discourse through the repetitive use of infinitives and sentence fragments: “To displace the objective and to change its scale. To define new tactics to attain a target that is now more tenuous but also more widely spread in the social body. To find new techniques to adjust punishments to it, and adapt their effects. To lay down new principles to regularize, to refine, to universalize, the art of chastisement. . . . In brief, to constitute a new economy and a new technology of the power to punish: such are without doubt the essential raisons d’être of penal reform in the XVIII century” (DP, 89; our trans.). Infinitives, syntax, and rhythm are marshaled to exhibit the impact of discourse as material practice (see also DP, 148). Personification. Conversely, the narrator frequently personifies principles, instruments, and institutions in order to bring relations of power to life: “The principle of the moderation of punishments . . . articulates itself first and foremost as a discourse of the heart. Better, it springs up like a cry from the body that revolts and is revolted by the sight or the imagination of too many cruelties” (DP, 91; our trans. and italics. See also 9–10, 22, 111). Personification thus intensifies the effects of power relations by signifying the affects and emotions they induce. Narrativization. Rhetorical maneuvers are supported by vivid storytelling. The heterotopic fiction switches from the dry, expository tones of the historian to that of a breathlessly engaged storyteller using hyperbole, simile, and almost gothic intensity: “‘Consider those first moments when the news of some atrocious action spreads itself in our cities and in our countryside; citizens resemble men who see lightning fall beside them; each one is penetrated by indignation and by horror. . . . That is the moment to punish the crime: do not let it escape; hurry to prove it and to judge it. Set up scaffolds, stakes, drag out the guilty man to public squares, call out to the people with great cries; you will then hear them applaud at the proclamation of your judgments as at the proclamation of peace and liberty; you will see them run to these terrible spectacles as to the triumph 26 Woolf uses “people said” in square brackets to similar effect: “[Prue Ramsay, leaning on her father’s arm, was given in marriage. What, people said, could have been more fitting?].” Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Susan Dick (Oxford: Shakespeare Head and Blackwell, 1992), 112 (hereafter, TTL).

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of the laws.’ Public punishment is the ceremony of immediate recoding” (DP, 110; mod. trans.). Thus can the narrator expose the rationality and the emotional investments allowing the state to wage war on individuals and call it peace and the triumph of law and order. Within the footnotes,27 tales (nouvelles) of the obscure and their perilous lives explode.28 There is, for example, the story of Antoine Boulleteix, “who is already at the foot of the scaffold when a rider arrives holding the famous parchment. ‘Vive le Roi [Long live the king]’ is cried out; Boulleteix is taken to the tavern while the clerk of the court passes the hat for him” (DP, 53; mod. trans.; SP, 56–57, n. 4). Such fleeting encounters with lives blending “dark stubbornness and rascality,” at the very brink of death, are included to move the reader. Foucault explains their affective force: “I would be hard pressed to say what I felt exactly when I read these fragments and many others that were similar. No doubt one of these impressions of which one says that they are ‘physical’. . . . And I admit that these nouvelles, surging suddenly through two and a half centuries of silence, have shaken more fibres in me than what one would ordinarily call literature” (EWF, 3:158). Yet, this polyphonic disposition of the archive is systematically transposed onto a different plane, that of the rationality sustaining sovereignty, reform, and discipline. Throughout Discipline and Punish, Foucault produces multiple lists—not actual laws, but rules, techniques, procedures, prescriptions, results, maxims, formulations—for three purposes: to parody the exhaustive methods characteristic of the will to truth and order; to plot and summarize the book’s argument; and “to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control” of otherwise ever-proliferating information (DP, 172). With these nineteen lists, deployed in every chapter, Foucault moves from the specific to the general, from event to system, from micro- to macro-physics of power (DP, 160).29

27 The English translation overrides Foucault’s use of the materiality of the page to extend and shape the production of meaning. In the translation, citations and apposite anecdotes are usually enfolded into the text within, or without, parentheses. The reading process is made continuous, but the text becomes more digressive. The revealing play between the text and its notes is destroyed. See the examples of Saint-Hilaire, DP, 141, and Marx, DP, 163–164. 28 Foucault and Woolf planned to publish anthologies of tales they had found in the archive; neither project was realized, but both lead to fascinating essays: Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men” (1977, EWF, 3:157–175); and Virginia Woolf, “The Lives of the Obscure” (1924, in her Essays, ed. Andrew McNeillie and Stuart Clarke (London: Hogarth Press, 1986–2011), 4:140 [hereafter, WE]). See Nancy Luxon, ed., Archives of Infamy: Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). 29 Foucault does the same for his own work, outlining in chapter 1 the four “general rules” that his “study obeys” (DP, 23), thus following his own imperative: “What seems indispensable to me, is respect towards the reader. A work must say and show how it is done. It is on that condition that it can, not only not be deceptive, but be positively useful” (no. 328, Dits, 4:414).

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Any list is intrinsically descriptive because its structuring titles, numbers, and categorizations serve to circumscribe as well as organize its objects. Description is tactical, part of the politics of truth-telling: the choice of object singled out, the manner of description, the amount and positioning of descriptions in a text, all matter. Many of the lists detail the techniques and functions of power-knowledge matrices, metonymically building historical tableaux. Foucault has done this before in The Birth of the Clinic, which diagnoses how the skillful combination of observation and interrogation of the patient produces an “exhaustive description” articulating the visible to the enunciable, to be shared among privileged men of science: “the labor implicit in the language of description,” Foucault states, “authorizes the transformation of the symptom into the sign, the passage from the sick to the sickness, the access from the individual to the conceptual.”30 Whereas clinical analyses elaborate exclusive scientific knowledge and protect it from the grasp of “the multitude,” Foucault’s lists and tableaux produce anti-scientific knowledge designed to lead to further questions and alterations. One example of Foucault’s complex descriptive “architecture” will have to suffice. In the middle of Discipline and Punish, the chapter entitled “The means of correct training” identifies three techniques that exercise and rationalize disciplinary power: “Hierarchical observation,” “Normalizing judgement,” and their combination in “The examination.” The tripartite chapter begins and ends with a description of the individual as the vehicle and effect of power relations: “Discipline ‘fabricates’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that gives itself individuals both as objects and instruments of its exercise” (DP, 170; mod. trans.). In “Hierarchical observation,” Foucault analyzes the effect of a dispositif “where the techniques that allow [one] to see induce effects of power, and where, conversely, the means of coercion render clearly visible those on whom they are applied” (DP, 171; mod. trans.).31 Spaces such as the military camp, the school, the workshop, the factory—each described as a “mechanism for training” because it is a hierarchical “apparatus for observation”—transform “somatic singularities” into docile bodies, disciplined individuals enmeshed in a web of power-knowledge relations.32 30 BC, 115; our trans. For Woolf ’s analysis of “facts,” their patriarchal privilege, and their inferiority to new “fictions,” see Room, TG, and “How Should One Read a Book” (WE, 4:388–400). 31 The term dispositif is widely used to mean a set of measures taken for a specific intervention: it has no particularly theoretical cachet in French. Although some have translated it to “dispositive” in English, most simply use the French term, as we do in this book. 32 The “major effect of disciplinary power is what could be called the reorganization in depth of the relations between somatic singularity, the subject, and the individual.” Foucault, Psychiatric

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In “Normalizing judgement,” Foucault builds an overall argument about the position, function, object, method, and results of discipline’s system of “infrapenality” with five numbered segments. The first explains how discipline targets “a space that the laws leave empty” (DP, 177; mod. trans.) and establishes there its infra-penality. The second specifies how punishment involves both an artificial order (made explicit by a law, a program, a regulation) and a natural and observable process (the duration of an apprenticeship, levels of aptitude) (DP, 179). The third describes the “essentially corrective” function of disciplinary punishment, the object of which is to rein in deviations through the mechanics of training. “To punish is to exercise,” the text bluntly insists (DP, 179, 180). The fourth describes how punishment is balanced with gratification, while the fifth, how “the distribution according to ranks or grade . . . also punishes and rewards” (DP, 181). The whole is ultimately summarized twice as five “quite distinct operations”: to refer, to differentiate, to measure, to valorize conformity, to trace the limit (“the external frontier of the abnormal”)—and again, perpetual penality “compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In a word, it normalizes” (DP, 183). Thus disposed or arranged, the argument allows Foucault to demonstrate that the celebrated emergence of the liberal-humanist subject at the close of the eighteenth century was also contemporary with the new mechanisms of the “normalizing sanction,” which, within a system of putative equality, establish a politics of identity through gradation and differentiation. In “The examination,” Foucault analyzes how this particular exercise of power is linked to the formation of knowledge through three mechanisms that interlock visibility, writing, and case studies in the production of disciplinary individuals. First, the exam inverts the economy of visibility such that it is the subjugated individual that is constantly seen, and the mechanisms of power, unseen (DP, 187). Second, the examination positions the individual in a network of writing and documentation dedicated to norms: records, dossiers, comparative studies, and statistical averages position each candidate in a space of measurement. Third, the examination, “surrounded by all its documentary techniques, makes each individual a ‘case’” (DP, 191). The very stuff of nineteenth-century realist fiction.33 Foucault’s heterotopic fiction redeploys and repurposes the disciplinary mechanisms that it identifies in order to perform its archaeological critique:

Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2006), 54 (hereafter, Psy). 33 In “Lives of Infamous Men,” Foucault situates Western literature’s “locus and conditions of existence” and its “immanent ethic” in the exposition of “the most quotidian elements of existence” (EWF, 3:172–4).

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it makes the visible visible, it constructs tableaux vivants; it draws up lists that expose the rationalities sustaining discursive practices and their systems of thought—but to tell a different story. In other words, this disposition of archival materials, which harnesses all the provocative force and evocative complexities of fiction, transposes them onto the level of discourse as battle. Distraction (distract to transact): a genealogy of the “art of the human body.” While disposing to transpose defamiliarizes the systems of thought that sustain sovereign and disciplinary punishment, the second heterotopic process, distracting to transact, works historically to materialize the transcendental subject and its truth. Foucault’s genealogical analysis of the prison, this self-enclosed counterspace that reproduces all others (individual cell/home, classroom, workshop, barracks, clinic, central administration, yard, chapel, the “hole”), enables him to establish that the prison is the legitimate child of an Enlightened carceral society —that inalienable freedoms and unremitting controls are the fraternal twins of the Age of Reason. In Discipline and Punish the soul, the body, and indeed the liberal-humanist individual are reconceptualized as the material constructs of technologies of power and relations of knowledge. The book’s objective is clearly stated from the outset: to provide “a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge; a genealogy of the actual scientifico-judicial complex where the power to punish takes its supports, receives its justifications and its rules, spreads its effects and masks its exorbitant singularity” (DP, 23; mod. trans.). To accomplish this goal, Foucault distracts the history of the prison from that of “total institutions,” such as Erving Goffman had performed for asylums, in order to link it, to make it transact, with the histories of disciplinary processes proliferating across institutions, centers of production, and philanthropic or benevolent societies. Technologies of power developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to control disordered multitudes by determining and enforcing the correct ways of marching, shooting, writing, learning, laboring, and punishing yielded docile, productive bodies, tempered by wellmeaning souls, behaving normally—just in time for the Industrial Revolution. Concomitant forces of demographic, economic, and industrial expansion required new means of individual and mass surveillance, and supervision. Foucault summarizes that, “Discipline is the unitary process by which the force of the body is reduced as a political force at the least cost, and maximized as a useful force. The growth of a capitalist economy has called forth the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulae, procedures of submission of forces and bodies—in a word, the ‘political anatomy’—could be set to work through very diverse political regimes, apparatuses or institutions” (DP, 221; mod. trans.). Capitalist exploitation severs the worker from the object

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of production to increase profits; disciplinary duress compounds this relation of force by linking the docile body’s increased aptitude and performativity to enhanced domination (DP, 138). Through a redefinition of the scale, object, and means of control, this political anatomy, in effect, aims to produce an optimum disciplinary individual, a “Man-Machine.” The scale: not the body politic, but its constituent units. The object: the efficient exercise of the active body in time.34 The means: an uninterrupted coercion in time, space, and movement. Obedience internalized as mastery of one’s body and soul. Thus, in conversation with Marx, Foucault demonstrates how a disciplinary “art of the human body” was born (DP, 136–8). (The attention paid to clocks in Mrs. Dalloway or to laborers’ grueling shifts in In the Skin of a Lion accomplishes a transgredient critique of capillary relations of power.) The gradual predominance of discipline is enabled by three mutually reinforcing processes. First, disciplines evolve from being principally pre-emptive to being productive: deployed not only to “neutralize dangers, to fix useless or agitated populations,” but to “increase the possible utility of individuals” (DP, 210; mod. trans.). Second, disciplinary mechanisms disengage from specific institutions (military, medical, educational, religious) and instead invade all manner of relations (including the family). Finally, this generalized discipline is permanent, exhaustive, and omnipresent—we live in a society of surveillance, not spectacle, Foucault insists (DP, 217). Discipline is “a gaze without a face that transforms the entire social body into a field of perception . . . capable of rendering everything visible, but on the condition that it remains itself invisible” (DP, 214; mod. trans.). Thus, by the 1780s, just when all indices of economic development started a meteoric rise into self-sustained growth, mobile and adaptable disciplinary mechanisms cross the “technological” threshold, saturating powerknowledge relations. Foucault identifies the swarming of these disciplinary tactics as part of an overall strategic organization of peace as war. To the “politics-war series” that shapes relations among adversarial states Foucault correlates an “army-politics series” that functions through disciplinary tactics deployed within civil society to render disobedience, disorder, or insurrection improbable, abnormal. The military dispositif (“the military institution, the military character, military science”) constitutes the point of junction between “war and the noises of battle” and the “order and obedient silence of peace” (DP, 168; mod. trans.). Foucault’s 34 Foucault states that disciplinary power “is a total hold, or, at any rate, tends to be an exhaustive capture of the individual’s body, actions, time, and behavior. It is a seizure of the body, and not of the product; it is a seizure of time in its totality, and not of the time of service” (Psy, 46).

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analysis of the school shows how its spatial disposition, temporal regulation, hierarchical supervision, progressive training of mind and body, and economy of punishments and prizes, systematically redeploy military tactics and procedures. The school’s spatial configuration is modeled on the military camp, the “diagram of a power that acts through the effect of a general visibility” (“stones can render docile and knowable”) (DP, 171, 172; mod. trans.). Through myriad architectural decisions “without honor,” bedrooms, dining halls, classrooms, and latrines are designed to expose children to the infinitely scrupulous supervisory gaze (DP, 173; mod. trans.). Temporal control is wholesale, insistent; “norms” imposed “both to accelerate the process of learning and to teach speed as a virtue” (DP, 154). Variously ranked, students are not only subjected to a hierarchy of school authorities and instructors: they are made to monitor each other, day and night—and rewarded for doing so. Students, like soldiers, are trained and thereby disciplined through constant exercise and correction—everything from mastering the body that uses the writing instrument to mastering grammar (DP, 167). Such training, which coordinates a strict disposition in space with a comprehensive capture of time, takes place within a complex micro-economy of privileges and penalties; notation, calculation, and sanction not only differentiate but perpetuate a “cycle of knowledge of individuals” (DP, 181). Like the army and the workshop, Foucault states, the school is “subject to a whole micro-penality of time (latenesses, absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), of behavior (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body (‘incorrect’ attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency)” (DP, 178). Moreover, disciplinary mechanisms gradually invade and envelope students’ families. If a child misses school, misbehaves, shows signs of health or moral deficiencies, a teacher or official is justified to “go and question the neighbours, especially if there is any reason to believe that the family will not tell the truth; then the parents themselves, to verify if they know the catechism and the prayers, if they are resolute to root out the vices of their children, how many beds there are, and what the sleeping arrangements are” (DP, 211; mod. trans.).35 Through such surveillance, Foucault demonstrates, “disciplinary power becomes an ‘integrated’ system. . . . a multiple, automatic, and anonymous power” (DP, 176; mod. trans.). 35 In Psy, Foucault argues that because the family is a “cell of sovereignty,” it acts as “the switch point . . . from one disciplinary system to another, from one dispositif to another” (Psy, 84–85). In DP, he shows how the family became the privileged site “of emergence for the disciplinary question of the normal and the abnormal” (DP, 216). Woolf describes the sovereign family as domestic tyranny, to be correlated with imperialism, in fiction and essays. Ondaatje’s Divisadero exposes the always imminent and immanent violence of the sovereign family cell.

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The “art of the human body” calls forth a “circular architecture” (DP, 174), a specific heterotopic spatial deployment that produces utter visibility and utter control. Through a series of striking analyses, Foucault provides a genealogy of the shift from sovereign to disciplinary uses of such designs. Louis Le Vau’s 1664 menagerie, built in Versailles for the Sun King’s pleasure, allowed the monarch to see, from his central pavilion, animals culled from around the world now displayed by species in separate enclaves (DP, 203). Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s 1774 Royal Saltworks organized raw materials, workshops, laborers’ homes, and administrative offices to be in full view of the Director’s residence, referred to as the oculus, the all-knowing gaze inscribed by the œil de bœuf (a circular window at the pediment’s center)—a striking example of speaking architecture, one that articulates its meaning for all to see (DP, 173–174). The eighteenthcentury military camp—“the hastily-built and artificial city that one constructs and remodels almost at will”—mobilizes these architectural principles to surveil and control armed men (DP, 171). Lieutenant-Colonel Samuel Bentham’s 1786 plan for a “central inspection house” designed to manage Catherine the Great’s shipbuilding industry and unskilled workers in Russia was famously refined and expanded by his brother Jeremy in a series of letters published as Panopticon: or, the Inspection-House (1791) (DP, 316, n. 2).36 Foucault’s genealogical transactions thus reveal just how plausible, even organic, the birth of the prison as generalized punishment had become.37 Dislocation (dislocate to transit): the strategic art of surveillance. Yet, it wasn’t an easy birth—and unexpected complications eventually led to the appearance of the delinquent in carceral society. To arrive at one of its most provocative theses—that contemporary industrial societies need delinquency in order to function—Discipline and Punish shifts from the “annihilated body of the tortured criminal” to the emergence of “the body of the prisoner, strengthened [doublé] by the individuality of the ‘delinquent,’ by the little soul of the criminal, which the very apparatus of punishment has fabricated as the point of application of 36 See Catherine Pease-Watkin, “Bentham, Samuel (1757–1831),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/, for Bentham’s biography. In a note, Foucault wonders if Bentham was aware of Robert Barker’s (1739–1806) contemporary panoramas (DP, 317, n. 4). His circular paintings positioned the viewer, like the sovereign, in the center of the scene. 37 DP uses the panopticon design as diagram for widely disseminated processes throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Brunon-Ernst misses the mark when she states that “Foucault got it wrong” because he did not fully appreciate that there were “at least four different versions of Bentham’s surveillance machine.” Anne Brunon-Ernst, “Deconstructing Panopticism into the Plural Panopticons,” in Beyond Foucault: New Perspectives on Bentham’s Panopticon, ed. Anne Brunon-Ernst (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 40.

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the power to punish and as the object of what is still called today penitentiary science” (DP, 254–255; mod. trans.). Strategically, Foucault’s analyses dislocate a putatively monolithic punitive power in order to show how struggles for domination among multiple discursive factions, in varied and ever-changing alliances, make the definitions of deviance and means for its containment transit, change course, gain and lose currency. Whereas there is no shame in the deployment of sovereign power, discipline cloaks its ferocity, disavows it, “no longer takes charge publicly of the part of violence that is linked to its exercise”; punishment is now “a correction, a therapy, a normalization” (DP, 9, 227; mod. trans.). Discipline can isolate individuals in well-lit cages, subject them to constant surveillance for years at a time, and still call it a “gentle kind of justice” (la douceur des peines)38. Foucault traces how, within discipline, the singular power to judge and enact punishment is dislocated, multiplied, made to transit among various judicial and extra-judicial instances. From the fraught confrontation among the penal, the judiciary, and the penitentiary systems, seemingly infinite series of judges are born. Early nineteenth-century penal codes establish clear demarcations between the licit and illicit; the courts are there to discover guilt and exact punishment. Madness erases the crime (according to Article 64 of the 1810 French penal code). The tendency of tribunals, however, is to misinterpret Article 64, to insist that criminals could be a little mad, yet still guilty, or dangerously guilty because obviously mad (DP, 19–20). By 1832, the concept of attenuating circumstances further complicates matters by focusing on the individual behind the crime, rather than the criminal act. The work of judge and jury needs supplementation. From then on, Foucault argues, “le maître de la justice n’est plus le maître de sa vérité”: the master of justice is no longer the master of his truth or of justice’s truth (SP, 100; DP 98). The judiciary is entangled by a cadre of experts seemingly able to gauge degrees of culpability, gradations of dangerousness and monstrosity. Tentacular and capillary relations of disciplinary power-knowledge can now enter the fray. The paradigmatic form of this power Foucault finds in the Benthams’ designs.39 The Panopticon, like military camps, schools, and factories, exercises

38 The French phrase immediately calls to mind another, diffuse and affective dimension: the sweetness of sorrows, which is absent from the “the gentle way in punishment” (DP, 104). 39 Bentham worked tirelessly to turn his plans into reality, in France, Ireland, and England, but to no avail. Eventually, his plans were adapted for many prisons, as the Presidio Modelo in Isla de Pinos, Cuba (built 1926–1928, closed 1967). “The model prison opened at Fleury-Mérogis [France] in 1968,” states Foucault, took “over in its overall distribution the panoptic star that had, in 1836, lent such glamour to the Petite-Roquette. It is the same machinery of power that there takes a real body and a symbolic form” (DP, 271; mod. trans.).

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power in a built environment through a disposition in space, a composition in time, and uninterrupted surveillance. Its powerful ruse consists of asymmetrical visibility: positioned in a cell flooded by light, the inmate is rendered absolutely visible at all times to the invisible one situated in the circular building’s central tower. These ocular relations “automate and disindividualize power” (DP, 202). Whether or not anyone is present in the tower, and whatever motivates that presence, the effects on the detainee (the prisoner, the school child, the sick person, or the worker) are the same. The inmate both experiences and internalizes subjectivization, “assumes responsibility for the constraints of power” and becomes the co-author of her own domination: “a real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation” (DP, 202)—the disciplinary individual as the overall strategy and effect of peace as war. Modern penal codes and penitentiary systems were the invention of the bourgeoisie, and as Foucault trenchantly observes in an interview, “The bourgeoisie is not at all what Baudelaire thought it to be, a mass of old codgers, stupid and asleep. The bourgeoisie is intelligent, lucid, calculating. No other form of domination has ever been as fecund, and consequently as dangerous, as deeply rooted, as its own” (no. 152, Dits, 2:725). Discipline and Punish shows how, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when new Codes were drafted and established, various types of popular illegalities (refusal of taxation or conscription, looting or burning of staples, commodities, and industrial machines, illegal unions and strikes) opposed disciplinary techniques taking hold of workers’ lives. Such resistance was easily recognized as a kind of civil war, a class struggle against those who drafted laws and regulations in their own interests (PS, 22; DP, 274). Working-class publications denounced maneuvers that conflated common law offenses, breaches of regulations, and documentation micromanaging workers: “No other class is subjected to a surveillance of this kind; it is exercised almost in the same way as that of released prisoners; it seems to place the workers in the category that we now call the dangerous class of society” (qtd DP, 323, n. 22). Not that legislators and their advisors were loath to admit such class dissymmetry; it was generally recognized that “a social category dedicated to order sanctioned another destined to disorder” (DP, 276; mod. trans.). Moreover, emerging forms of crime stories both in literature and in the daily penny press buttressed police and state surveillance with vivid narratives of the everyday war against the threatening presence of criminals, the “interior battle against the faceless enemy” (DP, 286; mod. trans.). Popular publications countered with critiques of a two-tier justice system, noting how multiple bourgeois crimes were treated with leniency by the courts; the cause of illegal activities was not to be found in individuals, they claimed, but in “society” (DP, 287).

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“Serving time” or “spending time” in jail, however, was never simply a matter of judicial and moral economics, paying for one’s crime with time (as one had been paid hourly for labor).40 Prisons were charged with reforming criminals and dissidents alike through a “total education” made possible by three instruments: isolation and coercive individualization, soul-calming work (“‘the religion of the prisons,’” according to Faucher, 1838; DP, 242), and normalization (DP, 236–247). On hand to supervise this transformation were various experts and scientists cum judges: wardens, guards, criminologists, penologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, church representatives—all staking a claim in the prisoner’s “cure.” As Foucault insists, “this disciplinary supplement in relation to the juridical, is what, in sum, has been called the ‘penitentiary’” (DP, 248; mod. trans.). Foucault juxtaposes panoptic visibility to the “infinite labyrinth” of penitentiary knowledges that “entrap the whole of penal justice and imprison the judges themselves” (DP, 248–249). It is this excess of penitentiary power-knowledge relations that gives birth to the delinquent as “a biographical unity, a kernel of dangerousness, representing a type of anomaly” that must be redressed (DP, 254; mod. trans.). Yet, from the beginning onto this day, prisons have been accused of failing their reformative mission. Courts deliver offenders to the prisons; prisons release delinquents; delinquents are eventually brought back to the courts. Identifying the “seven universal maxims of the good ‘penitentiary condition’” circulated in reports spanning one hundred and fifty years, Foucault demonstrates how “word for word, from one century to the other, the same fundamental propositions are repeated”—yet, despite their continual failings, prisons are always presented as their own best cure (DP, 268–70). Foucault intervenes to tell another story, a heterotopic fiction in which prisons are not malfunctioning at all.41 He identifies the many advantages of the systematic production of deviance among restricted segments of the population. First, the closed circuit of delinquency is easier to control and surveil—through the police, record-keeping, mandatory reporting—than the dispersed, occasional “illegalities” of vagabonds, beggars, the unemployed, recruiting each other for criminal activities. Delinquency thus allows the targeted control of transgressions of the law within a more general 40 In both DP and PS, Foucault correlates the “salary-form” with the “prison-form,” arguing that the ubiquity of the former made the latter more acceptable as a form of punishment, in the new relation between time and disciplinary regimes (DP, 232–233; PS, 72–73, 85). 41 Foucault repeatedly refers to current events—“inmate revolts, these past few weeks,” comments made by prison officials “in July 1974,” or declarations by the Head of State “a few days ago”—to demonstrate how his strategic analysis of the prison system constitutes a rather urgent history of the present (DP, 268, 322, n. 13, and 317, n. 1).

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strategy of subjugation (DP, 272). Second, delinquents can be enlisted to perform extra-legal police functions as informants, spies, strike-breakers. Third, they facilitate the “illegality of the dominant groups” by trafficking in drugs, sex workers, refugees, undocumented laborers, arms, money-laundering services, and any number of objects of desire (works of art, endangered species) (DP, 279). Recidivism is all but guaranteed by the police-prison-delinquency apparatus, and appears more like strategic population management than failure to reform. This network of power-knowledge relations Foucault names the “carceral archipelago,” a provocative phrase to use just months after the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1973; trans., 1974).42 For readers in the mid-1970s, a correlation of the Soviet system of labor and reeducation camp governance to liberal, democratic Western societies was telling, and shocking. Beyond the socialist/capitalist divide, strategies for the most effective means to discipline individuals and populations were shared from the time of Catherine the Great and Louis-Philippe to that of Leonid Brezhnev and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Peace as war therefore means that while “the juridical opposition is between legality and illegal practice, the strategic opposition is between illegalities and delinquency” (DP, 277). This new economy of power works with a different form of law, “a mixture of legality and of nature, of prescription and of constitution, the norm,” which brings “the internal dislocation of judiciary power, or at least of its functioning” (DP, 304; mod. trans.; our ital.). In carceral societies, not only do extra-penal forms of incarceration multiply, but “judges of normality are now everywhere,” Foucault notes: “the professor-judge, the physician-judge [see Woolf ’s Holmes and Bradshaw, below], the educatorjudge, the ‘social worker’ judge; all let the universality of the normative reign; and each at his place subjugates bodies, gestures, behaviors, conducts” (DP, 304; our trans.). Foucault ends his book abruptly, leaving the reader stranded among judges in the carceral city, awash in the sounds of war: “In this central and centralized humanity, effect and instrument of complex relations of power, bodies and forces subjected by multiple dispositifs of incarceration, objects of

42 “GULag” is an acronym for the Soviet labor camp system’s governing board: Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel′no-trudovykh Lagerei. Since the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, gulag has become an international name for camps. The term “archipelago” naturalizes the system of forced labor and reeducation camps; allusions to The Gulag Archipelago while analyzing the emergence of the carceral society in the nineteenth century (Mettray “was the most famous of a whole series of institutions which, well beyond the frontiers of criminal law, constituted what one might call the carceral archipelago” [DP, 297]) are another ironic means of writing the history of the present in the mid-1970s.

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discourses that are themselves elements of this strategy, one must hear the roar of the battle” (DP, 308; mod. trans.)43 Strategic analysis of the inextricable links between domains of knowledge and relations of power allows Foucault to explain the epistemological shifts he had first traced in Les mots et les choses [The order of things] without being able to account for them.44 The “Rise of Man” at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (marked by the substitution of the docile body for the tortured one) can now, in Discipline and Punish, be viewed as the effect and instrument of the coming to dominance of disciplinary power: “The carceral network constitutes one of the armatures of this power-knowledge that has made the human sciences historically possible. Knowable man (soul, individuality, conscience, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of this analytical investment, of this domination-observation” (DP, 305). To see, feel, and understand how these power-knowledge relations of identification and subjugation are lived everyday as though they constituted freedom and autonomy, singular choices made by unique individuals, we turn to Woolf ’s post-World War I novel, Mrs. Dalloway.

Mrs. Dalloway: A Dangerous Day Neither great battles nor famous leaders—the stuff of “monumental” histories—feature in Mrs. Dalloway’s critique of contemporary patriarchal, imperialist relations. Instead, the novel focuses on ordinary minds, emotions, and activities on an ostensibly ordinary June day in 192345—the stuff of

43 The book’s last words in French are “the roar of the battle”; a final footnote explains: “At this point I interrupt this book that must serve as a historical background to various studies of the power of normalization and the formation of knowledge in modern society” (DP, 308; mod. trans.). The English version, however, moves the note into the text proper, as its final words, destroying the impact of Foucault’s final “roar of the battle.” 44 Documenting an epistemological break at the end of the eighteenth century, Foucault notes, “For an archaeology of knowledge, this profound breach in the expanse of continuities, though it must be analysed, and minutely so, cannot be ‘explained’. . . . Only thought re-apprehending itself at the root of its own history could provide a foundation . . . for what the solitary truth of this event was” (OT, 217–8). DP, which begins with a vivid illustration of this rupture, explains it by strategic analyses of power-knowledge. See Antonio Campillo, “On War: The Space of Knowledge, Knowledge of Space,” in Reconstructing Foucault: Essays in the Wake of the 80s, ed. Ricardo Miguel Alfonse and Silvia Caporale-Bizzini (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 277–299. 45 The text specifies a Wednesday in June; the precise date has been inferred by critics. Wednesday, June 20, 1923 was remarkable for its ordinariness (the day after the UK/US agreement on

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“effective histories” mapping “what we tend to feel is without history—in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts” (EWF, 2:369). The main story line juxtaposes Clarissa Dalloway’s preparations for her lavish party with the disintegrating chaos of Septimus Warren Smith’s last day. Clarissa sees her party (gathering prominent figures from political, social, religious, and intellectual spheres) as a “gift” to life; “‘I’ll give it you!’” cries Septimus as he ends his life by flinging himself out of a window.46 Plot development, however, is largely driven by the urban meanderings of Peter Walsh, the colonial administrator back from India. Clarissa’s peace and Septimus’ war are thus effectively mediated through the absent presence of empire. Through the heterotopic processes of disposition, distraction, and dislocation, Mrs. Dalloway exposes the mechanisms of disciplinary and governmental power relations that foster hopes and desires, ambitions and identities. The novel also demonstrates how biopolitics and thanato-politics are locked in an endless danse macabre. Yet the knowledge and power relations between the narrator and the reader adumbrate other possibilities. Disposition (dispose to transpose): “She was delighted to be free.” Commonplace truths about the self-sufficient individual are everywhere challenged by Mrs. Dalloway, disposed and then effectively transposed to show the political functionality of the seemingly autonomous subject for the myriad forces that produce it. The novel’s opening line—“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself ” (MD, 5)—and indeed its first two sections, make clear that such lives result from teeming interactions with others: to know one individual is to know the relations of power and knowledge among the many. The first three words establish her in a discursive relation marked by class and gender: the upper-middle-class woman of the house is known by title and husband’s surname; the servant she addresses is merely and always Lucy. Male hired help are acknowledged by their employer’s surname, “Rumpelmayer’s men.” The first eighteen pages multiply and variegate this system of characters through more than ninety references to named persons and differently specified groups: Mrs. Dalloway’s wanderings bring to mind or to view her immediate family (husband Richard, daughter Elizabeth, deceased sister Sylvia), her past loves (Peter Walsh

Britain’s war debt obligations; the day before Ascot). In “Modern Fiction” (1925), Woolf asks the reader: “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions, . . . the accent falls differently from of old.” WE, 6:160. 46 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Morris Beja (Oxford: Shakespeare Head and Blackwell, 1993), 11, 92 (hereafter, MD). For an analysis of female modernist writers and their thoughts on exchange and the gift in relation to philosopher Marcel Mauss (and Woolf ’s MD), see Rebecca Colesworthy, Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought of Exchange (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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and Sally Seton), her friends and acquaintances (Hugh and Evelyn Whitbread, Scrope Purvis, Mrs. Foxcroft, Lady Bexborough), but also “Hugh’s old mother” and the “poor mothers of Pimlico”; orphans and widows; the King and Queen, “Queen Alexandra’s policeman” and “Sir John Buckhurst, the old Judge”; the “most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps” and “laughing girls”; Rezia and Septimus Warren Smith and the ghost of Lt. Evans; Dr. Holmes and a nursemaid; Miss Kilman and Miss Pym; Einstein and Mendel; “one of Jim’s boys,” “boys on bicycles”; “old ladies” and “the British middle classes” on top of omnibuses; commercial concerns such as Durtnall’s, Hatchard’s, Mulberry’s, and Atkinson’s; “men without occupation”; Americans, Russians, Austrians; Indian women and “an old Irishwoman”; “a seedy-looking nondescript man”; strangers; and of course, “the unseen.” From family ties to class disparities, from capitalism and empire to palace, Parliament, the judiciary, military, and Church, from the sane and the well to the insane and unseen—the panoramic narrative sweep insists that all are implicated in the making of Mrs. Dalloway. This mobile, worldly throng, however, is disciplined down to its bones and sinews by a strict spatio-temporal regimen. The novel is famously called to order by the chiming of Big Ben, the imposing, phallic clock tower of the nation’s Houses of Parliament: “one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air” (MD, 6). Nothing escapes temporal regulation—not bodies, not heartbeats, not feelings, not traffic, not any moment of June (MD, 6). (Space is no different, as argued below: characters are on the move, certainly, but within class-inscribed boundaries.) Campaigns to standardize global time in the 1880s and then to adopt daylight saving time in the early 1900s were led by capitalist interests to regulate the daily transactions of work, travel, and leisure. Temporal standardization was vaunted as an efficient, convenient security measure ending “time anarchy.”47 As Michael O’Malley summarizes, “Standard railroad time, like the new emphasis on punctuality in school books and in public life, grew out of . . . the same need to order and control financial events and human movements across space and time. It offered a uniform gauge for regularizing market relations.”48 Just

47 M. A. Favarger, speaking at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, during the International Congress on Chronometry; quoted in Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York: Norton, 2003), 226. 48 Michael O’Malley, Keeping Time: A History of American Time (New York: Viking, 1990), 148–149.

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as importantly, as noted by the New York Herald (November 19, 1883), standard time went “‘beyond the pursuits of men and enter[ed] into their private lives as part of themselves.’”49 When Septimus Warren Smith leaves the office of Sir William Bradshaw, the specialist who prescribes “proportion” in all things (even as remedy for shell-shock), the narrator pauses to describe the disciplinary rewards of time management as later analyzed by Foucault: “Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs. Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that it was half-past one. . . . [S]ubconsciously one was grateful to Rigby and Lowndes for giving one time ratified by Greenwich; and this gratitude . . . naturally took the form later of buying off Rigby and Lowndes socks or shoes” (MD, 77). The necessities of war convinced governments to adopt daylight saving time: first the Germans (April 30, 1916) then the British (May 21, 1916) mandated extended daylight hours for work at the Front and on the home front.50 Spatial relations are similarly controlling. Characters’ ostensibly random meanderings along London’s streets are shown to follow prefigured, historically entrenched political, economic, gender, ethnic, and class lines.51 Not surprisingly, the imperial administrator, Peter Walsh, covers the most territory, from the upper-class enclave of Westminster to the then working-class Regents Park, from Bond Street to Bloomsbury. Being between jobs affords him the leisure to take up the role of flâneur. Mental illness provides the demobilized, now unemployable soldier, Septimus Warren Smith, with time to wander. Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread remain within the shadows of palace and parliament. For all that Clarissa Dalloway exclaims, “‘I love walking in London. . . . Really it’s better than walking in the country,’” when she briefly leaves the house, she limits 49 Quoted in O’Malley, Keeping Time, 145. “George M. Beard’s pioneering 1881 study of American Nervousness partly blamed ‘clocks and watches’ and ‘the necessity of punctuality’ for the American middle-class’s generally strained nerves. . . . Beard depicted a fierce and rigid social time discipline that demanded unhealthily intimate relations between people and their timetelling machines” (ibid., 150–151). 50 Like personal income tax, “the great revolution of Mr. Willett’s summer time” or daylight saving time (MD, 120), was a war-time measure meant to be temporary but never relinquished. 51 For an alternative interpretation of how, following Lacan and Althusser, the characters’ urban meanderings constitute the subject’s submission to the state through the Symbolic order, see Ban Wang, “‘I’ on the Run: Crisis of Identity in Mrs. Dalloway,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 38, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 177–191.

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herself to the secure confines of Westminster and Mayfair (MD, 7). The sight of omnibuses as they “swooped” by, like “garish caravans, glistening with red and yellow varnish,” elicits from Elizabeth Dalloway longings for freedom (MD, 101).52 Mounting a bus to the wilds of the Strand, she imagines a future that would be anathema to both her mother and Doris Kilman, her religious mentor: she “would become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into Parliament,” rather than assuming the role of “perfect hostess” or Christian reformer within “the republic of women” (MD, 102). Sailing eastwardly on top of a bus that is focalized as an “impetuous creature—a pirate . . . reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down ruthlessly . . . and then rushing insolently all sails spread up Whitehall . . . she was delighted to be free” (MD, 102). But: Elizabeth Dalloway only goes so far, as far as her additional penny will take her, then heads back home to Westminster, “calmly and competently,” to attend her mother’s party (MD, 104). (“She must go home. She must dress for dinner. But what was the time?—where was a clock?” [MD, 102].) Possibilities of transformation after the war are no less limited than they were before it; radical ambitions are exposed to the reader as illusory. Rebellious youths, “pioneers,” and “romantic buccaneer[s]” (MD, 42) find themselves “borne on,” pulled as their parents were, retracing predictable paths of identity formation. Woolf constructs characters “only in relation to other things”:53 to their rooms, to other characters (both known and unknown), to memories, and to present conditions. Characters are textual strategies, thought patterns and interconnections, rather than substances. Indeed, her goal is to “insubstantise” them and thereby make identification with them impossible for the reader (WD, 2:248).54 But she does more. Given that governmentality attains individuals as “profoundly, essentially, biologically linked to a materiality within which they live” (Sec, 21; our trans.), in order to normalize conduct and expectations, Woolf ’s text uses this same technique to denaturalize present conditions and increase the possibilities of alterity and transformation for the reader. This narrative process of knowledge production is foregrounded in a self-reflexive moment of the text when Peter Walsh remembers Clarissa’s explanation of her “theory”: “she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’ . . . but everywhere. . . . So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the 52 See Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps, “‘Something so varied and wandering’: ‘Restless’ Subjectivity in Virginia Woolf ’s Fiction,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 95 (Spring–Summer 2019): 44–47. 53 Virginia Woolf, The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 4:152 (hereafter, WD). 54 Woolf ’s most radical experiment in insubstantized figures is The Waves; see below.

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places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to. . . . [T]he unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps—perhaps” (MD, 114). Through transposition, this heterotopic world fiction constructs a space that generates new meanings by differently articulating intersections of the political, the epistemological, and the empirical.55 From the novel’s first words (the generic title of any wife of any Dalloway) to its last (“For there she was”), textual dispositions effectively de-individualize all characters; narrative processes reveal their quotidian lives to be shaped both by formidable, historically freighted processes of normalization, and by the ever-present possibility of transgression haunting them all. The perfect hostess feels the entire edifice of her life threatened from within: “never to be content, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred, which . . . made all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved and making her home delightful rock, quiver, and bend as if indeed there were a monster grubbing at the roots, as if the whole panoply of content were nothing but self love! this hatred!” (MD, 11–12). Miss Kilman must think of God and blame the flesh to assuage the “hot and painful feelings [that] boiled within her, this hatred of Mrs. Dalloway, this grudge against the world” (MD, 93). Peter Walsh compulsively fingers his pocketknife. Septimus knows that the “brute” of normal life is upon him (MD, 71).56 Ironically, such hatreds, fears, and misgivings only feed the desire for security, for governmental interventions—but always, inflected by class. Peter Walsh considers a speeding ambulance (and the medical profession it serves) to be “one of the triumphs of civilisation”; recently returned “from the East,” he admires “the efficiency, the organisation” that allows the system to “pic[k] up instantly, humanely, some poor devil” (MD, 112). Unlike the reader, Peter has no way of knowing that the ambulance in question is probably transporting the corpse of the man who feared Drs. Holmes and Bradshaw, “men who made ten thousand a year and talked of proportion, . . . saw nothing clear, yet ruled, yet inflicted. ‘Must’ they said” (MD, 110). For Septimus knew biopolitics, knew that “once you fall . . . human nature is on you. . . . The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless” (MD, 74). Analogously, Richard

55 The empirical and epistemic subjects are distinguished in Bourdieu; see also Alan D. Schrift, “Reconfiguring the Subject: Foucault’s Analytics of Power,” in Reconstructing Foucault: Essays in the Wake of the 80s, ed. Ricardo Miguel Alfonse and Silvia Caporale-Bizzini (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 185–199; and Wang, “‘I’ on the Run.” 56 For Louis in The Waves, the “brute” is always stamping nearby; see below.

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Dalloway inveighs against the police for doing so little, not even stopping traffic to protect “little creatures” as they cross “Piccadilly alone” (MD, 87), but “Shawled Moll Pratt,” on the other hand, knows better, feels the force of surveillance. She has only to see “the constable’s eye upon her” to check her behavior and forgo the “lighthearted” pleasure of throwing a bunch of roses in the path of a car she presumes is carrying the Prince of Wales (“the dear boy”) (MD, 16). Richard Dalloway and Dr. Bradshaw plan acts of parliament to sort out the wayward and unfit. Thus, narrative disposition displays how disciplinary and governmental measures regulate the population’s everyday life—for, as Clarissa Dalloway apprehends, it is “very, very dangerous to live even one day” (MD, 9). To make visible the reach and efficiency of these power-knowledge relations, the “swing, tramp, and trudge” of Londoners is twice brought to a standstill—by a car and an airplane (relative newcomers to the urban scene). Their ominous appearance frightens at first because of recent associations with the War, but soon after, they captivate the docile crowd and demonstrate how the population is made to act as one. Everyone attempts, unsuccessfully, to see who is being chauffeured in the “motor car with its blinds drawn and an air of inscrutable reserve” (MD, 14); everyone tries, unsuccessfully, to decipher the airplane’s commercial message (save Clarissa, who has been narratively eclipsed by the crowd). Such events again bring expectations and desires in line, in step, on time: “The car had gone, but it had left a slight ripple which flowed through glove shops and hat shops and tailors’ shops on both sides of Bond Street. For thirty seconds all heads were inclined the same way—to the window. . . . ladies stopped; when the sentence was finished something had happened. Something so trifling in single instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration; yet in its fullness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in all the hat shops and tailors’ shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. . . . For the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very profound” (MD, 15–16). Perhaps no mathematical instrument could measure such vibrations, but Woolf ’s self-reflexive, heterotopic fiction can. By the end of these powerful sentences, the “surface” meanings of common errands and pleasures (worrying about white ribbons, drinking in a pub) are transposed onto “profound” geopolitical forces (sovereignty, capitalism, empire, patriarchy, and war). In other words, the novel takes ordinary minds on an ordinary day and provides a grid of intelligibility that makes them make sense: it performs an archaeological critique of systems of thought and the politics of truth. Distraction (distract to transact): “That little shindy of schoolboys with gunpowder.” Mrs. Dalloway is designed to distract the reader from usual teleological

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expectations and to disorder the reason of normalcy, to derange the regular operations of the intellect. The plot demonstrates how present lives are moulded to fit past patterns. Lives are rarefied, diminished, until their owners become normal, perfectly predictable for others, and yet strange and incomprehensible to themselves. The text carefully traces the ever-narrowing paths followed by all: “the wild, the daring, the romantic” Sally Seton becomes Lady Rosseter, wife of the cotton manufacturer, with the big house in Manchester and the “five enormous boys” (MD, 55, 127); Hugh Whitbread, the “perfect specimen of the public school type” (“No country but England could have produced him”), becomes the food- and power-loving bureaucrat—the “admirable Hugh” (MD, 56, 128); Lady Bradshaw, even though she could fish for salmon and take “photographs scarcely to be distinguished from the work of professionals” (MD, 75), “had gone under. It was nothing you could put your finger on; there had been no scene, no snap; only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into [her husband’s]. . . . [Q]uick to minister to the craving which lit her husband’s eye so oilily for dominion, for power, she cramped, squeezed, pared, pruned, drew back, peeped through” (MD, 76). Domestic shell-shock. En route to purchase flowers for her party, docile Clarissa feels that “this body she wore . . . this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible . . . not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway” (MD, 10). Ironically, such feelings emerge while Clarissa is happily performing her duties as “perfect hostess,” the role that everyone, save herself, had always known she would fulfill. At Bourton, when she was eighteen and each day seemed like a “plunge” into “the open air,” she resented such forecasts; at fifty-two, she still finds them hurtful even as she flourishes in the role. Conversely, middle-aged Peter Walsh believes himself to be unique, with future promise and possibilities abounding, while everyone else recognizes that his whole life (as student, socialist, lover, husband, civil servant) “ha[s] been a failure,” and will remain so (MD, 8, 81). Just as Clarissa’s “progress with the rest of them” is inscribed in feminine commodity consumption, Peter’s masculinity is disciplined into his thoughts and behavior, conscripted by militarism and inflected with racism. The narrator notes that as Peter meanders, “suddenly a patter like the patter of leaves in a wood came from behind, and with it a rustling, regular thudding sound, which as it overtook him drummed in his thoughts, strict in step, up Whitehall, without his doing. Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, . . . and on their faces an expression . . . praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England. It is, thought Peter Walsh, beginning to keep step with them, a very fine training. . . .

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[O]n they marched . . . as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline. One had to respect it; one might laugh; but one had to respect it” (MD, 39–40; our ital.).57 Having complied in thought and movement and sentiment with the young soldiers, Peter (like Clarissa) momentarily feels displaced, indisposed, struck by “the strangeness of standing alone, alive, unknown, at half-past eleven in Trafalgar Square” (MD, 40). For him, uncertainty quickly becomes liberating, and (like Clarissa and Elizabeth) he daydreams that, “He had escaped!—was utterly free . . . feeling like a child who runs out of doors” (MD, 41). Narrative transactions, however, again counter these emotions with cultural and spatiotemporal limitations. He will escape “only of course for an hour or so”; among the set of pre-fixed avenues available to him, Peter chooses the most obvious: fantasizing as he follows an attractive young black woman, all the while “fingering his pocket-knife” (and thereby foregrounding the age-old intersections of gender, racial, and transnational violence) (MD, 41).58 Septimus Warren Smith was “one of the first to volunteer,” to “save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole [his literature teacher] in a green dress walking in a square” (MD, 65). His understanding of the stakes of “The European War” was also limited by his education (being “one of those half-educated, self-educated men whose education is all learnt from books borrowed from public libraries, read in the evening after the day’s work,” MD, 64). The committed reader “developed manliness” at the Front, learned to feel “very little and very reasonably” (MD, 66)—or so he wished. Industrialized war’s extreme violence simultaneously engendered intense emotional ties among men living in death.59 Back home, he is no longer able to recognize England or love Shakespeare (MD, 67); ironically, it is the threat of being forcibly returned to “normal life” that precipitates his death, not enemy shells. Woolf ’s fiction distracts the reader’s gaze from the trench—a historical 57 Earlier, and also without realizing it, Peter is completely “in time” with the sounds of Big Ben: “he stepped down the street, speaking to himself rhythmically, in time with the flow of sound, the direct downright sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour” (MD, 38). See Elicia Clements, Virginia Woolf: Music, Sound, Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020). 58 Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), argues the reverse: the individual is the origin of meaning. See also Josephine Schaefer, “The Great War and ‘This Late Age of World’s Experience’ in Cather and Woolf,” in Virginia Woolf and War, ed. Mark Hussey (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 134–150. 59 In a 1981 interview for Le Gai Pied [The gay foot], Foucault discusses intense friendships among men during World War I. “Friendship as a Way of Life,” EWF, 1:139.

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heterotopic space that both reiterates and contests the overwhelming force of power-knowledge relations—to transact among urban encounters that make manifest how war games continue apace, sotto voce. Septimus can no longer function in crowds; he is absent from a “general shindy” in a local pub triggered when “a Colonial insulted the House of Windsor” (MD, 16). But when he thinks of “The European War” as “that little shindy of schoolboys with gunpowder” (MD, 72), the narrative ties neighborhood brawls between locals and colonials with international, imperialist wars. The pattern is repeated in the “cold stream of visual impressions” registered in Peter’s mind as he notes a “retired Judge, presumably . . . an Anglo-Indian presumably. And here a shindy of brawling women, drunken women; here only a policeman and looming houses, domed houses, churches, parliaments” (MD, 122). In other words, any “triumph of civilisation” is textually implicated in relations of power and exploitation through aesthetic means (juxtaposition and reiteration) and heterotopic processes (distraction and transaction). Septimus cannot escape the throes of madness and war; Rezia constantly longs for peacetime normalcy. Textual juxtapositions demonstrate that both states are variants of each other (Mussolini was already in power in Rezia’s Italy). For Drs. Holmes and Bradshaw, Warren Smith will never be more than an unfortunate yet straightforward case, one of many, to be treated with liberal doses of the English way of life—rest, porridge, outdoor sport. These measures, in turn, should be buttressed by special legislation, for the health of the nation at large (Sir William and Richard Dalloway discuss such a Bill at the party, to counter “the deferred effects of shell-shock” MD, 136). Yet Woolf ’s genealogical method shows that Septimus’ veering away from the “reason of normalcy” (his distraction) can be traced forensically to a network of causes enmeshing emotions, masculinity, sexuality, as well as education and class. (Thus Woolf ’s historical investigation of shell-shock can be aligned to Foucault’s analysis of the prison: both consider their objects to be discipline’s correlative.) In Mrs. Dalloway, the now is reconfigured when spliced with memories of various past experiences and with figments of “primeval” time. Other spaces and times as remembered by the characters intersect and interrupt the London present, layering it with micro-moments extending in many different directions. Clarissa and Peter’s thoughts constantly shift the reader back to the Parry family’s country retreat in Bourton; Richard invokes the fields of Norfolk, where “[h]aymakers who had pitched beneath hedges to sleep away the morning toil, parted curtains of green blades . . . [under] the blue, the steadfast, the blazing summer sky” (MD, 85). Lady Bruton brings back the “fields down in Devonshire” where she “jumped the brooks on Patty, her pony, with Mortimer and Tom, her brothers”

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and took tea with her parents “on the lawn, under the trees” (MD, 84). Many critics have analyzed Woolf ’s use of Bergsonian duration or “felt time” to characterize the relations between lived time and spatialized, mechanical time. But it is equally important to notice how flashbacks and inner time enable her fiction to render visible the workings of impersonal systems of thought within both individual minds and transnational economic and political relations. The text makes plain that such memories of wealthy pleasures, for example, rest on capitalist exploitation, violence, and war. Because of Peter Walsh, Helena Parry, and Lady Bruton, three hundred years of exploiting India haunt the London day. Mutually intensifying ties between racism and sexism are glaringly apparent when Peter Walsh congratulates himself and “thank[s] God he was out of that pernicious hubble-bubble [of London society] if it were only to hear baboons chatter and coolies beat their wives” (MD, 128).60 “Old aunt Helena” had “no tender memories, no proud illusions about Viceroys, Generals, and Mutinies—it was orchids she saw, and mountain passes and herself carried on the backs of coolies in the ’sixties over solitary peaks” (MD, 132). Lady Bruton recalls little of “the flora or fauna” from her visits “with three Viceroys; thought some of the Indian civilians uncommonly fine fellows; but what a tragedy it was—the state of India!” (MD, 134).61 Septimus Warren Smith’s recollections are of a different class altogether. Helplessly, he relives Evans’ explosive death in the trenches; his wife Lucrezia’s current melancholia (longing, in Regents Park, for “‘the Milan gardens’” [MD, 20]) is intensified by his delusional public misbehavior. She tries to get him back on track by citing the time for his impending appointment on Harley Street: “‘It is time,’ said Rezia. The word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable, words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time. He sang. Evans answered from behind the tree. The dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the orchids. There they waited till the War was over, and now the dead, now Evans himself— ‘For God’s sake don’t come!’ Septimus cried out” (MD, 53–4). The dialogical clash of Aunt Helena’s visions of orchids in the Indian mountains and Septimus’s hallucination of ancient Greek war dead among the orchids, experienced by the 60 Violence against women as a negligible fact of life reappears when Walsh rails against uppercrust manners: “God knows the rascals who get hanged for battering the brains of a girl out in a train do less harm on the whole than Hugh Whitbread and his kindness” (MD, 129). 61 Lady Bruton is appalled by the Indian liberation movement led by Mahatma Gandhi, which gained international attention in 1922 with the demonstrations carried out during the Prince of Wales’s royal tour.

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reader, transforms the subject and object of knowledge and the grounds for their elaboration now extend to empires across millennia. Worldly textual time-space shifting produces a new chronotope that critiques the familiar and given. Such a genealogical perspective signals the fragility of the now by exposing moments of possible alteration or transgression that were overlooked, relinquished, refused. Clarissa does not pursue the ecstasy of Sally Seton’s kiss, nor heed their youthful “presentiment” that marriage would always be a “catastrophe” (MD, 27); instead, predictably, she marries the man who needs her to be a perfect hostess, the one who provides “support,” allows her to “crouch like a bird and gradually revive” and without whom, she is convinced, “she must have perished” (MD, 88, 137). When the “affection” between Septimus and Evans is obliterated by war, Septimus seeks refuge in heteronormativity, becomes “engaged one evening when the panic was on him” (MD, 65, 66). Genealogy also exposes the hostility underlying acceptable behaviors: Lady Bruton’s longing for an active role in politics is thwarted by misogyny. Miss Kilman (previously, Kiehlman) is isolated, confined to menial employment, because of her German descent in postwar England, and her lack of feminine appeal. And thus the reader is distracted, made to realize how present, peacetime conditions are shot through with transhistorical, violent transactions. Dislocation (dislocate to transit): “This is madness, this sense.” In the military, dislocation refers to the redistribution, to several fronts and garrisons, of the corps composing an army. In Mrs. Dalloway, strategic narrative dislocations serve to gainsay the obvious, happy certainty that “The War was over” (MD, 6). Such a statement, and the truth regime that makes it undeniable, are belied by the redistribution and reinscription of warring factions in the multiple systems of thought and relations of force (governmental procedures) enabling peacetime patriarchy, economic exploitation, and racism. The novel’s fifth paragraph begins: “For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened the bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven—over. It was June. The King and Queen were at the palace. And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats” (MD, 6). The passage continues to describe “the now” of “laughing girls,” shopkeepers tempting American tourists, and Clarissa thinking that she was “going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party” (MD, 6). With typical economy Woolf uses narrated interior monologue to illuminate the correlations

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among the privileges of peacetime, the battles of capitalist sexism and racism, and the physical and emotional ravages of war (and peace)—with no exceptions. Such conflicts are fluid and constant, entwined with the forging of both individual and group identities from multiple subject positions. Although the novel makes clear that individuals are continuously assembled from discursive relations that exceed them, characters would have it otherwise. Witness the formidable figure of Lady Bruton, who by virtue of birth, wealth, and power luxuriates in essentialism—indeed, her very name grounds the neighborhood (Westminster is graced by Bruton Place, Bruton Street, Bruton Lane, and Bruton Way), the metropolis, and the nation (Bruton is derived from Brutus, mythical Trojan founder of Britain and London). Coming from a family of “military men, administrators, admirals . . . men of action, who had done their duty,” she is “a strong martial woman, well nourished, well descended, of direct impulses, downright feelings, and little introspective power” whose goal is nothing less than to help govern the population (MD, 83, 82). She has been successful in the past, having “organise[d] an expedition to South Africa (which she had done in the war)” (MD, 82). Her new plan is to foster the emigration of “respectable” yet “surplus” people. This grandiose scheme, the narrator explains, is but the “liberator of the pent egotism” that Lady Bruton “feels rise within her . . . and must eject upon some object . . . round which the essence of her soul is daily secreted,” and this object “becomes inevitably prismatic, lustrous, half looking-glass, half precious stone” (MD, 82). Ironically, the same words both flatter the character’s ego (lustrous, precious) and point to the kind of power-knowledge relations that irradiate, prismatically, through her actions—and thus demonstrate how, in Foucault’s terms, power is both intentional and nonsubjective (HS, 1:94). In her mind, “London flowed up to her” (a general once dispatched troops from her desk) but the text dislocates that illusion by placing Lady Bruton at the intersection of multiple, mobile forms of domination and subjugation (MD, 84). For gender partially disinherits Lady Bruton (unlike Mrs. Foxcroft, who loses the manor entirely). Keenly “feel[ing] the futility of her own womanhood,” Lady Bruton is forced to rely on the kindness of men, whom she must flatter and feed to enlist their help to publicize her plan (MD, 82). Thanks to gender, education, and position, Richard Dalloway, MP and Hugh Whitbread, court functionary, know how to get a letter printed by The Times while pleasing a dowager (whose request mostly involves “stuffing and bunkum” [MD, 83]). Lady Bruton’s subjection is short-lived, however, for at the end of her lunch party, the following chiasmic exchange takes place: while Whitbread patronizes Milly Brush (Millicent Bruton’s secretary) with “some discarded ticket or other compliment, which she loathed from the depths of her heart,” Lady Bruton rebuffs

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Dalloway, who, “with his hat in his hand,” both requests and assumes, “‘We shall see you at our party to-night?’” (MD, 83–4). Lady Bruton prevaricates; only thus can she “resum[e] the magnificence which letter-writing had shattered,” and dismiss them, “standing at her doorway; handsome, very erect,” very masculinized, while “Miss Brush disappear[s] into the background with her hands full of papers” (MD, 84). The text demonstrates that power relations and the truths and emotions that sustain them are exercised and felt intermittently, negotiated continually, carried out and reversed, yet strategically accrue to privilege certain groups or classes while dominating others. Foucault would later concur (HS, 1:94, 96). Lady Bruton is an emblem for and a function of governmentality, a latter-day Britannia (see The Waves, below), working prismatically to foster the life of the one and the many through innumerable transactions. The text also delineates how other members of her class, by establishing their position and simply reaching for “the utmost happiness to be enjoyed in this life” simultaneously strengthen the state (EWF, 3:321). Starting from the perspective of individuals rather than national institutions, Woolf ’s fiction thus prefigures and complements Foucault’s later theorizations (EWF, 3:322). Bradshaw, who has the “support of the police and the good of society” on his side, knows how to “shut people up” (MD, 77): “Worshipping Proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion—his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were women (she embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out of seven at home with her son), so that not only did his colleagues respect him, his subordinates fear him, but the friends and relations of his patients felt for him the keenest gratitude” (MD, 75). With such satirical sentences dislocating the normal everyday, Woolf ’s heterotopic fiction displays how the fluid transit among choices and alliances, affinities, sentiments, and fears enforces norms through multiple measures securing the life of families, governments, and nations. Nowhere is this more apparent than during the climactic party at the Dalloways, that exemplary heterotopic event, during which hegemonic forces are both reaffirmed and contested: “every one was unreal in one way; much more real in another. It was, [Clarissa] thought, partly their clothes, partly being taken out of their ordinary ways, partly the background, it was possible to say things you couldn’t say anyhow else, things that needed an effort; possible to go much deeper” (MD, 127; our ital.). Gracing the Dalloway drawing-room are guests whose positions instantiate the major means and institutions of governance: parliament, the judiciary, the army, the Empire, the industrial middle

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class, the church, health care services, and academia. (No artists.) The forces that these characters embody and the discourses that they enact are brought to bear on one another in a concentrated chronotope that allows otherness to emerge, however momentarily. Moreover, the interdependencies and processes previously elaborated by the text are dramatized anew. The prime minister’s entrance and transit replays (vividly reconfigures) three prior scenes that mobilized the public: the military procession of “weedy” boys, the opulent car, and the sky-writing airplane. Like the boy soldiers, “[h]e looked so ordinary. You might have stood him behind a counter and bought biscuits” (MD, 128, 40), yet “he went his rounds . . . [so] very well” that “they all knew, felt to the marrow of their bones, this majesty passing; this symbol of what they all stood for, English society” (MD, 128; our ital.).62 Like any other commodity, the prime minister needs to be advertised, tarted up, “rigged up with gold lace”: “poor chap. . . . He tried to look somebody. It was amusing to watch” (MD, 128). The major figures of imperialism, Lady Bruton, Helena Parry, Peter Walsh, are described with all their imposing presence and persistent memories as they chatter among themselves. Sally Seton crashes the party and recounts to Peter, ever her ally, all the old disparaging stories (about Hugh, Richard, and Bourton). As Lady Rosseter, however, she prefers to kiss Clarissa on both cheeks, brag about her boys, and proffer, “hour after hour,” the discourse that one expects of one in her position (MD, 141). Elizabeth, no longer a pirate on the Strand, dances attendance upon English society at her parents’ function by exchanging pleasantries with Willie Titcomb and standing at her father’s side (MD, 144). Most importantly, the dead Septimus Warren Smith is brought to the party by the Bradshaws, to bring home the fact that this moment of civilization, like any other, is also simultaneously an act of barbarism.63 In manner and mode—through the conduct of its representative guests, and through textual dislocation and transit—the party is both event and process, heterotopic chronotope and text. The Bradshaws’ discussion of Warren Smith’s suicide momentarily unsettles, distracts Clarissa Dalloway, who retreats into the side room where Lady Bruton had moments ago discussed India with the Prime Minister (MD, 136). Horrified at the thought of death intruding into her party, her gift to life, Clarissa instinctively adumbrates Sir William’s culpability, for she had been to his office once, and thus understands him to be “capable of some indescribable outrage—forcing your

62 In Lady Bruton’s mind, London “flowed up to her,” yet the narrator notes that she “swam up” to the prime minister (MD, 84, 128). 63 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” VII, in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256.

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soul,” making it imprison the body. Now she easily imagines “if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said (indeed she felt it now), Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable, men like that?” (MD, 137). First she feels, then visualizes Septimus’ “plunge” onto the “rusty spikes” (MD, 136), and verbalizes to herself the network of relations that the text has been drawing all along: that her happiness and prosperity are variously implicated in his oppression and madness (“this is madness, this sense” [MD, 75]): “Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress. She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success,—Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton” (MD, 137). The duplication of spatial cues further tightens the links between narrative scenes: both Clarissa and Septimus grasp their lives at the window, while staring at an elderly version of themselves staring back. This mirror of the future provokes their choices: for Septimus, to own his life by giving it up to the enemy; for Clarissa, to accept her life, to “feel the beauty . . . feel the fun,” and return to the party (MD, 138). But this moment of truth can only be made possible through impossible means: Clarissa has no realistic way of seeing and feeling the details of Septimus’ death—yet she does, for the reader. It would have been so easy for Woolf to make Clarissa’s moment at the window transformative: to have her also remember her sister’s unfortunate death, for example, and decide to share these realizations with her daughter. Such a conclusion practically writes itself, as a tender scene of cross-generational empowerment through experience. But the text refuses such an impulse to conversion, for many reasons. First, Clarissa is not a soul to be saved, a character with whom the reader should identify sympathetically, but the effect of discursive subjugation (and privilege).64 As a girl, she used to read Plato and Shelley and William Morris (MD, 27), discuss politics with Sally and Peter; now she matter-of-factly describes herself as being ignorant and vain, unable to distinguish among or care for victims of ongoing genocide (“no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? But she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?)—the only flowers she could bear to see cut” (MD, 90).65 As a woman, Clarissa would love to “have looked differently,” she would

64 Novels such as The English Patient and Warlight similarly refuse closure through empathy; see Part II. 65 See Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps, “‘Facing Governments’: Imagining World Citizenship with Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje,” in Mapping Nations, Locating Citizens:

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like “that people should look pleased as she came in,” she wants her servants to like her, and her “breakfast in bed every day; Lucy carried it up” (MD, 10, 91). To believe that this individual, so positioned, could be radically altered through a single moment of empathy would be theoretically and narratively bankrupt. Moreover, to presume to tell the reader how to live, to suggest a regimen, political or otherwise, would be to assume authority, à-la-Bradshaw or Bruton, the very relations of power-knowledge that the text critiques. Mrs. Dalloway works differently, through a significant form that distracts the reader not only from accepted truths but from accepted, realist reading practices. There are no chapters or numbered divisions to direct the reading of Mrs. Dalloway, only discreet pauses (marked with two lines of blank space), repeated eleven times. The twelve sections66 offer some symmetries of length, and the central part that begins at noon and ends with Septimus’ suicide at 6 pm is the longest. Repeatedly, the narrator addresses the reader in parenthetical remarks or through free indirect discourse, but such gestures end abruptly, ambiguously, with the final ontological reiteration: “For there she was” (MD, 144). The reader is left stranded among strategic, immanent relations of force with no easy answers, no obvious lines of transit or transformation, but with the narrative’s own double-edged gift: a cognitive increment, and the responsibility of critique. Thus Mrs. Dalloway performs a transgredient “anarchaeology” through the “refusal of universals—anti-humanist position—technological analysis of mechanisms of power and, instead of reform program: further extend[s] points of non-acceptance” (GL, 80).

In the Skin of a Lion: Dangerous Yearnings Looking back at roughly the same historical period as Mrs. Dalloway, Ondaatje’s novel focuses on Toronto, the largest English-speaking city in the British Empire’s Dominion of Canada. Narrative gaze is directed away from country estates, elegant luncheons, and glittering parties, to focus instead on makeshift logging camp bunkhouses overcrowded with seasonal laborers, fume-infested tanneries, and meals shared “beside the stalls and crates” of neighborhood street markets, with

Interdisciplinary Discussions on Nationalism and Identity, ed. Daniel Hambly (Toronto: Humber Press, 2017), 7–21. 66 Paul K. Saint-Amour, “Mrs. Dalloway: Of Clocks and Clouds,” in A Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Jessica Berman (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019), 79–94, notes that British editions have twelve sections; the American, only ten.

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the “King Street Russian Mission Brass Band [performing] fifty yards down the road.”67 Ondaatje’s historiographic metafiction documents the precarious lives of immigrants in the city, both local and international, who were employed to build the era’s major infrastructural works (and architectural statements): the Prince Edward Viaduct and the R. C. Harris Water Filtration Plant. This shift in focus is vividly illustrated in a vignette recounting the viaduct’s 1918 opening ceremonies. The “expected show car containing officials,” which in Mrs. Dalloway stops citizens in their tracks and aligns their thoughts with empire, is twice trumped by the people in Skin: publicly in the moment, by an anonymous, illegal cyclist who, wielding a string of onions, bypasses police barriers to claim the bridge (“Thunderous applause greet[s] him at the far end”); solemnly the midnight before, by workers who “brus[h] away officials” guarding the site and, “in a wave of civilization,” honor the “bridge dead” with a candlelight vigil (Skin, 27). The episodes instantiate both the reach and the limits of power: the bridge cannot be used until officials declare it open, yet the cyclist and the workers have already staked their various claims. The official car’s progress in Mrs. Dalloway confirms subjects; its passage in Skin of a Lion also provokes incipient forms of resistance. These two novels are transgredient: each completes the other’s semantic, political, and aesthetic project. Both novels produce effective histories that include emotions, instincts, and desires, but, while Woolf ’s text tracks them through the thoughts of largely idle characters, Ondaatje’s text manifests them through action, struggle, and dialogic encounter. In Mrs. Dalloway, sex is on some characters’ minds sometimes; in Skin of a Lion, sexual pleasures are enjoyed variously. The narrative arc of both novels is elaborated by several characters in turn, and both inscribe in filigree what was relinquished or neglected, quiet hesitancies that change the course of a life (had Clarissa heeded her love for Sally, had Patrick been able to address the skating immigrants who fascinated him as a boy). Whereas characters in Mrs. Dalloway remain blind to the circumstances and forces that shape them (Peter Walsh unwittingly marches along with boy soldiers without noticing what the narrator realizes, that his life, and their lives, are all disciplined by Empire), those in Skin of a Lion constantly confront such influences (following a marching band, Patrick falls in step but comes to recognize what the novel’s structure argues, that his life only acquires meaning through engagement with others [Skin, 144–145]). In the Skin of a Lion begins obliquely, with a formal (metafictional) passage: “This is a story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning. She 67 Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987), 114 (hereafter, Skin).

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listens and asks questions” (Skin, 1). The italicized four-paragraph prologue presents unnamed characters, in an ahistorical now, chatting; the driver “picks up and brings together various corners of the story” that the girl (and the reader) must gather and interrogate (Skin, 1). But the storyteller could be lying: “The man who is driving could say, ‘In that field is a castle,’ and it would be possible for her to believe him” (Skin, 1).68 The reader is set up to expect a first-person account, but the bildungsroman is displayed, dislocated, and multiplied by the omniscient narrator’s meandering tale presenting fragments of multiple characters’ life stories. From a country boy and his father (Patrick and Hazen Lewis, the farm worker turned dynamiter), to a construction worker and a nun (Nicholas Temelcoff and Alice Gull), to a predatory capitalist of the entertainment industry and his lover (Ambrose Small and the actress Clara Dickens), to a thief and the agricultural worker he marries (David and Giannetta Caravaggio), to a murdered union organizer and his daughter (Cato and Hana): an intricate network of relations is gradually brought to light, only to bring the reader back to the beginning, in the end—but this time, the characters are named and known, and have switched positions. The girl, Hana, is now in the driver’s seat (Skin, 244). The novel as a whole transcribes the driver’s introductory story and thus functions as a prequel for the prologue, one that makes new beginnings for the characters and the reader possible through the gift of the tale’s experience. Disposition (Dispose to Transpose): “Tar that blackens the workman’s hands.”69 In the Skin of a Lion enlarges the archive, fleshes out the lives of those whom the Brutons of the world would blindly import or export according to the fluctuating demands of international markets. Like Foucault’s heterotopic fictions, Ondaatje’s text self-reflexively displays the politics of its production in order to disturb the reader’s relationship to knowledge and power: “The articles and illustrations [Patrick] found in the Riverdale Library depicted every detail about the soil, the wood, the weight of the concrete, everything but information on those who actually built the bridge” (Skin, 145). Nicholas Temelcoff is one of several historical figures whose thoughts, emotions, and struggles are imagined in order to produce truths through fiction—truths that have their bearing in the future, for the characters (Hana and Patrick especially) and for the reader (by implication). By laying bare the everyday working lives of loggers, miners, construction and factory workers, Skin of a Lion constitutes an archaeology of experiences.

68 The storyteller’s warning is borne out by the text: events listed as happening in 1938 by the narrator actually took place throughout the 1930s, but not in 1938 (Skin, 209). 69 Gilgamesh, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Free Press, 2004), book VI, 6, 132 (hereafter, cited as Gil).

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The novel transposes them onto the forces of transnational capitalism that shape workers’ bodies and minds. “What is foregrounded” in historiographic metafiction, Linda Hutcheon argues, “is the self-conscious inscription within history of the existing, but usually concealed, attitude of historians toward their material . . . partisanship and even overt politics—these are what replace the pose of objectivity.”70 Filling the gaps, redressing the absences in archival records, horrendous working conditions are documented in detail and at length, in all the ravages they inflict over time, reducing life to bare life with unrelenting purpose and discipline. Digging tunnels under Lake Ontario, the men who fear “the water heaving in, shouldering them aside in a fast death,” work in “slippery darkness”: “[e]ach blow against the shale wall jars up from the palms into the shoulders as if the body is hit. Exhaustion overpowers Patrick and the other tunnellers within twenty minutes, the arms itching, the chest dry. Then an hour more, then another four hours till lunch when they have thirty minutes to eat . . . no one speaks” (Skin, 105–106). Loggers die of pneumonia “or from the sulphur in their lungs from the mills they work in during other seasons” (Skin, 8); a bridge worker is cut in two by wires, “the upper half of his body found an hour later, still hanging in the halter” (Skin, 41). In tanneries, the dyers are “paid one dollar a day. Nobody could last in that job more than six months and only the desperate took it . . . [they] consumed the most evil smell in history . . . flesh death” (Skin, 130–131). Fear and desperation are also the stuff of workers’ nightmares. Thus, a text that virtually expulses World War I forces the reader to register the gradual, relentless mortification of laboring bodies—transposing the government of life unto death, or “bare-knuckle capitalism” (Skin, 57), onto a global war against the proletariat.71 A crucial part of the novel’s archaeological work is to bring to light the systems of thought that made the intolerable, tolerable. For the privileged, workers are virtually invisible and literally unnoteworthy. When Patrick invades Harris’s office in the waterworks and demands, “‘Do you know how many of us died in there?’” the unapologetic reply is, “‘There was no record kept’” (Skin, 236).

70 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 74. For a discussion of Skin as revisionist history from an ex-centric perspective, see Carol L. Beran, “Ex-Centricity: Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising,” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 18, no. 1 (1993): n.p. See Karen Overbye, “Re-Membering the Body: Constructing the Self as Hero in In the Skin of a Lion,” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 17, no. 2 (1992): n.p., https://journals.lib.unb. ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/8161/9218, for the importance of bodies in Skin. 71 See also Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40; and Antonio Hart and Michael Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

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Exploitation is justified both by laissez-faire capitalist practices and by the usual disclaimers, those exercising authority purporting to be powerless, without option or choice. Harris describes himself as an “amateur” compared with those wielding “real power” (Skin, 242). At play is also the willful ignorance of “the rich,” so despised by Alice: “‘the rich are always laughing. They keep saying the same things on boats and lawns: Isn’t this grand! We’re having a good time! . . . But they keep you in the tunnels and stockyards’” (Skin, 132). This attitude governs the decidedly non-heterotopic costume party at the yacht club during which, “under false stars and false moonlight,” the rich dance and laugh and aim champagne corks at monkeys tethered in trees, “never able to reach the diners because of a frail chain” (Skin, 221).72 At a time when immigration reached unprecedented levels, the luxury of treating workers as if they were goods was buttressed by racism, enacted by careful screening at the national front door. Several legislative acts and administrative processes established a dispositif of ethnic gradation among whites. British citizens were prized over all others, but Scandinavians and Germans were actively sought by government campaigns advertising Canada’s promise.73 As documented by Ninette Kelley and Michael Trebilcock, the 1910 Canadian Immigration Act “formalized admissibility and deportation procedures. . . . Cabinet was authorized to enact regulations that prohibited the entry of immigrants ‘belonging to any race deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada or immigrants of any specified class, occupation, or character.’”74 The leitmotif of invisibility characterizes several workers, but none so much as Caravaggio: “A tarrer of roads, a house-builder, a painter, a thief—yet he was invisible to all around him” (Skin, 199; see also 166, 210, 228). Until incarceration: in the Kingston penitentiary, racialized differences make him all too visible and vulnerable, the target of men “who have evolved smug and without race,” who beat and slash the throat of the “‘Fucking wop! Fucking dago!’” (Skin, 185). Xenophobic power relations are exercised from below as well as from above. To gainsay the “truth” that workers are no more than economic resources, the novel

72 Unlike Mrs. Dalloway, in which the social event and the reader’s experience of it both reiterate and interrogate established relations of power-knowledge (through heterotopic space and transactions), In the Skin of a Lion uses the party merely as confirmation and display of such relations. 73 Ninette Kelley and Michael Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 126. 74 Ibid., 120. See Avery for the correlation between declining birth rates in farm families and the increased demand for immigrant laborers. Patrick Lewis, the only child of an agricultural worker, represents this demographic trend.

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highlights heroic figures with larger-than-life stories: the construction worker in a harness who catches a nun falling from a bridge with one arm, dislocating the other, and never lets go; the strike organizer who is shot by authorities while running for his life across a frozen landscape and is buried in the snow; a troupe of performers risking arrest to foment community among workers and their families; Finns temporarily escaping the daily grind of logging by taking the night, laughing as they skate on the river, waving lit reeds. In the Skin of a Lion demonstrates that workers could tolerate the intolerable because of a toxic mix of desperation and hope. Expectations were fostered by stories of previous emigrants’ success; by movie screens flickering with chimerical promises; by theatrical performances—all giving variations of the North American dream of individual triumph.75 Temelcoff ’s life story exemplifies both the dreams and the cost of their realization. In 1914, he leaves his Balkan village because it has been torched by war-time genocidal attacks, but he chooses Canada because “Daniel Stoyanoff had tempted them all. In North America everything was rich and dangerous. . . . Daniel buying a farm with the compensation he had received for losing an arm during an accident in a meat factory” (Skin, 43–46). Exceptionally strong and skilled, Temelcoff takes the work that no one else will, and is wounded repeatedly: a “coiling wire” breaks his jaw, nearly killing him; “[h]ot tar burns on his arm. Nails in his calves” (Skin, 37). “[A]bout twenty scars” and four years later, he has earned enough money to open a bakery, his dream. His is the friendly face of capitalism; generous to strangers and friends, the only life Temelcoff risks is his own. Through a series of figurative parallels, however, the text shows that between Temelcoff, the small entrepreneur, and Ambrose Small, the predatory capitalist, the differences are of degree, not kind. Both are described as “spinners” linking everyone, standing in mid-air and then falling or swooping down in their enterprise (Skin, 34, 57), for they “had to win or . . . [they] lost everything” (Skin, 84). The commercial “war of all against all” enlists everyone. When Ambrose Small and his fortune disappear in December 1919 and an $80,000 reward is offered for his capture, legions of “searchers” paid $4 a week are deployed to find him, and “these individuals roamed the city and the smaller towns dragging suspicious strangers into police stations” (Skin, 59).76 The novel thus demonstrates

75 See Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Anchor, 1989), on the invention of the Hollywood dream by Jewish immigrants. 76 See Katie Daubs, The Missing Millionaire: The True Story of Ambrose Small and the City Obsessed with Finding Him (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2020), for an account of the story of Ambrose Small.

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how free enterprise works by reducing every human relation to a cash nexus, shattering communities. Narrative dispositions transpose the individual, the local, the taken for granted, onto globalizing capitalist forces. Distraction (distract to transact): “Only the best art . . . can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become.” Foucault describes his work of the 1970s as part of a general “insurrection of subjugated knowledges”—various attempts to bring to the fore what had been previously disqualified or ignored, what scientific or totalizing theories had masked (P/K, 81). “Two Lectures” defines genealogy as “the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today” (P/K, 83). By “erudite knowledge,” Foucault refers to “historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systemisation”; popular knowledges comprise the “local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate” understandings of ordinary people (le savoir des gens) (P/K, 81–83). In the Skin of a Lion participates in this insurrection. Its genealogical work uncovers early twentieth-century erudite and local knowledges to reposition the Canadian policy of multiculturalism instituted in the 1970s and 1980s as both commemoration and erasure: a policy that remembers and legally respects “communities whose members share a common origin and their historic contribution to Canadian society” while eliding the often brutal material conditions and costs of such “contributions” for immigrants and refugees.77 But the 1960s, 70s, and 80s were also the time when many dissidents, including the FLQ (Front de Libération du Québec [Quebec Liberation Front]) in Canada, the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, and the Italian Brigate Rosse (Red Brigade), resorted to violent forms of protest and anarchy, countered forcefully by governments (including, in October 1970, the invocation of the War Measures Act in Canada). Registering the aftershocks of bloody working-class dissent in the 1920s and 30s, Skin of a Lion traces the genealogy of a would-be suicide-bomber who finds his way out of violence through dialogic encounters. Thus the novel fictionalizes forgotten or hidden histories of the present to draw alternative futures, writing against the grain of “official histories and news stories [that] were always soft as rhetoric, like that of a politician making a speech after a bridge is built, a man who does not even cut the grass on his own lawn” (Skin, 145).

77 Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1988), www.solon.org/Statutes/Canada/English/C/CMA. html. See Susan Spearey, “Mapping and Masking: The Migrant Experience in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 29, no. 2 (1994): 45–60, for a discussion of Ondaatje’s postcolonial aesthetic in relation to migrants.

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Patrick Lewis is the ur-Canadian whose story would seem to recapitulate that of the nation: the son of Hazen Lewis (farm worker, logger, and dynamiter who calls square dances) is the white farm boy from Upper Canada who immigrates to the city and becomes a man. Yet the centre does not hold: Patrick and Hazen are both isolated, “born in Abashed, Ontario” (Skin, 157). The father remains “uninterested in the habits of civilization outside his own focus” (Skin, 15); the “one leap of his life,” teaching himself to work dynamite, eventually brings him to the feldspar mineshaft that collapses and buries him alive, one more worker killed on the job, his commodification ultimately materialized by the feldspar desk adorning Harris’s lavish office (Skin, 74, 235). The son’s journey is different and illustrates the text’s method: his elaboration of self78 is distracted from the paths predicted by patrimony and realized, instead, through a series of transactions with others. Working as a Small searcher, he finds and falls in love with the magnate’s mistress, Clara Dickens; the blind iguana she leaves him when she returns to Small is instrumental for his introduction to the Macedonians, who sell the vetch Patrick needs to feed the gooshter. Patrick’s knowledge of dynamite prompts an invitation to join the workers’ clandestine gatherings at the filtration plant construction site, where he encounters, for the third time, Clara’s friend (and Temelcoff ’s falling nun), Alice Gull. Patrick is a “prism” that refracts other lives and struggles: “His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web—all of these fragments . . . something ungoverned by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day” (Skin, 157, 145). Ondaatje’s novel thus heeds the methodological precautions proffered by Nietzsche and Foucault: “if the genealogist . . . listens to history,” he “finds that there is ‘something altogether different’ behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence, or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms” (EWF, 2:371).79 Such is Ondaatje’s technique. Skin of a Lion refuses any totalizing or homogenizing narrative impulse; it is offered in fragments that must be assembled rather than consumed by the reader, just as the girl in the prologue must gather

78 Part II defines and studies the elaboration of self performed by Patrick Lewis and other characters. 79 Glen Lowry, “The Representation of ‘Race’ in Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6, no. 3 (2004), http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol6/ iss3/, analyzes Skin’s construction of “whiteness.” There is only one casual reference to Indigenous peoples (Skin, 119), when even the word Toronto is derived from Mohawk. See Jodi Lundgren, “‘Colour Disrobed Itself from the Body’: The Racialized Aesthetics of Liberation in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion,” Canadian Literature 190 (Autumn 2006): 15–29.

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the story she is told. Proceeding in this fashion suggests that causality is never straightforward or linear; only parts of the story come to light parts of the time, inferring that the narrative mural is multivalent, multidirectional, and can never be contained by a dominant story. As Hutcheon argues, “Historiographic metafiction accepts [a] philosophically realist view of the past and then proceeds to confront it with an anti-realist one that suggests that . . . the past exists for us— now—only as traces on and in the present.”80 Patrick understands this method intimately: he “never believed that characters lived only on the page. They altered when the author’s eye was somewhere else” (Skin, 143). Several times, for example, the text implies a close, continuing, and transformative friendship between Alice and Nicholas, without ever focusing on it. Their first, startling encounter irrevocably alters both: “Nicholas Temelcoff walks now seeing Parliament Street from the point of view of the woman—who had looked through his belt-satchel while he slept, found his wide wire shears, and used them to cut away the black lengths of her habit. . . . He is aware of her now, the twin” (Skin, 48–9).81 (Even though the characters only reappear together on the page as she is dying, Alice’s daughter introduces Patrick to her friend Temelcoff). This chance event literally transforms the unnamed nun (the epitome of gendered submission) into Alice Gull, the actress who elaborates her self through ongoing engagement with others—a series of dialogic transactions with Temelcoff, Clara, Cato, working-class immigrant communities, and of course, Patrick, leaping from “her true self to her other true self ” (Skin, 153). Her violent death sets Patrick’s life on a radical political itinerary, which lands him in jail. Released in 1938 into a city rocked by riots and protests, he intensifies his fight by strapping dynamite to his body and infiltrating the water purification plant he had worked to build, which is now defended by the army against civil unrest. Written in the age of terrorist attacks on political and economic institutions around the world, Ondaatje’s text argues that anarchy is bred at home, from ruthless exploitation. To illuminate its own method of elaboration, the novel also traces the genealogy of its form by drawing intertextual relations to world artistic developments contemporary to the story, and by adopting their aesthetic practices as they are introduced. Thus Mimi’s death scene in La Bohème [Bohemian life] serves not only to liberate workers from bare life as they listen to the radio in the steam bath, but also prefigures Patrick’s final, moving aria when he recounts Alice’s death for

80 Hutcheon, Politics, 73. 81 For both, the music of Fats Waller provides pleasure but also functions politically: Temelcoff learns English (Skin, 47); Gull, “for whom the twentieth century’s greatest invention” is the jitterbug, “can almost forgive capitalism for that. She is in love with Fats Waller” (Skin, 147).

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Rowland Harris. Thus the novel stages multiple spatio-temporal planes of visibility when it presents the construction of the viaduct as a “moment of cubism” (Skin, 34). Thus allusions to jazz and Fats Waller underscore narrative strategies of multiple voice montages through a series of featured performances (the Lewises then Temelcoff then Caravaggio then Patrick). Thus Joseph Conrad’s impassioned letters to newspapers help to politicize Alice Gull, who reads them to Patrick in order to convert him to her cause (“So Patrick listened to his contemporary” [Skin, 134]); letters from her former lover Cato, the murdered union organizer, also help to radicalize Patrick; his unsent letters to Clara Dickens involve the reader in the “sudden intimac[ies]” of the epistolary mode in a kind of infinite regression or mise en abyme (Skin, 84–86). But from the title to the climactic confrontation between Lewis and Harris, in overall design and through myriad details, the epic of Gilgamesh inhabits Ondaatje’s novel. Both stories test and affirm the limits of mortality, and invoke catastrophic loss and grieving; both present a journey and then return to their starting point (with a shift in narrative perspective); both delineate transactions between the rural and the urban. Some would argue that these intertextual relations reaffirm the transhistorical, universal struggles of humankind with power, death, mourning, and return. Others would stress that by redeploying the epic, Ondaatje is using well-known modernist techniques contemporary to the novel’s temporal framework (the “mythic method” favored by James Joyce or T. S. Eliot), just as he uses Cubist techniques to describe the era of Cubism. Yet we would argue that it is the history of Gilgamesh’s fabrication, translation, and transmission that is most pertinent to the novel’s worldly political practice. Gilgamesh is indeed an urtext, but of multicultural productions born in conflict and war. Well before 2000 BCE (more than 1500 years before the Iliad), Gilgamesh was recited in ancient Babylonia. In the sixth century BCE, in the first of several imperial appropriations, the story was inscribed in cuneiform on tablets and preserved in the library of the Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal. Palestinian, Syrian, and Turkish versions followed, realigning the epic with other cultural and historical perspectives. As Stephen Mitchell and David Damrosch recount, in 1844 Austen Henry Layard, a young Englishman en route to Ceylon, stopped in Mesopotamia to work in the excavations of Nineveh and Nimrud that yielded, among other treasures, still indecipherable tablets, some 25,000 of which were “shipped back to the British Museum.”82 In 1853 another team of eager, amateur 82 Stephen Mitchell, “Introduction” (Gil, 4). See also Damrosch, What Is, 39–77; and David Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Henry Holt, 2007).

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British archaeologists found in Nineveh tablets that told the story of Gilgamesh. Greater interest and financial support for the work was spurred in 1872, when it was believed that Gilgamesh included a version of Noah’s flood, thus ostensibly documenting a fundamental Judeo-Christian story. This prompted London’s Daily Telegraph to finance further excavations the following year. (Another version of Gilgamesh had been discovered in Warka, site of the ancient city of Uruk, in the 1850s.) An English translation of the fragments was presented to the British Society of Biblical Archaeology in December 1872; the first two-volume edition of the tablets was published in 1884 and 1891, and subsequently translated into German, in 1900–1901. In the 1930s, when Toronto was rocked by civil, ethnic, and anti-Semitic unrest, the Nazis sponsored excavations at Uruk in the hopes of finding evidence of their Aryan roots. The relation between Gilgamesh and the history of its imperialist dissemination is homologous to the relation between the workers’ stories in Skin of a Lion and imperialist capitalism. Chronological correspondences are decisive: the novel’s time period, from the 1860s to the 1930s, roughly corresponds to that of the lost epic’s rediscovery and various tactical redeployments.83 Many other correlations can be drawn between Gilgamesh and Skin of a Lion, both textual (through motifs, story, and plot) and generic (through the novelization of the epic84). Thematic correspondences abound. Both texts prominently display deforestation, logging, and construction (with tar as leitmotif); treacherous tunnel passages and sudden slumber; scenes of abusive governance; a ritual of encircling the protagonist (with flour, for Gilgamesh; with green chalk and later crayon, for Patrick); sexual initiations; and the repetition of key scenes. Textual refractions in terms of plot signal the novel’s reworking of Gilgamesh’s gendered and class givens: Enkidu, the loving friend (the “wild man” who tempers and saves Gilgamesh) becomes Clara Dickens and Alice Gull, friends and lovers who introduce Patrick to community life; the goddess Ishtar, who tames Enkidu and sends him to the city, becomes Temelcoff, who saves the nun and 83 Adaptations keep proliferating, from pop culture to Saddam Hussein. See Damrosch, The Buried Book. 84 In the 1920s and 1930s, Bakhtin studied such a shift. See “Discourse in the Novel” (DI). Dimock opposes Bakhtin’s view and maintains that the epic genre is recycled across literatures and popular cultures. See Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents; Wai Chee Dimock, “Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents,” Narrative 14, no. 1 (2006): 85–101; Wai Chee Dimock, “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge,” PMLA 122, no. 5 (October 2007): 1377–1388; Wai Chee Dimock, “Low Epic,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 614–631; Wai Chee Dimock, “Gilgamesh’s Planetary Turns,” in The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 125–141.

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launches her Toronto existence as Alice (both interventions ultimately leading to death); Shiduri, the tavern keeper who counsels Gilgamesh to “enjoy your life . . . / love the child who holds you by the hand”85 becomes both the “goddess” waitress at the Thompson Grill on River Street (Skin, 111–112) and the blind woman in the garden on Muskoka’s Page Island who laughingly advises Patrick, “‘Don’t resent your life’” (Skin, 170). Such textual remanences are thematized when Patrick remembers Alice’s description of a play in which “several actresses shared the role of the heroine,” each in turn donning the “powerful matriarch’s . . . large coat from which animal pelts dangled . . . they assumed the skins of wild animals, when they took responsibility for the story” (Skin, 157). In Gilgamesh, however, only the male sovereign’s story matters: only he roams the wilderness in “the skin of a lion” to manifest his mourning for Enkidu (Gil, 155, 158). Ondaatje’s heterotopic world fiction reverses these formal relations and their ethos by altering generic parameters.86 We have already noted how Skin of a Lion reshapes the bildungsroman’s story of individual development along the paths of male entitlement by figuring the formation of subjectivity as a process realized through a network of relations: Patrick only reaches maturity when his dialogic encounters enable him to cross the “space between him and community,” destroying “the terrible horizon in him beyond which he couldn’t leap” (Skin, 157). Only then can he become Hana’s father, and can they together model a new form of “multiversality”87 produced from ethnic and cultural differences. Community formation is further specified by referring to and altering epic traits. The epic’s focus on a sovereign, god-like hero’s trials and conquests is exchanged for a wider perspective on the greatness of the people; the depiction of an absolute past existing beyond the reach of the speaker or auditor is replaced by the novel’s ongoing engagement with the present as becoming; the affirmation of stasis through the hero’s return to the city is transformed into a return to mobility, to a journey towards an undetermined, unsayable future. Whereas the ancient texts function through and because of memory, the novel “by contrast, is determined by experience, knowledge, and practice (the future)” (DI, 15)—a knowledge and experience of the present that are Janus-like in their engagement with past and future. 85 Gilgamesh, book X (Gil, 168–169). 86 As Bakhtin argues, “every genre has its methods and means of seeing and conceptualizing reality”; “the artist must learn to see reality with the eyes of the genre.” Mikhail Bakhtin/P. M. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 133–134. 87 See Robert Latham, “What Are We? From a Multicultural to a Multiversal Canada,” International Journal 63, no. 1 (Winter 2007/2008): 23–41.

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Through such transgressive generic transactions, and genealogical distractions, Ondaatje’s text alters relations of power and knowledge. Dislocation (dislocate to transit): “The home of the other. . . . The taste of the other.” Mrs. Dalloway strategically demonstrates that the “great war” is not over by dislocating the trenches to Regents Park and Westminster; In the Skin of a Lion strikingly ignores World War I, choosing instead to focus on the ways in which transnational capitalism wages war against workers. The text shows various asymmetrical forces engaged in the multiple battles that constitute peace. Rather than considering the People in its relation to national institutions of government, the novel apprehends the people (“le peuple, les malheureux” [the people, the unfortunate])88 in their many, ever-changing relations with mechanisms of discipline, sovereignty, and governmentality. We have already delineated the novel’s meticulous tracking of discipline’s impact on laborers’ bodies and minds; moreover, leisure activities (going to the movies or the theatre) not only integrate immigrants by teaching them English, but also encourage acceptable desires and ambitions, behaviors and goals, through stories of individual success and happiness—a collateral benefit of the entertainment industry. The pressures to lose ethnic markers, to disappear into English, were experienced variously but systematically: “Sojourners walked out of their accent into regional American voices” (Skin, 47). Yet, where there is power there is resistance. The political activist Cato (the Finn’s “war name” Skin, 122, 140)89 is murdered for attempting to organize a loggers’ union; his lover Alice dislocates the struggle to guerrilla theatre productions at the waterworks construction site. Her play gives a “caricature of a culture”: a mob of puppets, their costumes “a blend of several nations,” tentatively sets foot on “this dangerous new country of the stage” and are “gestur[ed] down with laws” (Skin, 116–117). The hero (Alice wearing a curled moustache, “a Finnish shirt and Serbian pants”) is “brought before the authorities, unable to speak their language”; s/he is “assaulted by insults” and then pummeled until a member of the audience intervenes on the stage (Skin,

88 This Robespierre quotation is discussed by Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1963); and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998). 89 Two Finnish-Canadian labor activists, Viljo Rosvall and Janni Voutilainen, disappeared in Thunder Bay (then Port Arthur), Ontario in November 1929 while heading for a bush camp to promote a strike. They were found dead, under suspicious circumstances, by a union search party five months later. Their April 1930 funeral was attended by thousands. See Dennis Duffy, “A Wrench in Time: A Sub-sub-librarian Looks beneath the Skin of a Lion,” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (Summer 1994): 125–140.

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116–118)—just as the reader is meant to implicate itself in the narrative’s political project.90 Sovereign relations are inscribed in a series of seemingly offhand remarks by the narrator concerning bylaws and executive powers. In 1929 Toronto Police Chief Draper “imposed laws against public meetings by foreigners. So if they speak . . . in public, in any language other than English, they will be jailed. A rule of the city” (Skin, 133)91—a rule that affected foreign-born workers differently, making them vulnerable to summary deportation. When Patrick is released from prison in 1938, “‘Red Squads’ intercepted mail, tear-gassed political meetings. By now over 10,000 foreign-born workers had been deported out of the country. Everyone sang ‘Just One of Those Things’” (Skin, 209). Yet it wasn’t. First legalized in 1910 (within the framework of the Immigration Act), the deportation of “agitators, activists, and radicals” became “deliberate and systematic,” intensifying from 1914 until the late 1930s. Barbara Roberts documents how “between 1918 and 1922 . . . about twenty radical groups, including the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), were made illegal in Canada under the War Measures Act”92 (81)—thus enabling targeted expulsions.93 Sotto voce, Ondaatje’s story of Finns in Canada (from joyful night-skating to labor struggles, deportation, and murder) inscribes the all-too-easy executive dispatch of people caught in the mesh of economic and political interests.94 Administrators 90 This provocative scene from Skin functions as does the final “mirror” episode in Between the Acts; see below. 91 “[D]isorderly or seditious utterances” also justified arrest: “Police Chief Draper and Mayor McBride promoted police harassment and assault against radicals. . . . Toronto remained a hotbed of radical action and repression by the authorities until the mid-1930s.” Barbara Roberts, “Shovelling Out the ‘Mutinous’: Political Deportation from Canada Before 1936,” Labour/Le Travail 18 (Fall 1986): 88. See also Kelley and Trebilcock, Making of the Mosaic, 237–8. 92 Barbara Roberts, “Shovelling,” 81. 93 See ibid.; Barbara Roberts, Whence They Came: Deportation from Canada 1900–1935 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988); and Kelley and Trebilcock, Making of the Mosaic. For contemporary studies of immigration and deportation policies and practices, see Oscar Ryan, Deported! (Ottawa: Canadian Labour Defense League, 1932); Frank Scott, “Immigration Act: False Arrest, Illegal Treatment of Arrested Person,” Canadian Bar Review 14, no. 1 (January 1936): 62–67; William Van Vleck, The Administrative Control of Aliens: A Study in Administrative Law and Procedure (New York: The Commonwealth Fund, 1932); and C. F. Fraser, Control of Aliens in the British Commonwealth of Nations (London: Hogarth, 1940), published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. 94 Between 1900 and 1911, 21,000 Finns immigrated to Canada (the “most sizeable movement” of any national group [Kelley and Trebilcock, Making of the Mosaic, 126]). Roberts documents how radicals were forcibly returned to a country in which “the Whites had been in power for more than a decade (which they had initiated with concentration camps and executions for Reds) and were busily carrying out anti-radical campaigns of their own through the agency of fascist thugs.” Roberts, “Shovelling,” 100. See also Anthony Upton, The Communist Parties of Scandinavia and Finland (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973).

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could wield sovereign power: “Cases were often built on personal impressions of officials about the attitudes of the accused; the immigrants were not privy to and could not refute this material.”95 These forms of abuse were answered in kind by demonstration, riot, and anarchy. Such methods are defended by Alice Gull, who does not participate in bombings yet is killed by the accidental detonation of a clock bomb she unknowingly carries through the chaos and crowds of popular protests (Skin, 239).96 Thus Patrick Lewis’ attempted bombing of the water-filtration plant (in the chapter entitled “Maritime Theatre”) is staged in the midst of violent opposition: “dissident groups were already voicing themselves within the city. The events in Spain,97 the government’s crackdown on unions, made the rich and powerful close ranks. Troops were in evidence everywhere. When the last shift left the water-filtration plant the police and the army moved in to guard it. . . . There were soldiers on the roofs and searchlights dipped now and then along the waves of the lake” (Skin, 220). Governmental relations are predominantly figured by the historical Rowland C. Harris, Toronto’s Commissioner of Public Works (1912–1945), who imagined and oversaw the construction projects featured in the novel. Through this recurring character the text unearths the erudite knowledge (connaissances) required and generated by governmentality: “He was a man who understood . . . the daily consumptions of water, the speed of raw water through a filter bed, the journeys of chlorine and sulphur-dioxide to the island filtration plant, the 119 inspections by tugboats each year of the various sewer outfalls . . . and the two miles a year of water-main construction. . . . This was choreography in 1930” (Skin, 110–111). Working from given conditions (the Don River dividing the city, Lake Ontario, the Victoria Park forest, a growing population, economic fluctuations, political turmoil), Harris’s governmental function is to develop statistics, forecast urban needs, initiate projects to meet them, and take whatever security measures are required for the protection of the population and its built environment. For example, he envisions that the massive bridge spanning the river could “carry traffic, water, and electricity across the Don Valley . . . could carry not just cars but trains on a lower trestle,” thereby enabling the circulation of subway trains almost four decades later (Skin, 26, 29). Like Gilgamesh, he “pulled down” a forest “and the essential temple [the waterworks] swept up in its 95 Roberts, “Shovelling,” 96. 96 This event resonates with Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1906), the novel about anarchy and terrorist bombings that is never mentioned in Skin (unlike Conrad’s letters). Both Alice Gull and Conrad’s Stevie are accidentally blown up by a parcel bomb they are carrying unwittingly. Hazen Lewis, like Conrad’s Professor, fantasizes about exploding himself and others. 97 For Woolf ’s response to the Spanish Civil War, see the discussion of Three Guineas below.

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place. . . . The architect Pomphrey modelled its entrance on a Byzantine city gate, and the inside of the building would be an image of the ideal city” (Skin, 109).98 Piano piano, the conduct of conduct is inscribed throughout the novel. Local labor agents rename immigrants to ensure a homogenous, easily identifiable workforce (as government officials often did at national entry-points): “Charlie Johnson, Nick Parker. They remembered the strange foreign syllables like a number” (Skin, 132). Teachers correct pronunciation: on the streets one can hear “the chanting of English lessons to large groups at Central Neighbourhood House—one pure English voice claiming My name is Ernest, and then a barrage of male voices claiming their names were Ernest” (Skin, 138). Regularizing pressures aimed at the population are resisted through the forging of communities based on the very differences that were supposed to be erased. For example, the persecuted Cato is embraced by Alice, who dons a Finnish shirt and curly moustache in the play that expresses both personal loss and class suffering; Patrick, with his “Macedonian-style moustache” and “his Finnish suit,” is embraced by his neighbors, the Macedonian community—even though he is “their alien” (Skin, 113). These trans-gender and trans-cultural overlaps are epitomized by Hana, the child of Cato and Alice later raised by Patrick (and Temelcoff, when Patrick is incarcerated), who enjoys transiting within her own counter-city: “the city [Hana] had constructed for herself—the places she brought together and held as if on the delicate thread of her curiosity: Hoo’s Trading Company where Alice bought herbs for fever . . . Italian gymnasts at the Elm Street gym” (Skin, 138). Within the governmentalized city built for the People, the people create and inhabit multiple communal spaces constructed from age-old traditions and new ties to the homes and tastes of others. Between the predatory and friendly capitalists, Small and Temelcoff, there is David Caravaggio, the local cat burglar who works with a dog, swooping down to profit from the fruits of others’ labor (stealing from the rich). Caravaggio confounds and mediates the lines of force, visibility, enunciation, and subjectivity drawn by the narrative.99 The picture of disorganized crime, he is thrown into prison. By chance, during a roof-top work detail, he realizes that he can be painted into invisibility and freedom, blue on blue (Skin, 179–180). In a heterotopic space of constant surveillance, he thwarts panoptic mechanisms with the assistance of “the prisoners Buck and Lewis . . . government paintbrush[es] in hand” (Skin, 179). Like his namesake, Caravaggio is an escape artist, an 98 Having “chopped down the trees of the Cedar Forest,” Gilgamesh and Enkidu build “a gigantic door” and “float it down the Euphrates to Enlil’s temple in Nippur” (Gil, 128–129). 99 In “What is a dispositif?” Deleuze argues that Foucault’s dispositif mobilizes these lines.

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opportunist.100 His circuitous route back to Toronto transits through the hegemonic rural landscape of Can Lit, marked by his encounters with the helpful boy Al (a nod to Al Purdy) and understanding writer Anne (presumably Wilkinson) (Lowry).101 Glen Lowry further suggests that Caravaggio “steal[ing] his way back to the city” can “be read as an imaginative reflection of Ondaatje’s own presence within the centralist tradition of Canadian letters.” However interesting, this biographical interpretation bypasses the crucial metafictional functions of Caravaggio, which foreground the novel’s method. The artist’s name is synonymous with chiaroscuro, an experimental technique that altered realism in the 1590s by transforming both the object and the means of its perception. The thief ’s first encounter with his future wife playfully foregrounds and eroticizes this aesthetic: he sees her “black shadow mov[e] parallel to her whiteness” as she dresses; she sees him hiding in a bed of mushrooms when the beam of light from her helmet discovers him (Skin, 192). Caravaggio the painter (1571–1610) affronted his contemporaries by naturalizing sacred figures; conversely, Ondaatje’s narrative light transforms ordinary people (Temelcoff, Cato, Gull) into extraordinary and inspirational figures (to each other and potentially to the reader). The section entitled “Caravaggio” begins with the eponymous character descending from a prison roof and ends with him embracing his wife, lifting her “onto his shoulders so her arms ascend into the chandelier” (Skin, 206). Their passionate lovemaking is excessive and tender, the novel’s most romantic erotic encounter staged amidst shards of glass and falling crockery (Skin, 204). But does it take place? The scene of a “kitchen being fucked” begins and ends with a description of Caravaggio drinking milk in the hallway as Giannetta arrives (Skin, 204, 206). The text does not differentiate between the pleasures of 100 Andrew Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (London: Allen Lane and Penguin, 2010), notes that most information about Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) comes from criminal archives. For a visual archive, consult Caravaggio Foundation, http://www.caravaggio-foundation.org/ 101 The encounter with Anne archly “appropriates and rewrites literary history within the frame of fiction”: a sentence from Wilkinson’s then-unpublished journal is attributed to Caravaggio and therefore presumably stolen by the writer. Thus “Ondaatje undermines the originary moment of the very material.” Lowry, “The Representation of ‘Race’ in Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion.” Al Purdy the poet will be to the landscape what the Group of Seven painters were, from the 1920s to the 1950s, to the rugged central and northern Ontario landscape (see King). During Caravaggio’s escape from prison, narrative descriptions of the landscape evoke Group of Seven imagery. Caravaggio at one point crosses the same Salmon River on which the Finns skated, near Tamworth, during Patrick Lewis’s childhood and in which Hazen Lewis dynamited logs. Thus the text continues to enmesh its materials historically and imaginatively.

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anticipation and those of actuality. This textual heterotopia positions the reader in a space of possibilities, potestas, rather than norms. In an apartment strewn with “broken glass and crockery” (Skin, 86), the abashed Patrick is brought back to life by sex with Alice (which remains undescribed, merely suggested in terms evoking Enkidu—nature, transparency, and “her sudden animal growl” [Skin, 89]). Cato, the political agitator and outsider, can only have sex outside, on Thursdays (Skin, 150–1). The erotic moment when Alice and Clara dance and crawl together in the darkness, in the rain, amid the moon flowers, is enabled by the actresses’ gendered experience and habit of playing. In Skin, leitmotifs such as earrings removed or lost during sex (Skin, 89, 153, 204), outstretched arms (Skin, 76, 206), allusions to nature (Skin, 76, 150–1, 205), and growls (Skin, 76, 89) underscore how sexuality is both a constructed and shared experience. Thus the text demonstrates how discursive subject positions inflect individual desires and passions. But the Caravaggio section, which literally interrupts and dislocates the main narrative, is there to show an alternative, joyful elaboration of self as a practice of freedom, through a multiplication of bodies and pleasures (HS, 1:157). Caravaggio is the one who helps Patrick Lewis, the novel’s other convicted felon, to risk life and limb in order to steal into the water purification plant and blow it up. While still under construction, the site had been used for illegal transcultural gatherings, political meetings, and guerrilla theater—a heterotopic space claimed by the people, who refused to be disciplined into isolation and alienation. When Patrick prepares to bomb the plant, it has been turned into an armed camp—the military ready to defend the Palace of Purification against any and all attacks foreseen by Harris (“Cutting off the water supply or poisoning it would bring the city to its knees” [Skin, 220]). Patrick and Caravaggio counter by resorting to their best trick. Patrick will infiltrate the plant by disappearing into the intake tunnel he helped build: “Patrick is invisible except by touch, grease covering all unclothed skin, his face, his hands, his bare feet. Demarcation. Caravaggio can sense his body, can feel and distinguish the belt straps, the button-locks that secure the fuses. . . . No words” (Skin, 228). The climactic scene between the would-be bomber and the sovereign in his Palace distracts reason, common sense, and generic expectations of heroism. After heated political discussion between opponents, Patrick and the narrator movingly describe—for the first time—the circumstances of Alice’s violent death (years before, near the middle of the novel). Like Gilgamesh after an incantation, Patrick is then overcome by sleep. Seeing this, Harris (or the narrator) quotes the epic: “‘He lay down to sleep, until he was woken from out of a dream. He saw the lions around him glorying in life; then he took his axe in his

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hand, he drew his sword from his belt, and he fell upon them like an arrow from the string’” (Skin, 242). The quotation truncates the sentence, eliding the final moment when sovereignty exercises its power to give death: “and struck and destroyed and scattered them.”102 Instead of shooting or arresting the intruder, Harris instructs his officer: “‘Let him sleep on. Don’t talk. Just take [the blasting box] away. Bring a nurse with some medical supplies here, he’s hurt himself ’” (Skin, 242). Both men thus refuse to play their assigned, combative roles, rejecting the “preposterous masculine fiction” of war.103 Alice, one could say, saves Patrick’s life twice: in life, she rescues him from self-imposed isolation and mortification after he is abandoned by Clara; in death, the story of her chance annihilation instigates a peaceful resolution. In this heterotopic space—both physical and textual—the dialogical encounter of power and potentiality allows a transit out of war. Ondaatje’s world fiction shows how men can walk away from the seemingly inevitable “final battle . . . [that] would put an end, once and for all, to the exercise of power as continual war” (P/K, 91). Ondaatje’s oeuvre works towards désoeuvrement; it works to render inoperative, to disarm, the biopolitics of truth in capitalist, governmentalized societies. Only then can Skin of a Lion return to its beginning, become the prequel to the prologue that transits the present towards a different future. Patrick now has a story to tell Hana, her family story, which includes the community and performs a genealogy of multiculturalism. Skin of a Lion registers the full force of bio- and thanatopolitics, but also, through the figures of Alice, Hana, and Patrick, enables the reader to experience the elaboration of self as practice of freedom. ... Part I has demonstrated how Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje variously critique biopolitics through heterotopic world fictions. Discipline and Punish correlates a genealogy of the prison to the rise to dominance of disciplinary power-knowledge relations required by the development of industrial capitalism; later studies on social defense mechanisms and liberal institutions lead the philosopher to define and analyze governmentality, a mode for the exercise of power able to temper civil war through interconnected measures concerning everyday interests. Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway narrativizes the experience of biopolitics; it inscribes the feelings, fears, and truths that make the soul the prison of the body; 102 The Epic of Gilgamesh, ed. N. K. Sandars (London: Penguin, 2000), 94. 103 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), 2:76 (hereafter, WL).

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it links patriarchy and imperialism; it exposes how discourses shape individuals as vehicles and effects of power relations; it connects London scenes to the British and ancient Greek empires, and to primeval times. Her novel focuses primarily on the upper classes, and restricts the possibility of transformation to the narrator and reader, endowed with the responsibility of incremental knowledge. Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion positions itself in a network of world literatures and cultures; it novelizes the epic genre to lionize the people rather than the sovereign, workers rather than members of parliament or civil servants. Registering the forceful impact of disciplinary and governmental forces in a global capitalist war on workers; it uses heterotopic spaces to let laughter and love emerge, to witness docile bodies being revived and transformed through sexual pleasures, and to stage the formation of new modes of selving, collectivities, and political alliances. Ondaatje’s heterotopic world fiction completes Woolf ’s by enfolding the classes and pleasures that Mrs. Dalloway barely acknowledges; Woolf ’s novel completes In the Skin of a Lion by closely analyzing the everyday behaviours, discourses, and emotions of ruling-class lives. Both inscribe the imperial dimension and reach that are largely absent from Foucault’s investigations. Ondaatje’s female characters transgress the boundaries of gender so carefully drawn in Woolf and unseen in Discipline and Punish, a text that sporadically includes the singular lives of le menu peuple in a more general theorization and historicization of warring relations among discourses, institutions, and clashing grids of intelligibility. These transgredient texts forge a critique of biopolitics that extends from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, with lines drawn across deep time and worldly networks. Part II will now turn to a series of texts by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje to think beyond biopolitics, by examining the elaboration and strategic deployment of biopoetics in the aesthetico-ethical elaboration of the self as a practice of freedom.

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BIOPOETICS: TECHNOLOGIES O F T H E W O R L D LY SELF Intimately interlinked, bio- and thanatopolitics conduct and constrain everyday life; biopoetics oppose such disciplinary and governmental normalizations through aesthetico-ethical means. In the early 1980s Foucault distinguishes between the “political technologies of individuals” deployed by governmental processes through which “we have been led to recognize ourselves as a society, as a part of a social entity, as a part of a nation or of a state” (TS, 146), and “technologies of the self ” or biopoetics, the active, discursive construction of one’s own life. Studies of sexuality serve Foucault’s critique of biopolitics as well as his genealogy of the ethical subject of desire (ST, 34). Part II begins by tracing the theoretical and methodological shifts that provoked Foucault’s moves from biopolitics to biopoetics. We then explore first the concepts, then the methods forged by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje to untie truth from relations of domination and subjectivization, and to delineate agency in the elaboration of self as a practice of freedom. Three groups of heterotopic world fictions explore archival criminal case studies, World War II genealogical fictions in a century of genocides, and strategic forms of life-writing through avowal and disavowal.

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From Biopolitics to Biopoetics In Subjectivity and Truth, Foucault turns to the ancient Greek distinction between zōē, the quality of being alive, and bios, “the correlative of the possibility of modifying one’s life, of modifying it in a rational fashion and according to the principles of the art of living” (ST, 34). Such arts could be called “biotechniques,” Foucault states, but since previous usage of the term “shifts us towards something else entirely,” he proposes the phrase “technologies of the self ” to denote the reflexive, “elaborated, systematized procedures taught to individuals in such a way that, through the management of their own life, through the control and transformation of self by self, they can attain a certain mode of being” (ST, 35). The manuscript of the lesson proposes an alternate term, biopoetics, to signify “a sort of personal fabrication of one’s own life,” the “aesthetico-moral conduct of individual existence” (ST, 34, n.). In order to distance his thought from the concept of power-knowledge as warring relations, Foucault turns from the juridical to the ethical subject emerging within the government of self and others, in what the ancient Greeks call “the arts of existence.” For if one starts with the juridical subject, one is bound to the discourse of rights granted or trampled by political institutions, or peace as war; but if one starts with freedom, strategies, and governmentality, then one can “bring out the freedom of the subject and its relationship to others—which constitutes the very stuff [matière] of ethics” (EWF, 1:300). The risks involved in such transversal thinking were constantly brought to the fore by Foucault, at times ironically, at others, preemptively or defensively: “In a completely schematic, arbitrary way, which would horrify any historian who is at all serious, let us all the same say this” (GL, 48; other examples at GL, 96; ST, 29, 75, n.). Perhaps most strikingly, Foucault completely transforms his style and rhetoric: a straightforward, one could say modest manner replaces past flourishes, staged dialogues, and verbal jousts. Whereas History of Sexuality 1 is caustic, ironic, and playful, L’Usage des plaisirs [The use of pleasure] and Le Souci de soi [The care of the self] have been characterized by Frédéric Gros as “thoroughly precise and informed” books that “rarely go beyond the meticulous reading of the texts brought together,”1 as evident in these opening sentences of volume 3 in the series: “I will begin by analyzing a rather singular text. It is a ‘practical’ work dealing with everyday life, not a moral reflection or prescription” (HS, 3:3). Compare these with the opening sentences of volume 1:

1 Frédéric Gros, “Course Context,” ST, 311.

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“For a long time we would have endured, and we would suffer still today, a Victorian regime. The imperial prude would figure on the coat of arms of our sexuality, restrained, mute, hypocritical” (HS, 1:3; mod. trans.). In the first passage, the “I” announces its intention to the reader, characterizes the textual object of analysis positively and negatively (it is, it is not), and then begins the task at hand in crystalline prose, with measured sentences. The second passage begins a game with the reader, one of many, through irony, sarcasm, metaphor, subjunctive mood, and punctuation (see below). The truth regime each style invokes is strikingly different; many interpretations of this radical shift in writing practice have been brought forward. In the chronology of his partner’s life, Daniel Defert dates Foucault’s reconsideration of “his writing regime” to reading Pierre Rivière’s memoir: “the slightly anonymous speech, enveloped by documents, of the Rivière dossier, [had] seduced him” (Dits, 1:49). Others, like Gros, regard this stylistic transformation as a turn to didactic explications de texte [explanations of text]; the final volumes are “enriched with new textual references, but also divested of some major theoretical or historical perspectives [presented in the lectures] . . . as if Foucault wished to erase some hypotheses that perhaps may be judged too bold, adventurous, or general.”2 Foucault himself described his new style as a choice required by his changing philosophical project. In a 1984 interview, he acknowledged: “It was very abruptly, in 1975–1976, that I completely abandoned that style. . . . Even if I admit—and I do admit!—that I practiced with The Order of Things, History of Madness, and even Discipline and Punish a philosophical study essentially founded on a certain usage of vocabulary, of play, of philosophical experience and that I threw myself into it completely, it is certain that now I try to detach myself from that form of philosophy.”3 Such rhetorical play, he explains, is what allowed him to bypass the problem of individual conduct. Thus this new approach “that can, in the eyes of some, appear as a radical non-philosophy is at the same time a more radical manner of thinking the philosophical experience” (PPC, 243; mod. trans.). The implications of this stylistic shift for volumes 2, 3, and 4 of the History of Sexuality will be explored below.

2 Ibid. 3 Michel Foucault, Politics Philosophy Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan et al. (London: Routledge, 1988), 243 (our itals.). Hereafter, PPC. See Francesco Paolo Adorno, Le style du philosophe: Foucault et le dire-vrai [The philosopher’s style: Foucault and truth-telling] (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1996); Frances Fortier, Les stratégies textuelles de Michel Foucault: un enjeu de véridiction [The textual strategies of Michel Foucault: The stake of veridiction] (Paris: Nuit blanche, 1997).

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Concepts Parrhēsia: Dangerous Truth-Telling From 1980 to 1984, Foucault’s lectures elaborate a series of new answers to a question fundamental to all his work: “Why in this great system of relations of power has a regime of truth developed indexed to subjectivity?”4 The traditional philosophical-political question had been, “given the bond tying me voluntarily to the truth, what can I say about power?” Foucault reframes the problem: “given my desire, decision, and effort to break the bond that binds me to power, what then is the situation with regard to the subject of knowledge and of truth?” (GL, 77; mod. trans.). His later interest in agency and the difficult work of freedom lead to questions of why, and in what forms, do individuals “become themselves essential actors in the procedures of manifestation of the truth [alethurgy]?” (GL, 81).5 After investigating ancient Greek, Hellenistic and Roman, and early Christian forms of alethurgy, one concept and practice emerges as the most capacious: parrhēsia, saying it all frankly, courageously, to the demos, sovereign, mentor, adversary, friend, or oneself. Variously deployed for a millennium, from Euripides to John Chrysostom (from the fifth century BCE to the fifth century CE), parrhēsia is revived by Foucault in order to reconsider relations among truth, power, and subjectivity, but now from the point of view of the subject’s will and agency.6 The relevance of parrhēsia for today rests in the attitude it fosters towards the self and others as primary concerns. Foucault is adamant that ancient Greek society, which reserved democracy and ethics for male citizens, cannot serve as 4 The lecture series at the Collège de France are: On the Government of the Living, Subjectivity and Truth, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, The Government of Self and Others, and The Courage of Truth: the Government of Self and Others II). Other conferences on these concepts include: the 1980 conferences at Dartmouth College entitled “Truth and Subjectivity” and “Christianity and Confession”; the 1981 course at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, three 1982 conferences, first at the Université de Grenoble, “La parrhêsia,” then at the University of Toronto, “The Discourse of Self-Disclosure” (published in French as Dire vrai sur soi-même), and finally at the University of Vermont, Technologies of the Self; and the 1983 conference at the University of California at Berkeley, Discourse and Truth. 5 Foucault fabricates the word alethurgy, “the manifestation of truth as the set of possible verbal or non-verbal procedures by which one brings to light what is laid down as true as opposed to false, hidden, inexpressible, unforeseeable, or forgotten” (GL, 7). 6 See Étienne Balibar, “Dire, contredire: Sur les formes de la parrêsia selon Foucault” [To say, to contradict: on the forms of parrêsia according to Foucault], in Libre Parole (Paris: Galilée, 2018), 81–125; and Torsten Bech Dyrberg, Foucault and the Politics of Parrhesia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) on Foucault’s use of parrhēsia.

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a model—the treatment of women, slaves, and barbaroi (foreigners) disqualifies it. On the other hand, the Christian parrhesiastic drive towards renunciation, mortification, and the death of the self leads to fearful domination through controlling systems of rule and pastorship. Yet, Socratic and Cynical parrhesiastai fearlessly engage their individual will and agency in truth-telling for the benefit of the one, the other, and the many. And it is this form of parrhēsia that could be redeployed, Foucault suggests, as alternative to a morality based on obedience to codified regulations (FL, 451).7 Throughout his lectures Foucault investigates two main types of fearless speech: one in relation to “the city, its institutions, and the status of the citizen” and another in relation to “individuals’ ways of doing things, being, and conducting themselves (ethos), and also to their formation as moral subjects.”8 Foucault cites the confrontation between Diogenes and Alexander the Great (as reported by Dio Chrysostom) as an example of the struggle between the power of truth and political power. Through his philosophical intervention, Diogenes shows “that the truly royal character is not linked to special status, birth, power, and so on. Rather, the only way of being a true king is to behave like one” (FS, 131–132; DT, 179). The “main effect of this parrhesiastic struggle with power,” Foucault argues, “is not to bring the interlocutor to a new truth, or to a new level of self-awareness; it is to lead the interlocutor to internalize this parrhesiastic struggle—to fight within himself against his own faults, and to be with himself in the same way that Diogenes was with him” (FS, 133; DT, 181). Unlike discipline, which produces the subject’s willing compliance to the forces of normalization and naturalization, the Cynical parrhesiastic encounter fosters will and agency through self-questioning.

7 “From Antiquity to Christianity, one passes from a morality that was essentially a search for a personal ethics to a morality as obedience to a system of rules. And if I have taken an interest in Antiquity, it is because . . . the idea of a morality as obedience to a code of rules is now disappearing, has already disappeared. To this absence of a morality, one responds, or must respond, with an investigation which is that of an aesthetics of existence” (FL, 451). 8 Foucault, The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 33 (hereafter, CT). Stoicism values parrhēsia in the context of individual personal relationships; Epicureanism, in the context of community life. Parrhēsia as “a public activity” is “one of the main aspects of Cynicism—or this kind of life was at the borderline of Cynicism and Stoicism.” Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth and Parrhēsia, trans. Nancy Luxon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 158 (hereafter, DT). DT is the English translation of Discours et vérité; précédé de La parrêsia (Paris: Vrin, 2016), which was the enlarged French version of lectures originally delivered in English, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (New York: Semiotext[e], 2001), hereafter, FS.

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Foucault delineates five constitutive aspects of parrhēsia. Then as now, parrhēsia only takes place when the speaker owns the experience: when she insists, “‘I am the one who thinks this and that’” (FS, 13; DT, 41). Second, the parrhesiastes knows what she says to be true: “there is always an exact coincidence between belief and truth” (FS, 14; DT, 42). Third, courage is vital, for the parrhesiastes risks everything—mockery, censure, exile, even death— when choosing “himself as a truth-teller rather than as a living being who is false to himself ” (FS, 17; DT, 49). Fourth, the dangers of parrhēsia come from the interlocutor who is criticized and is always more powerful: “parrhēsia comes from ‘below,’ as it were, and is directed towards ‘above’” (FS, 18; DT, 44). Thus Foucault’s focus on the dynamics of parrhēsia provides a space of resistance at the very site of power’s emergence, from “below,” an argument consonant with his earlier theorization of disciplinary power-knowledge relations. Fifth, telling the truth is experienced as a duty (FS, 19; DT, 45). In summary, parrhēsia “is a verbal activity in which the speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhēsia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy” (FS, 19–20; DT, 46). Considering how Woolf and Ondaatje deploy parrhesiastic events in their writings not only thickens Foucault’s analyses by staging them within complex contemporary sites but also challenges some of his findings concerning strategies of resistance. For example, Foucault insists that rhetoric has no part in parrhēsia, because “rhetoric provides the speaker with technical devices to help him prevail upon the minds of his audience (regardless of the rhetorician’s own opinion concerning what he says)” (FS, 12; DT, 40). Woolf demonstrates, however, that this is not necessarily the case when engaged in collective rather than individual struggles through her representation of a female parrhesiastes in A Room of One’s Own (1928). A mere decade after some British women finally won the right to vote and participate in the demos, the invited speaker at Cambridge’s poorer sister colleges, Newnham and Girton, chooses to ingratiate herself to her listeners (and then to her readers) in order to speak the truth winningly.9

9 For a history of the lectures and publication, see S. P. Rosenbaum, Preface and Introduction to Women & Fiction, by Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Shakespeare Head and Blackwell, 1992), ix–xlii (hereafter, W&F). See Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), on Woolf ’s feminism.

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Cloaked in fiction, Room demonstrates Woolf ’s polemical expertise as well as her willingness to work courageously to deliver unpopular truths about gender, discrimination, misogyny, and the perils of tyranny (whether insidiously personal or overtly international). She does so by combining what Foucault deems incompatible: rhetorical dexterity and the spare straightforwardness of parrhēsia. On the surface, the lecturer is neither a bluntly speaking Socrates nor a repellant Cynic; instead, she is charming and disarming and demure. The tone is light, sometimes arch; the diction, unassuming; the syntax, flowing, as befits oral delivery. She begins colloquially, by interrupting in a manner that Foucault would applaud: “But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own?” (Room, 3).10 The speaker is never adamant (“one could perhaps go a little deeper . . .” [Room, 64]), nor combative, only strategically self-effacing (“But . . . I had said ‘but’ too often. One cannot go on saying ‘but’. One must finish the sentence somehow, I rebuked myself ” [Room, 90]). The female speaker/narrator, self-described as an impersonal discursive construct (“‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being” [Room, 4]), is designed to stand commonplace notions on their heads. To counter all the ostensible “facts” men have been serving up about women, she offers different stories: “Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact. Therefore . . . [I will use] all the liberties and licences of a novelist” (Room, 4). Each chapter presents different facets of the all too real political, economic, and cultural forces, both official and unofficial, conditioning creativity and self-fashioning since the Renaissance in ways that all but guarantee the ongoing subjugation of women. But what is risked? The writer who worked two decades to establish herself as a literary critic and experimental novelist risks her professional standing and cultural capital by insisting that neither the writer nor her work are independent of historically contingent material conditions. Abuses of power, whether petty, pronounced, local or global, are documented throughout: the bullying by university authorities who refuse women entry to libraries and to the professions;11 social-Darwinist arguments about women’s physical and moral inferiority (Room, 26); legal impediments to women’s financial and personal independence; age-old anti-feminism re-institutionalized by Mussolini and his fascist

10 Dialogue is “a major technique for playing the parrhesiastic game” (FS, 20; DT, 57). 11 Although Oxford began to offer classes to women in 1879, they could neither matriculate (become full members of the university) nor be granted a degree upon completion, until 1920. At Cambridge, Newnham was founded in 1871, and Girton, in 1869, but university degrees were not granted to women until 1948.

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government in the 1920s (Room, 27, 32, 92, 100); male scholarly endorsement of “wife-beating” (Room, 38); sexist statements by aristocrats, the Lord Chancellor, the Dean of St. Paul’s, academics, and literary critics published in contemporary newspapers and books (Room, 48–9, 68, 100); the prosecution and destruction of books alluding to lesbian desire such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (Room, 74).12 Woolf brings to parrhēsia the satirist’s wordplay, skewering pretensions and exposing the harm inflicted by such commonplaces. Even the august British Museum and its renowned library are implicated, for London is an imperial workshop at its most efficient, Woolf insists, and knowledge its chief export: “London was like a machine. . . . The British Museum was another department of the factory. . . . Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion of how many are written by men?” (Room, 24). To counter the truths perpetuated against women, she invents the parable of Judith Shakespeare: “wonderfully gifted” like her brother but cursed with a gendered life-script, she is beaten at home and ends up stranded in the city, sexually abused, committing suicide, and buried ignominiously.13 And yet: in the final paragraph of Room, the speaker enjoins her interlocutors to change the story and actualize other possibilities: “This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think . . . then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. . . . As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination . . . that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her” (Room, 102–103; our ital.). And so with all the powers of rhetoric, the speaker performs parrhēsia: she claims her truth, believes it because she knows it to be true, courageously addresses her critique to interlocutors who might scorn

12 Reference is made to Sir Chartres Biron, magistrate in the obscenity trial of Hall underway at the time of Woolf ’s lectures (autumn 1928). Woolf was among those in court to defend the book and its author; none were allowed to speak. On November 16, Biron declared the book obscene. 13 In W&F, she is “severely beaten” by her father for “gallivanting off in the woods dressed like a man” (74). Judith Shakespeare Quiney (1585–1662) was the Bard’s illiterate daughter, whose small inheritance needed to be safeguarded in court by her father against her adulterous husband.

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and dismiss her entirely, and does so as a duty in the hope of transforming the common lives of women and men. In lectures at the University of California Berkeley (1983), Foucault questions the possibility of performing parrhēsia within the modern epistemological framework, which requires evidentiary proof for truth to exist (FS, 14; DT, 55). For the ancient Greeks, access to truth is “guaranteed by the possession of certain moral qualities” (FS 15; DT, 55); what the parrhesiastes believes to be true can therefore serve as a catalyst for action. For René Descartes, however, the truth of one’s belief cannot be gauged until, through mental exercise, positive proof is established as the outcome of a rational process. Rational thought, however, is often insufficiently exhaustive to justify one’s leap into action. Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost modifies the parrhesiastic game for contemporary tactical warfare by combining speech activities with Cartesian evidential experiments and local everyday knowledge. Paradigmatic truths of Western rationalism are disseminated throughout Ondaatje’s fictional Sri Lankan landscape, assumed and utilized by physicians, nurses, entomologists, and by two main characters, Anil Tissera, a forensic pathologist, and Palipana, an archaeologist. From the outset, however, the narrative makes clear that their embrace of such scientific methods is carried by a political “wave of nationalism”—power and knowledge relations are but two faces of the same coin. Palipana is, “for a number of years, at the centre of a nationalistic group that eventually wrestled archaeological authority in Sri Lanka away from the Europeans” (AG, 79). A stickler for facts, for research, Palipana follows the Western approach to knowledge production, down to the mistake of assuming that his gaze originates from the center: “While the West saw Asian history as a faint horizon where Europe joined the East, Palipana saw his country in fathoms and colour, and Europe simply as a landmass on the end of the peninsula of Asia” (AG, 79). But his rationalist approach also includes a history that “was ever-present around him” (AG, 82) and attention to the living and the parochial: “He was more likely to work beside a stonemason or listen to a dhobi woman washing clothes . . . than with a professor from the University. . . . He approached runes not with a historical text but with the pragmatic awareness of locally inherited skills” (AG, 82). His decolonizing archaeological methods therefore proceed along the lines suggested by Foucault for genealogy, articulating erudite knowledge to common practices and thus recognizing the subjugated knowledges silenced by totalizing theories or official histories (P/K, 45). But Palipana does more, takes a “step to another reality, the last stage of a long, truthful dance” (AG, 81), and in this way complicates the parrhesiastic game: “he had found the hidden histories, intentionally lost, that altered the perspective

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and knowledge of earlier times. It was how one hid or wrote the truth when it was necessary to lie. . . . The dialogue . . . between what was official and unofficial. . . . [He was] an epigraphist studying the specific style of a chisel-cut from the fourth century, then coming across an illegal story, one banned by kings and state and priests, in the interlinear texts. These verses contained the darker proof ” (AG, 105). As long as his translations serve nation-building interests, his position in the establishment is secure.14 But when he exceeds the limits of both scientific and doxological truths, his publications are repudiated as mere fictions. Palipana risks and loses his ability to speak with authority in order to tell transgressive truths: “The point was not that he would ever be proved wrong in his theories, but that he could not prove he was right. Still, the patterns that emerged for Palipana had begun to coalesce. . . . And so the unprovable truth emerged” (AG, 83). Truth-telling is life-altering: Palipana ends his days shunned and ignored, in self-imposed exile. The content of Palipana’s truths is never identified in the narrative: it is the transgressive attitude that matters.15 Carried by the same wave of nationalism, Anil Tissera wins scholarships to be trained in England and in the United States. Unlike Palipana, however, she renounces Sri Lankan culture to identify almost entirely with Western customs—she can’t get enough of them, not just her lab work, but cowboy flicks, bowling, and the music of “The Artist formerly known as.” When she returns to Sri Lanka, it is as an investigator charged with reporting on “organized campaigns of murder” for the Geneva-based Centre for Human Rights (AG, 16). She is teamed with a local archaeologist, Palipana’s former student Sarath Diyasena, who was selected by a government forced to agree to this investigation “under pressure, and to placate trading partners in the West. . . . Nobody at the Centre 14 See Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Buddhism and the Spirit Cults of North-East Thailand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), for a summary of Buddhism and the Sinhalese nation-building project. See Marlene Goldman, “Representations of Buddhism in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6, no. 3 (2004), https://doi. org/10.7771/1481-4374.1236, on Buddhism in AG, and her book Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2005) for Palipana’s connection to epigraphist Senerat Paranavitana, who claimed Aryan descent for the Sinhalese people. For a discussion of transnational identities in AG, see Victoria Cook, “Exploring Transnational Identities in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6, no. 3 (2004), https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1234. See also Lesley Higgins and MarieChristine Leps, “The Politics of Life after Death: Ondaatje’s Ghost,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45, no. 2 ( June 2009): 201–212. 15 For a discussion of Palipana’s work as decolonizing knowledge, see Burton. For a discussion of this world novel as bringing forensic and testimonial truths into crisis, see Ganguly, This Thing Called the World. See also Chelva Kanaganayakam, “In Defense of Anil’s Ghost,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 37, no. 1 (2006): 5–26.

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for Human Rights was very hopeful about it” (AG, 16).16 Anil is willing to work in the midst of civil war because she believes that scientific truth is a weapon against oppression and terror—“the truth shall set you free,” she insists, and for her it is bred in the bone, literally. While endeavoring to identify the skeleton of a recent victim she nicknames Sailor, Anil knows that the shape, size, deformations, and chemistry of bones will, if scientifically analyzed, tell you the facts (where the body lived, what it ate, how it labored, how it died, where it was buried): “She began to examine the skeleton again under the sulphur light, summarizing the facts of his death so far, the permanent truths, same for Colombo as for Troy. One forearm broken. Partial burning. Vertebrae damage in the neck. The possibility of a small bullet wound in the skull” (AG, 64–65). Her project of “obsessive[ly] tunnelling towards discovery” (AG, 69) is judged inadequate by Sarath, who insists on the need to examine what he calls “the archaeological surround of a fact,” for he is keenly aware that truth can be dangerous, like “a flame against a sleeping lake of petrol” (AG, 44, 156). He accuses Anil of thinking like a Western journalist, someone who sensationalizes suffering (pictures of children beset by flies) and then leaves—boards the plane, goes back home, hits the lecture circuit; the war is over, for all intents and purposes (AG, 286).17 The novel also underscores the limits of fact-finding through the structural ironies of its plot: from the very beginning, when a fresh skeleton is discovered in a state-protected archaeological site, government involvement in death squads is all but proven. Towards the end of the novel, a suicide bomber eliminates the corrupt president before Anil can even write her report. Moreover, in order to identify their victim, Anil and Sarath realize that they “nee[d] help”: forensics alone will not suffice (AG, 76). Palipana directs them to Ananda Udugama, an artificer who reconstructs Sailor’s face. Like Palipana, Ananda learns by immersing himself in everyday life: he watches “the village move around him, with its distinct behaviour, its local body postures and facial characteristics” (AG, 167). Mud collected from surrounding fields is mixed until the color, depth, and texture of Sailor’s face is realized. Thus through a series of dialogical encounters among various practices of truth-production, a hybrid method of knowing and telling the truth emerges, which no one can 16 See Manav Ratti, “Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and the Aestheticization of Human Rights,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 35, nos. 1–2 (2004), https://journalhosting. ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel/issue/view/2406, for a discussion of the novel in relation to human rights. 17 In Three Guineas Woolf refuses to sensationalize photographs of bombing atrocities during the Spanish Civil War; see below.

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fully claim, but which succeeds, uncannily, both in naming Sailor and apprehending him differently: not only as an individual “representative of race and age and place,” not just as Ruwan Kumara, victim of the Sri Lankan civil war machine, but also as one of the international citizenry (bio)governed unto death (AG, 55). Compelled to “give her report with no real evidence” (because Sailor’s skeleton has been disappeared by governmental forces, again), Anil counters her many interrogators (including “military and police personnel trained in counter-insurgency methods”) with “a lawyer’s argument and, more important, a citizen’s evidence,’” asserting: “‘I think you murdered hundreds of us’” (AG, 271–272). Telling these truths engages the displaced, historical components of her “myself.” Thus, she acts the part of a parrhesiastes in the ancient Greek sense when, by confronting those in government who manage torture and murder, she becomes one of the collective, resisting “us.” Sarath pretends to doubt her findings and questions her loyalties in order to save her, and her mission. The consequences are horrendous. Sarath is tortured and killed. Anil is literally abandoned by the narrative in the dark hold of the Oronsay, the ship laboratory, with “blood everywhere. A casual sense of massacre” unlikely to be staunched by any report by whatever organization (AG, 283). Her version of the Enlightenment project is starkly confronted by its limits and its ignorance of power relations. Yet it is not completely discarded, nor substituted by a more powerful Eastern religious solution: Ondaatje’s novel refuses any single, absolute, or transcendent truth. Thus Anil’s Ghost and A Room of One’s Own map transnational flows of knowledge and the geopolitical relations of power they sustain between governments and within individuals, only to reroute them, bringing the reader to explore and establish different relations with truth—provocative, tentative relations that provide tools for the transformation of existing conditions. These texts stage the politics of truth and the harrowing stakes of parrhēsia in the present in ways that Foucault had not imagined.

Bios/Logos: Living Truth But how can parrhēsia be articulated to bios, a person’s way of life, in an aesthetics of existence? Rather than focus on a philosophical practice “whose dominant theme is knowledge of the soul” and which “produces an ontology of the self,” Foucault emphasizes “philosophy as test of life, of bios, which is the ethical material and object of an art of oneself ” (CT, 127). As he demonstrates, the

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“decisive criterion which identifies the parrhesiastes is not to be found in his birth, nor in his citizenship, nor in his intellectual competence, but in the harmony which exists between his logos and his bios” (FS, 106; DT, 156). Foucault elaborates: “In the first and second centuries, we arrive at a culture of the self . . . with extremely rich forms”18 for a “beautiful, striking, and memorable existence, and the concern with truth-telling” (CT, 162–163). Socratic and Cynical parrhēsia illustrate wildly different methods of making truth emerge in life, one that elicits and one that proclaims. With all its ironic force, Socratic parrhēsia performs three main functions. One, the interlocutor is made to give an account of his life (not a confession of sins) so that he can no longer ignore his self-ignorance. Two, the dialectical process allows Socrates to act as the basanos (touchstone) that tests the harmony between the interlocutor’s life and virtue, courage, and truth (FS, 101; DT, 141–142). Three, Socrates’s parrhesiastic practice serves the city and is “more useful than the Athenians’ military victory at Olympia—because in teaching people to occupy themselves with themselves, he teaches them to occupy themselves with the city” (TS, 20). Thus the harmonization of bios and logos produces an ethos for the one and the many. After Socrates, the Cynics provide more extreme lessons in parrhesiastic exigence. Outrageously, and over a thousand years, they embody unrestrained truth: their punishing poverty, shameless public behavior, and provocative, general hectoring make “the form of existence an essential condition . . . [and] space for truth-telling. . . . In short, Cynicism makes life, existence, bios, what could be called an alethurgy, a manifestation of truth” (CT, 172). Whereas Foucault characterizes the soldier as a mobile fragment of space that materializes and exemplifies the disciplinary individual (DP, 163) one could argue that the Cynic, conversely, is a mobile fragment of space that materializes and exemplifies critique through otherness, for “there is no establishment of the truth without an essential position of otherness” (CT, 340). Whereas Socratic parrhēsia aims to convert the self in order to serve the nomos [law], Cynical parrhēsia counters every political institution, any kind of nomos (FS, 105; DT, 148–149), with a relentlessly confrontational attitude and purpose. The oppositional relations of Socratic irony and Cynical scandal form a powerknowledge grid of intelligibility that Foucault surprisingly describes as a “sort of

18 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 316 (hereafter, Her).

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constitutive rectangle of parrhēsia”19 that diagrams contradictions and implications (GS, 173–174): Democracy (constitutional equality)

Game of ascendency or superiority (political game)

Truth-telling (truth)

Joust of rivalry and confrontation (courage)

While democracy constitutionally establishes the equality of citizens (and implies truth-telling), always-present political games contradict this equality by establishing the ascendency or superiority of a few who, through strategy or courage, prevail in any given confrontation. The specifics of these contradictory relations are always contingent and historically determined, Foucault insists, but his establishment of a transhistorical grid has the advantage of making the ancient practice of parrhēsia transferable to the present, both epistemologically and politically. In Room and Three Guineas, Woolf fleshes out this diagram in terms of patriarchy, imperialism, and fascism. Her narrators are outsiders staging and telling the truth, first as a genial, feminine Socrates advocating androgyny (sameness) and then as a provocative feminist Cynic proclaiming radical difference (otherness). In Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, democracy, truth-telling, ascendency, and rivalry literally go to war. The narrative begins with the primary binary, democracy versus the game of ascendancy, made manifest by bodies decapitated, nailed to the tarmac, kidnapped, tortured, thrown out of helicopters. The plot culminates with the courageous confrontation between Anil and her interrogators, during which she and Sarath switch roles (she lights the flame of truth, he demands material proof). Truth is life and death.

19 Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 173 (hereafter, GS).

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Askēsis: The Art of Elaborating the Self as a Practice of Freedom But how is one’s life to be imagined and managed in relation to truth, power, and ethics? Again, Foucault reconfigures a Hellenistic schema in order to ascertain “the formative elements” of an ethical life (HS, 3:67), one that is not ensnared within religious discourse and prohibitions, not formulated within a psychology of repression or lack, and always cognizant of one’s relations to others (EWF, 1:255). Askēsis, in the strict sense, is a “gymnastics” to care for and cultivate the self, a daily series of exercises, a long and transformative labor (GL, 131, Her, 16). The objective of askēsis is not to acquire specific aptitudes but rather to work on thought, to develop qualities of being, modalities of experience (ST, 31, 33; EWF, 1:207). We have, Foucault argues, focused too much on the injunction to “know thyself ” (gnothi seauton) rather than considering (as Plato does in Alcibiades, for example) “the question of the ‘care of oneself,’ epimeleia heautou” (EWF, 1:88). Such care, however, is active, not merely introspective or renunciative. It is an attentive relation to the self relating to the world: “one situates oneself within or takes as the correlate of oneself, a world that is perceived, recognized, and practiced as a test” (Her, 485–486; our ital.). Askēsis, in other words, is an aesthetics of living in truth rather than in obedience to the law: it is an ethopoeitic “art of the self ” that transforms truth into agency and right action (HS, 2:77; EWF, 1:209). And it is this ancient ethics distanced from codified morality that can be redeployed in the present, Foucault suggests, when “most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded in religion, nor do we want a legal system to intervene in our moral, personal, private life. Recent liberation movements suffer from the fact that they cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics. . . . [other than] an ethics founded on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on” (EWF, 1:255–256).20 Foucault conceives the self as immanent, transversal, and non-identitarian, an undoing of ready-made identities and positions. Cultivating the self is a constant struggle, a continuous learning and unlearning. Practices of abstinence, silence, attentive listening, memorization, and meditation accompany the reading and re-reading of books of specific exercises that must be thoroughly appropriated “in order to construct a lasting matrix for one’s own behaviour” (FS, 143). The assessment of one’s daily conduct serves to test

20 See McGushin’s study of askēsis, Edward F. McGushin, Foucault’s Askēsis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007); see also Couze Venn, “Beyond Enlightenment? After the Subject of Foucault, Who Comes?,” Theory, Culture and Society 14, no. 3 (1997): 1–28.

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just how well one has performed, unlearned unethical habits of conduct (not to be confused with the Christian examination of conscience according to an index of sins); it is a series of life-forming rather than mortifying activities (EWF, 1:265). This task, Foucault insists, “makes the question of truth—the truth concerning what one is, what one does, and what one is capable of doing—central to the formation of the ethical subject” (HS, 3:67–68). Writing arrived late on the scene of ascetic work on thought, with Seneca and Epictetus, as a means of gathering, assimilating, and memorizing heterogeneous experiences of life and reading (EWF, 1:208–209). These writing practices could be circular or linear in effect: circular when leading to further meditation and work on the self; linear when instigating a practical test in the world. Ethopoeitic writing, Foucault explains, appropriates two well-worn genres, the impersonal hupomnēmata (notebooks, memory-aids, public registers, commonplace books) and inter-personal correspondence (which directs the analytical gaze both to oneself and to the addressee, and generates a shared sense of copresence) (EWF, 1:214–221). Both forms manage the disparate and resituate the writer in new, transformative relations. For Epictetus, as for Foucault, these two forms of writing are separate enterprises. In the 1930s, Woolf strategically deploys both in her polemic Three Guineas. For more than a decade, she assembles in three scrapbooks21 newspaper clippings, political speeches, pamphlets, government and religious proclamations, and photographs. (She also keeps reading notebooks for each of her writing projects, producing sixty-four throughout her life.) She does this, however, not to memorize and learn, but rather to unlearn, for herself and her reader, the misogyny, racism, and imperialist drive—in other words, the fascism—circulating internationally. In Three Guineas, this process of unlearning is staged as three letters in which the subject of ethics (the female correspondent) addresses the subject of law (the male lawyer). Whereas traditionally, the disparate elements of the hupomnēmata were to be unified in the reader-writer, Woolf ’s project is to be realized in a future Society of Outsiders, the discursive correlate of her ascetic 21 See Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Boston: University Press of New England, 2001); and Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), for a history of commonplace books; see Naomi Black, Virginia Woolf as Feminist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); and her Introduction to Three Guineas, by Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Shakespeare Head and Blackwell, 2001), xiii–lxxv; as well as Alice Wood, Virginia Woolf’s Late Cultural Criticism: The Genesis of The Years, Three Guineas, and Between the Acts (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), for Woolf ’s notebook practices. See also Vara Neverow and Merry Pawlowski, eds., Three Guineas Scrapbooks: A Digital Archive, http:// woolf-center.southernct.edu/.

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feminist self-writing. Three Guineas thus works towards what Tina Campt terms “futurity” in the future real conditional tense, for the text “is a form of prefiguration that involves living the future now, as imperative rather than subjunctive, as a striving for the future you want to see.”22 Three Guineas bluntly assesses the possibilities for practices of truth in an era in which “the whole iniquity of dictatorship, whether in Oxford or Cambridge, in Whitehall or Downing Street, against Jews or against women, in England, or in Germany, in Italy or in Spain is now apparent” (TG, 94).23 Woolf ’s fictional correspondent defines her project as an “inquiry into the nature of fear”: “the fear which forbids freedom in the private house. That fear, small, insignificant, and private as it is, is connected with the other fear, the public fear, which is neither small nor insignificant” (TG, 116, 128).24 The premise of Three Guineas is deceptively ordinary: a lawyer-cum-fundraiser has written to ask for advice and financial aid because of this question, “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” (TG, 3). After a three-year delay, the correspondent replies in three different letters, each proffering a guinea to support new ways of practicing, individually and collectively, social justice and pacifism. Initially, the correspondent concentrates on what women need most, a threefold commitment to askēsis: to receive a proper education, enter professions, and refuse to support masculinist organizations. The care of the self recommended by the correspondent, rather than an overturning of gender norms, constitutes a thoughtful production of difference, of otherness. “And since we are different,” she observes, “our help must be different. . . . we can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your 22 Tina Campt, “Black Feminist Futures and the Practice of Fugitivity” (October 7, 2014), Barnard Center for Research on Women, http://bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/. 23 Among the current “events” exerting pressure on the correspondent: in Nazi Germany, June 30, 1934, the “Night of the Long Knives” or Blood Purge of the Nazi Party (“Those brutal bullies,” Woolf observed, “go about in hoods & masks . . . acting this idiotic, meaningless, brutal, bloody, pandemonium” [WD, 4:223]); and the Spanish Civil War, 1935–1939. The “poison” and the “worm” of dangerous militarism have “other names in other countries,” Woolf explains: “There we have in embryo the creature, Dictator as we call him when he is Italian or German, who believes that he has the right, whether given by God, Nature, sex or race is immaterial, to dictate to other human beings how they shall live; what they shall do” (TG, 50). 24 Such biopolitical mechanisms profit from physiological processes: their effects are literally incorporated in the amygdala, the neural “knot of fibres” that fascinates Anil Tessera in Ondaatje’s novel because it stores traumatic memories, the “nerve bundle . . . near the stem of the brain . . . which houses fear—so it governs everything” (AG, 1345). Thus does physiology stubbornly contradict the Enlightenment dream of knowing the truth by transcending the body. See Burrows, “The Heterotopic Spaces of Postcolonial Trauma,” for a discussion of the amygdala in relation to trauma; see Margaret Scanlan, “Anil’s Ghost and Terrorism’s Time,” Studies in the Novel 36, no. 3 (2004): 302–317, for a discussion of terror in AG; see Higgins and Leps, “The Politics of Life after Death.”

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words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods” (TG, 131). Society cannot be cured of tyranny and warmongering until radical changes are effected, beginning with the reconstitution of women and men. Radical exercises of self-fashioning are offered. The challenges of unlearning are steep but the purpose is clear: to “teach the young to hate war” (TG, 23). Indifference to established rewards for voluntary subjugation is key. Women and men must eschew, for example, any distinctions or academic honors from universities that ordinarily treat women like second-class citizens: “directly badges, orders, or degrees are offered you, fling them back in the giver’s face” (TG, 75).25 They must reject curricula that sanction the use of force, and refuse to participate in public pageantry that glamorizes military or antifeminist institutions such as the church and the judiciary (the man in ceremonial garb is not “an impressive spectacle. He is on the contrary a ridiculous, a barbarous, a displeasing spectacle” [TG, 21]). The need to “break the circle, the vicious circle of prostituted culture” (TG, 115; see The Waves, below) is also stressed: “It should not be difficult to transmute the old ideal of bodily chastity into the new ideal of mental chastity—to hold that if it was wrong to sell the body for money it is much more wrong to sell the mind for money” (TG, 77). Women must refuse the kind of marriage that is no more than state-sanctioned prostitution, an arrangement that renders independent thoughts and actions (askēsis) impossible for wives. Woolf ’s fiction is populated by such figures of stultification: Helen Ambrose (The Voyage Out, hereafter, VO), Mrs. Hilberry (Night and Day), Betty Flanders and Mrs. Barfoot (Jacob’s Room, hereafter, JR), Mrs. Dalloway, Lady Bradshaw, and Miss Kilman (Mrs. Dalloway), Minta Rawley (To the Lighthouse), Isa Oliver and Lucy Swithin (Between the Acts).26 This is the most pernicious dimension of marriage for middle- and upper-class women; being married to their husbands’ incomes and prestige, they are married to tyranny: “Thus consciously she desired ‘our splendid Empire’; unconsciously she desired our splendid war” (TG, 46). During war, women must refuse to participate: not to promote militaristic propaganda, not to purchase war bonds, not to roll bandages. For men, in order to grasp why and how war “is an abomination; a barbarity” (TG, 10), they must unlearn ingrained habits and reject the three basic motivations which lead

25 Woolf refused all honorary degrees and turned down the opportunity to deliver the prestigious Clark Lectures at Cambridge in 1932. 26 Stultification, Foucault suggests, is “the other pole to the practice of the self. The practice of the self has to deal with stultitia as its raw material, if you like, and its objective is to escape from it. . . . The stultus is someone who has not cared for himself ” (Her, 131).

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their “sex to fight; war is a profession; a source of happiness and excitement; and it is also an outlet for manly qualities, without which men would deteriorate” (TG, 7). At all times, one must vigilantly practice critique and “abstain” from supporting authoritarian enterprises; not to support university research that participates in what one would now call the military-industrial complex (“[H]as your college taken a leading part in the invention of the implements of war? How far have your students succeeded in business as capitalists?” [TG, 31–32]). A new kind of “adventurous college” should be provisioned, so that it will “not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions. Do not have chapels. Do not have museums and libraries with chained books and first editions under glass case” (TG, 32). Paraphrasing Milton, the correspondent demonstrates that “to be passive is to be active; those also serve who remain outside” (TG, 108). The Society of Outsiders may be allegorical, but its means are practical: it “has the same ends as your society—freedom, equality, peace; but . . . it seeks to achieve them by the means that a different sex, a different tradition, a different education, and the different values which result from those differences have placed within our reach” (TG, 103). Men and women are enjoined to practice fearless speech at home and in public: “it is so important to accustom ourselves to the duties of free speech, for without private there can be no public freedom” (TG, 111). The “instruments” for new thought and writing the correspondent recommends include “the private printing press,” which is “not beyond the reach of a moderate income. Typewriters and duplicators are . . . even cheaper. By using these cheap and so far unforbidden instruments you can at once rid yourself of the pressure of [newspaper] boards, policies and editors” (TG, 90). The work required to shed “unreal loyalties” (TG, 73) is never underestimated by the correspondent, but the necessity of doing so is made obvious: life instead of death, ethics instead of propaganda. For as Foucault suggests, “a progressive transformation of the self by the self for which one takes responsibility in a long labor of ascesis” allows one “to become capable of truth” (Her, 16).27 Although each main character in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost undergoes the “work of the self on the self ” in arduous circumstances, it is in the “Grove of Ascetics,” Palipana’s exilic home, that Sarath and Anil fundamentally reshape and expand both their learning and their practices of the self. Palipana now lives “the importance of habitual self-reflection” through listening, reading, and writing (EWF, 27 See Barber’s discussion of Woolf ’s TG in relation to Foucault’s work on freedom and the aesthetics of existence: Stephen Barber, “States of Emergency, States of Freedom: Woolf, History, and the Novel,” Novel 42, no. 2 (2009): 196–206.

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1:101). This is not the case simply because he has “stripped worldly goods and social habits from his life” (AG, 83) or retreated to “a forest monastery” established by sixth-century monks (AG, 84), or has become almost blind. “You renounce society,” he advises, not unlike Woolf ’s correspondent, “but to do so you must first be a part of it, learn your decision from it. This is the paradox of retreat” (AG, 103). Palipana achieves tranquility as a modality of experience, a way of detaching one’s self from the forces of subjectivization. As Foucault suggests, tranquility “is not simply a manner of reacting minimally or with maximum control. . . . Tranquility is a certain quality of being” that allows one to keep one’s “autonomy and independence” in relation to whatever favorable or unfavorable events happen (ST, 33). Palipana knows that his way of life has limits, for it does not impede violence from continuing to thrive: “He would lie there conscious of the noises from the surrounding ocean of trees. Far away were the wars of terror, the gunmen in love with the sound of their shells, where the main purpose of war had become war” (AG, 98).28 Palipana’s spare life, however, includes caring for his niece, Lakma, whom he brings back to life after her parents are slaughtered. And saving her saves him. Together they craft a life that is a work of art, ephemeral and all-encompassing, which she will ultimately memorialize in a rune of her own. “She had already cut one of his phrases into the rock, one of the first things he had said to her, which she had held on to like a raft in her years of fear. . . . Just the sentence. Not his name or the years of his living, just a gentle sentence once clutched by her” (AG, 107). The heterotopic Grove of Ascetics, that other space where practices of the self are indelibly dramatized, confirms that “there is no establishment of the truth without an essential position of otherness; the truth is never the same; there can be truth only in the form of the other world and the other life (de l’autre monde et de la vie autre)” (CT, 356).

Experience-Books: Altering Truths How do the writings of Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje position the reader, and the writer as reader, differently in the production of truth, how do they recognize the forces limiting their thought experiments, delineate their reach, and work to counter them? As early as The Order of Things, Foucault insists that a book

28 In The English Patient, the Villa collective initially functions like Epictetus’s school of philosophy, or Palipana’s Grove of Ascetics, as “hospital or clinic of the soul,” where “a group of people joi[n] together to practice a care of the self ” (Her, 99).

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presents the era’s understanding, not the author’s truth: “My book is a pure and simple fiction: it is a novel, but I am not the one who invented it, it is the relation of our epoch and its epistemological configuration to all of this mass of utterances. Such that the subject is in effect present in the totality of the book, but it is the anonymous on that speaks today in everything that is said” (no. 48, Dits, 1:591).29 The security provided by such delineations establishing the known and the unknowable can be the object of intense desire by the writer, as tactically performed by Foucault in the opening words of his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, L’ordre du discours [The order of discourse]: “I wish I could have slipped surreptitiously into this discourse which I must present today. . . . I should have preferred to become aware that a nameless voice was already speaking long before me, so that I should only have needed to join in, to continue the sentence it had started and lodge myself, without really being noticed, in its interstices, as if it had signaled to me by pausing, for an instant, in suspense.”30 At the end of his presentation, Foucault names the voice as that of his teacher, Jean Hyppolite: “I know now whose voice it was that I would have liked to precede me, to carry me, to invite me to speak, to lodge itself in my own discourse. I know what was so terrifying about beginning to speak, since I was doing so in this place where I once listened to him, and where he is no longer here to hear me” (DL, 237; mod. trans.). Foucault thus enacts how profoundly implicated and emotionally invested individuals are in discourse, whatever its anonymity. But, by ultimately inverting the process—the voice of the past invoked at the beginning of the lecture, the one providing a space for the speaker to lodge his own, now “lodges itself in my own discourse”—Foucault stages the now of new displacements and the ethical imperative of work to be done (DL, 237; mod. trans.). (In the Skin of a Lion uses a similar tactic: the initial and final car scenes invert the figure of agency from the master/father to the student/child.) But the writings of Woolf and Ondaatje are here to decolonize this scene, to insist on the patriarchal and imperialist character of this seemingly anonymous voice. In her first university lecture, Woolf satirizes the discursive inheritance that Foucault takes for granted. She describes both the pleasure afforded the desiring subject when reading the masculine tradition and the costs of such a 29 See also Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (hereafter AK), which theorizes how truths are produced within epistemological planes. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1972). 30 Translated as “The Discourse on Language,” in Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1972), 215 (mod. trans.; hereafter, DL).

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welcoming embrace: “One had a sense of physical well-being in the presence of this well-nourished, well-educated, free mind. . . . All this was admirable. But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’. And one began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. . . . One began to be tired of ‘I’. . . . polished for centuries by good teaching and good feeding. I respect and admire that ‘I’ from the bottom of my heart. But . . . in the shadow of the letter ‘I’ all is shapeless as mist. Is that a tree? No, it is a woman. But . . . she has not a bone in her body” (Room, 95). Whereas Foucault’s speaker can assume both his place in the philosophical tradition and his right to develop its future, Woolf ’s speaker must invent a past in order to lay the grounds for a possible future (one in which Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, would be at home). Against such powerful truth regimes, Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje offer experience-books, fictions that do more than demonstrate facts, produce connaissances, or establish historical truths: they engage the writer and reader in dialogical, biopoetic processes of becoming. An experience, Foucault insists, “is neither true nor false. An experience is always a fiction: it’s something one fabricates oneself, that doesn’t exist before and will exist afterward” (EWF, 3:243). By entering into a “difficult relationship with truth” that “in some degree, destroys it” (EWF, 3:243), experience-books can function as agents of change. In other words, the experience-book constitutes a heterotopic space-time that, like a mirror, displaces the reader into this other space in which the reader is not, yet is—sees itself, not to confirm an identity or being but, in Woolf ’s words, to “insubstantise,” to multiply and differentiate. The female artist, for Woolf, must begin by gagging the voice of patriarchy. In To the Lighthouse, the painter Lily Briscoe must silence the insistent, braying refrain, “Women can’t write, women can’t paint,” before she can achieve her “vision” and complete her work of art with a final stroke, drawing a line (TTL, 74, 176). In “Professions for Women,” the writer must destroy a “certain phantom,” eventually named after “the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House” (WE, 6:480). This “immensely charming” phantom repeatedly comes “between me and my paper”: “It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. . . . She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality” (WE, 6:480–481). Similarly, the writer in Ondaatje’s Cat’s Table must dispatch another Victorian literary icon in order to stop seeing himself through the eyes of the imperialist, “white as lamps” (TCT, 84). Not only must he annihilate the colonized subject, he must also abandon the very concept of identity as being

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fixed or substantial; only then can he embrace becoming other, variously and transnationally, as a way of writing, and of life. Correspondingly, Foucault insists that intellectuals must distance themselves from a position of universality and work instead in localized struggles, in a new “connection between theory and practice” (P/K, 126).31 Thus an experience-book “has the function of wrenching the subject from itself, of seeing to it that the subject is no longer itself, or that it is brought to its annihilation or its dissolution. This is a project of desubjectivation” (EWF, 3: 214). Such efforts strengthen agency through critique, which Foucault associates with virtue in both senses of the word: as ethical imperative and as that which makes something powerful or effective (PT, 25). When Discipline and Punish was first published, it was criticized by psychologists, social workers, and prison wardens who found it difficult to go about their business as usual after reading it. Foucault took these reactions as a sign of success: “one reads [the book] as an experience that changes, that prevents one from always being the same, or of having with things, with others, the same type of relations that one had before reading. This shows that the book expresses an experience that is far broader than mine,” and can therefore work as an agent of transformation, “an experience-book as opposed to a truth-book or a demonstration-book” (no. 281, Dits, 4:47). Or, as Ondaatje explains, “I think I always see the reader as being an active participant in the book,”32 for the text “is a meeting place for reader and writer. There has to be empty space, and silence, so that the reader participates.”33 Thus, the “experience of a book is not finite. The reader can ‘investigate’ the given story and look back and pause and qualify the material” (TCT, 46). Woolf concurs: “To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice” (WE, 4:390). But how to enfold the reader temporarily in other spaces of comprehension? It begins with respect. Foucault repeatedly asserts that a book can serve various purposes not defined by its writer (no. 328, Dits, 4:414); “all my books . . . [are] little tool boxes. If people wish to open them, use this idea, that phrase, this

31 In TG, Woolf works as a specific rather than universal intellectual, a stance delineated by class, by the specificity of her “conditions of life and work. . . . [It is] here that . . . the local or specific combat that [she] engages carries effects, implications that are not simply professional or sectorial. It functions or it struggles at the general level of this regime of truth that is so essential to the structures and functioning of our society” (no. 184, Dits, 3:113). 32 Robert Birnbaum, “Michael Ondaatje,” The Morning News, January 7, 2010, https://themorningnews.org/article/michael-ondaatje 33 Angel Gurria-Quintana, “Skins of the Lion,” Financial Times, September 15, 2007.

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analysis, as a screwdriver or as a socket-wrench to short-circuit, disqualify, break systems of power, including eventually the ones from which my books emerge . . . well, that’s great” (no. 151, Dits, 2:720).34 For Foucault (as for Woolf and Ondaatje), a work “must say and show how it is made . . . [for] every book draws around itself a field of virtual work and it is, up to a certain point, responsible for what it renders possible or impossible”—“freedom of usage and transparency of technique are linked” (no. 328, Dits, 4:414). The effects of such methods are described by Woolf in similar terms: reading “produces at first a queer feeling that the solid ground upon which we expected to make a safe landing has been twitched from under us, and there we hang asking questions in mid air. . . . [We] have gained a sense of astonishing freedom” (WE, 2:245). Furthermore, “[t]he method that at first seemed so casual and inclusive” is controlled by an “honesty” (WE, 2:245) that requires “the breaking and falling, crashing and destruction” of past forms “in poems and novels and biographies, even in newspaper articles and essays” (WE, 3:433–434). “Great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us” (WE, 4:393). Thus, by turning to ancient texts and contemporary events, heterotopic world fictions by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje variously explore ways to live in truth: fearlessly voicing it, courageously manifesting it in everyday activities, purposefully practicing an aesthetics of life, and developing new textual modes for the co-production of alternative meanings in fragmentary, mobile, experiential assemblages.

Heterotopic Methods To gauge how biopoetic concepts can both alter conditions of existence and inform methods of writing, we return to the three processes of heterotopic world fiction, examining the impact of each on experience-books by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje. The first section, “Disposing/Transposing the Archive: Criminal Vanishing Acts,” analyzes how larger-than-life legends of extraordinary violence or love are rewritten to expose their blinding, subjectivizing effects. Biographical texts of famous murderers such as I, Pierre Rivière and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, and of a dog’s traumatic theft by a criminal organization, Flush, enter

34 Philippe Artières and Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, D’Après Foucault. Gestes, luttes, programmes [After Foucault: gestures, struggles, programs] (Paris: les Prairies ordinaires, 2007), do just that: take Foucault’s tools to rethink them and present-day struggles.

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into a parrhesiastic relation with their readers, to expose the force of ignorance and initiate a return to the archive as experience of struggle. The next section, “Distracting/Transacting Genealogy: Reading for One’s Life,” examines how biopoetic genealogies create a space of félhomály, a semi-darkness in proximity to death: an English village pageant in June 1939 (Between the Acts), weeks before the slaughter begins, an Italian villa collective from April to August 1945, shattered by the event of nuclear devastation in Japan (The English Patient), and the general landscape of a century of genocides (History of Sexuality, vol. 1: The Will to Know). Triangulated, these texts expose the infernal encircling of war, and offer the reader a future anterior, a latch onto other actualizations. The final section, “Dislocating/Transiting Strategics: Reading Biopoetic Assemblages,” focuses on the effortful project of becoming other (History of Sexuality, vols. 2, 3, 4, and “Answering Questions”); how to counter current relations of subjugation and imagine new relations to truths, that would repudiate their unquestioning acceptance (Orlando) or unthinking reiteration (The Waves), and decry the production of lies (official histories) maintaining established relations of knowledge and power leading to private and public mortification (Warlight). These texts call upon the reader to imagine, and actualize, an altered bios/logos. We end with Ondaatje’s fictional (auto-)biographies that erase identity to engage in askēsis, in writing and becoming otherwise. Transgrediently, these texts imagine a concern for the self that could also function as a description of heterotopic world fiction, as “notion, precept, attitude and technique,” as “practical matrix for the experience of the self ” and of others.35 Transiting among these experience-books shifts one’s relations to truth, and encourages one to practice an aesthetics of life, to inhabit a future anterior—for, as Woolf reminds us, “Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves. . . . [C]ommoners and outsiders like ourselves [will] make that country our own country, if we teach ourselves how to read and how to write” (WE, 6:277–278).

Method 1—Disposing/Transposing the Archive: Criminal Vanishing Acts In the early 1970s, when confrontations over the Vietnam war, the Québec independence movement, and post-1968 government crackdowns were flar35 Michel Foucault, Qu’est-ce que la critique? Suivi de La culture de soi [What is critique? Followed by the culture of self] (Paris: Vrin, 2015), 88 (our trans.).

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ing transnationally (in Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Japan, Mexico, and the United States, among others), Foucault and Ondaatje both turn to the archive to produce texts dedicated to infamous nineteenth-century criminals: Pierre Rivière, the peasant parricide, and William H. Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, the legendary gunslinger.36 Woolf had queered the archive in the early 1930s, when fascism was on the rise, by composing a parodic biography of victims of crime, real and implied: Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dognapped cocker spaniel, and its owner, secluded and held hostage in the lap of patriarchy.37 All three use the archive, not as a cemetery for documents, where “texts in their dryness” collect dust and mould (EWF, 3:158), but as a heterotopic space in which discursive battles take place, or should take place, for the reader. All three produce protean assemblages of “singular lives, transformed into strange poems” (EWF, 3:157) through multiple curatorial and biopoetic tactics that this section will explore. Those “flash existences, those poem-lives,” as Foucault terms them (EWF, 3:157, 159), shift the grounds of reading; they move the reader from passive consumer of stable historical truths obtained from a fixed perspective to active, mobile, co-producer of contingent knowledge. “To adventure into that wilderness,” Woolf warns, is “an ordeal, an upsetting experience which plies [the reader] with questions, harries him with doubts, alternately delights and vexes him with pleasures and pains” (WE, 4:62). These texts are on the move, blocking the reader’s view of the past, exuding doubt, causing exile from every assurance. While all three texts revisit nineteenth-century crime scenes, the formal arrangement and style of each constitutes a different kind of experience-book, a different theater of quotidian and historical events. Juxtaposing, cheek by jowl, expert testimony, witness statements, newspaper articles, pastoral evaluations, the murderer’s memoir, and present-day analyses of the affair, I, Pierre Rivière demands that the reader cross generic boundaries to gauge the relative value of rumor, opinion, and scientific lore as they circulate and compound within the economies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century truth regimes.38 36 Vadde links Ondaatje, Foucault, and the archive, but to suggest that Ondaatje “overindulges . . . engagements with the past.” Aarthi Vadde, Chimeras of Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 150. 37 For the sake of convenience, we refer to the poet as Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Miss Barrett was confined to her room in 1841–1845. Robert Browning initiated their correspondence in January 1845 after reading her poetry; they met on May 20, 1845. Flush documents how, on September 12, 1846, “Miss Barrett” became “Mrs. Browning” and fled to Italy with her dog, maid, and husband. See Marjorie Stone, “Browning [Née Moulton Barrett], Elizabeth,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com. 38 See Sheringham for a discussion of the archival imaginary in Foucault, the Rivière dossier and the films it inspired. See Gefen for a consideration of the dossier’s context of production.

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These documents multiply perspectives, exposing how identities that had been produced to explain excessive hate and violence succeed in making the visible, invisible. Foucault presents discursive “combats” (MPR, x); Ondaatje, hostilities between competing sides of an emerging capitalist frontier. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (1970) supplements the archive with affects, sounds, smells, colors, delivered in eighty short prose and poetic bursts staging the desires, dreams, and exploits of several famous killers in the Lincoln County War—thanatopolitics at its most infamous. Woolf seems to substitute humor for violence in Flush: A Biography (1933). The endearing coming-of-age story of a naïve and affectionate cocker spaniel (a bestselling Book-of-the-Month Club selection) is at the same time a satirical indictment of intersecting discourses of gender, class, race, and empire, as well as a lesson in the limits of liberation tactics. Quoting from “authorities”39 including Barrett Browning’s poems, letters exchanged with Robert Browning and Mary Russell Mitford (who gave Flush to her friend), and Thomas Beames’s The Rookeries of London (1850), Woolf ’s improbable tale asks the reader to see from two different positions: the unknowing (accepting, enthralled) and the knowing (discerning, resistant). All three texts supplement the work of reading biography with paratextual exhibits. The original edition of Moi, Pierre Rivière reproduces the broadsheet dedicated to the affair, which includes details both historical and invented, and the “Lament” on this subject to be sung to the air “Of the Faithful Dog”; chronologies of the Rivière family and of the murderer’s month-long randonnée [hike]; a map and a textual topography of his movements while evading capture; and a glossary of dialect terms. (The English translation excises these materials save for a footnote that summarizes the broadsheet.) Billy the Kid includes photographs by L. A. Huffman, illustrations, and examples of posthumous Kidinspired pop cultural texts such as the cover of The True Life of Billy the Kid (from The Five Cent Wide Awake Library) and the text of Billy the Kid and the Princess. Woolf ’s Hogarth edition of Flush has a photograph of her own cocker spaniel, six Victorian-era drawings of principal figures and locations, and four arch illustrations by Vanessa Bell. All of these elements impede vision and certainty, so that the reader may unlearn the obvious or the legendary or the romantic and promote the formation of other standpoints.

39 Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography, ed. Elizabeth Steele (Oxford: Shakespeare Head and Blackwell, 1999), 83 (hereafter, Flush).

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Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur, et mon frère... Neither oeuvre nor text, the documents assembled by a team of researchers working with Foucault in a seminar at the Collège de France all refer to a notorious, premeditated triple murder that occurred in 1835 in the tiny Normandy village of La Faucterie, in Aunay-sur-Odon. On that ordinary June day, June 3, Pierre Rivière brutally kills his mother, sister, and brother with a billhook,40 flees to the woods, and manages to escape arrest for one month. After a prolonged investigation that starts locally but eventually involves experts from the metropole (including Jean-Étienne Esquirol, famous alienist), Rivière is tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. The court’s decision is later commuted by King LouisPhillipe on the recommendation of the Minister of Justice, who, unable to determine whether Rivière should be executed or exempted from any punishment in view of conflicting reports on his sanity, advocates life imprisonment. Almost five years later, Rivière hangs himself in Beaulieu prison because he knows that he is already dead and that his body does not matter. However shocking, the affair was almost immediately forgotten, in spite of the publication of Rivière’s singular memoir, and the broadsheet devoted to his crime. This combination of sensationalism and silence, noise and neglect, criminality and insanity, attracted Foucault’s team—they confess to being enthralled by “the parricide with reddish-brown eyes” (IPR, xiii).41 Publishing these documents allowed them both to pose the Rivière question anew (no. 185, Dits, 3:115), and to intervene in the archive “to map diverse struggles, to reconstruct these confrontations and battles, [and] to find again the game of these discourses, as weapons, as instruments of attack and defense in relations of power and knowledge” (IPR, xi; mod. trans.). Furthermore, the assemblage provokes a new mode of reading by “hold[ing] in abeyance the old academic methods of textual analysis and all the notions that derive from the monotonous and dry prestige of écriture” (IPR, xi; mod. trans.). The overall biopoetic strategy is to expose the precarity and contingency of historical truths to question and reevaluate present configurations of knowledge (the book constitutes “a trap,” Foucault admits, set for “shrinks in general”) (FL, 203).42

40 The billhook was a medieval weapon of war domesticated for agricultural use, to prune shrubs; it features a sharp, curved blade and a short handle. 41 The dossier inspired two films: René Allio’s 1976 recounting of the crime and Nicolas Philibert’s 2007 documentary on Allio’s film, Retour en Normandie [Return to Normandy]. Neither film altered what Foucault identified as the radical invisibility of the crime. 42 If psychologists and psychiatrists knew better than to fall into the “trap” set by the dossier, others did not. See essays by anthropologist John M. Ingham, “Matricidal Madness in Foucault’s Anthropology: The Pierre Rivière Seminar,” Ethos 35, no. 2 ( June 2007): 130–158;

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For those initially involved in the Rivière case, the recent introduction of “mitigating circumstances” as a legal category demanded that new kinds of knowledge supplement and inflect the determination of guilt: the education, habits, past behaviors, relations—in short, the life of the accused—needed to be considered before judgment could be rendered. The dossier contains four different biographies (apart from Rivière’s memoir) written by various experts, each one reiterating the same constellation of motifs that demonize his physical characteristics (narrow forehead, oblique gaze), habits (simulating arguments in different voices while walking down the road by himself), behavior (awkward gait, aversion to women, crucifixion of birds and frogs, decapitation of cabbages), and reading (the catechism or philosophy alone at night in the quarries). The first biography is a mere sketch contained in the crime-scene report by the District Prosecutor at Vire; the second, a more elaborate version that he included in the application to pre-trial court for committal; the third, a synthesis contained in the bill of indictment prepared by the Regional Prosecutor at the Royal Court of Caen; and the fourth, the comprehensive narrative that is Dr. Vastel’s report. From unsubstantiated rumors circulated by unknowing witnesses43 to sensational facts, and then to seamless and capacious life story: the various stages of the legal and medical process progressively solidify into a totalizing consistency that nevertheless remains difficult to interpret. Reversing the ancient Greek practice of gauging the harmony of bios and logos to determine truth-telling, the French authorities invent a bios to fit a criminal essence and individual identity. But: does this bios/logos signify careful cunning or insanity? The sentence of life imprisonment resolves the matter without answering the question. The second part of the book, consisting of various present-day analyses, makes the reader move restlessly from one discursive standpoint to another, from one disciplinary investment to another, from one century to another, without ever reaching a moment of overarching coherence. In his reading of the dossier, an essay entitled “Les meurtres qu’on raconte” [Tales of murder]), Foucault transposes the problematic onto a discursive plane, both to situate Rivière’s murder and memoir within popular crime discourses, and identify the function of murder stories within power-knowledge relations and inclusive education specialist Artemi Sakellariadis, “A Wider Sense of Normal? Seeking to Understand Pierre Rivière through the Lens of Autism,” Emotion, Space and Society 5, no. 4 (November 2012): 269–278. 43 Typical is mayor Michel Harson: “I hardly knew Pierre Rivière before his crime; I have not seen him for two years,” “I have often heard,” “This young man . . . according to what I have heard said about him,” “I have no personal knowledge of,” “but I have long heard said” (IPR, 24–25). See also statements of Z. T. Morin, J.-L. Duriray, and G. P. Retout.

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more generally. He demonstrates that Rivière’s fierce triple murder and memoir, although they were made out to be extraordinary, aberrant events, in effect followed the protocols of popular broadsheets that routinely juxtaposed ordinary, common or garden murders with famous tales of military victories, both recent and past. While the broadsheets maintained a strict opposition between these two types of events, vilifying the former and glorifying the latter, Foucault argues that murder functions as a “switcher” between them, establishing an “equivocation of the legitimate and the illegal” (IPR, 206; mod. trans.). Murder starkly exposes the state’s legal power to kill and have killed, and the individual’s powerlessness to do the same with impunity. War rumbles throughout Rivière’s memoir. In 1813, his father marries Victoire Brion to avoid military conscription (IPR, 55). Prenuptial wrangling over the marriage contract is but the beginning of a twenty-two-year-long series of confrontations, fights, and litigations (as peasants continued to struggle with the complexities of the newly established Napoleonic civil code [FL, 205]). Such familial relationships were always already enmeshed in governmental forces—until the son’s homicidal attack transfers them onto other popular and legal planes. Refusing the traditional broadsheet distinctions between private homicides and state-sponsored, glorious killings, conflating the roles of lone wolf criminal and lionized hero, Rivière’s memoir invokes biblical and historical precedents—from Judith to Charlotte Corday, from Huron warriors to Bonaparte and Jesus Christ—to authorize both crime and memoir, and thwart death through immortality: “I thought that an opportunity had come to me to elevate myself, that my name would make some noise in the world, that by my death I should cover myself with glory, and that in times to come my ideas would be adopted and the apologia of me made. Thus I therefore made this fatal resolution” (IPR, 108; mod. trans.). Broadsheets, Foucault argues, thus constitute the conditions of possibility, the grounds for crime and memoir alike: “Pierre Rivière effectively came to fill this position. . . . He filled it by a real murder, the narrative of which he had planned in advance, and the exact account of which he made at the judge’s request. He came to lodge his gesture and his speech in a place well-determined in a certain type of discourse and on a certain field of knowledge” (IPR, 208; mod. trans.). Moreover, Rivière assumed the generic criminal’s voice as constituted by the broadsheet lament, accepting responsibility for the crime, for his “monstrosity,” and welcoming impending punishment: “Now that I have made known all my monstrosity, and that all the explanations of my crime are done, I await the fate which is destined for me, I know the article of the penal code concerning parricide, I accept it in expiation of my faults; alas if only I could see the hapless victims of my cruelty alive once more, even if

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for that, I should only suffer every possible torment” (IPR, 121; mod. trans.).44 Whereas the positivistic nineteenth-century documents construct a homogenized identity, the autonomous subject and object of discourse (“Moi, Pierre Rivière”; “me, Pierre Rivière”), Foucault’s experience-book brings to light an impersonal system of thought disrupting the very grounds of representation; it performs for the reader (and asks of the reader) a “cogito for a dissolved me”— the dynamic archive.45 For Rivière and all those involved in the management of the case, the murder and the memoir are inextricably linked; they constitute, in Foucault’s terms, a murder-narrative, or narrative-murder (he uses both).46 Although the memoir provides a wealth of details concerning the lives of Rivière’s family and neighbors (their everyday activities, their problems, their miseries, their sexuality), the reader knows very little of these “small fragments of life that confront each other intensely”: “these characters,” Foucault explains in an interview, “the more one sees them, the less one understands. The more light is thrown upon them, the more obscure they are” (no. 182, Dits, 3:107). Similarly, the intricate account of the circumstances and reasoning leading to the triple murder only manages to distance the crime, which finally seems to disappear behind its telling. Foucault insists that for the first time, “a crime is accompanied by a discourse that is so strong, that is so strange, that the crime ends up by not existing.”47 Foucault had analyzed this process of referential erasure before, in his lectures on Édouard Manet.48 Manet ruptures the very ground of realist representation, of referentiality, through his invention of the “painting-object” that displays invisibility (or the limits of visibility). Since the Renaissance, paintings had 44 Witness the song of a nineteen-year-old female parricide, published in 1811: “You shudder, I see, feeling hearts, / And the sight of me inspires terror. / Yes, my felonies, my crimes are horrible / And I have deserved the rigor of heaven. / Take heart, my torment is ready” (quoted IPR, 207). 45 Gilles Deleuze uses the expression “cogito pour un moi dissous [cogito for a dissolved me]” in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2004), xxi; mod. trans. 46 Rivière insists that he imagined the memoir before the killings and began to compose it. Only after his arrest and interrogation, and at the behest of the magistrate, does he write it. 47 “Me, I have said nothing on Rivière’s crime itself, and, once again, I believe that no one can say anything about it” (no. 180, Dits, 3:98). 48 Foucault delivered his Manet lectures in Milan, 1967; Tokyo and Florence, 1970; Tunis, 1971. The book is a transcription of the Tunis version. See Michel Foucault, La peinture de Manet [The painting of Manet] (Paris: Seuil, 2004). For the English translation, see Michel Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, trans. Matthew Barr (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), hereafter, Manet. See also Lucio D’Alessandro and Adolfo Marino, eds., Michel Foucault: Trajectoires au cœur du présent [Michel Foucault: trajectories to the heart of the present], trans. Francesco Paolo Adorno and Nadine Le Lirzin (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998). The Rivière texts were found in the archive in 1971.

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masked their material existence as two-dimensional spaces through an intricate set of techniques that effectively fixed the painter and the viewer. Space was ordered hierarchically; the viewer’s dominant gaze, oriented towards the vanishing point, could oversee the artwork as a whole. Color, brought to life by the deliberate play of light and shadow, contributed to the illusion of reality. Manet changes the experience, by insisting upon the physical materiality of the canvas, by locating the source of light beyond its parameters, by underlining its horizontal and vertical dimensions, by making the viewer struggle to see beyond prominent black spaces or dense clouds of smoke. Characters in his paintings are caught observing things or events that remain invisible to the viewer; the disposition of objects and their reflections position the painter and viewer in “two incompatible places: one here and the other there” (Manet, 76). In A Bar at the Folies Bergères, for example, “the viewer has no assigned position—nowhere in reality could a gaze perceive this disposition of figures and their reflection. . . . With Manet, painting brutally ceases to be a normative space . . . and becomes a space in relation to which the viewer must place himself, reminded of his mobility and his ontological disinclination before a flat object, deprived of depth.”49 Manet’s painting thereby marks the “definite birth of an individual exiled from his certainties regarding his place in the world.”50 Manet’s insistence on the materiality of his paintings allows his works, from within representation, not only to signal their intimate relations to other paintings and to the museum, but also to distance the referent; similarly, his contemporary Gustave Flaubert was imploding realism from within, through writing that gestured towards the infinite numbers of other books lying in wait in libraries. Flaubert’s novel-object, like Manet’s painting-object, like Rivière’s narrativemurder, all refer to discursive formations: “Their art builds itself where the archive is formed” (no. 20, Dits, 1:299). Yet Foucault’s insistence that these aesthetic endeavors eventually evacuate the referent comes at a cost: that of eliding gender, race, and class politics. The misogyny in Rivière’s memoir remains invisible to male experts, past and present, in spite of its vociferousness. The murderer explains that previously, one saw “Charlotte Cordays against Marats; now it must be men who employ this mania, it is the women who are in command now in this fine age which calls itself the age of enlightenment . . . it is therefore not just that I let a woman live who is disturbing my father’s tranquility and happiness” (IPR, 108; mod. trans.). And while explicitly focusing on certain aspects of lighting, Foucault never mentions either the sexualized power relations 49 Nicolas Bourriaud, “Michel Foucault: Manet and the Birth of the Viewer,” Manet, 16. 50 Ibid.

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in Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe [Luncheon on the grass] (the naked woman sitting with clothed men, on offer as much as the fruit lying beside her clothing) or the racialized subjugation in Olympia (the almost invisible black female servant in the background51). To read the Rivière file is to experience the precarity of knowledge, to feel its shifting grounds and political force, then and now. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems Towards the end of Collected Works, the reader is enjoined to “imagine if you dug him up and brought him out. You’d see very little. There’d be the buck teeth. Perhaps Garrett’s bullet no longer in thick wet flesh would roll in the skull like a marble. . . . | His legend a jungle sleep”52 (CW, 97). Both Ondaatje and Foucault know that the lives and crimes of their famous murderers are obscured through never-ending textual refractions. Whereas Foucault unearths archival documents to transpose them onto a discursive plane where impersonal positions are substituted for familiar identities, Ondaatje evacuates the few well-known facts about his eponymous character in order to critique and rewrite the legend and alter the reader’s desire.53 He presents an archive of experience and of the absence of thought—thoughtless violence always bordering on madness.54

51 For an analysis of “gender and the colour of art history,” see Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992). 52 Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1970), hereafter, CW. 53 Other works of historiographic metafiction, such as Coming Through Slaughter (1974) and Divisadero (2007), engage archival materials. Coming Through Slaughter thematizes the archivist’s will to knowledge, and enfolds interviews with those who knew Buddy Bolden, the New Orleans trumpet player (1877–1931); first-hand accounts of his performances; the transcription of taped interviews with Frank Amacker (1890–1975), ragtime, jazz, and blues musician; and, like Foucault in DP, a timetable from the asylum where Bolden was confined from 1907 until his death. In Divisadero, Anna, a literature professor, researches the life of French author Lucien Segura, living in his house in the south of France and studying in the “Lucien Segura Archives, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California,” where she listens to recordings that he made, and sifts through photographs, maps, and letters. “I work where art meets life in secret,” Anna muses. Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007), 191, 141 (hereafter, Div). 54 See J. M. Kertzer, “On Death and Dying: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” English Studies in Canada 1, no. 1 (1975): 86–96; and David Donnell, “Notes on The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” in Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje, ed. Sam Solecki (Montreal: Véhicule, 1985), 240–245. Stephen Scobie, “Two Authors in Search of a Character,” Canadian Literature/ Littérature Canadienne 54 (Autumn 1972): 37–55, argues that Ondaatje’s Billy is a legend, a detailed aesthetic portrait without the substantiality of history. We argue the opposite: the Collected Works rewrite the legend (not history) in order to implicate all parties in the madness of violence.

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William H. Bonney’s dates of birth and death, the various names attached to him throughout his life, even the photograph that preserves his image, are all ignored.55 The opening “CREDITS” ostensibly refer the reader to authorities, but The Saga of Billy the Kid (1926) is about as reliable as the comic book Billy the Kid and the Princess (1969). Some unspecified frontier images are credited to “the great Western photographer” L. A. Huffman, as well as the technical expertise informing the first italicized prose segment, which promises clarity of vision: “I send you a picture of Billy made with the Perry shutter as quick as it can be worked—Pyro and soda developer. I am making daily experiments now and find I am able to take passing horses at a lively trot square across the line of fire” (CW, 5). The photographer’s words highlight the desire to capture and record the fugitive with precision.56 They also signal that the Collected Works depend on the reader for their development, for the comments are situated below an empty frame that dominates the top half of the opening page—one that stages the absence of the historical record, the invisibility of the object of discourse. The lie of the ekphrasis (“I send you a picture”) reveals that the incipient realist contract has been shredded, replaced by a Calder-like mobile of heterogeneous, fleeting elements, the meanings of which must be co-determined by the reader.57 The stakes of such a re-reading are confirmed, enhanced, by the book’s coda, a page featuring a large frame containing, in the bottom right hand corner, a small photograph of Michael Ondaatje as a smiling kid dressed like a cowboy. How far east did the Western legend’s colonizing impact reach? What was the Ceylonese boy imagining? With whom was he identifying? Like an inverted telescope, Collected Works distance and reconfigure the desiring subject and its object by immersing the reader in the experience of thanatopolitics—living with and in fear of death. For there was much to work against. In the 1960s and early 1970s, one could enjoy US American Wild West culture on television (Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Death Valley Days, Quick Draw McGraw), at the movies (Once Upon a Time in the West, True Grit, The Wild Bunch, Hang ’Em High, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), 55 Various editions have used the iconic photograph of Billy the Kid for the cover, an image which, because it was reversed, led to the conviction that Bonney was left-handed. Ondaatje’s subtitle, Left Handed Poems, calls attention to that historical misreading, and also recalls Arthur Penn’s iconic 1958 Western biopic, The Left-Handed Gun. 56 Thus the first edition’s cover (1970) featuring a still from Eadweard Muybridge’s famous series of stop-motion photographs (taken with multiple cameras) to capture a horse’s locomotion was perfectly chosen: the text duplicates the process by using multiple perspectives and genres to capture fleeting, mobile moments of violent lives. 57 See Lucia Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2012), on readers’ responsibilities in collecting Billy’s works, and the documentary aspects of the book.

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in comic books (Billy the Kid  [1957–1983], Cheyenne Kid  [1957–1973]), in novels (Louis L’Amour published twenty-nine Westerns in the 1960s), and in poetry (Edward Dorn’s long poem Gunslinger).58 Against this toxic love affair with glorious guns and heroic masculinity, Collected Works provide not the biography of a legendary hero, but alternative experiences of extreme violence and degradation as well as tenderness, friendship, humor, desire, pleasure, love, and wonder. The missing “picture of Billy” and its caption are immediately followed by a prose-poem in which the speaker begins by assuming the voice of the broadsheet criminal lament (analyzed by Foucault), describing the crimes and acknowledging guilt: “These are the killed. / (By me)—/ Morton, Baker, early friends of mine. / Joe Bernstein. 3 Indians. / . . . / 5 Indians in self-defence (behind a very safe rock). / . . . Deputy Jim Carlyle, Deputy Sheriff J. W. Bell” (CW, 6). The artfully phrased confession, “These are the killed by me” (not, “I killed the following”), uncannily reiterates Rivière’s phrase, “Me, Pierre Rivière, having killed. . . .” These two instances—one imagined, one historical, both fictional—manifest that the homicidal speaking subject is positioned by discourse on crime. Initial culpability is then complicated, and the formulaic stance troubled, by juxtaposed statements: “These are the killed. / (By them)—/ Charlie, Tom O’Folliard / Angela D’s split arm . . . / me” (CW, 6). Billy posthumously defends himself by itemizing the victims of a generalized thanatopolitics. Rather than calling for his own punishment, according to the lament’s conventions, Billy insists during the fictional Texas Star “EXCLUSIVE JAIL INTERVIEW” that “the fact is that the Clark shooting took place during the Lincoln County war—when everybody was shooting. . . . [Governor] Houston . . . admitted that . . . both sides were guilty, and like a state of war there was no criminal punishment that could be genuinely brought against me without bringing it against everyone connected with that war. Two wrongs make a right, right?” (CW, 82). Ondaatje’s Billy thus

58 Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger, issued in parts from 1968 to 1975, is an exuberant postmodern long poem. Part road narrative, part quest (for Howard Hughes), part psychedelic-philosophical verse party, it parodies (with ahistorical, cartoonish pleasure), but does not critique, clichés of the Western genre: the Gunslinger (whose main weapon is words), his talking horse (also known as Stoned Horse, Heidegger, and Claude Lévi-Strauss), Lil, the madam who owns the saloon, and “I” (sometime narrator, reincarnated as Parmenides’s secretary in part 3). Gunslinger might have encouraged Ondaatje’s experiments with Collected Works (and one of the characters in Div is named Edward Dorn), but the texts are wholly dissimilar. McHale cites Ondaatje’s work on behalf of the Canadian long poem in an essay that discusses Gunslinger but does not connect the latter with Collected Works. Brian McHale, “Telling Stories Again: On the Replenishment of Narrative in the Postmodern Long Poem,” The Yearbook of English Studies 30 (2000): 250–262.

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anticipates Foucault’s argument that murder operates as a “switcher” between state-sanctioned heroism on the battlefield and state-castigated individual villainy at home. Billy expands the argument by implicating economic structures, because the so-called “Lincoln County War” was actually competition between capitalist factions who not only resorted to murder but also enlisted killers for hire, their “Regulators,” with various government officials taking either side. Finally, whereas broadsheet laments were meant to be widely circulated, sung, recited, so that one and all could enjoy the position of the unmasked, unabashedly monstrous criminal, Collected Works generalize violence to prevent the reader’s identification with Billy: “‘I didn’t want a book that explained him, that was a kind of sociological study of this cowboy or this killer,” Ondaatje explains in an interview, “I didn’t so much identify with him as I saw him as a kind of mask with which to try to discover and investigate someone who was violent.’”59 The resulting experience-book thus dismantles and transposes the subject (Billy the Kid) and the singer-reader of the tale. Collected Works de-individualize both the criminal and the lawman, who mirror each other in their conduct: like the Rivière case file, Ondaatje’s text insists that murder is murder, neither the stuff of legend nor of ethics. For Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett are portrayed as the same: charming, attractive, polite, and genial killers. Garrett is anonymously described as an “Ideal assassin” who could “kill someone on the street walk back and finish a joke. One who had decided what was right and forgot all morals. . . . An academic murderer—only his vivacious humour and diverse interests made him the best kind of company” (CW, 28). Women remember Billy as “the pink of politeness / and as courteous a little gentleman / as [they] ever met” (CW, 87, 52, 96). Billy and Pat are friends before they are paid to be enemies; within a culture of violence, the gunslinger and the sheriff are caught up in warring capitalist relations. Three heterotopias confound distinctions between life and death, legal and illegal, sane and insane, and leave the reader stranded epistemologically, politically, and ethically, forced to reconsider entertaining legends, pleasure and desire, anew: the Boot Hill graveyard, the Chisum ranch, and Livingstone’s “wooden walled farm” dedicated to breeding mad dogs (CW, 60). Part of the text’s initial framing devices, the cemetery poem positions the reader in a generic place of death, where the path “tangles / like branches of a tree among the gravestones” (CW, 9).60 This vantage point is both the 59 Vit Wagner, “Ondaatje’s Billy rides again . . .,” Toronto Star, April 6, 1990, D9. 60 “Boot Hill” was the Wild West’s generic name for cemeteries (“they died with their boots on”).

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characters’ untimely destination (three out of four “of the dead in Boot Hill died violently”) and the beginning of an experience-book that digs up fragments of life from multiple perspectives: less than half (40 per cent) of the textual elements in Collected Works are Billy’s. The majority are either from eight other named characters or from an impersonal point of view. As one of Billy’s prosepoems states, “Not a story about me through their eyes then. . . . Here then is a maze to begin, be in. . . . That there is nothing of depth, of significant accuracy, of wealth in the image, I know. It is there for a beginning” (CW, 20). Thus do the writer and the reader become accomplices in the book’s rhizomatic development, tracing various forms of death-in-life.61 Billy’s friend Tom O’Folliard, for example, always “[o]ut of his skull,” must eat “red dirt to keep the pain away, off his body” since his gun misfired in the desert and blew off half his face (CW, 50). To embody the metaphor that everyone barely hangs on to life by a thread, there is the funny, grotesque shooting death poem, in which a chicken “digs the beak into [Gregory’s] throat/ straightens legs and heaves/ a red and blue vein out/. . . till it was 12 yards long/ as if it held that body like a kite/ Gregory’s last words being/ get away from me yer stupid chicken” (CW, 15). To correlate household activities and in extremis life-saving, a mirror poem (the first stanza repeated, inversely, by the second) compares putting one’s “hand into/ a pot of lukewarm tea” to “dragging out the stomach to get the bullet” (CW, 27). Boot Hill cemetery, emblematic heterotopia of Collected Works’ argument with death, is counterpoised with the Chisums’ ranch, where characters come back to life to enjoy conversation, food and drink, friendship, love and sex. For Billy, it is a place of healing when his legs are burned, or a weekend getaway with Angela D, “his girlfriend that he plans to marry” (CW, 42); for Pat, it is an oasis after a near-fatal desert storm, which also offers the unexpected opportunity to meet the famous William Bonney in the flesh (“I’d of course heard of him”) and enjoy the Kid’s company (CW, 42–43). For the reader, the Chisums’ homestead reproduces and troubles all other spaces. The working ranch functions as a gathering place (a restaurant, a saloon), a walk-in clinic, and a zoo (“every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome” [CW, 36]). But this site of industrious reason and benevolence is troubled by madness and death. Billy knows three days of delirium there, when he is dropped unconscious on the porch. The reader is asked to feel and to “know what a mad man’s skin is” (CW, 33), when Billy picks Sallie Chisum up out of bed, places her sheet-wrapped body in water, and then watches her struggle to escape. 61 Other devices marking narrator-reader relations include passages addressing a generic “you” (CW, 26), announcing a character’s entrance (CW, 42), or foregrounding writing (CW, 72, 85).

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At night, the Chisums’ isolated building seems “to be stuffed with something yellow and wet. The night, the dark air, made it all mad” (CW, 37). When Sallie and John ask Billy to kill their dying cat, they are appreciative of their friend’s skills; predictably, Garrett feels “incredible admiration” for the stalking and killing techniques;62 but Angela is “terrified. Simply terrified” at the calculated, cold-blooded efficiency of her lover’s manner in dealing death (CW, 44–45). Nothing is simple here. The third heterotopia is presented by John Chisum, the Civil War veteran, who tells Billy the story of Livingstone, the choir member who secretly and methodically inbred dogs into deformity and madness, until the fateful day when they ate their breeder alive, and later were killed by the veterinarian and the sheriff. Livingstone’s walled compound, purchased with his mother’s money and blind support, is a heterotopic horror show, a mise en abyme of the text’s multiple denunciations of Western cultures of violence. Obvious or subtle figurative tendrils extend out to other features of the text. All that remains of the breeder once his dogs have devoured him, for example, is “his left wrist—the hand that held the whip when he was in the pen . . . left untouched” amid the Left Handed Poems (CW, 62). (Garrett’s own wrist is marked by “a purple stain there all his life” [CW, 28].) The canine leitmotif links the deranged to the domestic and to the manly. The story of Sallie’s pet Henry and his breeding ancestry frames Livingstone’s “nasty story” (CW, 59, 62). The mad dogs hiss through their teeth, like Garrett just before he ambushes and murders Billy who can hear him breathe: “hissssssssssssssssssssssssss” (CW, 61, 90). Billy imagines the prelude to his death scene as: “One dog, Garrett and two friends, stud looking, came down the street to the house, to me” [CW, 46]). Even at the scene of writing, “The dogs sleep their dreams off / they are everywhere . . . / the blood from my wrist / has travelled to my heart / and my fingers . . . mapping my thinking going its own way” (CW, 72). Reader engagement with this mapping is formally required. Many critics have considered the text’s fragmentary, photographic, and cinematic techniques, as well as the “clamour of voices . . . [that] renders subjectivity ambiguous.”63

62 Billy “sniffed carefully” until he found his prey, like Livingstone’s killer dogs (CW, 45). 63 Kathleen I. Bethell, “Reading Billy: Memory, Time, and Subjectivity in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 28, no. 1 (2003): 80. See also Anne Blott, “‘Stories to Finish’: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 2, no. 2 (1977): 188–202; Keith Harrison, “Montage in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” Journal of Canadian Poetry 3, no. 1 (1980): 32–38; Ajay Heble, “Michael Ondaatje and the Problem of History,” Clio 19, no. 2 (1990): 97–110; Manina Jones, “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Scripting the Docudrama,” in

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Kathleen Bethell suggests that “the scrap-book-like qualities” of The Collected Works “invite its reading as a type of commonplace book.”64 Ondaatje assembles hupomnēmata, but not for the elaboration of self; instead, the text sets in motion fluctuating fragments that plunge the reader into felt rather than linear time, each Bergsonian fragment a new moment of experience, trigger for both recollection and foreshadowing. Although many sequences seem to be free-standing— O’Folliard’s story, the barn vignette, the newspaper interview, the remnants of popular culture perpetuating the gunslinger’s mystique—all resonate with one another, transpose the other, through recurring animal, light, and aural motifs. Three key sequences, however, are scattershot, exploded into bits and pieces that multiply perspectives and timelines, destroying causal chronology: the visit at the Chisum ranch; Billy’s capture, transportation, sentencing, and escape; and the shooting death of the Kid. Each sequence deploys differently. The weekend at the Chisums’, disassembled into three separate realist stories told from various perspectives and textually dispersed in chronological disorder, must be reconstructed as a single episode by the reader. It begins with Billy’s narrative of the weekend (“Forty miles ahead of us. . . . thinking it is night” [CW, 32–35]); continues from Garrett’s perspective with the segment entitled “Mistuh . . . Patrick . . . Garrett ! ! !” (CW, 42–45); the third scene (which includes the shooting of the cat) is out of order chronologically, as it takes place prior to the previous segment (CW, 67–71). Because each vignette seems complete, and because the narratives are focalized differently, it is not immediately apparent that they fit together to form a single story. Within each of these chronotopes, the reader (like the characters) can settle down comfortably and understand events as they occur. Readerly effort is required, however, to transpose these disparate fragments into a coherent plot. The traumatic sequence beginning with Billy’s capture by Garrett and ending with his escape is broken into multiple heterogeneous elements: short lyric and prose poems, brief and extended narratives presented in fractured time, moving backwards and forwards. The sequence consists of seven segments, beginning with the jarring declaration, “When I caught Charlie Bowdre dying” (CW, 12). Ten pages later, a short prose narrative describes with graphic specificity how her That Art of Difference: ‘Documentary-Collage’ and English-Canadian Writing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 68–84, 165–166; Smaro Kamboureli, “The Alphabet of the Self: Generic and Other Slippages in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family,” in Reflections: Autobiography and Canadian Literature (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988), ed. K. P. Stich, 79–91; Scobie, “Two Authors”; and Sam Solecki, ed., Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje (Montréal: Véhicule Press, 1985), for analyses of this text. 64 Bethell, “Reading Billy,” 71.

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the wounded Charlie is used as a weapon by his buddies (“Get up Charlie. I prop him to the door, put his gun in his hand. Take off, good luck Charlie. . . . Shoot him Charlie” [CW, 22]). The third, six-line prose segment, some twentysix pages later, begins by repeating word-for-word the last two lines of the previous segment (“Snow outside. Wilson, Dave Rudabaugh and me. No windows, the door open so we could see. Four horses outside” [CW, 22, 48]), then closes in on the three men as they surrender. (Immediately juxtaposed to this scene is a short lyric that loops back to a moment of homosocial pleasure when Charlie is alive and cooking [CW, 49].)65 The prisoners’ week-long trek through the desert toward imprisonment, during which Billy is metaphorically raped by the sun, “good and fucked by Christ” (CW, 76–8), constitutes the fourth segment, in realist prose (CW, 76–8). The juxtaposed fifth segment describes their arrival at the railroad depot hotel, and ends with Billy “melting” into sleep, remembering how he once “turned to say goodnight to Charlie who was about ten yards away and there was the moon balanced perfect on his nose” (CW, 79). The next segment presents Judge Warren H. Bristol sentencing Billy to death (CW, 80). After an interval of two segments (but decades later) the story of Billy’s escape from jail is told anonymously, second-hand, with reference to “the picture books . . . the films” that had proliferated to tell the tale (CW, 86). Like the characters themselves, the reader is plunged into moments of feeling, seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, hallucinating extreme violence, unable to discern the plot (except in hindsight). The third shattered sequence recounting the killing of Billy the Kid also has seven segments (CW, 46, 53, 90, 92–93, 94, 95, 103) that switch genres (prose, verse, or hybrids of prose and verse), and tenses (conditional past, simple past, ongoing present, indicative present, and imperative). Thus distended, the killing takes place several times towards the end of the text. These mobile emplotments, focalized through several characters and the narrator, prevent the reader from standing still, from grasping all aspects of any event at once. Like the viewer of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies Bergères, who realizes that the mirror confounds planes of visibility and thereby deranges ontological stability, the reader of Collected Works cannot find a secure position in relation to meaning—as though the fatal shot had exploded the text as well as Billy’s body.66 65 See Dennis Denisoff, “Homosocial Desire and the Artificial Man in Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (1994): 51–70, for a discussion of homosocial desire in CW. 66 The last sequence is shot beyond Collected Works: written two years later, a poem set thirty-seven years after Billy’s death, “Sallie Chisum / Last Words on Billy the Kid. 4 a.m.,” was published in Michael Ondaatje, The Cinnamon Peeler (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989), 70–71.

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Foucault’s I, Pierre Rivière shows the reader the ethical imperative to question archival documents fabricating life stories that normalize the eruption of violence in the midst of normal life. Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid makes the reader wear Billy’s blood necklace (CW, 6) to experience thanatopolitics within an uncommon commonplace book. Through the radical defamiliarization of the legend, the reader is awakened in times of war: in Lincoln County, in Vietnam, in the present. But just as Foucault’s analyses of the dossier and Manet’s paintings evacuate its politics of gender and race, Ondaatje’s collection never faces the genocide of Indigenous peoples, whose presence is reduced to a mere generic mention in Bonney’s initial kill list. (The text’s unsaid: Fort Sumner (New Mexico), the first place identified in CW, played a key role in the dispossession and genocide of Native Americans from 1862 to 1868.) Flush: A Biography Woolf ’s Flush: A Biography intervenes in the circulation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s legend in order to critique its discursive conditions of emergence. The “dramatic and romantic”67 story of Sleeping Beauty rescued by the dashing Prince of Poetry and swept away to live in the Palazzo Guidi of sunny Florence was being revived again in Rudolf Besier’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a theatrical succès de scandale that Woolf saw on October 6, 1930. Her response was twofold. In an essay on Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, she states: “Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her, nobody troubles to put her in her place. . . . In short, the only place in the mansion of literature that is assigned her is downstairs in the servants’ quarters” (WE, 5:258). More dramatically, Woolf uses archival materials to displace the poet’s legend by creating a new one, all about Flush, her willing lapdog. In Besier’s comedy, a female visitor muses, “Oh, wouldn’t it be fwightfully interesting if only dear Flush could speak? . . . You see, dear Flush is the only witness of all that goes on at Ba’s weekly tête-à-tête with the handsomest poet in England.”68 By focusing on the dog’s life, with special emphasis on his theft by a notorious criminal gang, Woolf ’s satire provides the reader with a different way of experiencing the surround of archival facts, to estimate the costs of love—for women, dogs, and fathers, for romance, home, and empire—from 67 Woolf begins “Aurora Leigh” (1931) by noting that the Brownings “are now far better known in the flesh than they have ever been in the spirit. Like so many other Victorian worthies they have been transformed in the past few years into figures of romance, passionate lovers with . . . peg-top trousers and sweeping skirts. In this guise thousands of people must know and love the Brownings who have never read a line of their poetry” (WE, 5:257–258). 68 Rudolf Besier, The Barretts of Wimpole Street: A Comedy in Five Acts (New York: Little, Brown, 1930), 38–39, https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/besierr-barrettsofwimpolestreet/.

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multiple angles. Three main biopoetic tactics are used in Woolf ’s fiction of the archive69: satire, correlation, and displacement. Satire initiates a complicitous relation between reader and writer, distances the reader from recognized truths, “to tug, to distort, to thwart” the obvious.70 Correlation critically structures connaissances to generate new knowledge. Displacement transposes common truths onto struggles about gender and race, class and nation, thereby shaping the epistemological, political, and ethical imperatives of a worldly chronotope. Flush stages what Elizabeth Barrett knew too well: that white middle-class women, and female poets in particular, enjoy the same standing as lap dogs. In a letter to Robert Browning, she clearly states: “I am your Flush, and he is mine.”71 Woolf chooses to dramatize the correlation rather than quote the passage. Flush is the physical, emotional, and social double of his mistress. Elizabeth and her dog share wide mouths, deep brown eyes, and heavy curls: “Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, each, perhaps, completed what was dormant in the other. But she was a woman; he was a dog.”72 Initially, their complementarity fulfills Victorian understandings of womanhood. Imprisoned in “the bedroom school” with Miss Barrett as teacher, the male dog learns to “resign, to control, to suppress” (Flush, 20–21), to be meek, docile, dutiful, happy to lay quietly and lovingly at his mistress’s feet; in other words, to become the Angel in the House where the invalid Elizabeth lays on the sofa, obeys her father’s every wish, and writes—the lapdog of patriarchal relations of force. Flush is chained when walked in Regents Park; she “could not go out. She was chained to the sofa. ‘A bird in a cage would have as good a story’, she wrote, as she had” (Flush, 21). Love between mistress and dog weakens them both. Anthropomorphizing the dog allows the text to flush commonplace truths supporting great men and subjugating women down the satirical drain, desiccating romance: Woolf ’s text is a warning tale for all who love the legend of Barrett Browning.73

69 A list of texts consulted is provided by the writer (Flush, 83). 70 Brenda R. Silver, ed., “‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’: Virginia Woolf ’s Last Essays,” Twentieth-Century Literature 25, nos. 3–4 (Autumn‒Winter 1979), 390 (hereafter, “Anon”). 71 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845–1846 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1898), 2: 518–519. 72 Flush, 81–82. 73 Some accuse Woolf of using the dog merely as literary allegory, condescendingly depriving him of his animal alterity; see Jutta Ittner, “Part Spaniel, Part Canine Puzzle: Anthropomorphism in Woolf ’s Flush and Auster’s Timbuktu,” Mosaic 39, no. 4 (2006): 181–196. Derek Ryan, “The Question of the Animal in Flush,” in his Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2013), defends Woolf ’s reconfiguration of the spaces shared by human and non-human animals. Such analyses must bypass Woolf ’s satire to make sense.

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Constantly imagined as that of an upper-class Victorian gentleman, Flush’s mind serves as prism for the commonplace truths that exercise power through a series of essentialist assumptions. The dog’s biographer uses earnest, and hence farcical, tales of etymology (Hispania), conquest (the Carthaginians), and breeding (“at least seven famous Spaniel families” [Flush, 2]) to gush over his subject’s eminence. Canine determination of pedigree (as established by the Spaniel Club) is judged superior to that of Heralds’ College by the narrator, who grudgingly admits, however, that the latter “at least makes some attempt to preserve the purity of the human family” (Flush, 3). The correlation defamiliarizes the deadly desideratum of racialized purity,74 as it extends from Barrett Browning’s day to Woolf ’s, from eugenicists to Nazis (and to the present). Animal husbandry, a booming business and source of pleasure, is thus transposed, positioned as yet another story of conquest and legitimation, articulated to race and gender (trophy pets, wives, and daughters).75 The biographer’s assurance is continually satirized, from the first words that state (à la Austen), “It is universally admitted that” (Flush, 1). Reveling in the quantity of archival information on the subject of canine heritage, the narrator laments the absence of the same for servants. The reader (like Patrick Lewis) is made to notice what does not count, what disappears. Always present, servants remain imperceptible, their material conditions of existence unnoticed. Even the biographer’s extended endnote on Barrett Browning’s faithful servant Lily Wilson and “the great army of her kind—the inscrutable, the all-but-silent, the all-but-invisible servant maids of history” can only dwell parenthetically “for a second on the extreme precariousness of a servant’s life” (Flush, 87, 86). Thus the text duplicates the effects of the Browning legend, to show how ignorance is produced as vehicle of power relations; transposing these mechanisms from gender to 74 See Anna Snaith, “Of Fanciers, Footnotes, and Fascism: Virginia Woolf ’s Flush,” Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 614–636; Jennifer McDonell, “Ladies’ Pets and the Politics of Affect: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush,” Australian Literary Studies 25, no. 2 (2010): 17–34; Pamela Caughie, “Flush and the Literary Canon: Oh Where Oh Where Has That Little Dog Gone?,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 10, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 47–66; and Pamela Caughie, Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996). Linden Peach, “Editing Flush and Woolf ’s Editing in Flush,” in Woolf Editing/Editing Woolf: Selected Papers from the Eighteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Eleanor McNees and Sara Veglahn (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2009), 201–205, notes that the segment of the novel discussing the relative efficiency of the Spaniel Club and the Herald’s College was published in an issue of the Atlantic Monthly that also contained a review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (October 1933). 75 Thus Woolf ’s post-Galton, Nazi-era satire anticipates arguments brought forth in Foucault’s studies of the “war of the races” at the Collège de France (1975–1976) and the use of breeding stories in Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid.

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class multiplies and compounds the impact of systematically generated, willful ignorance. Spatial correlations highlight class divisions in racialized terms. The narrator reveals that “not a stone’s throw from Wimpole Street,” “[b]ehind Miss Barrett’s bedroom, for instance,” is St. Giles, “one of the worst slums in London. Mixed up with that respectability was this squalor” that “threw doubts upon the solidity even of Wimpole Street itself ” (Flush, 40). Quoting Thomas Beames’ The Rookeries of London (1850), which describes St. Giles as “‘wellnigh a penal settlement, a pauper metropolis in itself ’” (thereby materializing Foucault’s point about delinquency), the narrator moves on to Whitechapel, the east-end slum where “poverty and vice and misery had bred and seethed and propagated their kind for centuries without interference” (Flush, 41), where local “banditti” hoard their loot (Flush, 48). The narrator recycles Beames to create Flush’s impressions of Whitechapel. Its inhabitants are described as a subhuman race, “hordes of half-naked men and women”; these “horrible monsters—some were ragged, others were flaring with paint and feathers—squatted on the floor. . . . The demons pawed and clawed . . . cursed and quarrelled” (Flush, 41, 43–44). But perhaps even more unsettling for Flush is the sight of “dogs of the highest breeding, chained dogs, footman’s dogs, like himself,” behaving just like their captors (they “tore and worried a festering bone that they had got between them” [Flush, 43]). Flush and his biographer are disturbed by the chaotic lack of essential differentiation. Breeding—high or low—should always tell, regardless of material circumstances. The reader, however, recognizes the functions of using racialized discourse to apprehend the working classes: to serve as alibi for ruthless exploitation, and to negate the fact that the civilization of Wimpole Street rests comfortably on Whitechapel misery.76 Discourses of race, class, and gender are correlated by the writer in the physical and dramatic center of the biography: when Flush is taken for ransom, power relations are exposed and reversed, and both the dog and his mistress are transformed.77 The balance of power between classes and genders, the necessity 76 The biopolitics of race are inscribed at the very hearth of 50 Wimpole Street through the Roman-named “savage Cuba bloodhound” Catiline, the same species used on the family’s Jamaican slave-based plantations (Flush, 26). See McDonell. Imperialism is further inscribed with “the curious objects brought from [Barrett’s] East Indian property,” and the “Indian shawls” that warm the poet (Flush, 11; 20, 23, 31, 53, 61). Linked to ancient Greek city-states and now perished “old empires,” Wimpole Street secures civilization, in the narrator’s view (Flush, 9). 77 An endnote specifies: “Flush was stolen three times; but the unities seem to require that the three stealings shall be compressed into one. The total sum paid by Miss Barrett to the dog stealers was £20” (Flush, 85). Two notes later, Barrett Browning describes her maid Lily Wilson as “‘an expensive servant’—her wages were £16 a year” (Flush, 85).

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of delinquency and sexism in capitalist relations (“The terms upon which Wimpole Street lived cheek by jowl with St. Giles’s were well known. St. Giles’s stole what St. Giles’s could; Wimpole Street paid what Wimpole Street must” [Flush, 42]) are suddenly destabilized. To her astonishment, the men surrounding Barrett choose to fight “in the interest of their class” by refusing to negotiate with the dog thieves: “Wimpole Street was determined to make a stand against Whitechapel” (Flush, 47). Up until the June 1845 Bill for the Further Prevention of the Offence of Dog Stealing, ransoming dogs was a booming business rather than a crime, for they were not considered property. Associated with women’s frivolity and weakness for the meek, lap dogs were fair game for “The Fancy” of St. Giles and Whitechapel. One could incur a sentence of seven years’ transportation for stealing a dog’s collar, noted Sir J. Graham during the parliamentary debate on the issue, but one could steal a dog with impunity, whatever its value.78 The hesitancy of lawmakers to recognize pet dogs as property stemmed from their association with emotional attachment rather than utility; legislation on the matter was enacted only after a petition and a Report from the Select Committee on Dog Stealing were submitted to Parliament.79 When Flush is stolen in 1846, when dogs have finally been recognized as property and stealing them a crime, the men of Wimpole Street draw the line. Barrett’s father and brothers, and even her then-secret fiancé, all reject a demand for ransom; Robert Browning considers paying for Flush’s release a “lamentable weakness” (Flush, 48) that would position anyone who did so on the side of “‘the execrable policy of the world’s husbands, fathers, brothers and domineerers in general’” (Flush, 48). In a letter to Elizabeth, Browning writes a detailed account of what he would have said to Mr. Taylor, intermediary between owners and criminals, “if he had had the good fortune to meet that gentleman” (Flush, 48): 78 Hansard, HC Deb., June 25, 1845, vol. 81 cc1185–9, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/ commons/1845/jun/25/dog-stealing. 79 United Kingdom Parliament, House of Commons, Report from the Select Committee on Dog Stealing (Metropolis) (London: British Parliamentary Papers, July 26, 1844); House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, http://parlipapers.proquest.com:80/; Henry Mayhew, “Of the Street-Sellers of Live Animals,” London Labour and the London Poor (London: Griffin, Bohn, and Company, 1861), 2:48–51. See also Phillip Howell, At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015); Henry Askham, Legal Protection of Dogs from the Increasing Evil of Dog Stealers and Receivers (London: n.p., 1844); Bob Boddice, A History of Attitudes and Behaviours toward Animals in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Britain: Anthropocentrism and the Emergence of Animals (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008); Laura Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); and Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), for additional historical information.

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‘“don’t talk nonsense to me about cutting off heads or paws. Be as sure as that I stand here and tell you, I will spend my whole life in putting you down, the nuisance you declare yourself—and by every imaginable means I will be the death of you and as many of your accomplices as I can discover—but you I have discovered and will never lose sight of ” (Flush, 47–48). The poet turned wannabe avenger/murderer, however, remains safely in the background while Barrett Browning enlists the help of her terrified maid and goes to Whitechapel in a carriage to pay for her dog’s release. From the window of her vehicle she sees what she had always so willingly ignored, like others in her class: a “mysterious world” that “lay on the other side of Wimpole Street—these faces, these houses. . . . Here lived women like herself; while she lay on her sofa, reading, writing, they lived thus. . . . They were to inspire the most vivid passages in Aurora Leigh. But now the butler had opened the door, and she went upstairs to her room again” (Flush, 49, 50). Woolf ’s text refuses to sentimentalize the scene of recognition: Elizabeth is shown to force a horrified maid into submission; she never leaves her carriage; she returns to her privileged home and still must demand her brother’s help to get Flush back. Yet the text also insists that “Miss Barrett was not to be intimidated” (Flush, 48): rejecting the role assigned to her, she will not submit to the will and reasoning of the men who love her (father, brother, fiancé), even at the risk of losing her true love’s good opinion of her (Flush, 48). Both the female poet and servant know that the value of Flush is not to be monetized, not to be circumscribed in terms of class or gender: they can see the bonds of love and duty that tie them to this living creature, and will not let the men fight proxy class wars over its body.80 Structured as a series of spatial displacements, the biography of Flush tells a tale of progressive Enlightenment: from the innocence and minority of puppydom with Mitford at Three Mile Cross, to adolescent illusions of racial superiority at 50 Wimpole Street dashed by the experience of suffering in Whitechapel, to reaching majority, with the freedom, democracy, happiness, and world citizenship possible in Italy. Each of the stages in that bildungsroman is marked by a concomitant detachment from a previous understanding of identity. In Italy, where the Spaniel Club does not seem to exercise any authority, Flush becomes more democratic towards mongrels, less assured of his superiority: “He was the friend of all the world now. All dogs were his brothers” (Flush, 60). The final moment of revelation comes when Flush loses all his marks of pedigree when he is shaved by Browning, to relieve him from the torment of fleas, a suffering 80 Similarly, Mary Russell Mitford, despite her dire need of money, refused to sell Flush, preferring to give him to her friend Elizabeth Barrett: “to sell Flush was unthinkable” (Flush, 8).

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correlated by Barrett Browning to “Savonarola’s martyrdom here in Florence” (Flush, 68). At first feeling “emasculated, diminished, ashamed,” Flush then considers: “What am I now? . . . He was nobody. Certainly he was no longer a cocker spaniel” (Flush, 69). But, the biographer notes, “as if the potent spirits of truth and laughter were whispering” to Flush, the dog soon realizes that to “be nothing—is that not, after all, the most satisfactory state in the whole world? . . . To caricature the pomposity of those who claim that they are something—was that not in its way a career?” (Flush, 68). Like Savonarola and other domini canes before him, Flush ultimately assumes the transhistorical attitude and function of the Cynic: “‘Flush’, Mrs Browning wrote to her sister, ‘is wise’. She was thinking perhaps of the Greeks saying that happiness is only to be reached through suffering” (Flush, 69). Reading this triumphant Enlightenment story, in all its sweetness and formidable prose, no doubt accounts for the novel’s reception as a best-seller in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Barrett Browning is equally transformed by her transposition to Italy, for “fear was unknown in Florence; there were no dog-stealers here and, she may have sighed, there were no fathers” (Flush, 60). She has a room of her own to write in and, from her window at Casa Guidi, shares the people’s enthusiasm for the Risorgimento. Yet soon enough and once again, both mistress and lapdog live “where nothing in the room [is] itself; everything [is] something else,” as was the case in the London bedroom, for tables can now spin in Florence, or stand on one leg, while the dead communicate with the living. The lesson of Whitechapel has apparently led to spiritualist, rather than political, risks. Through free indirect discourse, the reader learns that, “She had discovered a world that she had never dreamt of within half an hour’s drive from Wimpole Street. Why should there not be another world only half a moment’s flight from Florence—a better world, a more beautiful world, where the dead live, trying in vain to reach us? At any rate she would take the risk” (Flush, 76). Once again, Barrett Browning spends her days staring where there is nothing to see (Flush, 78); “as the weeks passed, this preoccupation of Mrs. Browning’s with the invisible [grows] upon her” (Flush, 77), and “the kicks and the screams and the vinegar,” as well as the procession of “evil-smelling, seedy-looking men,” take their toll on the dog’s nerves (Flush, 78). Flush satirically shows the limits of Enlightenment liberation narratives by making the dog the philosopher Cynic, and the poet the victim of spiritualist hoaxes, in an Italy they both continuously misread as the land of milk and honey. Because the dog and its biographer cannot or will not read81 Barrett Browning’s work (like those who would only love the “brilliant, the doomed, the adored” 81 The biographer often condescends to Barrett Browning’s limited understanding (Flush, 21).

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poet and ignore her poetry [Flush, 8]), they overlook her actual biopoetic practices of self and her engagement in world political struggles. They cannot know that Casa Guidi Windows (1851), after embracing triumphant populism, laments the return of marching troops, “The regular tramp of horse and tread of men” (II, XII:103). They cannot know about Barrett Browning’s anti-slavery work and A Curse for a Nation, nor of her Poems Before Congress (1860). Having repetitively shown how Barrett Browning’s legend can only make sense within relations of domination and subjugation, Woolf ’s satire asks the reader to refocus on material struggles; to reconsider Il Duce’s Italy; to refuse to be lulled into quiescence by easy promises of (political, cultural, or spiritual) change. Her experience-book “takes us and reads us; flouts our preconceptions; questions principles which we had got into the habit of taking for granted, and, in fact, splits into two parts as we read, making us, even as we enjoy, yield our ground or stick to our guns” (WE, 4:62).

Method 2—Distracting/Transacting Genealogy: Reading for One’s Life But how to respond, how to intervene, how to interact with the other at a time when “massacres have become vital” (HS, 1:137)? Experiments with the archive engage the reader in a process transposing the subject onto multiple, unstable planes of knowledge where no single perspective can dominate the landscape— reading as writing the object of knowledge anew. The reader is brought to doubt, to be suspicious of the will to love legendary figures of violence or adoration. Genealogical experiments work to disengage the reader from forms of belonging to present truth regimes by disrupting chronologies, troubling historical facts with philosophical questions, and questioning philosophical truths with historical facts (PT, 46). Focusing on the periods before and towards the end of World War II (Between the Acts, English Patient) or more broadly on the century of genocides (History of Sexuality, vol. 1), the experience-books investigated in this section work genealogically to detach the reader from individual and collective identities that make everyday violence, war, and domination make sense. Rejecting the “one-way history” of the geopolitical model of progress,82 such transactions bring the reader to the edge—of meaning, of sense, of life— through various aesthetic strategies. Woolf brings the reader “‘there to lose what

82 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 144.

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binds us here’”;83 Ondaatje, to “that pure zone between land and chart between distances and legend between nature and storyteller” (EP, 246); Foucault, “to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance” (HS, 1:157). These biopoetic experiments develop heterotopic chronotopes: time-space arrangements preparing the stage—and the reader—for practices of the self. Between the Acts Begun in 1938, published after the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz, Between the Acts looks back to a peaceful June day in 1939 when a village comes together to enjoy a pageant at Pointz Hall, the great, privately owned manor. Combining the traditionally conservative genres of the country house novel and the historical pageant, the text asks the reader to consider how such forms enfold individual lives into a celebration of national bounty and security—and how they might be contested.84 At the time of its publication (1941), readers knew how violently this peaceful scene had been interrupted.85 Between the Acts not only performs a genealogy of this and other such days to argue that love of patriarchy, village, nation, empire, and god lead to war, but also to detach the reader from normal present-day subject positions through several biopoetic tactics of disruption, which will be considered in turn: an interruptive process to impede the conduct of conduct, the progress of plot, and the logic of genre; a process of fragmentation to obstruct totalization and transform the literary work into

83 Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, ed. Susan Dick and Mary S. Millar (Oxford: Shakespeare Head and Blackwell, 2002), 9 (hereafter, BTA). 84 For studies of the country house novel see Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Marjorie Garber, Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses (London: Pantheon, 2000); Richard Gill, Happy Rural Seat: The English Country House and the Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972); David Littlejohn, The Fate of the English Country House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Alison Oram, “Sexuality in Heterotopia: Time, Space, and Love between Women in the Historic House,” Women’s History Review 21, no. 4 (September 2012): 533–551. 85 For Woolf and war, see Madlyn Detloff, “Thinking Peace into Existence: The Spectacle of History in Between the Acts,” Women’s Studies 28, no. 4 (September 1999): 403–433; Patricia Laurence, “The Facts and Fugue of War: From Three Guineas to Between the Acts,” in Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth, ed. Mark Hussey (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 225–245; and Karen Schneider, “Re-Plotting the War(s): Virginia Woolf ’s Radical Legacy,” in her Loving Arms: British Women writing the Second World War (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1996); for a discussion of BTA in relation to its political surround, see Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996). See also Anna Snaith, Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s, 2000) for a discussion of private and public in BTA.

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a node, a “vehicle and effect” of multitudinous, networked texts; an ironic or satiric distancing from characters and their stories both to deindividualize and condemn the comforts of stable identities; and repeated interventions by the narrator to confound spatio-temporal boundaries and scale the proceedings of the day beyond the individual or the nation—from lambent light to planetary hues of blue. The stability and normalcy of the present are thus dismantled, distracted, through genealogical inquiries across time and space. “‘Am I,’ Isa apologized, ‘interrupting?’ Of course she was—destroying youth and India” (BTA, 11). These two sentences, in which the narrator interrupts Isa interrupting her father-in-law’s dreams of guns and “savages” in India, is emblematic of a more generalized technique in Between the Acts: a gesture that presents the reader with a series of links tying family emotions to violence and Empire and Progress in order to expose and weaken this connectivity. A similar process underscores the pageant: as the villagers sing “‘See the warriors—here they come,’” the narrator interjects, “The pompous popular tune brayed and blared. . . . The play had begun. But there was an interruption. ‘O,’ Miss La Trobe growled behind her tree, ‘the torture of these interruptions!’ ‘Sorry I’m so late,’ . . . ‘What’s it all about? I’ve missed the prologue. England?’” (BTA, 43–4). Every time the audience and the reader are about to recognize and embrace the series of correlations that make the family the preeminent means to govern the population, from the domestic to the national and imperial, interruptions occur, to destroy comfort and complacency, and distract subjectivity: “Yet somehow they felt—how could one put it—a little not quite here or there. As if the play had jerked the ball out of the cup; as if what I call myself was still floating unattached. And didn’t settle. Not quite themselves they felt” (BTA, 80). Everyone and everything get interrupted in Between the Acts; even the title suggests interruption. Woolf ’s biopoetic method highlights and undermines plotlines, be they historical or fictional (“surely it was time someone invented a new plot” [BTA, 115]).86 Characters enter rooms and interrupt conversations, dreams, or luncheons; audience chatter, whispers, and wayward thoughts constantly interrupt the pageant, as do wind, rain, and animal noises; any part of the novel is presented in segments (the first Interval, for example, is broken into ten experiences [BTA 51–66]). The pageant and the country house novel genres interrupt each other, thus destabilizing the fiction of inviolable truth that both

86 Woolf had exposed disruption as a fundamental tactic against women’s liberation in Room (see Peggy Kamuf, “Penelope at Work: Interruptions in A Room of One’s Own,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 16, no. 1 [Autumn 1982]: 5–18). BTA redeploys this tactic against the truths of governmentality in the late 1930s.

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generate (Lucy Swithin and her patron saint of historiography, H. G. Wells,87 would not approve). Even the narrator’s presentation of the pageant is interrupted by questions and remarks: “Then the play began. Was it, or was it not, the play? Chuff, chuff, chuff sounded from the bushes. . . . While they looked apprehensively and some finished their sentences, a small girl, like a rosebud in pink, advanced. . . . So it was the play then. Or was it the prologue?” (BTA, 42). To consider the design or shape of this hybrid text is to understand how it is constructed both to assert dissimilarity and to insist upon the reader’s dialogic engagement with difference. The composition is an exercise in radical prose parataxis, equal parts juxtaposition and rupture. Segments of pageant or country house life disrupt and then interlock; each fragment is the interlocutor of the other. The composition demands a new intensity of detached readerly engagement (yet again, Woolf refuses the easy comfort of reading sympathetically or quiescently). Grounding the narrative is the critique of country house privilege, scenes of which frame the book like a proscenium. The historical pageant consists of sixteen scenes: introduction, Elizabethan era prologue, two segments of a Renaissance play “About a false Duke; and a Princess”; the departure of Elizabeth I; prologue to the Age of Reason; three scenes from the parodic Augustan comedy Where there’s a Will there’s a Way; a nineteenth-century urban medley (a London “Pot Pourri”); an Age of Empire prologue delivered by Budge the Policeman; an ardent exchange from “The Picnic Party,” a Victorian drama; Budge’s address; the experimental “ten mins. of present time”; the provocative mirror scene; and the conclusion, with its unsettling assertion that “All you can see of your selves is scraps, orts and fragments” (BTA, 101).88 Between the Acts is thus a blueprint for irony, for reading the present against and across the narrative, generic, and historical grain. Or, to borrow the text’s musical metaphor: “The tune began; . . . Then down beneath a force was born in opposition; then another. On different levels they diverged. On different levels our selves went forward; . . . others descending to wrestle with the meaning” (BTA, 101). Each historical pageant scene induces a politicized reconsideration of life at Pointz Hall, and each country house scene in turn compels a reassessment of La Trobe’s verse and prose. A few members of the audience demonstrate, however fleetingly, that temporal displacements can produce effective ontological

87 See Woolf ’s critique of Wells in “Modern Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”; for a reconsideration of Wells, see Sara Cole, Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 88 La Trobe continually bemoans the fact that scenes had to be cut to accommodate the intervals.

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unease: “They were neither one thing nor the other; neither Victorians nor themselves. They were suspended, without being, in limbo. Tick, tick, tick, went the machine” (BTA, 95). No character, except for La Trobe, is sufficiently unsettled to imagine otherwise—but the reader is enjoined to do so. Between the Acts is just one of several Woolfian experiments in combining different modes of writing. Hybrid textuality is the hallmark of To the Lighthouse (Parts I and III present day-in-the life narratives ten years apart; Part II collapses that decade into an endless night of destruction and painful restoration), The Waves (see below), and The Pargiters, the intransigent project that became The Years and Three Guineas. To the Lighthouse and The Waves are much more formally explicit; Between the Acts, in comparison, has a mongrel élan that Ondaatje would endorse. In her diary Woolf refers to Between the Acts as a “medley” that would be “composed of so many different things . . . all life, all art, all waifs & strays—a rambling capricious but somehow unified whole . . . a perpetual variety & change from intensity to prose, & facts—& notes” (WD, 5:195, 135). (Leonard Woolf decided to italicize the lines of the pageant when preparing the novel for posthumous publication.) Both the audience’s and the reader’s expectations (of what is to come in the story of what has happened) are shattered by Miss La Trobe’s pageant. Often held on Empire Day as mass entertainment, pageants typically recorded great military victories, events, and conquests considered key to the nation’s growth, ending with the glories of Elizabeth I or the Glorious Revolution and the restoration of the monarchy.89 La Trobe’s pageant ignores such events to feature domestic scenes, picnics, and secret rendezvous through the Elizabethan, Augustan, and Victorian ages, each announced in a prologue by the era’s voice of authority. Correlations among the meals and drawing-rooms of the stage and those of 89 For historical studies of pageants, see Mark Freeman, “‘Splendid Display; Pompous Spectacle’: Historical Pageants in Twentieth-Century Britain,” Social History 38, no. 4 (2013): 423–455; Deborah Sugg Ryan, “The Man who Staged the Empire: Remembering Frank Lascelles in Sibford Gower, 1875–2000,” in Material Memories: Design and Evocation, ed. Marius Kwint et al. (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1999), 159–179; Mick Wallis, “Pageantry and the Popular Front: Ideological Production in the ‘Thirties,’” New Theatre Quarterly X, no. 38 (1994): 132–156; Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918); Michael Woods, “Performing Power: Local Politics and the Taunton Pageant of 1928,” Journal of Historical Geography XXV, no. 1 (1999): 57–74; and Ayako Yoshino, “Between the Acts and Louis Napoleon Parker—the Creator of the Modern English Pageant,” Critical Survey 15, no. 2 (May 2003): 49–62. See Marlowe Miller, “Unveiling ‘the dialectic of culture and barbarism’ in British Pageantry: Virginia Woolf ’s Between the Acts,” Papers on Language and Literature 13, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 134–161, for a history of the British pageant and analysis of La Trobe’s subversion of the genre. See also Catherine Wiley, “Making History Unrepeatable in Virginia Woolf ’s Between the Acts,” Clio 25, no. 1 (1995): 3–20.

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the manor house are always implied and finally proclaimed by an anonymous voice that first implicates everyone (“what we do”) and then connects certain members of the audience to their stage counterparts: “Consider the gun slayers, bomb droppers here to there. They do openly what we do slyly. Take for example (here the megaphone adopted a colloquial, conversational tone) Mr. M’s bungalow. A view spoilt forever. That’s murder . . . Or Mrs E’s lipstick and blood-red nails . . . A tyrant, remember, is half a slave’” (BTA, 100). Each example in the speech can be tied to a character or plot element: the view-spoiling “bungalow” to Pointz Hall; “lipstick and blood-red nails” to Mrs. Manresa; the tyrant to Bart Oliver; “Mr. H. the writer, scraping in the dunghill for sixpenny fame” to H. G. Wells; the “amiable condescension of the lady of the manor—the upper class manner” to Mrs. Swithin and Mrs. Oliver; “buying shares in the market to sell ’em” to Mr. Giles Oliver (BTA, 100). Pointz Hall, its family and their guests, the pageant writer and the audience—almost one hundred named characters—all eventually get caught up in the pageant’s history of the present. Unlike the great spectacles organized by famous pageant masters, La Trobe’s play performs a genealogy of the now, represented by a bare stage, for “ten mins. of present time” (BTA, 96). With no actors present, with no music, with no props, the audience can only fidget impatiently. La Trobe, the parrhesiast, “want[s] to expose them, as it were, to douche them, with present time: reality” (BTA, 96; an avant-garde gambit that scoops John Cage’s famous 1952 composition entitled “4′ 33″”). This “experiment” is followed by a scene during which mirrors and other shiny objects are used to reflect the audience in its unpreparedness and passivity. Individual bodies are fractured: “Here a nose . . . there a skirt . . . Now perhaps a face. . . . Ourselves? But that’s cruel. To snap us as we are, before we’ve had time to assume. . . . And only, too, in parts. . . . That’s what’s so distorting and upsetting and utterly unfair” (BTA, 98). The audience’s consternation is difficult to bear. For how, Between the Acts asks its reader, were they “all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle. Nothing happened” (BTA, 94). To destroy this complacency among the self-evident truths of civilization, the novel relentlessly breaks up thoughts, lyrics, proverbs, and the flow of doxa. All is reduced to bits and bobs—scraps of songs and ditties and “London street cries” (BTA, 84), fragments of poems and newspaper articles, unfinished utterances, snatches of conversations, inchoate reveries. Even single words get broken up, as when Reverend Streatfield’s utterance of “opportunity” is cut off in the middle by the roar of twelve airplanes “in perfect formation” overhead (BTA, 103). Between the Acts is “a mellay; a medley; an entrancing spectacle” (BTA, 51) that disassembles recognized truths into their constitutive parts—words.

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Words are constantly thematized: characters either roll them on their tongues like sweets or lament that they don’t have them, that they can’t hear them; words peter away and are blown away and lost; words are inaudible; they don’t matter; no one listens to them; they are cut short; people lose command over words or have no further use for them; they are coarse or meaningless or wonderful. This book of words foregrounds both its material and its method: “Words this afternoon ceased to lie flat in the sentence. They rose, became menacing and shook their fists at you” (BTA, 33). Moreover, as counterpoint to the lulling iambic rhythms of English conversation and poetry, the repeated use of spondaic and trochaic phrases interrupts the normal pace of reading: “Tick tick tick”; “Chuff, chuff, chuff ”; “Tut-tuttut”; “death, death, death”; “Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent”; “Music, music”; “Out they leapt, jerked, skipped. Flashing, dazzling, dancing, jumping” (BTA, 93, 42, 96, 88, 21, 43, 98).90 Thus the reader experiences the presence and pressure of words, compounded by the near-absence of meaning. Constant repetition and variation thwart linear narrative drive; radial phrases and paragraphs work through circular accretion.91 In the opening scene and throughout the text, word repetition (“cesspool,” “night,” “gentleman farmer,” “bazaar” [BTA, 3–4]) and phrase variation and progression (“her hair in pigtails,” “her dark pigtails hanging,” “with the pigtails falling over each shoulder”) [BTA, 4–5]) become leitmotifs that both complicate the reading process and defer the promise of meaning for the reader—as the pageant does for the audience (“And if we’re left asking questions, isn’t it a failure, as a play? I must say I like to feel sure, if I go to the theatre, that I’ve grasped the meaning” [BTA, 107]). Attempts at individual, domestic, or national totalization are strategically blocked; the reader is left stranded, holding onto “something half known, half not” (BTA, 97). Yet these biopoetic tactics of sound, rhythm, repetition, and interruption do more than disassemble, for “words belong to each other,” Woolf insists (as does her contemporary Bakhtin), they “are full of echoes, memories, associations —naturally. They’ve been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today—they’re stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the 90 For the function of the gramophone in BTA, see Melba Cuddy-Keane, “Virginia Woolf, Sound Technologies, and the New Aurality,” in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Pamela Caughie (New York: Garland, 2000), 69–96; and Bonnie Kime Scott, “The Subversive Mechanics of Woolf ’s Gramophone in Between the Acts,” in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Pamela Caughie (New York: Garland, 2000), 97–114. 91 Erich Auerbach was first to analyze Woolf ’s radial writing practices in Mimesis.

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past. The splendid word ‘incarnadine’, for example—who can use that without remembering ‘multitudinous seas’?” (WE, 6:625).92 By constantly invoking other texts (from her works as well as from a selection of world literature, and from everyday sayings to newspaper clippings93), Between the Acts becomes a network, a Barthesian text avant la lettre, “a methodological field” that is “experienced only in an activity of production . . . of associations, contiguities, carryingsover” in a multidimensional space-time.94 The reader is called upon to think simultaneously according to local and worldly scales in order for the semantic potential of narrative elements to be realized. Take Bart Oliver’s dog, for example,

92 BBC broadcast, April 29, 1937 (WE, 5:624–627). Woolf made three broadcasts (1927, 1929, 1937), but the BBC segment (part of its Words Fail Me series) is the only surviving recording of her voice. For the BBC recording see Fiona Macdonald, “The Only Surviving Recording of  Virginia Woolf,” BBC Culture, March 28, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/ culture/article/20160324-the-only-surviving-recording-of-virginia-woolf. See Debra Rae Cohen et al., eds., Broadcasting Modernism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), for a discussion of broadcasting and modernism. 93 For a summary of the novel’s intertextual relations, ranging from Chaucer to Cole Porter to newspaper accounts of the actual rape committed by English soldiers, see Susan Dick and Mary S. Millar, Introduction to BTA, xxx–xxxi; see also Bonnie Kime Scott, “Woolf, Barnes and the Ends of Modernism: An Antiphon to Between the Acts,” in Virginia Woolf: Themes and Variations. Selected Papers from the Second Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (New York: Pace UP, 1993), 25–32. Allusions to her novels are myriad: using one “June day” as narrative frame (MD); the country house as microcosm (TTL, Freshwater: A Comedy, ed. Lucio P. Ruotolo [New York: Harcourt, 1976]); mocking conventional histories of England (Orlando); past societies’ “scars” on the landscape (“Anon”; BTA, 3); gifts of Byron to future imperial functionaries (JR; The Waves [hereafter, TW]; BTA, 4); staging scenes on a terrace (MD); an airplane’s flight mesmerizing a crowd (MD; BTA, 103); switching perspectives from the human to the botanical (“Kew Gardens”; “Sketch of the Past,” BTA, 7); forcing dogs to obey (Flush; BTA, 8, 109); “empty” domestic interiors ruined if “no human being ever came” back (TTL; BTA, 10, 21); identifying forces of governmentality and masculinist violence with Whitehall (VO, MD; BTA, 12); weather forecasts: “fine” or “wet” (TTL; BTA, 13); meditating on words (TTL; “On Not Knowing Greek”; TW; BTA, 30, 33, 43, 75, 113); the “leaden” regularity of “duty” (MD; BTA, 37); the need to “respect” power (Walsh, in MD; the villagers in BTA, 16); India as apotheosis of British imperialism (MD; TW; BTA 3, 11, 41, 57); newspapers chronicling violence against women (TG; BTA, 12, 84, 115); focusing on present “moment” or “present day” (Orlando; The Years; BTA, 41); “time passes” (TTL; BTA, 68, 81); parodying Elizabeth I (Orlando; BTA, 45); the flight of moths (TW; BTA, 55); the nightingale’s cry (The Years; BTA, 3); an old man quoting Victorian poetry to ward off twentieth-century life (TTL; BTA, 59, 63); citing Conrad’s “heart of darkness” (The Years; BTA, 117); theorizing “ourselves” and “our selves” (Orlando; BTA, 99, 100); existing in others or in things (MD; BTA, 39); the fin in the water (TW; BTA, 109); the writer’s fear of “failure” (Bernard, TW; La Trobe, BTA, 51, 75, 112); the artist’s “vision” (TTL, 176; BTA, 53, 110). Thus, BTA’s method of elaboration through repetition, circularity, and accretion is also instantiated in relations among this novel and Woolf ’s body of texts. 94 Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Fontana Press, 1977), 157–158. For a study of Foucault and Barthes, see Eribon, Foucault et ses contemporains.

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the Afghan hound that the retired agent of the Indian Civil Service loves to hold in the noose “that he always carried with him” (BTA, 8). By species and name, the pet is inscribed by imperialist desires: Afghanistan, the site of never-ending invasion (by the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States, to name the most recent); Sohrab, the long-lost son unknowingly slain by his father in the tenth-century Persian epic Shahnameh by Ferdowsi (translated into Matthew Arnold’s 1853 narrative poem Sohrab and Rustum).95 Moreover, the theme of the powerful sacrificing their young reverberates throughout the novel: Bart denies his son’s choice of profession; Isa, William Dodge, and their generation rightly feel “‘the doom of sudden death hanging over us. . . . There’s no retreating and advancing . . . for us as for them.’ The future shadowed their present” (BTA, 62, 45). Such power relations are repeatedly overturned and offered up for laughter in the pageant, in which adult children always escape the older generation’s stultifying designs—only to replicate them. Thus the reader, to borrow Neil Smith’s geographical concept, is constantly asked to “jump scales” (local to international, domestic to imperialist, intimate to public) and thereby learn how the politics of resistance are enabled by the aesthetic.96 Multivalence is temporal as well as spatial, shaking the reader and the audience out of their chronological certainties. La Trobe’s pageant seems to unfold as expected, from the birth of “this isle” and its first warriors to the rebuilding of the wall of civilization by “human effort” (BTA, 42, 97) in a “flattering tribute to ourselves” greeted by a “burst of applause” (BTA, 97). A similar tale is told in Lucy Swithin’s favorite book, H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History, a bestseller that begins with the prehistoric and culminates in a call for the acceptance of a new movement and religion uniting all cultures into one—a Western, white, dream of a plan for a “Federal World State.” Such stories instantiate capitalism’s Time as described by Johannes Fabian: “the rise of capitalism and its colonialist-imperialist expansion . . . required Time to accommodate the schemes of a one-way history: progress, development, modernity (and their negative mirror images: stagnation, underdevelopment, tradition). In short, geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics.”97 Yet Between the Acts repeatedly

95 Sung-Yen, the “drawing-room name” of the Oliver family’s cat, evokes Sun-Yat-sen (1866– 1925), the first president of the Republic of China, known as the “Father of the Nation”; in the kitchen, the cat is known as Sunny. 96 Neil Smith, “Contours of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographical Scale,” Social Text 33 (1992): 66–67. 97 Fabian, Time and the Other, 144. Woolf never mentions Wells, nor the book’s official title (Swithin reads “an Outline of History”), but his 1920 bestseller, which sold more than two million copies in his lifetime (last rev. by Wells, 1937), would have been recognized. Readers

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questions this triumphant story and spectacle. Shot through with holes— missing scenes and eras, unheard histories—the whole is destabilized: “The words died away. Only a few great names—Babylon, Nineveh, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Troy—floated across the open space. Then the wind rose, and in the rustle of the leaves even the great words became inaudible; and the audience sat staring at the villagers, whose mouths opened, but no sound came. And the stage was empty” (BTA, 75). Linear progress is also denied by the constant performance of coevalness. The novel’s opening scene juxtaposes the now of a summer’s night to the international movements of peoples (Romans, Britons), to wars and conquests over millennia, to family histories over centuries, as well as to specific childhood memories. Lucy Swithin happily inhabits the primeval as much as the present: “she was given to increasing the bounds of the moment by flights into past or future” so that her glance could be simultaneously “half meant for a beast in a swamp, half for a maid in a print frock and white apron” (BTA, 6). When La Trobe’s theatrical illusion is about to die, cows take up the burden (responsibility and refrain): “From cow after cow came the same yearning bellow. The whole world was filled with dumb yearning. It was the primeval voice sounding loud in the ear of the present moment” (BTA, 76). Temporal multiplicity is typically denied by the characters, however, who prefer sameness, which is figured through one of the great luxuries of Pointz Hall, the view from the terrace that all the characters and the audience love to look at, repeatedly—a view judged “senseless, hideous, stupefying” by the narrator (BTA, 37): “They looked at the view; they looked at what they knew, to see if what they knew might perhaps be different today. Most days it was the same” (BTA, 29).98 Admirers turn to the view to forget themselves, to rub themselves out of the terrifying historical picture that is theirs: “How tempting, how very tempting, to let the view triumph; to reflect its ripple; to let their own minds ripple; to let outlines elongate and pitch over—so—with a sudden jerk. Mrs Manresa yielded, pitched, plunged, then pulled herself up. ‘What a view!’ she exclaimed” (BTA, 37). The view serves to inscribe collective abdication.99 Contemptuously, Giles Oliver looks down with rage on “old fogies who sat and looked at views over coffee and cream when the whole of Europe— over there—was . . . bristling with guns, poised with planes. . . . He, too, loved

were promised that, “Great movements of the racial soul . . . are discovered to be powerful and world-wide.” Wells, The Outline of History (London: Macmillan, 1920), 498. 98 See also BTA, 8, 13, 29, 30, 36, 37, 73, 82, 85, 93. 99 Abdication reverberates in the text through references to the coronation of George VI (1937), necessitated by Edward VIII’s 1936 abdication.

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the view. . . . one thing followed another; and so he sat, with old fogies, looking at views” (BTA, 29–30).100 As the narrator notes, the view chimes with the pageant’s tune and the cows’ bellows: “Folded in this triple melody, the audience sat gazing; and beheld gently and approvingly without interrogation, for it seemed inevitable” (BTA, 73). With the exception of La Trobe, the artist, all characters are content to follow their script, repeating their words and their conduct, day after day, year after year: “Then, for the seventh time in succession, they both looked out of the window. Every summer, for seven summers now, Isa had heard the same words; about the hammer and the nails; the pageant and the weather. Every year they said, would it be wet or fine; and every year it was—one or the other. The same chime followed the same chime” (BTA, 13). After the pageant, even though its words had “peppered the audience as with a shower of hard little stones” (BTA, 43), the villagers resume their chit-chat about sensible crepe soles, savages, and parking arrangements. After the pageant, at day’s end, Isa twice murmurs “‘This year, last year, next year, never . . .’” (BTA, 115–116). Any straying from acceptable conduct is immediately reined in by others: “‘Reason, begad! Reason!’ exclaimed old Bartholomew, and looked at his son as if exhorting him to give over these womanish vapours and be a man, Sir” (BTA, 72). To be a man implies force. The reader experiences its impact through the figuration of masculinity as hate. When Giles Oliver is introduced to William Dodge, he thinks of his uninvited guest as a “half-breed” and a “toady” (BTA, 27, 33); recognizing his host’s unspoken homophobia, Dodge responds by thinking of himself as “a half-man . . . a flickering, mind-divided little snake in the grass . . . as Giles saw” [BTA, 40]). Soon thereafter, the reader can literally see their loathsome feelings materialize when Giles stomps and crushes to death a “monstrous inversion,” a snake choking on a toad (BTA, 54). The text counters surrender to the historically justified visible and inevitable with a critical attitude modeled for the reader by the narrator in the present. From their physical appearance (“goose-faced woman with eyes protruding as if they saw something to gobble in the gutter” [BTA, 3]) to their inner thoughts and conversations, all characters are sized up and dressed down by a narrator with little patience for their vacuity and acquiescence. The long-suffering Isa, for example, judged by the narrator as incapable of assuming either her body or her thoughts, is repeatedly satirized (BTA, 9–10). Like Clarissa and Elizabeth 100 See “Reading” (1919): “Why did they choose this particular spot to build the house on? For the sake of the view perhaps . . . as an incentive to ambition, as a proof of power” (WE, 3:141).

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Dalloway (Isa is yet another “Sir Richard’s daughter” [BTA, 10]), Isabella Oliver luxuriates in her many privileges while feeling trapped: “pegged down on a chair arm, like a captive balloon, by a myriad of hair-thin ties into domesticity. . . . And she loathed the domestic, the possessive; the maternal” (BTA, 11). Yet on the same page, the narrator notes that even the dog can free itself from domestic ties, and outstare both Isa and his owner (“His tail never wagged. He never admitted the ties of domesticity. Either he cringed or he bit” [BTA, 11]). And for all her loathing, Isa regularly repeats to herself, looking at her handsome if unfaithful husband, Giles, “‘The father of my children.’ It worked, that old cliché; she felt pride; and affection; then pride again in herself, whom he had chosen” (BTA, 26). For her part, Isa moons over the “gentleman farmer, Rupert Haines,” spinning fantasies of feeling that the narrator lampoons. When Isa describes the library as “always the nicest room in the house,” she is quoting a “foolish, flattering lady” that the narrator mentions a few paragraphs before (BTA, 10–11). When she invents and hums a tune celebrating as well as masking compliance, the narrator must fill in the missing, obvious rhyming word: “‘Where we know not, where we go not, neither know nor care,’ she hummed. ‘Flying, rushing through the ambient, incandescent, summer silent . . .’ The rhyme was ‘air’” (BTA, 9). She hides her verse “in the book bound like an account book in case Giles suspected” (BTA, 9). Through Isa’s feelings, emotions, mutterings, and mind-numbing daily routines, the reader experiences how myriad small, willful abdications facilitate the flow of power and knowledge relations.101 Isa serves as node in relations reaching the Jewel in the Crown (through her father-inlaw), the City (through her husband), class (through her servants), militarism and violence (through a newspaper account of English soldiers raping a young woman in their London barracks).102 101 William Dodge, the office clerk, would-be artist, and closeted homosexual, is satirically described as having “a knot which had tied itself so tightly, almost to the extent of squinting, certainly of twitching, in his face” (BTA, 22); his companion, Mrs. Manresa (ironically named for the place where St. Ignatius Loyola composed his strict code of behavior for Jesuits), is “Vulgar . . . in her gestures, in her whole person, over-sexed, over-dressed, for a picnic” (BTA, 23). 102 The Oliver family serves as a matrix of biopolitical power-knowledge relations shot through by vectors of domination and subjugation embodied by these cliché characters. The fatherson tandem of Bart Oliver, retired from the Indian Civil Service, and his heir Giles, the City stockbroker, inscribes the forces of political and economic control in the family and the globe. The religiosity of Bart’s sister, Lucy Swithin—indicated by both names (reflecting hagiography and superstition) and her constant fingering of a gold cross—is positioned according to various scales of domination, from the local to the transnational. When her Rev. Streatfield entreats the villagers for additional funds, the narrator acerbically registers: “All gazed. What an intolerable constriction, contraction, and reduction to simplified absurdity

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Isa and those of her generation, the narrator notes, do not read literature, preferring shilling shockers and newspapers (BTA, 10, 12). Between the Acts expects its reader to do more: to experience and change positions, perspectives, and ethos, much like La Trobe, who cannot imagine her next play at the beginning of the novel (“No, I don’t get it”) but hears its first words after the day’s production (BTA, 35, 113). Just as the pageant’s Book of Words entreats the audience “to imagine” the missing scenes, to “imagine all that” (BTA, 76), Woolf ’s novel “asks of the reader a practical collaboration,”103 as would a musical score. The reader must heed “the other voice speaking, the voice that was no one’s voice. And the voice that wept for human pain unending” (BTA, 97). The reader must imagine peace rather than wait for war. The narrator models several ways to think otherwise: to encounter and reflect beauty in one’s self; to discern and extend transnational and worldly connections; to envision the world in any one of its elements. From dusk to dusk, moments of wonder are constantly evoked in lyrical passages. The reader can respond, as the narrator describing the silent child does, and let beauty affect being: “George grubbed. The flower blazed between the angles of the roots. Membrane after membrane was torn. It blazed a soft yellow, a lambent light under a film of velvet; it filled the caverns behind the eyes with light. All that inner darkness became a hall, leaf smelling, earth smelling of yellow light. And the tree was beyond the flower; the grass, the flower and the tree were entire. Down on his knees grubbing he held the flower complete” (BTA, 7). Between the acts of grubbing, a luminous passage of perception, destruction, and creation (the flower is torn apart and held entire), is offered to the reader. After the pageant, Lucy Swithin can now scale up her sense of place, and imagine Europe, India, Africa, and America in leaves floating on the garden pool (BTA, 109). The earth emerges in unfathomable blue, from an immeasurable distance: “Beyond that was blue, pure blue, black blue; blue that had never filtered down; that had escaped registration. It never fell as sun, shadow, or rain upon the world, but disregarded the little coloured ball of earth entirely. No flower felt it; no field; no garden” (BTA, 13). La Trobe works towards analogous ends from her outcast position, as the queer artist whom “the women in the cottages with the red geraniums” exclude as a matter of course (BTA, 113). In a remarkable passage of narrated interior he was to be sure!” (BTA, 101). Nonetheless, the villagers “respect” the call of the church bells. The pageant’s Victorian play satirizes the imperialist “long[ing] to convert the Heathen! . . . [A] lifetime in the African desert among the Heathens would be . . . perfect happiness!” (BTA, 89). Even Swithin’s bigoted brother can observe: “How imperceptive her religion made her!” (BTA, 109). 103 Barthes, Image Music Text, 163.

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monologue, the “invisible strings” that bind to identity become “individual strings” that the artist purposefully destroys to let otherness become: “‘You’ve twitched the invisible strings,’ was what the old lady [Mrs. Swithin] meant. . . . Glory possessed her. Ah, but she was not merely a twitcher of individual strings; she was one who seethes wandering bodies and floating voices in a cauldron, and makes rise up from its amorphous mass a recreated world” (BTA, 82). The novel ends with the narrator and La Trobe now able to imagine a similar scene in the future, in which the relations that constitute distance and difference are erased in a heterotopic, fictional chronotope of becoming. Crossing the terrace at dusk, when “there was no longer a view,” La Trobe envisions her next play thus: “‘I should group them,’ she murmured, ‘here.’ It would be midnight; there would be two figures, half concealed by a rock. The curtain would rise. What would the first words be? The words escaped her” (BTA, 112), and soon thereafter, “She heard the first words” (BTA, 113). The narrator ends Between the Acts with the same striking, imagined sight. The walls enclosing the domestic melt away and time and space are rearranged: “The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks. Then the curtain rose. They spoke” (BTA, 117). Woolf ’s genealogical fiction, with its biopoetic tactics of interruption, fragmentation, satiric distancing, and chronotopic scaling, with its leitmotif of the heterotopic terrace as empty stage,104 thus preemptively answers Foucault’s entreaty: “We have to dig deeply to show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness and deny its necessity. We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces. To make a truly unavoidable challenge of the question: What can be played?” (EWF, 1:139–40). The English Patient Towards the end of The English Patient, the English patient asks, “am I just a book?” One of many rhetorical questions the reader must consider,105 this one in particular interpellates “you” to become answerable to Ondaatje’s genealogical 104 The terrace, in between the manor and the village, constitutes a heterotopic space where relations of power (class, gender) take place, where the pageant intervenes, and where the next play is imagined. The “empty stage” appears throughout the novel: see BTA, 42, 45, 65, 75 (twice), 93, 94, 95, 96. 105 After mapping the North African deserts for the Royal Geographical Society during the 1930s, the patient asks, “‘This country—had I charted it and turned it into a place of war?’” (EP, 253).

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assemblage. Assuming the “spirit of the jackal” (EP, 258), the patient claims to have “one eye that looks back and one that regards the path you consider taking. In his jaws are pieces of the past he delivers to you, and when all of that time is fully discovered it will prove to have been already known” (EP, 259).106 This metatextual passage describes a narrative theory and process of rediscovery that must be shared by the reader. Taking place between April and August 1945, the period that saw the endings of the European and Pacific wars, the four-character primary story comes into gradual focus by looking back to the preceding fifteen years. Some event or memory affecting one of the characters marks each year between 1930 and 1945, with greater detail during the war; a brief coda takes place simultaneously in India and Canada thirteen years into the future. Yet no event or story is presented in order, or just once, or by the same character or narrator: fragments, flashbacks or forwards, returns, expansions, circuitous amendments. . . . The reader is gripped by a dialogical process that works to transform its subject (the reader as co-producer of textual form) and object (the already known), to mess up the machinery of war. This story that will not reveal itself simply begins in medias res with nameless, faceless figures of biopolitics in extremis: a young shell-shocked nurse and her patient (an older man burned beyond recognition) surviving precariously in semi-darkness to protect themselves and the bombed Renaissance villa they inhabit from marauding brigands. And the reader must wonder: who are these people? Where and when are they? What brought them to this place? How will they live “those months before he died” (EP, 4)? Answers will come from experiencing some of the most well-known events of World War II (the London Blitz, the North African and Italian campaigns, the everyday life of soldiers fighting, wounding, torturing), but from slant perspectives (those of a nurse, spy, or sapper) and in félhomály, the “dusk of graves. With the connotation of intimacy there between the dead and the living” (EP, 170).107 Most

106 The patient thus presents a crucial variation on the figure of Lucy Swithin, who also kept one eye on the endless past and one on the present: the patient demands answerability, asking “you” what will you consider doing, in light of all that is “already known,” while Swithin daydreams in isolation. Moreover, the patient’s description of the jackal’s purpose could be summarizing the telos of Between the Acts. 107 The use of the term félhomály both affirms a national linguistic essence and denies it, for the Hungarian word is identified as European; it is one of those “European words you can never translate properly into another language” (EP, 170). In other words, it is an “untranslatable”: “sympto[m], semantic and/or syntactic, of the difference between languages [langues]: not what one does not translate, but what one never ceases to (not) translate.” Barbara Cassin, Éloge de la traduction: compliquer l’universel [In praise of translation: to complicate the universal] (Paris: Fayard, 2016), 54 (our trans.). See Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On

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of the characters have already died when the reader first learns about them: Geoffrey and Katherine Clifton, Madox, Patrick Lewis, Lord Suffolk, Miss Morden, Mr. Harts, Hardy. Ultimately, the reader learns about tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and soon thereafter, of the eponymous English patient. The ethical imperative drawn by the memories of these past events, both historical and fictional, forcefully bears down on the reader: in the face of individual and mass murders, how can one think otherwise, become other, to live in peace? Will “you” be altered by the experience, or is The English Patient just a book? There could hardly be a stronger contrast to the 1939 June day of Between the Acts, yet the novels’ projects are remarkably transgredient. Woolf offers up character clichés (patriarchal family with pets, intrusive acquaintances, gossipy servants and neighbors) in order to distance the reader through ruthless critique of historically interconnected narratives of family, village, nation, and empire. The detachment achieved by irony and satire is neither comfortable nor stable, however, for the reader is confronted with equally well-known feelings of impotence and fear regarding the oncoming war, and thereby implicated in the apathy preceding the killing. Ondaatje parachutes the reader into three unexpected, alternate communities (the Villa grouping, the prewar desert explorers, and the wartime Suffolk “family” of sappers) to feel sensations, emotions, and desires with intimate, affective intensity. Both novels perform genealogies reaching back millennia to inscribe either in filigree or in bold the possibility of planetary relations among “outsiders” and “strangers.” Moreover, both novels share similar biopoetic techniques of genre mixing (the English Patient combines desert exploration tale with war story, spy thriller, adventure, romance and memoir, jazz music and popular songs), fragmentation, and intertextual dissemination. Yet, whereas Between the Acts proceeds through interruption, Ondaatje’s novel choreographs the circulation of truths in intricate chassés-croisés among characters, the narrator, and the reader, taking the “time to look everywhere, to theorize on the choreography of all things around you” (EP, 150). The narrator mediates the flow of information and implicates the reader in narrative explorations: characters’ names are withheld and multiplied, plotlines diverted, interpretations modified in a series of returns. The story of Almásy’s public undoing after Katherine insists on their separation, for example, begins with his seemingly innocent question to the Villa collective: “Do any of you know a dance called the Bosphorus hug?” (EP, 109). Slowly, through four more casual the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), for a discussion of the politics of “untranslatability.”

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mentions in the text, the reader engaged in “distant thinking” (EP, 169) learns the many emotional, erotic, and political valences associated with the phrase at various times, until the pivotal Cairo drunken dance scene is told towards the end of the novel (EP, 109, 162, 236, 241, 244).108 Caravaggio’s description of his torture is similarly interrupted, presented in chronologically disordered fragments, and finally further complicated by the fact that his Nazi interrogator bears the same name, Ranuccio Tommasoni, as the person murdered by Caravaggio the painter in May 1606 (EP, 55). When Caravaggio gives a Brompton cocktail109 to the patient and interrogates him, trying to force him to reveal his identity and his war-time espionage for the Nazis, the reader is compelled to co-create a story from a text that stages memories expressed by a narrator, an “I” speaking without quotation marks, and unattributed comments in direct discourse, which together interlock various times and spaces into felt coevalness (EP, 167–176). Thus is The English Patient’s reader made to learn the art of “thinkering” (EP, 37), of fabricating meaning through form. This overall biopoetic strategy will be explored through three tactics: the nesting of heterotopic space/time configurations and their communities of outsiders within the Villa, the nesting of other historical and fictional texts within Ondaatje’s, and the nesting of the novel itself through ring composition, as practiced by Herodotus in The Histories, a major intertextual vector (as Gilgamesh is for Skin of a Lion).110 Strategically, the novel’s genealogical inquiries perform a hermeneutics of the subject (to borrow Foucault’s title) and uncover how one can—or cannot—shed individuality in order to engage in effortful practices of freedom. “We are communal histories, communal books,” the English patient

108 The couple inflects erotics with politics by naming the place at the bottom of her neck the Bosporus—the strait that separates Eastern and Western Turkey. This East–West divide can be correlated to the final confrontation between Singh and the patient after the Allies bomb Japan. 109 A mixture (morphine, cocaine, ethyl alcohol, sugar water, chloroform water) developed in London’s Royal Brompton Hospital to alleviate pain and facilitate death. See R. Melzak et al., “The Brompton Mixture versus Morphine Solution Given Orally: Effects on Pain,” The RVH Manual on Palliative/Hospice Care: A Resource Book, ed. Ina Ajemian and B. M. Mount (Montreal: Royal Victoria Hospital, Palliative Care Service, 1980), https://www.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1818901/. 110 Herodotus inaugurated the discipline of history with his fifth-century BCE The Histories. Some call him “the father of lies,” arguing that his narratives either contained lies or were outright fictions (see Plutarch, De Herodoti malignitate [The malice of Herodotus]). During his desert trips, Almásy’s “only connection with the world of cities was Herodotus, his guidebook, ancient and modern, of supposed lies. When he discovered the truth to what had seemed a lie, he brought out his glue pot and pasted in a map or news clipping” (EP, 246). See Friedman’s comparison of Herodotus and Ondaatje. See Rufus Cook for a discussion of time and space compression in EP.

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confesses, “all I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps” (EP, 261)—a journey begun by The English Patient. However jumbled and fragmentary, the novel tells the story of three eccentric, close-knit communities of men—each with a singular woman among them— who either resist or foster the politics of identity: a 1930s band of desert explorers (and Katherine Clifton), a 1940–1941 group of sappers during the Blitz (and Miss Morden), and the April–August 1945 Italian Villa collective (formed in relation to Hana). From within the patient’s heterotopic room (the walls and ceilings of which are painted as a lush garden), the reader first follows a group of explorers who chart the deserts of northern Libya and Egypt, and in the process learn(s) how to become nationless from the moving, borderless territory they choose to invent and inhabit. In this fluid landscape, “a piece of cloth carried by winds” (EP 138), the explorers learn how to transform their internal topographies from the desert’s constant alterations: “Sandford called it geomorphology. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry . . . [their] own invention” (EP, 246). By the time he has reached the Villa San Girolamo, the patient and his AWOL nurse both endeavor to practice the desert’s lessons (“Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert” [EP, 139]). Transformed into a military hospital and then ruined by war, the Villa, a privileged site of Western civilization where “Pico and Lorenzo and Poliziano and the young Michelangelo” (EP, 57) might have been hosted, now shelters a collective of outsiders, in a “tableau . . . flung ironically against this war” (EP, 278). As though answering Woolf ’s call in Three Guineas and Foucault’s suggestion “to refuse who we are” (“The Subject and Power”), a nurse abruptly “step[s] away from the war” (EP, 52), and refuses to follow the First Canadian Infantry Division to the safety of Pisa, in spite of being threatened with charges of desertion. After a year of removing “so many pieces of shrapnel she felt she’d transported a ton of metal out of the huge body of the human that she was caring for while the army travelled north” (EP, 50), she refuses to go on: “She would not be ordered again or carry out duties for the greater good” (EP, 14). Soon she and her patient are joined by two men who appear suddenly in the night to keep her safe, and hold wartime functions similar to those of the patient (David Caravaggio is also a spy) and the nurse (the sapper Kirpal Singh saves lives and supports battlefield operations, as she used to do).111 These characters, like the 111 Like Hana, Singh maintains his wartime function while presumably being AWOL: still in uniform, he defuses bombs with his friend Hardy, but sleeps in the villa’s garden, never reports to any authority, and simply leaves the area at the end of the novel without permission.

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house and surrounding countryside, have been literally or figuratively defaced by war, but “now there is hardly a world around them and they are forced back on themselves” (EP, 40). Before they forged this unlikely collective, all had withdrawn their names and identities: Ladislaus de Almásy, the Hungarian count turned German spy had become “the English patient”;112 the Canadian nurse Hana called herself by the same name she gave all her patients, “Buddy”;113 the Italian-Canadian thief turned British spy, Caravaggio, never spoke and “revealed nothing, not even his name, just wrote out his serial number” while a patient in a Rome military hospital (EP, 27); and Singh went by the nickname Kip, given to him by his British military comrades and willingly shared with the Villa group.114 Gradually, they reinvent themselves by “shedding skins. . . . There was no defence but to look for the truth in others” (EP, 117). The reader witnesses how, by learning each other’s stories, they engage in a biopoetic process that enables different kinds of relations, however difficult and unlikely: friendship between spies from opposing sides; the “Englishman” and the Indian “‘get on so well together’” because “‘both [are] international bastards’” (EP, 177, 176); Hana and Kip develop emotional and erotic ties despite the wounds inflicted because of gender (“‘I was sick of the hunger. Of just being lusted at. So I stepped away’” [EP, 85]) and race (“In England he was ignored in the various barracks . . . the anonymous member of another race, a part of the invisible world” [EP, 196]). The third eccentric community is formed during the Blitz, the “Heroic Age of bomb disposal” (EP, 184), when the field and its practitioners had yet to be invented. The invisible Singh is seen at last, included, and cherished by an unlikely band of men, a “family” led by the parental figures of Lord Suffolk and his remarkable secretary, Miss Morden (EP, 189). They recognize his character

112 Loosely based on László Ede Almásy de Zsadány et Törökszentmiklós (1895–1951), who discovered Zerzura and was part of “Operation Salam” (smuggling two German spies across enemy lines through the Libyan desert). For Almásy’s expeditions, see Andrew Goudie, Great Desert Explorers (London: Silphium Press, 2018); and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, “The English Patient: ‘Truth is stranger than fiction,’” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (Summer 1994): 141–153. 113 Readers of Skin know her as the daughter of Alice Gull and Cato and de facto stepdaughter of Patrick Lewis and Clara Dickens, but no family name is given in The English Patient. 114 When his first report was marked by butter stains, an officer remarked, “‘What’s this? Kipper grease?’ and laughter surrounded him. He had no idea what a kipper was, but the young Sikh had been thereby translated into a salty English fish. . . . He hadn’t minded this” (EP, 87). So much does he accept this nickname that he gives it as his own to the villa inhabitants, who refer to him exclusively as Kip. Conversely, he is systematically called Mr. Singh by the community of sappers, except for the scene during which Miss Morden saves both their lives (EP, 202). Through these variations, the text notes how differently the “same” individual can be envisaged; a name can indicate racism, subjection, passion, and affection.

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and talent, know his customs and respect them. Trained in bomb disarmament, Singh is also initiated to local lore “as if it was a recently discovered culture” (EP, 184); fed tea and Kipling cakes and Devon cream, taken to visit churches, offered the opportunity to see a play (and chooses Peter Pan); soon the optimistic youth finds himself “beginning to love the English” (EP, 190)—like the charts he studies and produces, he is “Drawn by desire” (EP, 190). The reader witnesses just how willingly one can be taken away by figures of authority who show affection and respect, just how seductively and effectively patriarchal figures of Empire can be substituted for the old “noblesse oblige.”115 Thus, while the desert and Villa heterotopias dismantle identities and foster outsidership, the military “clan” of sappers brings Singh to identify as Kip and come to adore the English he is defending against the enemy. Each of these communities is ultimately destroyed by the war; each is revealed in disorganized fragments to a reader often positioned in Hana’s place (as it had been so ostentatiously in Skin of a Lion): The English Patient “whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse” (EP, 4). But the text offers a singular kind of witnessing: distant intimacy. Throughout the novel direct dialogue is registered without quotation marks. This slight difference recalibrates the reading process: neither inside the character’s mind (with free indirect discourse, as in Woolf), nor within the character’s immediate vicinity (overhearing conversations in quotation marks), the reader in The English Patient experiences the privilege of the unseen onlooker, but within an affectively charged and emotional space. Like the desert, the heterotopic Villa “is a place of pockets” (EP, 259); the stories that emerge within it seduce both Hana and the reader with wonders, natural (with striking, sensuous descriptions of wind, water, sand, and fire), cultural (with moving, lush accounts of customs and beliefs), and emotional (with shocking, endearing or repulsive scenes of human interactions). Yet gradually, “the supplementary to the main argument” is presented in Ondaatje’s novel (Herodotus, quoted in EP, 119), like it had been in Herodotus’ Histories, to rework meaning. Ondaatje’s biopoetics produce affective and emotional propinquity for the reader: a nearness in space, time, and association that works uncoercively to rearrange attitude, desire, and understanding, from willing acceptance to critique—to move the reader from Kip’s to Hana’s ultimate position.116

115 This is clearly revealed when Lord Suffolk first praises Singh’s abilities before a mission (“‘I trust you, Mr. Singh, you know that, don’t you?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ Singh adored him”) to then advise him to follow the untrained chauffeur’s advice in a difficult situation (EP, 186). 116 Spivak describes “the arena of the humanities as the uncoercive rearrangement of desire” in Death of a Discipline, 101.

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Consider the story of the Bedouins saving the patient’s life after his plane crashes in the desert and he emerges on fire from the wreckage. At first the reader is deluged by enthralling accounts of desert winds, of the customs of nomadic peoples, of the knowledge displayed by their healing practices and sense of time and place (EP, 8–9). Blinded by his burns, the patient recounts smells, sounds, and tastes, carrying the reader away through every exquisite sensation (pain is rarely mentioned), and erotic fantasy (of a luminous boy in blue-swaying cloth by the fire [EP, 22–23]). But eventually, the reason for the Bedouins’ care is brought to light: they need the pilot’s knowledge of military armaments to pair guns with bullets, which have been left to litter the desert by various colonial wars. The patient associates this task with pairing cards from memory in the game of Pelmanism taught to him as a child by his aunt; the narrator connects these two events with a third, taking place even further back in time: “The noise cracking crazily down the canyon walls. ‘For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.’ A man thought to be sullen and mad had written that sentence down in an English hospital. And he, now in this desert, was sane, with clear thought, picking up the cards, bringing them together with ease, his grin flung out to his aunt, and firing each successful combination into the air, and gradually the unseen men around him replied to each rifle shot with a cheer. . . . He thrived on it—the movement and the cheering after the solitude” (EP, 21). Multiple time-spaces are thus choreographed in these few lines, by both character and narrator: eighteenth-century religious poetry written by Christopher Smart while he was confined in an insane asylum (Jubilate Agno, Fragment B, 2; published 1939), an early twentieth-century system of scientific mind-development translated into a childhood game in an English garden, and the 1940s armament of the Bedouin. The arrangement reveals not only that the patient’s passion for encyclopedic knowledge (displayed throughout the novel) serves wartime weaponizing, but that he considers this transaction to be no more than a welcome distraction, a cheerful game. And with this supplementary argument, Hana’s “despairing saint” (EP, 3) appears to the reader in a new light, one that will color all future revelations. The same pattern of seduction followed by reevaluation structures the story of the desert explorers in the 1930s: their determined renunciation of nation and ancestry is eventually revealed as always having been no more than a collectively constructed fata morgana. Although they wanted to believe that “there is God only in the desert. . . . Outside of this there was just trade and power, money and war. Financial and military despots shaped the world” (EP, 250), these forces were always among them (with funding from the Royal Geographical Society), and even more urgently applied by the arrival of Geoffrey Clifton, a British

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intelligence officer posing as a wealthy dilettante travelling with his new wife, Katherine. With the outbreak of war, their expeditions are halted and their work repurposed to plan military campaigns: the reader learns that these “planetary strangers” (EP, 244) were never elsewhere, were never free to be “outsiders.”117 Moreover, the affair between Katherine Clifton and Almásy reproduces the lifedeath struggles of the world at large; their passion not only produces a “list of wounds” (EP, 153), it is based on the betrayal of a man they “both loved” (EP, 172), who also betrayed them, and it ends in three horrific deaths—love as war by other means.118 Correlating Almásy’s private and public betrayals, the text demonstrates the political impact of his passionate stockpiling of knowledge for the sheer pleasure of discovery, the epistemological equivalent of art for art’s sake (“I have always had information like a sea in me” [EP, 18]). Like Sherlock Holmes, Almásy believes in totalization and “a fully named world” (EP, 21): all he needs is “the name of a small ridge, a local custom, a cell of this historical animal, and the map of the world would slide into place” (EP, 19).119 In Foucauldian terms, Almásy desires connaissances (knowledge that names the world without altering the knowing subject) rather than savoir (knowledge that transforms the subject of knowledge and its relation to others while constructing new objects).120 Even though Almásy knows that Katherine uses his commonplace book, The Histories, in an effort to reinvent herself and her life, he will not become part of this risky operation (“‘If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn’t you?’ I didn’t answer” [EP, 145]). Katherine returns to her role as wife and socialite in the face of Almásy’s willful isolationism: “I left you because I knew I could never 117 As the patient is later informed by Caravaggio, to his great surprise: “‘I was always a private man. It is difficult to realize I was so discussed.’ ‘You were having an affair with someone connected with Intelligence. There were some people in Intelligence who knew you personally.’ ‘Bagnold probably.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Very English Englishman.’ ‘Yes’” (EP, 255). 118 See Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps, “Passport, Please: Legal, Literary, and Critical Fictions of Identity,” in Undisciplining Literature: Literature, Law, and Culture, ed. Kostas Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999), 117–168. 119 “From a drop of water,” Holmes states, “a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.” Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887), in his Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Cambria, CA: Anodos Books, 2017), 10. Another figure of global, comprehensive knowledge invoked by the novel is Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), who wrote a compendium of world philosophies; the English patient tells Hana, “‘That was my nickname when I was a kid. Pico’” (EP, 57). Similarly, Anil Tessera can reconstruct an entire life from bones, for there are “permanent truths, same for Colombo as for Troy” (AG, 64). 120 See Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, ed. and trans. Paul Virilio (New York: Semiotext[e], 1999), 69–70.

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change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, so wordless sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character” (EP, 173–174).121 Caravaggio’s separate conversations with the patient and his nurse in chapter VI eventually reveal that Almásy worked for the Germans after working for the British; as the reader already knew from the story of his time with the Bedouins in chapter I, Almásy’s store of information can serve any side, in any game, his remoteness making him, like Gamini Diyasena in Anil’s Ghost, a “perfect participant in the war” (AG, 224). The same pattern is displayed for the reader in the relations between Hana and Kip, the “warrior saint” (EP, 209) who has “come to adore her” (EP, 219) and yet “never allowed himself to be beholden to her, or her to him” (EP, 128). She is “irritated at his self-sufficiency, his ability to turn so easily away from the world” (EP, 128); for Singh (as for Almásy), “revealing his past or qualities of his character would have been too loud a gesture” (EP, 197). To deal with the constant casual racism he faces in the military, he had become invisible, inhabiting “the overlooked space open to those of us with a silent life” (EP, 200). Yet when news of the Allied nuclear devastation reaches the Villa, the fragile collective is torn asunder by the conviction that they “would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation” (EP, 286).122 For Kip, previous national and racialized identities reappear, indomitable: “‘My brother told me. Never turn your back on Europe. The deal makers. . . . The map drawers. Never trust Europeans, he said’” (EP, 284). The text explodes the mirage of “communal histories, communal books” (EP, 261); when Kip closes his eyes, he “sees the streets of Asia full of fire. It rolls across cities like a burst map, the hurricane of heat withering bodies as it meets them, the shadow of humans suddenly in the air. This tremor of Western wisdom” (EP, 284). Biopolitics at its most extreme, contradictory end: to foster the nation’s life through mass death. Facing this, Kip now knows that “his name is Kirpal Singh and he does not know what he is doing here” (EP, 287). 121 This withdrawal from Katharine is reproduced in Almásy’s relations with his friends: although he maintains that “we knew each other’s intimacies” (EP, 136), he keeps some “theories secret from the rest of the expedition” (EP, 143), is known to be secretive of his emotions, and lies to Madox, whom “he loved more than any other man” about his relation with Katharine (EP, 240). 122 For a discussion of Singh’s witnessing of nuclear devastation, see Amy Novak, “Textual Hauntings: Narrating History, Memory, and Silence in The English Patient,” Studies in the Novel 36, no. 2 (2004): 206–231; and D. Mark Simpson, “Minefield Readings: The Postcolonial English Patient,” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (1994): 216–237. For a discussion of both the film and the novel, see Raymond Aaron Younis, “Nationhood and Decolonization in The English Patient,” Literature/Film Quarterly 26, no. 1 (1998): 2–9.

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No longer willing to tolerate racism and violence for the lures of “civilization,” Singh leaves Hana and returns to India, refusing even to read her letters. The reader finds him thirteen years later, fully ensconced in family and national traditions: he has become a doctor, as his family expects from the second-born son. He is married to a “laughing wife” who tends to the children and the garden. He is proud to know that his son will go “beyond even his and his wife’s knowledge and humour,” whereas the peripheral daughter is only glimpsed fleetingly, as she struggles with her cutlery: “At this table all of their hands are brown. They move with ease in their customs and habits” (EP, 301).123 By then, Singh’s comfort in patriarchal relations is already known by the reader: the practices, values, and culture of the “first real gentleman he had met in England” (EP, 186) were fundamentally patriarchal, as was the play Singh chose (featuring Wendy who sews and cleans, and Peter who fights and mutilates pirates, saving the Princess of the Piccaninny tribe124). His abandonment of Hana is prefigured in his desertion of the work of Lord Suffolk’s clan after they are blown up. Although Kip feels the weight of responsibility bearing down on him (as he “was expected to be the replacing vision” [EP, 196]) he refuses to accept it, preferring to reenlist “in the anonymous machine of the army” (EP, 195) he had left the year before, and “hid[e] there for the rest of the war” (EP, 196)—his choice to abandon effortful, new relations with Hana and embrace patriarchal habits is thus foreshadowed in the “In Situ” chapter, and the reader discovers that the final plotline was also already known. Once again, bios and logos do not harmonize. The English Patient’s biopoetics of seduction, return, and re-evaluation make the reader intimately experience how governmental power relations work best by saying yes: by fostering pleasure and desire (conversely, Between the Acts shows how characters, prisoned by norms, are gradually immobilized by frustration and fear). For the reader, distantly inhabiting the novel’s alternate communities demonstrates that names, nations, and ancestry cannot simply be willed into abeyance in heterotopic spaces, for their tentacles reach beyond the capillary, to “the soul of the voice” (EP, 21); that patriarchal and imperial relations are inextricably connected, even when the individuals serving as their vehicle and effect are literally adorable; that the accumulation of connaissances cannot serve 123 This happy scene takes place in 1958; the text elides the mass murders marking Partition. This textual silence is broken once by Kip’s reference to the guns in Lahore, “used in many battles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries against Sikhs,” recorded by Hana in a copy of Kipling’s Kim (EP, 118). EP was written soon after the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. 124 The indigenous tribe is thus named with the racist term used to refer to children of African descent in the Caribbean and antebellum United States.

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as alibi for the refusal to elaborate knowledge that transforms the subject and leads to altered relations with the other. The force of this experience is magnified by the second main biopoetic tactic, the interweaving of The English Patient into a world network of historical and fictional texts, which variously reiterate the familiar story of “those running away from or running towards a war” (EP, 93), over millennia. Herodotus’s Histories, an inquiry into the reasons leading to war between “the Greeks and the Barbarians,” figures prominently. Almásy works with and like Herodotus, carrying the “thick-leaved, sea-book of maps and texts” with him wherever he goes, writing into it (adding to, correcting, or corroborating its findings), pasting maps or vegetation into it, covering accounts of “wars that were of no interest to him” (EP, 172) with lists of Katherine’s grievances, transforming it into a working commonplace book, a “guidebook, ancient and modern” (EP, 246). Rudyard Kipling’s Kim is equally important: Kip seems to emerge “out of this fiction. As if the pages of Kipling had been rubbed in the night like a magic lamp” (EP, 94).125 The Villa inhabitants take on various roles from Kim: Kip plays Kim’s part, but then again also Creighton’s (EP, 111); Hana, who writes into the Villa’s copy of Kim, also plays the eponymous part (EP, 111); the English patient is the Master, and so on. Other books, less structurally integral to the plot, play key roles at crucial moments: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826; French and Indian War, 1754–1763), Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme (1841; Napoleonic Wars, the Battle of Waterloo, 1815); J. M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan (1904; “wars” between pirates and Native Americans); and Major A. B. Hartley’s Unexploded Bomb: A History of Bomb Disposal (1958).126 All the fictional texts involve similar machinations, whatever the historical circumstances: issues of identity and naming, disguise, and the confrontation and blending of cultures, as well as espionage, betrayal, murder, and war. Some correlations are obvious: Kip is very much like Kim, a “Friend of all the World,”127 as he comes of age and learns to play the Great Game of international intrigue and war, all the while remaining torn between two cultures and identities. But then Kip is also like Hawkeye navigating two civilizations in The Last of the Mohicans, witnessing oncoming genocide; he is also like Fabrizio del Dongo abandoning his 125 This Aladdin motif connecting The English Patient to One Thousand and One Nights is doubled by a formal relationship: the ancient text is renowned for embedding stories within stories, as Ondaatje does in this novel. 126 Lyall Watson’s descriptions from Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind (1984) are quoted as though they were from Herodotus (EP, 17). 127 Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. Harīśa Trivedī and Jan Montefiore (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2011), 94.

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family’s (and nation’s) political interests for Napoleon’s forces, like Peter Pan posing as Napoleon after disposing of a bomb,128 like David with Goliath (EP, 116). Hana playfully proclaims that she is the last of the Mohicans, “the Mohican of Danforth Avenue” (EP, 224), and demands that Kip “Confess!” (EP, 223) during a game of hide-and-seek among friends in the library, games that starkly reveal the limits of Hana’s political awareness. Casually she pretends to be the only survivor of a tribe decimated by Western colonizers; she plays at interrogation in the presence of the mutilated Caravaggio and thereby triggers in him traumatic flashbacks of torture by fascists; she “imagines all of Asia” (EP, 217) in her lover’s gestures, whom she only ever calls by the colonizer’s nickname, Kip. The English Patient relentlessly traces how at play and at war, in love and in hate, the same repetitive governmentalized plotlines conduct conduct, produce identities, and foster desire, across centuries. By constantly referring to these many variations, by forging characters from other famous characters, Ondaatje’s novel entraps the reader into the “already known” (EP, 259), in infernal repetition, to display the urgency of thinking otherwise. From The Histories to the Book of Isaiah to Kim and The English Patient, the great game always leads to war and will likely only stop when “everyone is dead.”129 Reversing the object of Herodotus’ inquiry, Ondaatje’s novel traces the effects of war rather than its causes, and calls on the reader to recognize narrative parallels and co-produce alternate modes of power and knowledge, of love and friendship. Endless entrapment in violence and death is amplified by the novel’s ring composition, which begins and ends in the villa, translating the ancient world literature structure deployed in Herodotus’ Histories onto a World War II (his) story.130 In Thinking in Circles: an Essay on Ring Composition, Mary Douglas describes how the form uses parallelism to build a long-view narrative that returns to its beginning. Such works are usually separated into two corresponding halves: the narrative opens up to include various motifs and themes, reaches

128 James M. Barrie, Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1911), 146. 129 Kipling, Kim, 270. 130 Mary Douglas notes that the parallelism of ring composition is “present in archaic literary forms as well as in contemporary folkloric recitals. . . . [in] the Ural Atlantic area, where Finnish oral poetry offers the classic case. . . . [in] texts from the Austronesian peoples, central Rotinese, the Celebes, the islands of eastern Indonesia. Parallelism appears in millennia-old Chinese poetry and in the ancient Hawaiian creation chants. Speakers of Papuan languages in Timor and New Guinea use it. Parallelism remains dominant in Chinese literature, it is a common literary form in Borneo and Madagascar and in Vietnamese parallel poetry, and similar traditions exist among the Burmese and Thai.” Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 4–5.

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a semantic center, and then turns back towards the beginning with a series of segments that parallel the ones in the first half. As Douglas demonstrates, the “structure is chiastic; it depends on the crossing over or change of direction of the movement at the middle point, marking the end of the quest.”131 A revolutionary work of the Greek Enlightenment, The Histories performs a genealogy that reaches back to the beginning of time and ends with the present year, covering all parts of the known inhabited world. The purpose of the work is proclaimed at the beginning: to consider the causes of war between “the Greeks and the Barbarians,” and to record the “wonders” of all peoples, so that they may not be forgotten. Bringing the supplementary to the main argument allows each tale of war to include descriptions of customs and values. Through a series of chronological regressions, additional information on the peoples involved in conflict is provided, until the narrative turns and moves forward chronologically again, eventually reaching the point of departure, completing the ring. As Gary Martin notes, clauses from the first and last sentences in The Histories combine through “a play on the words ‘one another’ . . . and ‘to others,’” implying a third sentence that expresses the fundamental theme and leitmotif of the work: “‘And this is the reason they fought one another rather than . . . to be slaves to others.’”132 The inevitability of conflict, the constant rise and fall of civilizations through invasion, are reiterated in The English Patient: “We knew power and great finance were temporary things. We all slept with Herodotus. ‘For those cities that were great in earlier times must have now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time before’” (EP, 142). Ondaatje’s novel uses ring composition to deny Herodotus’ essentialist opposition: not us/them, Greeks against Barbarians, but “Barbarians versus the Barbarians” (EP, 257): “For him all relationships fell into patterns. You fell into propinquity or distance. Just as, for him, the histories in Herodotus clarified all societies” (EP, 150). See Figure 1. Beginning and ending in the ruined Villa, each of the ten chapters creates present, everyday life and the past struggles that have led to it, until the center is reached (chapters V and VI), revealing the affair between Almásy and Katherine (to the reader) in chapter V, and its impact on the Cairo community (as well as Hana, Caravaggio, and the reader) in chapter VI, which ends with the deaths of Suffolk, Morden, and Harts (the “Holy Trinity”) and Kip’s withdrawal from the sapper unit. After the center is reached, the ring’s development

131 Ibid., 6. 132 Gary D. Martin, “Ring Composition and Related Phenomena in Herodotus” (MA independent study, University of Washington, Seattle, 2004), 21, https://faculty.washington.edu/ garmar/RingCompositionHerodotus.pdf.

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returns to the Villa collective, ultimately destroyed and abandoned by the narrative. Chiastic relations leading back to the Villa begin with chapter VII, “In Situ,” which describes another community that ends in destruction, corresponding to that of the desert explorers in chapter IV, “South Cairo, 1930–1938”; chapter VIII works in relation to III; chapter IX, in relation to II; and chapter X, in relation to I. “In Situ” constitutes a ring within the novel’s ring (a common occurrence in this form), beginning and ending with the 1940 scene of Singh disarming a bomb dropped on a famous White Horse carved into a hillside in Westbury, England. Figure 2, an analytical chart of the chapter, illustrates how this world literature form functions, and how this particular one demonstrates the effectiveness of governmental power relations: how a generous, risk-taking community of outsiders can also work to strengthen the politics of identification. In this chapter and throughout the novel, parallelism alerts the reader to narrative form. Some parallels concern behaviors that cross time and space and cultures: Hana pours calamine on her patient’s wounds and feeds him plums that she has chewed for him (EP, 4), as the Bedouin poured oil and fed him pre-chewed dates (EP, 6); the desert merchant doctor makes “a skin cup with the soles of his feet” (EP, 10), as the thumbless Caravaggio holds his “hands together like a human bowl” (EP, 54); in the Villa, Hana randomly reads aloud from books to her patient (EP, 8), like in the Punjab, the sacred book is opened at random and its verses sung (EP, 271). Some parallels signal a timeline hidden by an otherwise dispersed chronology. Caravaggio’s arrival at the Villa, for example, begins surreptitiously in Chapter I, when Hana hears “a scurry in her mind like a mouse in the ceiling” and looks down the hall (EP, 7); and then “a scurry in the ceiling like a mouse and she looked up from the book again” (EP, 8); and finally, in chapter II, “A scurry in the ceiling like a mouse. He stood with his valise at the far end of the hall. . . . She sat very still, the book on her lap” (EP, 30). Between first hearing and finally seeing the long-lost friend, multiple timespaces are brought into play, including the life of desert winds, the patient’s care by the Bedouin, descriptions of the villa, of games, of the war in the villa and the village, of a military hospital in Rome, of tonsils and gelato in Toronto in the 1930s, and still more. August serves as temporal echo for crucial plot lines: the Blitz (erroneously) begins in August 1940 (EP, 183; it actually began on September 7), Almásy’s plane crashes in the desert in August 1942 (EP, 167), Caravaggio stands on a bridge that blows up right after his torture in August 1944 (EP, 60), and Kip slides off a bridge on his motorcycle while leaving the villa after the August 1945 nuclear bombings, in the closing chapter entitled “August” (EP, 295).

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More than thirty references to North and Northwest pepper the novel, echoing across its many stories, spatially connecting multiple plotlines (EP, 9, 12, 78, 139, 249).133 Some parallels flag the transmission of knowledge: Almásy and The Histories are to Hana as Lord Suffolk and Lorna Doone are to Singh; in both cases, disciples adore their mentors (EP, 45, 186).134 From beginning to end, words are foregrounded (as they are in Between the Acts): they are “like water” (EP, 5), “tricky things” (EP, 37), “erotic” (EP, 120), having “tact” (EP, 231) and “a power” (EP 234), indeed some lives are “governed by words” (EP 231); some words one “can never translate properly into another language” (EP, 170). Words are the object of desire or suspicion; Madox wished “to become as intimate as he could with words” (EP, 243); Katherine “had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I [Almásy] thought words bent emotions like sticks in water” (EP, 238); for Caravaggio, “words did not emerge easily” (EP, 252). Words can be “put in thy mouth” and in “the mouth of thy seed . . . [and] thy seed’s seed” (EP, 294), and these words from the book of Isaiah Singh “loved” (EP, 294).135 These biopoetic tactics alerting the reader to its share of meaning production are strengthened by the novel’s two endings, which place the reader at a crossroads, faced with a choice between identity or becoming. The first possibility is figured by Singh luxuriating in the pleasure and (always temporary) security of patriarchal privilege; the second shows an altered, yet unknowable Hana, serving as “latch” to the ring composition, setting “the text as a whole in a larger context”136 with the possibility of becoming other. The final lines of the text establish an impossible connection between Hana in Canada and Kirpal in India, one that only the reader can “see”: she drops a glass while he simultaneously catches a fork falling off the table (EP, 302). This hopeful link (like Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway impossibly “feeling” and knowing Warren Smith’s suicide) is strengthened by the Hana of 1958, wise and alone: “She, at even this age, thirty-four, has not found her own company, the ones she wanted,” the narrator states (EP, 301). She who absorbed the ethnic nationalism taught in 133 This insistence on direction might recall Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest; like Cary Grant in the film, Almásy manages to escape death by airplane. 134 In Lorna Doone, which seems like a “familiar Indian fable” to Singh (EP, 185), two men fight over a woman (who gets shot in the process), echoing the ancient story of King Candaules, his wife, and his favourite spearman Gyges, and the story of Clifton, his wife Katherine (who gets killed in the process), and his colleague Almásy. 135 See Stephen Scobie, “The Reading Lesson: Michael Ondaatje and the Patients of Desire,” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (Summer 1994): 92–106, for a discussion of the foregrounding of words and reading in the novel. 136 Douglas, Thinking in Circles, 126.

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schools and encouraged by her stepfather and his friends (EP, 53), who joined the army mostly because of her love of Verdi (EP, 32), who displayed casual racism, has now learned to refuse such vectors of biopolitics.137 The text can neither explain nor erase her, and the narrator apologizes: “She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing” (EP, 301)—Ondaatje (like Foucault) thereby refusing to prescribe practices of freedom or specific goals for the reader.138 As Woolf would say, “There she was”: a “wonderful stranger” at home (EP, 223). The reader must consider which path to take: follow the “already known,” like Kip, or be “always taking risks,” like Hana (EP, 301). The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 That same stark choice—submitting to biopolitical norms or developing biopoetic modes of resistance—is foregrounded in the first volume of Foucault’s history of sexuality, a genealogical experiment that gradually, sometimes archly, detaches the reader from well-established truths concerning sex, sexuality, and desire. La volonté de savoir [The will to know] (HS, 1) begins with a subtitle consisting of an ungrammatical sentence fragment, a colloquial phrase: “Nous autres, victoriens.”139 Three words and a judiciously placed comma perform several discursive operations. The partial phrase seems rather a letdown after the grand, titular will to knowledge (a thinly veiled homage to Nietzsche’s “will to power”). Of course the subtitle refers to Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians (1964), but with important modifications. While Marcus’s definite article “the” simply presupposes the existence of other Victorians—“the prostitute, the client, and the pimp, together with the psychiatrist and his hysteric” named in the first few 137 When sixteen-year-old Hana stands on a table in a Toronto restaurant singing, the song is identifiable only by those who understand that “Alonson fon!” means “Allons enfants [Let us go, children],” the first two words of “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem (which calls for the enemy’s “impure blood” to water the furrows dug by patriots marching to glory). Initially, Caravaggio describes the scene lovingly (EP, 53). At the end of the book, he repeats the story and identifies the anthem, which Hana now knows, and performs, differently: “It had been altered by the five years leading to this night of her twenty-first birthday in the forty-fifth year of the twentieth century. Singing in the voice of a tired traveler, alone against everything. A new testament. There was no certainty to the song anymore, the singer could only be one voice against all the mountains of power” (EP, 269). 138 Josef Pesch, “Post-Apocalyptic War Histories: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 28, no. 2 (1997), https://journalhosting.ucalgary. ca/index.php/ariel/article/view/33901, considers this lack of accounting for Hana in later life a failure of the text. 139 Readers of the English translation have a different experience because the subtitle, “We ‘Other Victorians,’” quotes Steven Marcus’s book title directly, and implies that “we” are the other Victorians. Moreover, the volume is organized conventionally: “parts” and “chapters” supplement, with additional academic freight, Foucault’s choice of spare Roman numerals.

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paragraphs of Foucault’s book (HS, 1:4)—the categorical plural pronoun “nous autres” presupposes the existence of a group including the enunciator (and possibly the reader): roughly translated, nous autres would be “us,” a group identity formed in contradistinction to contextually defined others (vous autres, eux autres). Recourse to an accentuated (syntactically isolated) categorical pronoun has a deictic, ontical effect: it can “be assimilated to a gesture” pointing to the referential group.140 These pronouns can either include or exclude the interlocutor/reader, depending on enunciative circumstances. Foucault’s opening paragraph further complicates this discursive maneuvering, however, for recourse to irony and to past and present conditional tenses calls into question both the ontological affirmation of “Nous autres, victoriens” [Us, Victorians] and the writer’s status within that group: “For a long time, we would have suffered, and we would still be enduring today, a Victorian regime. The imperial prude would figure on the coat of arms of our sexuality, restrained, mute, hypocritical” (HS, 1:3; mod. trans.).141 Syntax and the comma after sexuality make the three adjectives applicable either to the imperial prude or to “our” unenviable sexuality, or indeed to both at once. While irony removes the writer from “us” Victorians, two positions open up for the reader: to ignore the irony and support the claims of a repressive sexual regime, or to perceive the writer’s critique and disbelieve such claims—or again, to alternate between the two possibilities. Moreover, whereas the first paragraph uses the past conditional to indicate the uncertainty of the enunciator in relation to the enunciated, the second and following paragraphs move to the continuing past (imperfect tense) of what “one” says in the present, thereby retrospectively changing the status of the first paragraph: what seemed to be the simple uncertainty of the enunciator is now repositioned as current, doxological certainty. The combination of the two paragraphs, or more precisely, the continuing elaboration of the text, thereby places the reader in the liminal zone produced by “free indirect discourse,” between two levels or two “minds”: the enunciator’s uncertainty (in the first paragraph) and the discourse’s certainty (in the second)—what “on” says, what everyone knows, what is said, in the present. Undermining singular truth,

140 Georges Kleiber, Anaphores et pronoms [Anaphores and pronouns] (Brussels: Duculot, 1994); and Gérard Moignet, Systématique de la langue française [Systematics of the French language] (Paris: Klincksieck, 1981); quoted in Emilia Hilgert, “Nous autres/ vous autres/ eux autres, pronoms catégoriels” [We others, you others, those others, categorical pronouns], Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française [World congress of French linguistics]—CMLF 2012 SHS Web of Conferences 1 (2012), https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/1782. 141 “Longtemps nous aurions supporté, et nous subirions aujourd’hui encore, un régime victorien. L’impériale bégueule figurerait au blason de notre sexualité, retenue, muette, hypocrite.”

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biopoetic tactics thus position the reader on uncertain epistemological grounds from the beginning. Similarly precarious epistemological grounds (“tout se passe comme si,” “everything happens as if ” [HS, 1:1, 55, 69, 111]) are frequent in a text that repeatedly satirizes those who proclaim ever-so-well-known truths about sexual repression or liberation: “We, for decades, can barely talk about [sex] without taking a bit of the pose: consciousness of going against the established order, tone of voice that shows that we know ourselves to be subversive, ardor in conjuring the present and in calling forth a future whose day will be hastened by the contribution we believe we are making. . . . Tomorrow will bring good sex” (HS, 1:6–7; mod. trans.).142 The narrator mercilessly satirizes the discourse of sexual repression and those who proffer it: if it holds up well, it is because it is so easy to uphold it; because it offers benefits to the speaker, placing it “outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; however tentatively, he somehow anticipates the coming freedom” (HS, 1:6; mod. trans.). Foucault’s chameleon narrator constantly transacts between tones and points of view; rather than receiving a totalizing historical analysis of modern sexuality, or the truth about sex, the reader is involved with multiple, overlapping, and frequently conflictive discourses. This uncertain experience, which often takes the form of un-learning, will be examined from three perspectives: from the overarching argument of the book as biopoetic process (rather than imposing demonstration); from the microtactics both foregrounding recognized truths and projecting other forms of knowledge, power, and pleasure (rather than prescriptions or solutions); from the silences, absences, and alterations of Foucault’s volonté de savoir (rather than results). Like The English Patient, La volonté ends where it begins, but with a crucial modification: Victorian sovereign rule over our prudish sexuality has been replaced by a resourceful sexuality dispositif subjecting us to the “austere monarchy of sex” (HS, 1:159). By then, the reader will have learned that the most fundamental, biological truth of sex, and the most personal, intimate, experience of sexuality, are produced by biopolitical strategies to foster life—of the individual,

142 This passage can also be read self-reflexively, ironically: substitute “the conditions for the elaboration of self as a practice of freedom” for “good sex” and the limits of Foucault’s work are intimated—the philosopher is always aware of enunciative positions in the present. The writer mercilessly satirizes the discourse of sexual repression and those who proffer it: if it holds up well, it is because it is so easy to uphold it; because it offers benefits to the speaker, placing it “outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; however tentatively, he somehow anticipates the coming freedom” (HS, 1:6; mod. trans.). For Woolf ’s biopoetical satire, see below.

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the population, the race, and the species—through proliferating, multifarious tactics ranging from confession to genocide. Just as the ring construction of The English Patient both entraps the reader in an infernal, transhistorical circle of war and offers the possibility of a latch to a different future with Hana (undefinable, still searching for an other to patriarchy and imperialism), La volonté both implicates the reader in the violent logic of biopolitics and suggests the possibility of a future “economy of bodies and pleasures” looking back to our own with astonishment, no longer understanding our dedication to the endless task “of extorting from this shadow [sex] the truest of confessions” (HS, 1:159; mod. trans.). To make such a radical reversal make sense, the writer performs a genealogy that distracts the usual story of repression and liberation in order to bring to light manifold transactions among discourses and discursive positions, such that sexuality may be reconceived tactically in the now. Sex is a particularly useful focus theoretically and methodologically because its management extends to both poles of biopolitics (the individual and the population); historically, in the age of “make love, not war,” and “sous les pavés, la plage,”143 the discourse of sexual liberation was shared across popular culture, political activism, and scholarly research (in the works of Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Marie Langer, and other Freudo-Marxists). In Foucault’s words, “A great sexual sermon—which has had its subtle theologians and its popular voices—has swept through our societies over the last decades” (HS, 1:7).144 Acting as principal adversary, the discourse of sexual repression is invoked in all five sections of the book, distancing the writer and the reader from nous autres and eux autres. The overarching argument—figuratively summarized by the initial and final sovereigns—is similarly presented frequently. Part IV, for example, begins by reiterating the main points of all preceding parts under the cover of Diderot’s Orientalist fable (“We all live, for many years now, in the realm of Prince Mangogul” HS, 1:77; mod. trans.) and then further emphasizes: “I have repeated a hundred times that the history of the last centuries in Western societies did not much manifest the play of a power that would be essentially repressive” (HS, 1:81; mod. trans.145). The text proceeds by returning regularly

143 The first slogan emerged in the North American countercultural sexual “revolution” and antiVietnam War protests; the second, “under the pavement, the beach,” emerged in France’s May 1968 protests. To utter either slogan was to identify with a group, a politics, and lifestyle. 144 Étienne Balibar, “Foucault et Marx: L’enjeu du nominalisme” [Foucault and Marx: the stake of nominalism], in Michel Foucault Philosophe, ed. Timothy J. Armstrong (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 54–76, discusses HS, 1 in relation to Freudo-Marxism. 145 In HS, 1:107, the writer underlines the repetition: “as we have seen, what was at issue . . .,” then gives a detailed summary of the main points and situates the preceding passage in a

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to four crucial areas of concern (children, women, procreation, and perversion) in order to enfold “the supplementary to the main argument,” as in Herodotus’ Histories and Ondaatje’s The English Patient (Herodotus; quoted in EP, 119), to rewrite meaning through a series of additions (the “wonders” of those under study) and displacements. Take children, for example. The text starts by playfully parodying the contradictions and kettle logic of modern discourses on childhood sexuality: “Children, for example, one knows too well that they have no sex: reason enough to forbid them from having it, reason enough to forbid them from speaking about it, reason enough to shut one’s eyes and plug one’s ears whenever they would come to manifest it, reason enough to impose a general and applied silence” (HS, 1:4; mod. trans.). Anaphoric repetition of “reason” (“raison de le leur interdire . . . raison pour défendre”) accentuates the irrationality of the repressive hypothesis. Part I’s parody is displaced by discourse analysis in part II, which tracks new means of controlling speakers, statements, and the spaces in which they may dwell, as well as new technologies of knowledge production that reinforce and intensify power and pleasure, multiply the objects on which they operate, all the while increasing economic returns. Such analyses are supplemented with a telling vignette: children made to stand on stage to declaim, confidently and on cue, institutionally transmitted sexual truths—while the audience, composed of parents and dignitaries, jitters and twitters (HS, 1:29).146 To the motif of a generalized silencing of childhood sex Foucault thus opposes multiple discourses that silence differently, at various times, for the purposes of control and normalization: “all around the child, lines of indefinite penetration were disposed” (HS, 1:42; mod. trans.).147 In part III, “Scientia sexualis,” the constitution note: “Cf. supra, p. 51.” The section entitled “Enjeu” [Stakes] is translated as “Objective” by Hurley. 146 Foucault uses the family as Ondaatje uses Patrick Lewis: as the figure of normalization refracting others. For Foucault, the family is “a crystal in the sexuality dispositif: it seems to diffuse a sexuality that in fact it reflects and diffracts. By its penetrability and by this play of reflections to the exterior, it is one of the most precious tactical elements of this dispositif” (HS, 1:111; mod. trans.). Ondaatje deploys the ur-Canadian, Patrick Lewis, to refract the lives of immigrants and refugees while maintaining the centrality of the white male to the order of things: “Clara and Ambrose and Alice and Temelcoff and Cato—this cluster made up a drama without him. And he himself was nothing but a prism that refracted their lives” (Skin, 157). 147 Both Foucault and Woolf impart the feeling of being in power’s grasp. Foucault: “power reaches the most tenuous and the most individual conducts, which paths allow it to attain the rare or barely perceptible forms of desire, how it penetrates and controls daily pleasure . . . in short, the ‘polymorphous techniques of power’” (HS, 1:11; mod. trans.). Woolf: “something . . . threw out many of Mr. Brewer’s calculations, took away his ablest young fellows, and eventually, so prying and insidious were the fingers of the European War, smashed a plaster cast of Ceres, ploughed a hole in the geranium beds, and utterly ruined the cook’s nerves” (MD, 65).

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and treatment of children’s sexuality (among others) exemplify how discourses can be endowed with scientificity, how sex was transformed into a general causality (explaining “everything and anything”), and who profited from this emerging expertise. Part IV, the theoretical and methodological center of the book, notes an unexpected reversal: “whereas childhood sexuality had initially been problematized through a rapport that was established directly from the physician to the parents . . . it is finally in the rapport between the psychiatrist and the child that the sexuality of adults themselves was called into question” (HS, 1:99; mod. trans.). The pedagogization of children’s sex is identified as one of four axes for future studies, along with a hysterization of women and their bodies, a socialization of procreative behavior, and a psychiatrization of perverse pleasures. Children’s sexuality is also brought to bear on the life of the species through discourses of eugenics and degeneration. Part V repositions this idea to argue why and how children’s sexuality is enlisted in the general biopolitics of life. Spectacularly, strangely, sex is found to be something more, a non-space where presence and absence, the hidden and the manifest, silence and noise, are harnessed in turn—product and projection of the sexuality dispositif. Throughout La volonté, the “wonders” of discourses on sex are showcased, not only those fathered by the greats (the Marquis de Sade, Sigmund Freud, and Wilhelm Reich), but also by the now usually repudiated (Charcot, “Kampe, Salzmann, Kaan, Krafft-Ebing, Tardieu, Molle, and Havelock Ellis” [HS, 1:63]), who carefully assembled a “herbarium” of “an entire small people” (“tout un petit peuple”) of sexual deviants, with their own enticing lives.148 In vivid free indirect discourse, for example, the reader learns not just their scientific names and classifications, but also how “[f]rom the end of the eighteenth century to our own, they run in the interstices of society, chased down but not always by the laws, locked up often, but not always in prisons, sick maybe, but scandalous, dangerous victims, prey to a strange ailment that also bears the name of vice and sometimes of offense. Children who were too alert, precocious little girls, ambiguous high school students, dubious domestics and educators, cruel or maniacal husbands, solitary collectors, ramblers with strange impulses. . . . It is the innumerable family of perverts who neighbor delinquents and are akin to the mad” (HS, 1:40; mod. trans.). Such recourse to free indirect discourse, insistent inversions and corrections, and the accumulation of ambivalent adjectives to constitute every type of sexual perversion, simultaneously performs the expert knowledge and its undoing for the reader. 148 The phrase tout un petit peuple is mistranslated as “an entire sub-race” by Hurley (HS, 1:40), and herbier [herbarium] is mistranslated as “herbal.”

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The project of this heterotopic fiction is described as “circular” by the narrator: looking more closely at historical materials allows it to advance towards another conception of power; elaborating another theory of power, conversely, enables another grid of historical analysis to be devised (HS, 1:90–91). Surprisingly, textual returns and parallels gradually form a ring composition. Figures 3 and 4. Diagramming the book’s argument in the ancient form of a ring composition foregrounds how the many returns and repetitions construct compelling parallels. In section II.1, “The Incitement to Discourse,” the usual history of sexual repression is juxtaposed to a genealogy of confession as subjectivizing technology and a general discussion of its distribution across discourses; in the corresponding section IV.4, “Periodization,” the usual truth about repression is repeated and then countered with a new chronology of technologies, their domains, and their diffusion. Reiterating the discourse of repression again in II.2, “The Perverse Implantation,” the text opposes four operations that generate a proliferation of discourses on sex; in the corresponding section IV.3, “Domain,” a similar variant of the discourse of repression is stated and then countered with four main axes, or sexuality dispositifs. Each new historical, methodological, or axiological perspective thus emerges, is further elaborated, and then supplemented through multiple engagements with established truths about the nature and history of sex—until the “nature” and “history” of “sex” are radically re-conceived by their insertion into an analysis of the biopolitical economy of modern power-knowledge-and-pleasure relations. Instead of following along a Hegelian line of progress, the recursive argument of La volonté de savoir moves forwards and backwards, encircling a continually shifting present position. Tracking the genealogy of sexuality through the ring enables the reader to experience differently the recurring cycles of the government of life, the biopolitical wars it entails, and their rationalizations: “Massacres have become vital. . . . If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the largescale phenomena of population” (HS, 1:137; mod. trans.). The biopoetic tactics enabling a re-envisioning by the reader can be addressed in two broad categories: the constant foregrounding of the text as discursive intervention rather than objective historical summary, and the staging of discursive exchanges in order to initiate a dialogic shift in the Western power-knowledge-pleasure regime. La volonté is performative (rather than constative) discourse; it does things with words.149 To show the reader how discourses of every description can be 149 J. L. Austin’s recursive series of lectures, published posthumously as How To Do Things with Words (1962), introduced the notion of performative language.

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stacked up in a generalized banishment of all that is not geared towards procreation, for example, the text invents a portmanteau phrase and combines it with two sentence fragments for emphasis: “Unproductive sex” should have “neither hearth nor law. Nor verb, either [ni feu ni loi. Ni verbe non plus]. At once chased down, denied and reduced to silence” (Volonté, 10; our trans.).150 Two common expressions, “sans feu ni lieu” [homeless: “without hearth or home”] and “sans foi ni loi” [lawless: “without faith or law”], are conflated into “ni feu ni loi” [without hearth or law] (Volonté, 10), a phrase that amalgamates domestic, religious, and legal vectors into an ostensibly generalized censorship. The text also performs the very proliferation it evokes. A passage referring to “other centers that . . . sprang into action to incite discourses on sex” abounds with examples—from medicine to psychiatry to penal justice to social controls filtering “the sexuality of couples, of parents and of children, of adolescents dangerous and endangered—setting about to protect, to separate, to prevent, signaling perils everywhere, awakening attentions, calling for diagnoses, piling up reports, organizing therapies; around sex they irradiate discourses intensifying the consciousness of an incessant danger that in turn relaunches the incitement to talk about it” (HS, 1:30–31; mod. trans.). Similarly, the text is prolix in its discussion of the prolixity of discourses on sex (HS, 1:33). Even when describing its own method, the text mimics the sheer variety of the discourses it analyzes. The reader is cautioned that resistance to power is never singular (in a sentence that is anything but cautious): there exist multiple resistances that are “possible, necessary, improbable, spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, violent, irreconcilable, quick to transact, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist in the field of strategic relations of power” (HS, 1:96; mod. trans.). Such a runaway list of adjectives bears down forcefully on the reader, pelts it with verbal pebbles, a tactic reminiscent of the pageant in Between the Acts. Conversely, personification highlights the easy, almost magical quality of accepted histories of seventeenth-century sexual “frankness,” when pleasure involved no agency, no responsibility, and indeed no individuality: practices, not people “barely sought secrecy”; words uttered themselves “without excessive reticence,” and “things without too much disguise”; “one had, with the illicit, a tolerant familiarity. . . . bodies made cartwheels” [faisaient la roue151] (HS, 1:3; mod. trans.). The imperious shift to nineteenth-century prudishness is then described in a series of short sentences that first personify and 150 This performative play on language is absent from the translation; see HS, 1:4. 151 The French phrase faire la roue refers both to the gymnastic performance and the peacock’s display of tail plumage to entice.

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then commodify sexuality. Melodramatically, “To this bright day, a rapid twilight would have followed, up until the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Sexuality is then carefully confined. It sets up house. The conjugal family confiscates it. And absorbs it entirely into the serious function of reproduction” (HS, 1:3; mod. trans. See the introduction to the Victorian era in Orlando, below).152 Discourses address themselves directly to the reader, in quotation marks, and at length (HS, 1:128–9, 151). The narrator stages what one will say against the text as it unfolds: “On me dira” [it will be said] (HS, 1:9, 150), “On serait en droit de m’objecter” [one would be entitled to object as follows] (HS, 1:151)—and indeed discursive practices oppose the narrator’s own elaborations in direct, indirect, or free indirect discourse, and the narrator responds to each one (HS, 1:150ff). Or again, the narrator dramatizes objections raised against its critique in the form of confession and self-doubt: “But, in an obstinately confused way, I spoke as though they were equivalent notions, at times of repression, at times of the law, of interdiction or of censorship. I misunderstood—through obstinacy or negligence—all that could distinguish their theoretical or practical implications. And I easily conceive that one would be justified to say to me: by referring constantly to positive technologies of power, you are playing a double game” (HS, 1:82). As if modifying Woolf ’s injunction that, to read differently, one must be “standing in the dock with the criminal” (WE, 4:390), the narrator avows his crimes. And the reader? Distracted from the usual story of sexual repression, the reader experiences a polemical transaction instead of being handed the truth. Sharing doxological “truths” in full contradiction establishes a familiarity between narrator and reader, a shared ironic distance from established norms, thereby suggesting the possibility of different relations of knowledge and power elaborated throughout the ring composition. Ironic references to “the most famous ear of our epoch” (Freud’s) (HS, 1:112), or to those professionals who “have offered their ears for hire,” establish a complicity between narrator and reader (HS, 1:7), who share jokes at the expense of Charcot, Freud, et al., as when the narrator describes psychoanalysis in a manner evoking a brothel:

152 Personification can also carry the narrator away into muddy theoretical waters. When advancing “the general hypothesis of the work,” the narrator invokes a single eighteenth-century (not nineteenth, as the translator states) society that sets up “an entire apparatus to produce true discourses” on sex. This society “talks a lot about” sex and “compels everyone to talk about it,” “as though it suspected . . . as though it needed . . . as though it was essential to her.” This unifying turn of phrase, positing a totalizing drive and organization, contradicts the methodological and theoretical principles explained in section IV.2, “Method” (HS, 1:69; mod. trans.) and might also partly account for the neutral tone adopted in subsequent books.

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“encore un chuchotement profitable sur un lit” [yet another profitable whispering on a bed]153 (HS, 1:5). A series of dialogical displacements transforms the object, the subject, and the grounds of knowledge production on sex and sexuality in Foucault’s text. The narrator insists that the object of analysis must not be “a curiosity or a collective sensibility; not a new mentality. But mechanisms of power, for which functioning, discourse on sex . . . has become essential” (HS, 1:23; mod. trans.). Repeatedly, the text dislocates truth from its usual transcendent position (“the truth shall set you free”) in order to expose its confession as a fundamental, multifarious mechanism in the West, from the Middle Ages: “The confession of truth inscribed itself at the heart of individualizing procedures by power. . . . Like the most defenseless tenderness, the bloodiest of powers need confession” (HS, 1:58–9; mod. trans.). Hence the noise—not censorship, but a new discursive regime establishing who must speak about sex, when, how, and to whom. Even discretion and silences perform their duty whenever necessary, shaping relations to the known and to the said: “There is not one silence but many, and they are an integral part of the strategies that subtend and traverse discourses” (HS, 1:27; mod. trans.). Such transactions reveal that sexuality is not an object of nature to be acted upon (hidden or revealed, repressed or liberated, policed or expressed), but rather the correlative of a complex power-knowledge dispositif (HS, 1:105–106). Moreover, analyses reveal that this dispositif was first deployed in the ruling classes, in an affirmation of their bodies, health, and vigor, and in consideration of their descendants rather than as a means to control the working classes. Genealogical analyses also distract the usual chronologies: whereas the discourse of repression recognized two ruptures (in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries), Foucault makes various chronologies transact with techniques and their dissemination. Finally, the usual story of capitalism’s repression of sexuality to increase economic production is displaced by one in which capitalism requires the micro-politics of life (HS, 1:140–141). Thus the reader is repositioned in an altered field of transactions among relations of knowledge, power, and pleasure, and made to see how the repressive hypothesis is “historically linked to the diffusion of the sexuality dispositif” (HS, 1:128; mod. trans). The final section, “Right of Death and Power over Life” operates the ultimate displacement by repositioning the sexuality dispositif as one of the most important biopolitical mechanisms. In an ultimate anaphoric turn, or supplementary argument, the reader learns that the will to know (about the sex, and the life, 153 By deleting the word “profitable” the provocative correlation of psychoanalyst and sex worker is lost in translation.

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of the population as a whole and each of its members) materially articulates the sovereign right of death and the power over life (HS, 1:140). Describing this articulation as a return that allows one to “complete the circle” [“boucler le cercle”], Foucault argues that “massacres have become vital”: “the more they are enabled by war technologies to tend towards complete destruction, the more the decision that initiates them and the one that ends them are ordered by the naked question of survival” (HS, 1:137; mod. trans.). Of course subjectivization intensifies: the individual may be made to feel liberated or purified by confessing (to parent, spouse, priest, psychiatrist) but discourse analysis reveals instead “a plurisecular injunction to talk about sex” (HS, 1:22). Imperatively, one must “seek to make of one’s desire, of one’s whole desire, discourse,” such that “all the censorships of vocabulary could very well be nothing other than secondary dispositifs in relation to this great subjectivization: ways of rendering it morally acceptable and technically useful” (HS, 1:21; mod. trans.). Thus are the grounds of knowledge production also transformed. Discourse analysis changes both the story and the way it can be told: the simplistic, self-congratulatory myth of overcoming Victorian prudery heroically, is replaced by a complex historical diagram of correlative discourses that enables the reader to see, and perhaps even actualize, altered relations of power-knowledge-pleasure. This is what differentiates the experience of discourse analysis from other forms of knowledge production: it is analytical rather than theoretical, diagrammatic rather than prescriptive. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, “every diagram is intersocial and constantly evolving. It never functions in order to represent a persisting world but produces a new kind of reality, a new model of truth. It is neither the subject of history, nor does it survey history. It makes history by unmaking preceding realities and significations, constituting hundreds of points of emergence or creativity, unexpected conjunctions or improbable continuums.”154 The diagram is both the product of discourse analysis, and a heterotopic space of intervention, for as Deleuze maintains, “to write is to struggle and resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map: ‘I am a cartographer’ [says Foucault].”155 But how would a sustained attention to gender have inflected La volonté de savoir? Post-Simone de Beauvoir, at the emergence of what has come to be known as French feminism (with the work of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig), post-Stonewall, the absence of gender seems 154 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 35. 155 Ibid., 44.

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all the more glaring.156 Of course the projected book on La femme, la mère et l’hystérique [The woman, the mother, and the hysteric] (vol. 4 in the original plan for The History) would presumably have foregrounded gendered powerknowledge relations. Within La volonté, the pointed descriptions of Charcot’s imperious treatment of patients and their parents, including the abusive public display of women in lectures (vaginal penetration by a baton was used to treat “hysterical spasms” that had been intensified by the amyl nitrate the doctor administered), followed by a careful cleaning up of all publications to maintain gravitas, underscore patriarchy at work. Moreover, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, David Halperin, and Judith Butler, among many others, have recognized La volonté as a text that laid the groundwork for their fields, because it directed the critical gaze onto the birth of the homosexual as a distinct discursive identity, a “species and sub-species” that “made possible a strong advance of social controls into their area of ‘perversity’” as well as “a ‘reverse’ discourse: homosexuality began to speak about itself, to claim its legitimacy” (HS, 1:101; mod. trans.). We suspect that gender would have been revealed to be a secondary dispositif in relation to biopolitical governance. Just as censorship covers up the great imperative to speak, just as the repressive hypothesis covers up the bourgeoisie’s affirmation of its body and class, gender norms cover up patriarchal, imperial, and class dominations, as Woolf ’s Between the Acts (and Three Guineas) and Ondaatje’s English Patient (and Warlight) insist. There is a sense of an ending produced in La volonté de savoir, a book that returns to Foucault’s previous books to modify, expand, satirize, or reposition their projects. The management of the mad or of the population had first been broached, differently, by History of Madness and Birth of the Clinic. The emergence of Life into history and Man into the discourses of the human sciences (HS, 1:141–145), which had “redistributed the order of the classical épistémè” (HS, 1:143) in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, are now integrated into the coming to dominance of the government of life (HS, 1:143). Disciplinary techniques and the subjection to norms had been analyzed in Discipline and Punish, but the preliminary work accomplished in the first volume of the history of sexuality enables Foucault to specify further that “a 156 See Susan Hekman, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Margaret A. McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity (New York: SUNY Press, 2002); Lois McNay, Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); Caroline Ramazanoglu, ed., Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism (London: Routledge, 2002); Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body (London: Routledge, 1991).

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normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life” (HS, 1:144). The rarefaction of discourse postulated in The Discourse on Language is now countered by the proliferation of discourses and their objects. All of these books would have been necessary for the elaboration of the five volumes planned for the History of Sexuality, which never materialized.157 Foucault engaged instead in a dialogic displacement of his object, his subject position, and the grounds of his knowledge production by an effortful turn to ancient Greece and Rome, and medieval Christianity, to write a genealogy of the subject of desire instead of the subject of sexuality.158 There is also a sense of a beginning at the end of La volonté, the possibility of an altered future, as there is in the genealogical heterotopic fictions by Woolf and Ondaatje analyzed in this section. Foucault imagines how our present fixations could be entirely incomprehensible in a future economy of bodies and pleasures. Readers of Between the Acts know all too well that the future predicted by the airplanes flying over Pointz Hall has been realized. But the text’s ending, which conflates La Trobe’s next play and the Oliver family’s plot, prompts the reader to reject the will to war, to break the historical embrace of a logic that makes the war machine make sense. How? Every tactic of the novel that extends spatio-temporal horizons—inscribing the futility of war in a pet’s name, enlarging perspectives to include deep time and the entire planet, challenging the teleological imperatives of official histories, enfolding world literature in its own making—manifests Woolf ’s strategy that one must “think peace into existence” (WE, 6:242). The English Patient evokes a future including both the continuation of warring patriarchal relations (with Kip) and the ongoing pursuit of self-elaboration, of living differently (with Hana). Thus the heterotopic process of distracting to transact displaces one onto shifting epistemological grounds; not only does it position one in dialogical exchanges, it also beckons the reader to alter its epistemological and biopolitical horizons, to enact virtualities emerging from such transactions. 157 Except for the draft of Les aveux de la chair [The confessions of the flesh], posthumously published in 2018 as vol. 4 of The History of Sexuality (although it was written right after HS, 1 and initially announced as vol. 2, La chair et le corps [The flesh and the body]). 158 See Miguel Beistegui, The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Agustín Colombo, “What is a Desiring Man?,” Foucault Studies 29 (2021): 71–90; and Daniele Lorenzini, “The Emergence of Desire: Notes toward a Political History of the Will,” Critical Inquiry 45 (2019): 448–470, on desiring man; see also Sandra Boehringer and Laurie Laufer, eds., Après Les Aveux de la chair. Généalogie du sujet chez Michel Foucault [After The Confessions of the Flesh. A Genealogy of the subject in Michel Foucault] (Paris: Epel, 2020); and Guillaume le Blanc, La pensée Foucault [The Foucault thought] (Paris: Ellipses, 2006).

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Method 3—Dislocating/Transiting Strategics: Reading Biopoetic Assemblages Biopoetics repudiate the transmission of truth from master to obedient disciple; they do not forge a Socratic dialectic that brings interlocutors to recognize their ignorance through a process resolving contradictory elements into a higher unity. Instead, such relations invite the reader to engage in games of truth according to what Foucault terms “strategic logic”: one that connects heterogeneous components rather than homogenize contradictory ones (BB, 42). Biopoetic strategics bring the reader to experience “how there is so little that is true in truth,”159 and how through this experience one can work to elaborate the self as a practice of freedom, and produce one’s life as a work of art. To dislocate the biopolitical subject (the correlate of governmental dispositifs), to cut the “invisible strings” (BTA, 82) tying individuals to their identities, to dis-integrate the normalized subject of law, Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje turn to the subject of desire. With Orlando, Woolf performs a parodic genealogy of the modern subject following roughly the same chronology as Foucault’s History of Sexuality, volume 1. From the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, the eponymous antihero, writer, diplomat, nomad, lover, man/woman, and mother is followed by a biographer vociferously complaining about the lack of meaning in this endless life. The biographer’s annoyance and ennui result in a series of disavowals of a life generated by accepted truths across centuries. Ondaatje’s Running in the Family covers roughly the same time period, but from the transgredient perspective of a former Portuguese, then Dutch, then English colony, immersing the reader in intimate experiences of bodies and pleasures, and trauma and struggle, transgenerationally. Conversely, in The Waves, biographical fragments are counterposed by lyrical interludes, lavish descriptions of a single day dawning and setting with the ebb and flow of the sea. Yet, the reader experiences this “abstract” and “eyeless [I-less] book” (WD, 3:203)160 of crashing waves in a formal assemblage that is becoming other—a collective biographical novel becoming satire, becoming 159 “One night when we were talking about the truth of myth,” Veyne reports, Foucault “said that the great question, according to Heidegger, was to know what was the ground of truth; according to Wittgenstein, it was to know what one was saying when one spoke the truth; ‘but in my opinion,’ he added—and I am quoting his exact words . . .—‘the question is: how is it that there is so little truth in truth?’ [d’où vient que la vérité soit si peu vraie?].” Paul Veyne, “The Final Foucault and His Ethics,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (Autumn 1993), 8, n. 1 (mod. trans.). 160 In “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925) Woolf suggests that Aeschylus stretches “every phrase to the utmost, by sending them floating forth in metaphors, by bidding them rise up and stalk eyeless and majestic through the scene” (WE, 4:44). The intertextual gesture is to John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, “eyeless in Gaza.”

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drama, becoming music. Characterization is dissolved into seven figures that each embody a dominant vector determining a normal life (gender, sexual preference, insecurity, family, education, profession, empire). Woolf ’s experiment in life writing works to disavow life as mortification—as simply living death. Warlight traces a family history of such mortification through the diverging lives of a British Intelligence Officer during World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, and her son, officially in charge of cleansing national archives of any whiff of war crimes, but also busy re-inventing his family history to excise signs of abandonment and betrayal. The Cat’s Table stages how one can become altered by strangers, and desire the risks of becoming more than the security of identity. For all three writers, we examine how their worldly heterotopic fictions untie the reader’s bonds to truth by developing new forms of reading that adumbrate different actualizations of unseen, unknown, disparate virtualities. Foucault 1: The History of Sexuality, vols. 2, 3, and 4 Like Orlando’s biographer, Foucault avows that he almost died of boredom writing the books that were initially projected to follow the first volume of the History of Sexuality, for it meant transcribing the already known (PPC, 47).161 The analysis of the Christian model in Les Aveux de la chair [Confessions of the flesh]162 uncovers an insatiable hermeneutics that produces the juridical subject of avowal: guilty, obedient, and bound to truth-telling (and retelling). In the “analytic of the subject of concupiscence,” Foucault maintains, “linked by ties that our culture has rather tightened than loosened, are sex, truth, and the law” (HS, 4:285; mod. trans.). Classical Greece and the Hellenistic period offer a different experience of desire in L’usage des plaisirs [The use of pleasures] and Le souci de soi [The concern for the self].163 We will analyze how, through a series 161 Ondaatje explains that when he writes, “there is a process of learning, which is the most interesting for me. Rather than going into a book knowing what I am going to do, which would bore the hell out of me, I want to know how a doctor works, or how a musician works.” Maya Jaggi, “Michael Ondaatje in Conversation with Maya Jaggi,” Wasafiri 16, no. 32 (September 2000): 7. 162 Foucault delivered Les Aveux de la chair to Pierre Nora in October 1982 with the understanding that publication would come after studies of Greco-Latin experiences of aphrodisia. See Frédéric Gros, “Foreword,” in Foucault, Les Aveux de la chair. Histoire de la sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 2018), 4:VII. For the English translation, see Confessions of the Flesh. History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon, 2021), 4:xi. See James Bernauer, “Confessions of the Soul: Foucault and Theological Culture,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31, nos. 5–6 (2005): 557– 572; and James Bernauer, Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought (New York: Humanities, 1990). 163 English titles alter meaning: for vol. 2, “pleasures” are singularized; for vol. 3, “concern” for the self becomes “care,” thus medicalized (“patient care”) and almost trivialized (“take care

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of avowals in the introduction to The Use of Pleasure, Foucault reorients both his work and the writer’s relation to the reader. To learn from other games of veridiction, he chooses to write a genealogy of the subject of desire. We will then examine the strategic logic deployed to display “even stranger” (HS, 2:39), “rather singular” (HS, 3:3), and “more enigmatic” (HS, 4:74) historical experiences of sexual morality to the reader. Finally, we will consider how the politics of these philosophical exercises are manifested in a series of public lectures, interviews, and a press conference in the 1980s. Foucault rewrote the introduction to volume 2 of The History of Sexuality (explaining the eight-year publication gap and his unexpected turn to ancient Greece, the Hellenistic period, and medieval Christianity) about ten times; he pre-published it three times before the book itself appeared in 1984.164 During the course of this introduction, the reader witnesses a series of strategic moves shifting the subject of enunciation from the “I” to the “one” (from Foucault to the writer), from the personal to the impersonal and discursive, to delineate the impetus of this new direction: “As for the motive that pushed me, it is quite simple. . . . It is curiosity . . . not the one that seeks to assimilate what is proper to know, but the one that allows the detachment from one’s self. For what would the relentlessness of knowledge be worth if it only ensured the acquisition of knowledgeableness [connaissances] and not, in a certain way and as much as possible, the knower’s displacement to an unknown elsewhere?” (HS, 2:8; mod. trans.). Foucault describes his intellectual choices as imperative: “There are moments in life when the question of knowing if it is possible to think otherwise than how one thinks and to perceive otherwise than how one sees is indispensable to continue to look or to think” (HS, 2:8; mod. trans.). To the relentlessness (acharnement) of knowledge, Foucault counters a restlessness of thought. In a 1971 interview, he had stated: “I therefore do not say things because I think them, I say them rather with an auto-destructive aim, to no longer think them, to be really sure that from now on, outside of me, they will live a life or die a death in which I will no longer have to recognise myself.”165 A genealogy of the desiring of yourself ”). Foucault delineates “souci, as question of the truth and as will to know.” Fonds Foucault, BNF, boîte II, dossier 4, ffos 4–5; our trans.; quoted in Frédéric Gros, “Notice,” in Histoire de la sexualité 2 et 3 by Michel Foucault, in his Œuvres [Works], Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), 2:1529–1542. For vol. 4, “avowals” is translated as “confessions,” a loss of the juridical inflection. 164 Gros states that different versions of the “Introduction” can be found in boîte II of the Fonds Foucault, BNF, and in boîte LII, dossier 1. In contrast, vol. 3 comes out a few months later, and starts with a one-paragraph prefatory explanation: “I will begin by analyzing a rather singular text” (HS, 3:3). 165 Foucault, “The Lost Interview,” 1971 (our trans.), Open Culture, video, 14:04, http://www. openculture.com/2014/03/lost-interview-with-michel-foucault.html.

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subject is thus born from a subject desiring, needing, to see and to think otherwise, leaving others in charge of the life or death of the text’s savoir. The introduction offers three disparate yet connected sections. First, “Modifications,” dramatizes the writer, the project, and its initial reception. The writer had faced a dilemma. Since ancient Greece, the subject of desire had, strangely, been a common category of common sense for philosophers, physicians, priests, and scientists. Therefore a critique of the modern subject of sexuality (correlate of extensive governmental measures) required a history of the ways in which individuals had been brought to recognize the truth of their being in desire, had been brought to avow themselves as subjects of desire (HS, 2:5). Such a turn would be risky, and would require time to forge new tools of analysis. Yet le jeu en valait la chandelle, the enterprise was ultimately worth it; for years the philosopher had been committed to write a history of truth. He thanks his editor, Pierre Nora, for his patience; thanks his auditors at the Collège de France for their support; and friends and colleagues for their advice as he struggled “to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still [found] reason to hesitate from one step to the next” (HS, 2:7; mod. trans.).166 Those who criticized the length of time required to complete the project are also mentioned (“clearly we are not from the same planet” HS, 2:7). The second section, “Forms of Problematization,” stages four testimonies concerning sexual desires and activities—the transhistorical presence of similar fears, models of behavior, figures of disgust and devaluation, and ideals of abstinence—that leave contemporary readers dumbstruck, facing the impossibility of thinking that, now, in truth. That male masturbation can cause the death of the individual, the race, and all of humanity; that the legend of the sexual life of elephants can serve as moral model for us all; that the image of feminized men as Plato’s Socrates described them is repugnant; that not having sex facilitates access to wisdom and truth. Even though their function and value have altered, such discursive objects have made sense for more than two millennia. Section three, “Morality and Practice of the Self,” discerns four elements that allow these alterations in sexual problematization to occur: the determination of the ethical substance, of the modes of subjectivization, of the elaboration of self through ethical work and practices, and

166 Gros notes that Foucault had almost completed two of the planned volumes before abandoning the projected series of books: La Chair et le corps [The flesh and the body] (boîtes LXXXVII–LXXXIX) and La Croisade des enfants [The children’s crusade] (boîtes LXI and LXIV) (“Notice,” 2:1529, n.). Woolf experienced a similar, lengthy struggle (more than six years) to produce The Partigers, an experimental text that would have juxtaposed fiction and essays. Ultimately, she divided her work into the novel The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938).

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the teleology of the moral subject. This final, methodological section constitutes a regressive ending, revealing that the initial presentation of the project’s modifications was simultaneously defining the writer/philosopher’s constitution as ethical subject. Thus, rather than being told the truth, the reader is invited to practice a new game of truth through return and reconfiguration—the ethical pleasure of using the book’s methodological tools is meant to be shared.167 Through a series of avowals in the first section, the writer had thus determined its ethical substance, “the prime material of moral conduct,” as “games of truth and error” (HS, 2:6), experiences that bind the subject to truth and to the force of truth. Philosophical inquiries would initiate processes to unlearn, untie, desubjugate (both the philosopher and the reader). The philosopher’s mode of subjectivization, “the way in which the individual establishes its relation to the rule[s] and recognizes [itself] as tied to the obligation of putting it into practice” (HS, 2:27; mod. trans.), is threefold. First, although focusing on prescriptive texts, the philosopher abstains from the “ludicrous” game of telling others what to think, do, or believe (HS, 2:9). Second, the application of strategic logic involves connections to heterogeneous domains of truth and power, with all the risks that such innovative thinking involves. “I am neither a Hellenist nor a Latinist,” Foucault confesses in a note, “but it seemed to me that on the condition of putting enough care, patience, modesty, and attention into the work, it would be possible to acquire, with the texts of Greek and Roman antiquity, sufficient familiarity: I mean to say, a familiarity that would allow [one] to interrogate both the difference that keeps us at a distance . . . and the proximity that remains in spite of that distance which we never cease to excavate” (HS, 2:7, n.; mod. trans.). This is what Damrosch would term “the detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time” (What is, 281); world fiction studies enter “into a different kind of dialogue with the work, not one involving identification or mastery but the discipline of distance and of difference. We encounter the work not at the heart of its source culture but in the field of force generated among works that may come from very different cultures and eras” (What is, 300). Third, the philosopher creates a “detached engagement” with the reader as well, through a new neutrality of tone and style. Within the scene of textual encounter, free indirect discourse creates a field of force between the ancient or

167 HS, 1 is an invitation to the reader: a “program book, a kind of gruyère cheese, with holes, so that one can house oneself in it. I didn’t want to say: ‘Here is what I think,’ because I am still not very sure of what I am proposing. . . . That’s why I wanted to hear the effect produced by this hypothetical discourse. . . . [T]his is the first time that I meet with people who are willing to play at this game that I am proposing to them in my book” (no. 206, Dits, 3:298).

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medieval writer’s thought; the writer/philosopher’s thought; and the reader’s thought. Foucault counters late twentieth-century investments in “feelings” as the “main field of morality”168 with flat affect. Many readers were affronted by this dispassionate manner, as outlined by Frédéric Gros: “the classic style, the prudent writing, the alignment of meticulous comments that stay at the surface of ancient texts, the smooth prose, disconcert. Certain readers see in it the expression of a thinker having now reached the shores of tranquil wisdom. . . . [Foucault] would have become again a smiling humanist calling to each one’s capacity to govern themselves beyond the great dimmed ideologies.”169 Others mistook this neutrality for endorsement,170 whereas in his writings and interviews Foucault insisted that, au contraire, ancient Greek society should not serve as a model for the present: “the whole of Antiquity seems to me to have been a ‘profound error’” (no. 354, Dits, 4:698): “It is a morality for men,” Foucault explains, “a morality thought, written, taught, by men and addressed to men, obviously free men. Virile morality, therefore, in which women appeared only as objects” (HS, 2:22; mod. trans.). In the more informal context of a Vanity Fair interview, he insists, “The Greek ethics of pleasure is linked to a virile society, to nonsymmetry, exclusion of the other, an obsession with penetration, and a kind of threat of being dispossessed of your own energy, and so on. All that is quite disgusting!” (“How We Behave,” 63). The philosopher’s medium for ethical work is the essay, “the living body of philosophy,” which the writer describes as “a trial that modifies one’s self in the game of truth and not as a simplifying appropriation of the other for the purpose of communication” (HS, 2:9; mod. trans.). The stakes of such a philosophical exercise are “to know to what extent the work of thinking its own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and allow it to think otherwise” (HS, 2:9; mod. trans.). These studies allow the philosopher to reconfigure his past works 168 Foucault, “How We Behave. Interview with Paul Rabinow and Hubert L. Dreyfus,” Vanity Fair (November 1983): 65 (hereafter, “How We Behave”). 169 Gros, “Notice,” 1540; our trans. 170 See Amy Richlin for a classicist’s dismissal, and David Halperin for a critique of her misreading. Richard Alston concurs with Halperin and expands the argument; see also the 2017 special issue of Foucault Studies, “Foucault’s Rome.” Pierre Hadot reproaches Foucault for not including the ancient Greek belief in universalism in his descriptions of the concern for the self. Not taking into account the different exigencies of a history of the present, the classicist misunderstands the process of “detached engagement.” See Brendan Boyle, “Foucault among the Classicists, Again,” Foucault Studies 13 (May 2012): 138–156; Thomas Flynn, “Philosophy as a Way of Life: Foucault and Hadot,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 31, nos. 5–6 (September 2005): 609–622; and Michel Senellart, “Gouverner l’être-autre. La question du corps chrétien” [To govern the being-other. The question of the Christian body], in Foucault(s), ed. Jean-François Braunstein et al. (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2017), 205–221.

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with “a certain theoretical advantage” (HS, 2:7): an archaeology of the human sciences is repositioned as an inquiry into the “games of truth by which man . . . conceives of himself as a living, speaking, laboring being”; a genealogy of the birth of the prison is transposed into games of truth in which the subject “judges and punishes himself as a criminal” (HS, 2:7). Yet ironically, the writer avows, the relentlessness of knowledge resurfaces, the boundaries persist, and the limits of thought are there, in your face and in your head: “Maybe [these efforts] have permitted, at most, to think otherwise what one already thought” (HS, 2:11; mod. trans.). “Sure of having travelled far,” Foucault explains, “one finds that one is looking down on oneself from above” (HS, 2:11), having gained perhaps a new perspective, a somewhat clearer understanding, from a different angle, of what one already knew. No triumphalism here. As ethical subject, the writer’s telos is to develop an aesthetics of existence dedicated to becoming other, and to stage other forms of engagement with truth that destabilize the ground and coherence of the biopolitical subject. To loosen the bonds of truth, the writer plunges the reader into the logic and rules of foreign truths, without warning or judgment, through free indirect discourse. The enunciator’s blending of its voice with that of the assured prescriptive texts creates an uneasy intimacy for the reader, in a heterotopic space in which there is no sure footing. The section “Act, Expenditure, Death” (volume 2), for example, surveys the “preciousness of the sperm” (HS, 2:130). Whether “emanating from the whole body, or coming for the most part from the head,” the reader is told, “semen is regarded as the result of a process that separates, isolates, and concentrates ‘the most potent part’ of the bodily fluid: to ischyrotaton. This force is manifested in the rich and foamy nature of semen, and in the violence with which it is expelled; it is also evidenced by the weakness that is always felt after coition, however small the amount excreted” (HS, 2:131). Authorial voices—the philosopher’s and the physician’s (Hippocrates, The Seed)—seem to harmonize in this solemn declamation of received wisdom. In “The Question of Monopoly” (volume 3), Plutarch sagely asks “the husband to refrain from sexual relations with other women: not only because it would be a threat to the rank of the legitimate spouse, but because it would be a wound—a natural wound that creates suffering. He recalls what happens with cats who are rendered furious by the smell of perfume; in the same way, women are rendered furious when the husband has relations with other women; it is therefore unjust (adikon) to make them suffer such a violent sadness for a pleasure that counts for so little; and he advises him to follow, with his spouse, the example of the apiarist who does not go near his bees if he has had intercourse with a woman” (HS, 3:175; mod. trans.). In “To Be

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Married” (volume 4), there is St. Augustine, in his Response to Two Letters of the Pelagians,171 explaining “that one can imagine the use of sexual relations in paradise only in four forms,” two of which are dismissed, after lengthy consideration, because of their incompatibility “with the beauty and goodness of God’s work.” The third, which “seems to be a concession that Augustine granted to his adversaries,” is when “humans, at the necessary moment, by their own volition, and according to the anticipations of a just prudence, bring[ing] forth the desire-libido that leads to sexual intercourse and accompanies it.” The fourth form involves “humans, in the total absence of libido, making their organs of generation, like any other member of the body, obey without difficulty the orders of the will” (HS, 4:260; mod. trans.). Les Aveux suggests: “For the moment, let’s leave aside the meaning of this concession. Hence Augustine prefers to define the sexual relation in paradise as an act from which libido is excluded, at least insofar as it is a compelling force. Now, if this absence is assumed, what would the sexual act consist in? In a natural and spontaneous movement whose unfolding would be troubled by nothing? Not at all. The text says it without ambiguity: it is, to the contrary, an act of which all the elements are placed under the exact and unfailing control of the will. Everything that happens in it, the man could want, and in effect did want. The sexual relation without libido is integrally inhabited by the volitional subject” (HS, 4:260; mod. trans.). The solemn tone of the free indirect discourse in all such passages encourages laughter to roll through the text and reach its reader, “the laugh that shakes . . . all the familiarities of thought” (Order, xv). Cumulatively, such juxtapositions, staged throughout The History of Sexuality, disavow any possibility of transcendental, universal, or absolute truth, as well as the dream of ever establishing the conditions that could produce such truth in discourse. What are the politics of correlating the truths of ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and early Christian texts and in the process emptying them of their cherished meaning? What are the pragmatics of shaping this heterotopic world fiction? Turning to Foucault’s work as a specific intellectual reveals how such histories of the subject of desire can be “used tactically today,” not only against institutionalized practices, but also in personal, interpersonal, communal, and transnational relations (P/K, 83). We will consider each in turn. 171 In the fifth century British monk Pelagius and his followers denied, among other Christian tenets, the theory of “original sin.” Julian of Eclanum, a Pelagian bishop, also argued that marriage was not sanctioned by God and that Satan devised conjugal intercourse. Augustine’s writings against such positions bolstered the pope’s recent decision to declare Pelagius a heretic (in 418). Julian was sent into exile.

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Foucault 2: Answering Questions In 1981, when penal reform and the nature and status of the dangerous offender were the objects of vehement debate in Belgium, Foucault was invited to give a series of lectures to the Faculty of Law’s School of Criminology at the Université catholique de Louvain. Expectations must have been high: Foucault, one of the founders of the GIP, author of Discipline and Punish, activist on several related fronts (the death penalty, the concept of dangerousness, prison conditions), would be able to resolve, or at least redirect, current debates. Instead, his audience was given Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonction de l’aveu en justice [Wrong-doing, truth-telling: the function of avowal in justice], a genealogy of “the type of subject the doctrine of social defense presupposed”172 using a history of avowal to expose “the relationship between veridiction and jurisdiction in penal practices from its origins [in ancient Greece] to the present.”173 Foucault informs his audience: “I come to you with a problem, or rather with an assemblage that is held together, in a more or less clumsy manner, by the question: What is the place and what is the role of Truth-telling in judicial practice?” (WDTT, 21; mod. trans.). As Gros suggests, Foucault is always “in dialogue. He is not in science: he makes us advance in the landscape of his problems. He explores, he inhabits, he discovers. This first real of philosophy (the expression is from Foucault himself), is public speech as exercise of one’s self and of others.”174 Foucault’s lectures demonstrate that the function of avowal is to “integrate regimes of veridiction and technologies of the subject” (WDTT, 24).175 From ancient senates to Christian confessionals and modern-day courtrooms, positive knowledge about those who avow (their thoughts, their desires, their sins, their crimes, their life stories) is meant to provide the basis for the conduct

172 Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt, “Editors’ Preface,” in Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, by Michel Foucault, trans. Stephen W. Sawyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 3. 173 Michel Foucault, Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, trans. Stephen W. Sawyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 30 (hereafter, WDTT). Brion and Harcourt identify the lectures as a form of heterotopia, a mirror that disconcerts the audience. Brion and Harcourt, “The Louvain Lectures in Context,” WDTT, 309. See Philippe Büttgen, “Foucault’s Concept of Confession,” Foucault Studies 29 (2021): 6–21 on the concept of confession in Foucault. See also Jean-François Braunstein et al., Foucault(s) (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2017). 174 Frédéric Gros, “De la supériorité des cours” [On the superiority of the courses], in Michel Foucault, ed. Philippe Artières, et al. (Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 2011), 159. 175 Thus avowal differs from parrhēsia, the fearless engagement of one’s individual will and agency in truth-telling for the benefit of the one, the other, and the many (see “Concepts,” above).

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of conduct. Foucault’s counterstrategy is to dis-integrate, to dis-affirm. No amount of positive knowledge about the dangerous offender’s inner being could ever suffice to justify state-sanctioned killing. Although the desire for avowal seems insatiable, “it is the thorn, the splinter, the wound, the vanishing point, the breach in the entire penal system” (WDTT, 228). In short, “truth does not make life easy for law, and especially not penal law” (WDTT, 22; mod. trans.). Exposing this “trap of avowal” destabilizes the very principles of sentencing practices, including the death penalty (WDTT, 211). Although Foucault repeatedly disparages the minutiae of his analyses and questions his expertise, he is all the while the parrhesiastes within the institution jamming up the machinery of the justice system for an audience of lawyers and criminologists now faced with a choice: ignore what they have learned about their desire for avowal or start the effortful, biopoetic process of thinking otherwise, in a manner that would not be sure of itself, that would ceaselessly worry about this “strange power of punishing” (no. 300, Dits, 4:207). In several gay publications, Foucault disrupts readers’ expectations by insisting that while “coming out” is important, it is only the first step. Because of their slant social position, gays are able to invent multiple, improbable forms of relationships. In a 1981 interview published in Le Gai Pied, Foucault proposes that one must abandon the hermeneutics of the subject (the drive to discover the truth of one’s inner sexuality) and practice instead forms of ancient Greek and Hellenistic askēsis, transformative work, to elaborate a self that “happily, one never attains” (EWF, 1:137).176 A gay becoming multiplies pleasures rather than discovers or avows desires, for while desire is always bound to the subject and its “psychological-medical armature,” pleasure is a “rather empty” category, an event that is “outside the subject” and can therefore be imagined, modulated, and variously disseminated.177 He advocates friendship, “the sum of all things through which, from one to the other, one gives pleasure” (EWF, 1:136; mod. trans.), as a way of life that can “yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized,” new “affective and relational virtualities” (EWF, 1:138). “It seems to me,” Foucault insists, “that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics” (EWF, 1:138). He takes women’s liberation movements as they 176 Ondaatje similarly states that “many novels are self-portraits—or future self-portraits, selfexplorations.” Michael Ondaatje, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (Toronto: Vintage, 2002): 128. 177 Michel Foucault, “Le gai savoir” [The gay science], interview with Jean Le Bitoux, July 7, 1978, https://progressivegeographies.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/foucault-1988-le-gaisavoir-i-and-ii.pdf. Translated as “The Gay Science,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 385–403.

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emerged in the nineteenth century as an example of this kind of work. Women seized the opportunity to actualize new virtualities that were not, that could not, be restricted to sex. Starting from a patriarchal discourse on their sexuality, women’s’ groups dislocated the struggle to imagine and transit through “forms of culture, of discourse, of language, that are no longer this kind of assignment or pinning onto their sex . . . that is what is creative and interesting” (no. 206, Dits, 3:321). That same year, the worldly dimensions of this ethics were brought to light at a press conference convened in Geneva to publicize the formation of an International Committee Against Piracy to defend Vietnamese and Cambodian refugee “boat people” against armed aggression. Written just minutes before it was presented, Foucault’s brief allocution, subsequently published as “Facing governments: human rights,” executed several shifts from its model, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It begins by noting, “We are just private individuals here, with no other grounds for speaking, or for speaking together, than a certain shared difficulty in enduring what is taking place. . . . Who appointed us, then? No one. And that is precisely what constitutes our right” (EWF, 3:476). Instead of claiming supposedly universal rights affirmed by a National Assembly, the committee defends human rights claimed in confrontation with governments; instead of speaking in the name of the nation’s people, unappointed individuals speak as part of an international citizenship of the governed. World citizens have the duty “to rise against all abuses of power, regardless of the [identity of] their authors, regardless of their victims. After all, we are all the governed, and thus, solidary” (EWF, 3:374; mod. trans.).178 While both the American and the French constitutions assert that governments have to protect and ensure the people’s happiness, the goal of the committee’s declaration is rather to ensure that human misery is not ignored. This statement to the world press protests the division of labor, the field of possible actions, established in contemporary power relations: individuals or citizen groups or the press can dissent, but only governments can act, because they control “reality,” what matters and what counts. Auditors/readers are asked to face governments on new grounds, produced by dislocating and redrawing the usual lines of confrontation; to become a worldly citizenship constituted not by identity (as defined by place or race or ethnicity or religion or sex or gender or sexual orientation), but by position, as the governed—not political representation but 178 Foucault’s next project was to head a mission to Vietnam for MSF, aboard a ship, but his death from AIDS prevented its realization. See Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (1926–1984) (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 328.

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mutual solidarity in the face of suffering. In other words, the ethics of the care of the self function as “a real social practice,” as “an intensifier of social relations”179 that are harder to manage, harder to govern, in “the ‘agonism’ between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom” (EWF, 3:343). As summarized by Gros, “practices of the self are neither individual nor communitarian: they are relational and transversal.”180 Thus, through a series of interventions, Foucault shows that the worldwide practice of governmental biopower also produces the conditions of possibility for new forms of solidarity and common action (in liberation movements, in Amnesty International or Médecins sans frontières [Doctors Without Borders]). One responsibility of this international citizenship is to “bring to the eyes and ears of governments the misery” for which they are answerable: “human misery,” Foucault states, “must never be a mute leftover of politics. It establishes an absolute right to rise and address oneself to those who hold power” (EWF, 3:475; mod. trans.).181 By providing a biopoetic assemblage of technologies of the self, these multiple interventions (lectures, interviews, press conferences) equip the reader with strategic tools. From the ancient Greek form of askēsis, one learns to conjoin the subject of knowledge and the subject of will in the work of self-mastery, to prevent excessive rule over others. From the Hellenistic life-long culture of the self, one learns the value of an aesthetics of existence: the effort to craft one’s life as a work of art that will live in the memory of others. From medieval Christian practices, one learns constant regeneration through renunciation: ego non sum ego [I am not I].182 All such practices view the subject as an impersonal form, a set of relations, not an inner substance. As argued by Jean-Pierre Vernant (referenced by Foucault), there is no introspection for the ancient Greek subject, no closed inner world to be discovered, that would make one a unique person: 179 From Foucault’s unpublished working dossier entitled “Government of the Self and Others,” quoted in Frédéric Gros, “Course Context,” Her, 537. See also Higgins and Leps, “‘Facing Governments.’” 180 Gros, “Course Context,” Her, 545; mod. trans. 181 Foucault reiterates the point in Louvain, in an interview: “It is very important to have clearly defined frontiers against governments—no matter which governments—that incite indignation, revolt, and permit struggle when they are crossed. So, as a historical fact and as a political instrument, human rights appear to me to be something important. But I do not associate them either with human nature or the essence of the human being in general. . . . I would go so far as to say that human rights are the rights of the governed” (WDTT, 266). 182 Michel Foucault, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud et al., trans. Graham Burchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 61 (hereafter, ABHS). See also Philippe Chevallier, “Michel Foucault et le ‘soi’ chrétien” [Michel Foucault and the Christian “self ”], Astérion 11 (2013), http://journals.openedition.org.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/asterion/2403.

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“the consciousness of the self is the apprehension of a ‘he,’ not yet of an ‘I’.”183 Moreover, Foucault insists that one must “try to detach oneself from those mechanisms that make two sides appear, to dissolve their false unity, the illusory nature of this other side that we have decided to support. That is where the real work begins, the work of the historian of the present” (no. 200, Dits, 3:265). The undoing of values and truths only makes sense if it allows new strategies to emerge. In a rare moment of personal disclosure, he states in the same 1977 Le Nouvel Observateur interview, “Non au sexe roi” [No to king sex], that “what often bothers me today—what saddens me, almost—is that all of this work done for the last fifteen years, often with difficulty and at times in solitude, ends up functioning for some simply as a sign of belonging: to be on ‘the right side,’ on the side of madness, children, delinquency, sex” (no. 200, Dits, 3:265). Instead, the reader is invited to work, in Foucault’s sense of the noun travail: “Work: what is susceptible to introduce a significant difference in the field of knowledge, at the price of a certain effort for the author and the reader, and with the eventual recompense of a certain pleasure, that is of an access to an other figure of truth” (no. 324, Dits, 4:367).184 Woolf 1: “very little persuaded of the truth of anything” It is a striking, rather singular, and even stranger but true fact that Orlando and The Waves offer a satirical performance of Foucault’s history of the subject of modernity, and of the avowing subject of desire, avant la lettre. Woolf also begins her history of the modern subject of desire with a romp from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, starting with the figure of the sovereign and her “strange domineering tendernesses”185 towards her subjects (a lascivious Elizabeth for Woolf, a prudish Victoria for Foucault) and ending in the present. Woolf then turns to a more restrained analysis extending from the present to ancient Egypt and Greece in The Waves, as would Foucault in History of Sexuality, vols. 2, 3, 4. Both Woolf novels experiment with different types of life writing not only to 183 Jean-Pierre Vernant, L’individu, la mort, l’amour: Soi-même et l’autre en Grèce ancienne [The individual, death, and love: the self and the other in ancient Greece] (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 227; our trans. 184 “My problem,” Foucault elaborates, “is to make for myself, and to invite others to make with me, through a determined historical content, an experience of what we are, of what is not only our past but also our present, an experience of our modernity such that we would be transformed. This means that by the end of the book we could establish new relations with what is in question.” “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” [Interview with Michel Foucault], EWF, 3:242 (mod. trans.); no. 281, 41–95, Dits, 4:44. 185 Virginia Woolf, Orlando, ed. Maria DiBattista (New York: Harcourt, 2006), 20; hereafter, cited as O.

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dislocate the reader from the well-known truths and plotlines of contemporary, normal life, but also to initiate a transhistorical process of disavowal. For Woolf, like Foucault, is “very little persuaded of the truth of anything—what I say, what people say” (WD, 3:203). Together, these novels dress down both the project of becoming other through the multiplication of bodies and pleasures, as well as the belief that fiction can actualize unseen virtualities and produce new truths in the future—in other words, they satirize Foucault’s project, Ondaatje’s project (and indeed this book’s project). Yet, through negation and disavowal, structure and form, both novels call on the reader to think, and live, otherwise. In the established narrative of Woolf criticism, Orlando is the light-hearted jeu d’esprit between demanding modernist experiments, part gender-bending folly and part love-letter to Vita Sackville-West; The Waves is the paragon of the high modernist mode (yet, mystical). But if the joke and the tour de force are read together, their transgredient modes of engaging the reader in a critique of patriarchal identity formation become apparent. These heterotopic fictions, one comic and the other despairing, will be analyzed in turn to examine two main strategies.186 The first strategy demonstrates how sex is but the product of sexuality, the keystone that holds together the entire dispositif in its determinations of gender (always inflected by class, race, and empire): in other words, that bodies, pleasures, and desires, identities and subjectivities, are relational and transversal (as Foucault would say). The second strategy disassembles and disavows systems of thought for the reader, along with the conventional narrative forms that instantiate and disseminate them. Woolf 2: Orlando Orlando: A Biography presents a wonderful, uchronic game: what if one did always become other, proliferate identities, multiply bodies and pleasures, forever and ever? The sixteen-year old eponymous protagonist, an aristocrat favored by Elizabeth I, becomes an official of Queen Anne’s imperial government in Constantinople, then a woman, then a gipsy, then returns to George II’s London to become an habitué of high society salons as well as of maisons closes, becomes a Victorian wife and mother and prize-winning author who, at thirty-six, ends up on a wild goose chase at “the twelfth stroke of midnight,

186 For Orlando as a comic or satiric novel, see Elizabeth Cooley, “Revolutionizing Biography: Orlando, Roger Fry, and the Tradition,” South Atlantic Review 55, no. 2 (May 1990): 71–83; Jonathan Greenberg, The Cambridge Introduction to Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); and Kari Elise Lokke, “Orlando and Incandescence: Virginia Woolf ’s Comic Sublime,” Modern Fiction Studies 38, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 235–252.

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Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight,” the novel’s publication date (O, 241). (The history of the present will never look the same.) In the process, he/she traverses four centuries of ever-so-well-known truths: that sex is freer in the permissive eighteenth century than in the straitlaced nineteenth, that beautiful young women always hold men in thrall, that the English gift civilization to backward peoples, and so on. Satire and parody dislocate and defamiliarize;187 the laughing reader transits through time, encouraged to remain always on the shiny surface of clichés—a history of systems of thought lampooned by a history of the absence of thought. In October 1927, the month in which she began Orlando, Woolf asserts in an essay that the “days of Victorian biography are over,” because it leaves out “all that has been most real” (WE, 4:478).188 Targeting the kind of Carlylean biography championed by her father, Leslie Stephen, in his Dictionary of National Biography (O, 224) and “Great Men of Letters” series, Woolf rejects the notion of reducing history to the lives of patriarchs.189 Such inspirational stories, meant to bring admiring readers to emulate normalized values, actively obscure all non-greats on the basis of sex, race, class, or nation.190 Woolf notes that a method “subtle and bold enough” to produce a new biography “still remains to be discovered” (WE, 4:478); in a letter to Sackville-West on October 9, 1927, she declares that she wants to “revolutionise biography overnight” (WL, 4:429). Through 187 In 1917, Woolf praises parodies that “make us think. . . . with greater daring than the critic can usually display” (WE, 2:89). See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), for parody; and Linda Hutcheon with Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), for a discussion of the 1992 film adaptation of Orlando. See Caroline Webb, “History through Metaphor: Woolf ’s Orlando and Byatt’s Possession: A Romance,” in Virginia Woolf: Emerging Perspectives, ed. Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow (New York: Pace University Press, 1994), 182–188, on metaphor and history. 188 “The New Biography” was a review of Harold Nicolson’s Some People (WE, 4:473–80). Nicolson, the husband of Vita Sackville-West, was a career diplomat. See Alison Booth, “The Lives of Houses: Woolf and Biography,” in A Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Jessica Berman (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019), 13–26; and Ray Monk, “This Fictitious Life: Virginia Woolf on Biography, Reality, and Character,” Philosophy and Literature 31, no. 1 (April 2007): 1–40. 189 Thomas Carlyle published the era-defining On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History in 1841. Woolf critiques its influence in JR. See Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, ed. Edward L. Bishop (Oxford: Shakespeare Head and Blackwell, 2004), 30. See also Virginia Woolf, “Carlyle’s House” (1909), in Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches, ed. David Bradshaw (London: Hesperus Press, 2003), 3–4; O, 214. 190 For discussions of gender, race, and nation in Woolf ’s novels, see Jaime Hovey, “‘Kissing a Negress in the Dark’: Englishness as a Masquerade in Woolf ’s Orlando,” PMLA 112, no. 3 (May 1997): 393–404; and Urmila Seshagiri, “Orienting Virginia Woolf: Race, Aesthetics, and Politics in To the Lighthouse,” Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 58–84.

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radically different strategies, both Orlando and The Waves counter biopolitical life-writing with revolutionary biopoetics. Yet outwardly, Orlando marshals all the matériels of standardized biographies. The usual paratextual armature is present, with the obligatory preface thanking all the greater minds who have helped, the notes bringing supplemental information and clarity, and the index. Photographs supply visual documentation of the life that will be tracked, as the biographer insists, by plodding “without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth . . . on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads” (O, 49). Yet reader expectations are immediately confounded, as fact and fiction intermix: huge ancestral estates as featured in the text existed; many of the characters existed (Queens Elizabeth and Mary, Shakespeare and the pope); but the historical portraits in the illustrations cannot be of Orlando (the ultimate literary figure of Ariosto and Shakespeare fame); and the photographs are of Woolf ’s lover, Vita Sackville-West, posing as Orlando.191 Dislocating the reader from history and fiction, such games transit continually between them, to bring in a different kind of “real,” the power of ever-changing, familiar truths to subjugate, which had been systematically eclipsed by both nineteenth-century forms of life-writing (the hagiographic and the case study—whether judicial, penal, medical, military, educational, literary192). Instead of directing the reader’s gaze to a singular individual, the mock realist strategy focuses on a constantly transforming vanishing-point: “for though one may say, as Orlando said . . . Orlando? still the Orlando she needs may not come; these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled high on a waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own, call them what you will . . . for everybody can multiply from his own experience the different terms which his different selves have made with him” (O, 225–6). Subjectivity transits through pronominal shifts from “she” to “their” to “him.”193 Sex is the correlate of the dispositif of sexuality, and as its truths are constantly changing, so is Orlando: “Change was incessant, and change perhaps would never cease. High battlements of thought,

191 The Renaissance portraits of Orlando are images of Sackville-West’s ancestors. Woolf ’s niece, Angelica Bell, posed for the photograph of Sasha, “The Russian Princess as a Child.” 192 The exercise of disciplinary power requires writing in order to be “total and continuous”: “Bodies, actions, behaviors, and discourses are gradually besieged by a tissue of writing, a graphic plasma, which records them, codifies them, and schematizes them” (PPC, 48–49). 193 See Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps, “Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando: The Subject of Time and Generic Transactions,” in Classics in Film and Fiction, ed. Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, et al. (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 116–136.

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habits that seemed durable as stone, went down like shadows at the touch of another mind” (O, 130). For more than three centuries, Orlando is like a fish in the waters of such changing truths, “hooked . . . through the nose and rushed through the waters unwillingly, yet with his own consent” (O, 39). Orlando performs a history of the absence of thought. After sleeping for a week, he wakes to find that he has become she. The biographer expects, and expects the reader to expect, gender to rule: “That it was precarious and embarrassing in the extreme must be the first thought of every reader who has followed her story with sympathy. Young, noble, beautiful, she had woken to find herself in a position than which we can conceive none more delicate for a young lady of rank. We should not have blamed her had she wrung the bell, screamed, or fainted. But Orlando showed no such signs of perturbation” (O, 103). For Orlando, no great soul searching occurs, and life simply goes on with another set of parameters for dress, behavior, ambitions, desires. Finding herself alone in Constantinople in the midst of revolutionary uproar, she swiftly and thoughtlessly abandons diplomatic life to ride with gipsies. The biographer follows with complete equanimity: “Often she had looked at those mountains from her balcony at the Embassy; often had longed to be there; and to find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a reflective mind, gives food for thought. For some time, however, she was too well pleased with the change to spoil it by thinking” (O, 104). The biographer similarly prefers surface appearances to thoughtful analysis. Orlando’s progress through the day as a diplomat is marked as a series of rituals, performances, and literally empty gestures: “Orlando was kept busy, what with his wax and seals, his various coloured ribbons which had to be diversely attached, his engrossing of titles and making of flourishes round capital letters, till luncheon came—a splendid meal of perhaps thirty courses. After luncheon, lackeys announced that his coach and six was at the door, and he went . . . to call upon the other ambassadors and dignitaries of state. The ceremony was always the same” (O, 90). Because of the excessive number of such official visits, perhaps “the most important part of a day,” “there was neither tobacco in the pipe nor coffee in the glass, as, had either smoke or drink been real, the human frame would have sunk beneath the surfeit” (O, 91). All of these scenes of excessive luxuriance are described with flat affect, as matters that go without saying yet deserve admiration—and satire reduces geopolitical forces and maneuvers to mere flourishes among the “properly scented, curled, and anointed” (O, 90). Such tactics condemn the reader to experience first-hand Orlando’s thoughtless attitude towards life; like Orlando pulled along life’s stream, one willingly turns the pages, but without necessarily consenting to such mindlessness, forced

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to drink from a beautiful, yet literally empty cup: “and so at last [Orlando] reached her final conclusion, which was of the highest importance but which, as we have already much overpassed our limit of six lines, we must omit” (O, 214). Reporting on the conversations Orlando shares with the greatest minds of the eighteenth century, the biographer refuses not only to comment, but even to register their words: As for what they said—nothing more tedious and trivial could be imagined. . . . At last Lady R. rapped [her fan] upon the arm of her great chair. Both gentlemen stopped talking. Then the little gentleman [Alexander Pope] said, He said next, He said finally, Here, it cannot be denied, was true wit, true wisdom, true profundity. A footnote explains that, “These sayings are too well known to require repetition, and besides, they are all to be found in his published works” (O, 148).194 Even when describing passionate conversations between Orlando and her true love, Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, the biographer insists that “it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language. . . . For which reasons we leave a great blank here, which must be taken to indicate that the space is filled to repletion”—and indeed, the page is flooded with a great blank covering “some days more of this kind of talk” (O, 186).195 On the odd occasion when Orlando thinks or writes, the biographer is dismayed, for a woman should not think or write (O, 197). After waiting for a moment, the biographer fills his time, and the reader’s, by making lists: of the months in a year (O, 197), or of the birds in the garden and their activities (O, 198–199). The reader soon becomes as impatient as the dim-witted chronicler, who avows: “Already—it is an effect lists have upon us—we are beginning 194 The biographer misses the blatant misogyny of Pope’s poetry and Joseph Addison’s prose (O, 153–154). The implied author, however, uses Pope to advance an argument about satirical methods (ranging from “malice, rage, triumph, wit, and terror” to disillusionment) (O, 148–149). 195 A technique Woolf steals from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767). For Woolf on Sterne, see WE, 1:280–288; 3:86–93, 3:94–99, 3:346–352. The blank space in lieu of Billy the Kid’s picture also desiccates speech and obliterates the legend; see above.

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to yawn. But if we stop, it is only that the catalogue is tedious, not that it is finished” (O, 80). Such moments of boredom, when the plot, its writing, and its reading are rendered synchronous, force the reader to experience both writing and thought as vacuity. Century after century, change is foregrounded, yet unmotivated and unexplained, even though Orlando poses fundamental yet unanswered questions: “What’s an ‘age,’ indeed? What are ‘we’?” (O, 150).196 The biographer’s initial stipulation of sameness at the moment of biological transformation is soon contradicted; gender colonizes the body, inflects its desires, and directs its actions elsewhere.197 “Thus,” the narrator reluctantly acknowledges, “there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them . . . they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking” (O, 138). Orlando only thrives through submission to monarchical whims, Augustan misogyny, Victorian crinolines, property entailments, marital state, and their “extraordinary tingling and vibration all over her” (O, 175). The Victorian age, however, conquers Orlando: the “spirit of the nineteenth century was antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and broke her, and she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never been before” (O, 178). Her muscles weakened by restricted movements, her spirit weakened and subject to frights and fears, her crinoline heavy and cumbersome, she eventually feels that, “It would be a comfort . . . to lean; to sit down; yes, to lie down; never, never, never to get up again” (O, 179). (A feeling shared by Flush’s mistress, Elizabeth Barrett.) Ironically, it is only when she binds herself to abjection that her centuries-old desire to write comes to fruition; she accepts the spirit of the age, takes a husband, and finds that she can at last be “herself. Now, therefore, she could write, and write she did. She wrote. She wrote. She wrote” (O, 196). The price of passing the age’s “examination successfully,” with all due “deference,” however, is high: one must be “no satirist, cynic, or psychologist” (O, 196)—in other words, no Virginia Woolf. In a novel that constantly parodies writers, the most damnable indictment of literature is that only when Orlando, whose desire to write never abates (in spite of scathing ridicule), consents to subjugation, that she is granted recognition. Throughout the novel, major writers (Dryden, Swift, Pope, Austen, Keats, Brontë, and so on), critics, literary institutions, publishing, are all satirized, but

196 In the British edition, “we” appears in quotation marks; in the American edition, it does not. 197 See also Chris Coffman, “Woolf ’s Orlando and the Resonances of Trans Studies,” Genders 51 (2010): 1–35, http://www.genders.org/g51/g51_coffman.html; Christy Burns, “ReDressing Feminist: Tensions between Essential and Constructed Selves in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando,” Twentieth-Century Literature 40 (1994): 342–364.

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none as often as Woolf herself: “Kew Gardens” (O, 215), “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (O, 167), the famous “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse (O, 72; 228), the sound of bells marking the hours of Mrs. Dalloway (O, 218–219, 224, 235), the modernist stream of consciousness technique (O, 74), as well as Woolf ’s “moments of being” (O, 223), are parodied for a reader left stranded at the edge of meaning, at the limits of writing, as though past works had meant nothing, or very little, and could be dispatched with a well-turned phrase or satiric quip.198 The realist method of “letting the facts speak for themselves” is also hijacked through biopoetic juxtapositions that provide the reader with a slant perspective that goes unacknowledged by protagonist and biographer. For example, Orlando’s transit from upper-class drawing rooms, where she “pour[s] out tea” for men of position, to working-class rented rooms where sex workers stir the punch bowl, manifests that women must serve/service men regardless of class (O, 155, 159). Embedded in chapter one are three figures, three interpretive occasions that inscribe the reader in the implied author’s attempt to alter the balance of power relations and dislodge acceptable truths. The first lesson in reading aslant takes place in the opening lines: “He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters . . . Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the . . . attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him” (O, 11).199 Each interrupting dash is the reader’s invitation to pause, and see—as these opening sentences interlace the governmental strands of patriarchy, property, and empire. The biographer can only agree that the young lord shows “chivalry” by hanging the head almost out of reach, and must gush, “Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one!” (O, 12). Coy about gender (spreading doubt by negating it), the biographer is oblivious to the obscene racist violence. The text’s incipit teaches the reader to beware, to be “very little persuaded of the truth of anything” in this biography (WD, 3:203). During the Great Frost of 1608, the chronicle pauses to mention a curiosity: “Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of some twenty

198 “Sapphism is to be suggested. Satire is to be the main note—satire & wildness. . . . My own lyric vein is to be satirized. Everything mocked” (WD, 3:131). 199 The term “Moor” alludes to the performance of Shakespeare’s Othello that Orlando later glimpses but will not stay to watch (O, 42).

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fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river. . . . The old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for all the world as if she were to serve a customer, though a certain blueness about the lips hinted the truth” (O, 27). The frozen spectacle is merely entertainment: “’Twas a sight King James specially liked to look upon, and he would bring a troupe of courtiers to gaze with him” (O, 27). The dismissive biographer quickly moves on to describe the “brilliancy” of aristocrats dining and dancing on the ice-bound Thames. Yet this act of narrative enfolding makes manifest the ethical responsiveness of the implied writing subject—marks its outrage and summons the reader to see the deadly effects of gender, class privilege, and governance. The third figure, Sasha, the Muscovite princess, exists only as an orientalized object of desire for Orlando, a possession or erotic pet that must be “irrevocably and indissolubly his own” (O, 36). (Orlando nicknames her Sasha “because it was the name of a white Russian fox he had had as a boy” [O, 33].) Vectors of gender, class, and ethnicity direct Orlando’s gaze, for he knows “the curious obliquity of the Muscovitish temperament,” that “the women in Muscovy wear beards . . . that both sexes are smeared with tallow . . . tear meat with their fingers and live in huts where an English noble would scruple to keep his cattle” (O, 35–36). Seeing her behave, Orlando wonders if there was not “something rank in her, something coarse flavoured, something peasant born?” (O, 38). Widespread xenophobic truths are not denied by the biographer, are only laughable and hateful to the reader. Sasha and the Russian retinue sail away from London just as the terrible thaw occurs. Orlando witnesses the “wild cries,” the “terrible inhuman groanings” of those “dashed to death and sunk” or “so dazed with terror that they sat immovable and silent” (O, 46–47), but he chooses to remain oblivious. All he wants to do is “rage,” hollering at the fleeing, “faithless woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex” (O, 48). In all three cases, irony makes the visible visible for the reader who must know differently, ethically. The reader should recognize and resist the intolerable, whatever the assurances of the noble gentleman and his faithful chronicler. After Orlando’s sexual transfiguration, her rights to the estate she has loved for centuries are almost severed. Heteronormativity is a convenient fiction, sometimes a farce, but its rights and privileges are nonetheless tightly scripted.200 But

200 Derek Ryan, “Orlando’s Queer Animals,” in A Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Jessica Berman (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019), 109–120, discusses heterosexual categories; Leslie Kathleen Hankins, “Orlando: ‘A Precipice Marked V: Between ‘A Miracle of Discretion’ and ‘Lovemaking Unbelievable: Indiscretions Incredible,’” in Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings,

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Orlando is always accepting, rather than questioning, less concerned about a world war (“for there had been another war; this time against the Germans” [O, 221]) than the perils of negotiating a large department store (O, 219–220). Only for the reader is the biographer’s pursuit of Orlando more than entertainment and wild goose chase (O, 241).201 Woolf 3: The Waves In The Waves, it is the novel that is continually transforming: the reader is confronted with a novel becoming a play-poem, becoming rhythm, exchanging characters for profiles.202 In this mobile assemblage, named figures grow from childhood to old age and death yet remain immobile, “chained in place,” each chiming in with its own refrain: “my body” (TW, 40), “I have no face” (TW, 21), “I think I am the field” (TW, 61), “now Percival goes” (TW, 92), “my father is a banker in Brisbane” (TW, 12), “the inheritor” (TW 165). Such rhythmical repetition results in part from the fact that these are not characters, but rather six vectors determining an identity, a subject position in discourse: Jinny, the body’s desire to please and frill; Rhoda, the unrelenting fear of invisibility, of insignificance; Susan, the longing to return, to be the earth-mother; Neville, the need to be loved, not despised; Louis, the need to belong, to find his rightful place in history; Bernard, the overwhelming desire to write himself into the future. The seventh, silent, literally mindless figure is Percival, their object of desire, the gorgeous yet stupid imperialist, who dies during a race in India because his horse stumbled (TW, 158, 96)—a common delusion that is loved, and grieved, by all. Instead of learning about events (that always happen offstage), imagining landscapes or interiors, or witnessing the movements of the mind, the reader of The Waves is serially anchored in heterogeneous places, listening to juxtaposed confessions of feelings, emotions, and fears in direct discourse. In the imagined Elvedon estate of their childhood;203 in the showed. Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 180– 202, the novel’s lesbian strategies. 201 The penultimate paragraph’s tactical summary: “‘It is the goose!’ Orlando cried, ‘The wild goose. . . .’” (O, 241). “Wild goose chase” is a late sixteenth-century horse-racing term. See Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 2.4.68–70. 202 For a discussion of intermediality, see Clements, Virginia Woolf. For a discussion of becoming in Woolf ’s novels, based on an unpublished study by Fanny Zavin, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massoumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 203 As children, Bernard and Susan imagine: “That is Elvedon. The lady sits between the two long windows, writing” (TW, 10); the scene is recalled six times (TW, 78, 139, 157, 162, 174, 184). Most critics see the “lady” negatively; see Judith Lee, “‘This Hideous Shaping and Moulding’: War and The Waves,” in Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth, ed. Mark Hussey (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 180–202; and Jane Marcus,

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ers, hallways, playing fields, and woods of school and university; in omnibuses and trains; at table in restaurants or on the dance floor; in the streets of London or at Hampton Court, speakers tie themselves to the truths that they utter, and are no more than this utterance, directed either to each other or to themselves. There is no subjection to a powerful other hearing such truths, for they are all trapped by the same game, with no possibility of redemption. Encircling the reader with this ring of avowals should trigger disavowal: following these truths, the novel demonstrates, leads only to despair and death—life as mortification. Yet the nine chapters are spliced by ten short italicized interludes, realist passages that sumptuously describe a day’s unfolding from sunrise to sunset on the sea, the shore, and in the sky: thus the austere play-poem that strings along progressively lengthening avowals of desolation is tied together with short, aesthetic triumphs, as if the narrative itself were frilling for the reader. That effect was hard won, the result of rewriting and retyping and typesetting the text six times to achieve such a singular work: “I am about to embody, at last, the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning—if The Waves is my first work in my own style!” (WD, 4:53).204 Comparing the first two holographs with the published novel, five crucial biopoetic strategies emerge as Woolf transits toward greater abstraction, pressuring the reader to struggle to see: the elimination of the dominant omniscient narrator; the transformation of characters into labile outlines; the design of the chapters; the creation and imposition of the interludes; and the arrangement and flow of carefully chosen motifs. Orlando features a predominant and usually preposterous narrator. The first draft of The Waves, then called The Moths,205 begins with an equally prominent but unassuming narrator, a figure who is “telling myself the story of the world from the beginning. I am not concerned with the single life, but with lives together.”206 “Britannia Rules The Waves,” in Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century “British” Literary Canons, ed. Karen Lawrence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 136– 162. For a critique of Marcus’s key essay, “Rule Britannia,” see Patrick McGee, “The Politics of Modernist Form: Or, Who Rules The Waves?,” Modern Fiction Studies 38, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 631–650. Overlooked is the link between Elvedon and Elveden Hall, Suffolk, which was owned by the exiled Maharajah Duleep Singh (1863–1893), former ruler of the Sikh empire (and former owner of the Koh-i-nor diamond, surrendered to Queen Victoria). 204 See J. W. Graham, “Introduction,” in The Waves by Virginia Woolf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 29. 205 Alternate titles, as of July 1929: “or the life of anybody ^one^ | life in general. | or Moments of Being | or The Waves” (TW-D, I:1). 206 Virginia Woolf, The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts, transcribed and ed. J. W. Graham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), I:9. The two drafts are numbered separately, hence our citation formula TW-D, I:1, and TW-D, II:1. The carets (^ ^) indicate Woolf ’s interlinear insertions. In the first iteration, the waves are present but cancelled (TW-D, I:6).

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The first revision of this statement confounds temporality and gender: “I am not concerned with the single life but with lives together. I am trying to find in the folds of the past such fragments as time, who has broken the perfect vessel, keeps safe. So neces There was nobody to hear these words; they were spoken, perhaps not even aloud, by somebody, whose sex could not be distinguished, in this very early light” (TW-D, I:42). Late in Draft I, Rhoda muses, “Like Louis, I might have been a prophet; but I detest that masculine pose” (TW-D, I:315). With this phrase, the absence of irony or critique in the manuscript becomes apparent— up until then, there had been no “satirist, cynic, or psychologist” (O, 196) at work. In Draft II, entitled “The Waves” (TW-D, II:400), the omniscient narrator has all but disappeared, and passages of lyrical observation are burgeoning. The only sign of an implied narrator remaining in the published version consists of the single word “said,” discourse always preceding interlocutor (“said Bernard”). Clarifying the function of the seven figures was another major task. In the first draft, there are many children with many different names (but always Susan, Jinny, and Louis). Both drafts are populated by realist characters with minds rather than the caricatures of The Waves: they are articulate and active, not wooden and declamatory.207 Susan, for example, is also a writer: “Very well, she said to herself defiantly . . . & taking an exercise book, she began to write a history story, that in her story the world was different” (TW-D, I:33). When formal schooling begins and the children are segregated by sex, the boys are drawn to a new presence, that of “the handsome” Percival, “all that was heroic & desirable” (TW-D, I:104). In the first draft, his mind is unavailable but he does speak,208 once, during his farewell dinner (“Life is before us, said Percival” [TW-D, I:218]); in the second, he says just one word, “Waiter,” during the dinner, a humorous flash that hints at the satirical distancing work to come (TW-D, II:553).209 Yet, Percival haunts the narrative from the first draft; he was always going to die in India. In draft I, only an “accident” is mentioned, by Bernard (TW-D, I:242); in draft II, Neville announces, broken-hearted: “‘Percival is dead. His horse fell, & he died. The sails of the world have caught me. . . . I am dead. All my past is cut from me . . . all fun, all happiness’” (TW-D, II:562). There is one other named figure in the two drafts missing from the published text, Bernard’s auditor for his final summation and avowal of their collective life: 207 Woolf uses the Paterian/Eliotic word “impersonality” to define the strategy (TW-D, II:557); see also “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925), WE, 4:38–53. 208 Louis observes: “He won his ascendancy over us by saying nothing” (TW-D, I:215). 209 For J. W. Graham, Percival and Bernard are heroes, confirming patriarchy. See J. W. Graham, “Manuscript Revision and the Heroic Theme of The Waves,” Twentieth-Century Literature 29, no. 3 (Autumn 1983): 312–332.

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“Now, James (whom I met for the first time last night)” (TW-D, 343–345). In the book, Bernard’s generalized imperative, “Now to explain to you the meaning of my life” (TW, 155), implicates the reader more effectively. Chapter organization was equally arduous.210 Initially, there were to be at least four (TW-D, I:14), and Woolf briefly considered linking them to the cycle of seasonal change (TW-D, I:58v). Death also concludes the subsequent six-part plan: “Prelude | Education | Soliloquy | The Town | Conversation | Death” (TW-D, I:192v). By March 9, 1930, Woolf adds a chapter set at Hampton Court and specifies that Percival’s accidental death will mirror that of William III (TW-D, I:280). Three months later ( June 13, 1930), draft II has nine sections (TW-D, II:400). In both drafts, chapters or narrative segments are spatially determined and dichotomous: playing outdoors or confined to a classroom; rural and urban settings; English and foreign references. Punctuating the narrative with three dinner scenes is also a crucial aspect of rhythmic patterning: the farewell dinner for Percival, the reunion at Hampton Court, and the “phantom dinner party” between Bernard and you, ending with “the general death” (TW-D, II:757). Observations of natural life were always part of the narrative, but only gradually became separate but temporally and figuratively linked interludes between the chapters. These segments are never mere exercises in post-Romantic lyricism.211 From the outset, they are inflected by human activity, force, and violence: “The waves broke now rhythmically, crisp or crisply on the breach. beating a measured tattoo; drum, like a drum rousing the the regiment; like a & yet like a drum tapping ra rousing the col dark heads of an of oriental troop, of turbaned, . . . plumed soldiers” (TW-D, I:28). Draft II commences with a narrative prelude; it is not until the fourth iteration that separate, italicized interludes are created and imposed, to make a “vague yet elaborate design” that would give the “book the right shape. . . . The interludes are very difficult, yet I think essential; so as to bridge & also give a background—the sea; insensitive nature—I dont know” (WD, 3:285). As of July 1, 1931, she is drafting nine “Interludes” (TW-D, 744). (Three months away from publication, Woolf has yet to write the tenth: “The waves broke on the shore” [TW 192].) In a separate notebook she reminds herself that the “rhythm of the waves must be kept going all the time” (TW-D, II:749). How to organize and shape the textual “assembly” is also a constant

210 In draft I, new segments are indicated with an asterisk (*); they are rarely numbered. In the published book, flow is enhanced by the absence of any numbering. 211 See Finn Fordham, I Do I Undo I Redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves in Hopkins, Yeats, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), for the suggestion that the interludes are neutrally written pastorals.

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concern: “here spiral, there straight, a conglomeration . . . these convolutions” (TW-D, I:191). Circularity is noted throughout the drafts, in natural and human terms: “Each felt here is the world, complete, circular; spinning self-centred” (TW-D, I:16; see also TW-D, II:553, 554, 654). In draft II, Louis states, “Here is the little book which contains a sentence,—as it were a ring. . . . And you all ignore it. And I cannot translate it, so that its binding power—for such I interpret it—rings you in” (TW-D, 498–499). In the published text, figures repeatedly verbalize feeling encircled, ringed in or out, or of the ring being broken (TW, 5, 59, 65, 73, 74, 83, 85, 86, 89, 90, 91, 124, 145, 170). This effortful, intricate shaping allows Woolf to produce a more abstract version of her feminist, anti-war critique, for The Waves fictionalizes the transhistorical subject of desire in terms of the love of power. All six figures are connected by their unwavering adoration of Percival: “‘But without Percival there is no solidity. We are silhouettes, hollow phantoms moving mistily without a background,’” says Neville in yet another metatextual moment (TW, 77). Like Orlando, Percival is the stuff of myth and legend, yet this Arthurian Grail knight is also the one who fails. Thus the great heroic quest is satirized as a collective quest for a hero in Woolf ’s novel, which exposes masculinity as perpetual adolescence: “He is conventional; he is a hero. The little boys trooped after him across the playing-fields. They blew their noses as he blew his nose, but unsuccessfully, for he is Percival. Now, when he is about to leave us, to go to India . . . [we] who yelped like jackals biting at each other’s heels now assume the sober and confident air of soldiers in the presence of their captain” (TW, 77). Thus Bernard, the would-be writer, approvingly traces the network of feelings, emotions, and identifications connecting playing fields to battlefields. While fascism is rising in Europe,212 Woolf’s text shows that this form of power both naturalizes and requires the cult of great men: “And every moment he [Percival] seems to pump into this room this prickly light, this intensity of being,

212 Benito Mussolini took power in late October 1922; his dictatorship is mentioned in Room (106). Hogarth Press published Mussolini’s pamphlet, The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism (October 1933). For Woolf and fascism, see Judith Johnston, “The Remedial Flaw: Revisioning Cultural History in Between the Acts,” in Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Jane Marcus (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), 253–277; Merry M. Pawlowski, ed., Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the Dictators’ Seduction (London: Palgrave, 2001); Mia Spiro, Anti-Nazi Modernism: The Challenges of Resistance in 1930s Fiction (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012); and Judy Suh, Fascism and AntiFascism in Twentieth-Century British Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). For the Hogarth Press and global print culture, see Claire Battershill and Helen Southworth, “Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and Global Print Culture,” in A Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Jessica Berman (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019), 377–395.

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so that things have lost their normal uses—this knife-blade is only a flash of light, not a thing to cut with. The normal is abolished” (TW, 75). The text’s composition suggests just the opposite: that normally, the love of toxic masculinity pervades everyday life. The lives of the six figures are inflected by this desire: like moths drawn to light (“a moth-like impetuosity dashing itself against hard glass” [TW, 55]), they seek their death. Their expectations, their poetry, they feel as painful, destructive, fell: “‘What I give is fell [said Susan]. . . . I cannot float gently, mixing with other people. . . . I shall be like my mother, silent in a blue apron locking up the cupboards.’” Neville feels that, “‘The desire which is loaded behind my lips, cold as lead, fell as a bullet, the thing I aim at shopgirls, women, the pretence, the vulgarity of life (because I love it) shoots at you as I throw—catch it—my poem’” (TW, 56). Percival dies in India like King William III did in Hampton Court, from falling off a horse that had stumbled on a molehill.213 This ignominious death— meaningless, clumsy, chance event—does not alter the figures’ shared obsession with their hero. The text addresses Orlando’s question, “Who are ‘we’?,” by moving from singular identities to collective experience. As Bernard enjoins Neville, “let me then create you. (You have done as much for me.)” (TW, 54). Ethical matters are studiously avoided by the seven, practices of freedom never considered. Neville takes solace in knowing that, “‘After all, we are not responsible. We are not judges. We are not called upon to torture our fellows with thumbscrews and irons . . . to mount pulpits and lecture them on pale Sunday afternoons’” (TW, 127). Bernard shamelessly prefers to “stand here in the street, taking no part, watching the omnibuses, without desire. . . . Having dropped off satisfied like a child from the breast, I am at liberty now to sink down, deep, into what passes, this omnipresent, general life. . . . Then individuality asserts itself ’” (TW, 145, 71). Yet, individuality itself is not singular: “it becomes clear” to Bernard “‘that I am not one and simple, but complex and many. Bernard in public, bubbles; in private, is secretive. . . . I have to effect different transitions; have to cover the entrances and exits of several different men who alternately act their parts as Bernard. . . . But “joined to the sensibility of a woman” (I am here quoting my own biographer) “Bernard possessed the logical sobriety of a man”’” (TW, 48). Doubling down on allusions to Orlando, Bernard asks: “‘which of these people am I? It depends so much upon the room. When I say to myself, “Bernard,” who comes?’” (TW, 51). Networks of feelings extending across space

213 The six figures are blind to the similarity between the deaths (TW, 146). In Room, Mary Beton dies from falling off a horse in Bombay (Room, 37), figuratively reiterating the fall of empire. Ironically, her death provides the £500 inheritance enabling the lecturer to write: another network of relations among power, knowledge, and writing.

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and time replace knowledge. Rhoda, who hates “all details of individual life,” laments that she is “‘fixed here to listen. An immense pressure is on me. I cannot move without dislodging the weight of centuries. A million arrows pierce me. Scorn and ridicule pierce me. . . . I am to be broken. . . . I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rock with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room’” (TW, 66–7). The reader is stranded by such aporetic laments: should they be read as expressions of humanity’s universal suffering or as white, gendered, privileged histrionics serving as alibi for abdicating ethics? Such passages also address Orlando’s other question, “What is an ‘age’?” The answer is equally disquieting: an age is collective life experienced in a continuous present that nevertheless extends transhistorically, as made manifest in the soliloquies imposed on the reader who is forced, “fixed here to listen” (TW, 66). The figures’ lives begin with the twentieth century, as indicated by the portrait of Alexandra of Denmark (Queen Consort of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, Empress Consort of India, 1901 to 1910) that adorns the childhood classroom (TW, 14, 22); their middle-class lives in the United Kingdom would have extended beyond the book’s publication date of 1931 (in effect, drawing a future anterior for contemporary readers). The death of Percival during the emergence of India’s self-rule movement prefigures the inevitable dismantling of the British empire. The rise and fall of empires is registered somatically by figures who avow their ties to ancient Greece and Rome. Neville, the closeted intellectual who adores Catullus (TW, 20, 30, 33, 45, 55, 159) and teaches ancient Greek texts, feels like a maggot creeping “in and out of the skulls of Sophocles and Euripides” (TW, 45). Louis, the transnational businessman and secret writer, says: “‘I force myself to state, if only in one line of unwritten poetry, this moment; to mark this inch in the long, long history that began in Egypt, in the time of the Pharaohs, when a woman carried red pitchers to the Nile. I seem already to have lived many thousand years. But if I now shut my eyes, if I fail to realise the meeting-place of past and present, that I sit in a third-class railway carriage . . . human history is defrauded of a moment’s vision’” (TW, 42). Since adolescence, he has been inserting himself into tableaux extending across centuries and borders: “‘I think myself the friend of Richelieu, or the Duke of St. Simon holding out a snuff-box to the King himself. . . . But when darkness comes I put off this unenviable body—my large nose, my thin lips, my colonial accent—and inhabit space. I am then Virgil’s companion, and Plato’s. I am then the last scion of one of the great houses of France’” (TW, 33).214 When walking 214 Catullus is the ancient poet of erotic brio and elegiac tenderness; Virgil defends war, that “preposterous masculine fiction” (WL, 2:76) on an epic scale (“Of arms and the man I sing”).

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through Hampton Court, that architectural conglomeration of English royalty from the Tudors to the present, Bernard is equally caught in an effort of spatiotemporal scaling: “a King, riding, fell over a molehill here. But how strange it seems to set against the whirling abysses of infinite space a little figure with a golden teapot on his head. Soon one recovers belief in figures: but not at once in what they put on their heads. Our English past—one inch of light. . . . No, I try to recover, as we walk, the sense of time, but with that streaming darkness in my eyes I have lost my grip” (TW, 146–147). The Waves states starkly what is only implied in Orlando: without critique, the truths of governmentality shall rule, onto collective death. All six figures love the dashing Percival who embodies empire, but they also love the effect of empire and its transhistorical truths. At school, where they would have sung “Rule, Britannia,”215 Rhoda imagines that she is the Russian empress, another Alexandra, not a revolutionary: “‘The diamonds of the Imperial crown blaze on my forehead. I hear the roar of the hostile mob as I step out on to the balcony. . . . “I am your Empress, people.” My attitude is one of defiance. I am fearless. I conquer’” (TW, 35). But any rush of desire takes over and then retreats, like a wave: “‘But this is a thin dream,’” Rhoda admits; “‘It is not solid; it gives me no satisfaction—this Empress dream. It leaves me, now that it has fallen, here in the passage rather shivering. Things seem paler’” (TW, 35–36). World War I is only mentioned once, by Louis, who (like Septimus) imagines it as a heroic quest: “‘I, the companion of Plato, of Virgil, . . . [s]ealed and blind, with earth stopping my ears, I have yet heard rumours of war . . . have felt the hurrying of many troops of men flocking hither and thither in quest of civilisation like flocks of birds migrating seeking the summer’” (TW, 60). Biopoetic tactics make the reader visualize what Louis, predictably, ignores: the horrors of the battlefields and of Nazi propaganda for Lebensraum [living space]. Woolf ’s fiction counters the conventional historiography of her day, as her contemporary Walter Benjamin suggests: “A historical materialist therefore . . . regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.”216 215 This national song originated in James Thomson and David Mallet’s Alfred, a 1740 historical masque first performed at a country estate belonging to the Prince of Wales. The first and last stanzas end with: “Rule, Britannia! rule the waves: / Britons never will be slaves.” See Maurice Disher, Victorian Song: From Dive to Drawing Room (London: Phoenix House, 1955), https://archive.org/details/victoriansong029921mbp/page/n10/mode/2up. Ironically, the fact that “Britannia” is based on the Romans’ feminized name (Britannicae) for the island that they conquered between 55 and 43 BCE is often overlooked. 216 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 200. See Angeliki Spiropoulou, Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

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The British were not the first to pride themselves for ruling an empire where the sun never sets. In the Histories Herodotus notes that Xerxes I boasted, before invading Greece, “By this step we shall make the boundary of the land of Persia border on the lofty realm of Zeus. The sun will not look down on any territory bordering our own, because . . . we shall have made them all one single territory” (Bk 7.8γ, Hist, 497). Like Herodotus’s Histories, The Waves uses a ring composition, but to drown out this undying desire for domination.217 Figures 5 and 6. Two rings, one encircling the other, transform the teleological life narrative into a cycle extending into deep time. The chapters of human life begin with the writer as a child saying, “I see a ring” and finish when, as an old man, he apostrophizes, “O Death!”218 Yet the text bends this straight biographical line by making Bernard redact, in the final pages, phrases from the opening interludes: “‘Day rises; the girl lifts the watery fire-hearted jewels to her brow; the sun levels his beams straight at the sleeping house; the waves deepen their bars; they fling themselves on shore’” (TW, 188–189). The reader is thus brought back to the beginning, having experienced myriad avowals of desperation with no revelation, no catharsis: “‘What does the central shadow hold? Something? Nothing? I do not know’” (TW, 189). The interludes, usually characterized as the aestheticized progress of a day, in fact begin and end in darkness—Woolf ’s text setting the sun on the love of imperialism. Figure 5. The ring composition destroys both realist and neo-liberal presumptions of meaning, purpose, and pleasure. On behalf of the six, Bernard insists, “‘Life is pleasant, Life is good. The mere process of life is satisfactory. . . . So the being grows rings; identity becomes robust’” (TW, 170). Yet, Bernard also knows that his individuality is indistinguishable from that of his friends (TW, 179, 187), and that together they have failed to become a “‘complete human being’” (TW, 179). That failure, however, is only too predictable, as the ring composition makes manifest. Although the figures affirm more than once their desire to “spread in wider and wider circles of understanding that may at last . . . embrace the entire world” (TW, 145; 12, 72), they remain imprisoned

217 Woolf first mentions Herodotus in a 1908 review (CWE, 3:234). Her diary for October 29, 1934 states: “Reading Antigone, How powerful that spell is still—Greek. . . . I will read Plotinus: Herodotus: Homer I think” (WD, 4:257). Exposure to Herodotus might have begun with Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena. See Rowena Fowler, “Moments and Metamorphoses: Virginia Woolf ’s Greece,” Comparative Literature 51, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 217–242; and Nancy Worman, Virginia Woolf’s Greek Tragedy: Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 218 Bernard, “the unheroic, flings himself against oblivion with Ajax’s words ὦ Θάνατε Θάνατε: ‘O Death!’ (Sophocles, Ajax, l. 854).” Fowler, “Moments and Metamorphoses,” 233.

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by their familiar truths, pressured to repeat them, bound to avow. Woolf ’s ring counters the typical triumphalism of biographical narratives by drumming in sameness: none of the figures evolve as they go through the stages of life, as demonstrated by the uniformity of their speech patterns and vocal register as well as the correspondences which the ring highlights. For half the book, the reader witnesses the shared love of power experienced by the figures in their common desire for Percival, their obsession with his bodily presence, until his death, at the centre; the other half of the narrative is haunted by his absence, which evacuates their lives. Figure 6. The interlude ring encloses these figures within planetary time, with the rippling of key auditory, visual, and verbal motifs providing continuity and expansiveness, like the waves rhythmically massing and falling. The left side of the ring correlates the rise of the sun to that of warriors with their horses and deadly weapons (TW, 47, 68, 69). The first four interludes record the gradual intensification and spread of light and heat building up to the central explosion (corresponding to Percival’s death) (TW, 94–5). With all its force, the sun beats, burns, strikes across the planet, in deserts, jungles, and the sea, in pinnacles and southern villages; it lights up “the smooth gilt mosque” and English fields (TW, 93, 94). Yet the centre of the ring also brings age-old scenes of domestic labor, women beating clothes against rocks (TW, 93). The right side of the ring regresses back to darkness, coloring contemporary rural scenes with primeval stain (TW, 118, 135). The ninth interlude begins with a variation on the theme that repositions the reader in the present moment: “Now the sun had sunk” (TW, 153; our emphasis). The short tenth interlude, the only one beginning with “The waves” (instead of “The sun”), acts as a hinge for the reader—a connection to an uncharted chronotope of sound, rhythm, and movement in darkness. The possibility of writing a different future is suggested by the anterior analysis. While planning this book, Woolf asks herself: “Who thinks this? And am I outside the thinker? One wants some device that is not a trick” (WD, 3:257). One could answer that the reader produced by the text thinks this. Although the chapters ostensibly position the reader in the narrator’s place, reduced to listening to a series of soliloquies, meaning in The Waves emerges in the transit between rings, between chapters and interludes that constantly bleed into each other. More than the simple sharing of motifs, the book’s two modes of knowing and writing—lyrical interludes and stark soliloquies—embody the same struggle, satirically highlighting that the human figures’ arch declamations of feelings and truths of the age are as unthinking as birdsong, “urged out of them by the pressure of the morning” (TW, 68). The desire to please, for example, is embodied both by Jinny, adorned and frilling for the male gaze, and by the dazzling, bejewelled girl in the waves

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(TW, 40, 46). Abject subjugation is staged both by Louis, describing himself as “‘some vast sucker, some glutinous, some adhesive, some insatiable mouth,’” having “‘known little natural happiness,’” and the snail methodically pecked by birds until “‘something slimy oozed’” (TW, 130, 69). Imminent dissolution threatens both “the ribs of the eaten-out boat” gilded by the sun amid “sea-holly and its mailed leaves gleam[ing] blue as steel” (TW, 82, 46) as well as Rhoda, who says “‘I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike . . . here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat’” (TW, 46, 82). The mobile assembly of The Waves requires the reader to disengage from thoughtlessness, to read the now against the grain. Foucault’s series of lectures in Louvain is subtitled The Function of Avowal in Justice. Woolf ’s series of soliloquies and interludes produces a heterotopic fiction that could well be subtitled “the function of disavowal in fiction.” Poised on the hinge between an uncharted future and the usual life stories unraveling from promise to dissolution, the reader, stranded in the dark, the sound of waves breaking on the shore, is asked by the implied writer to find the rhythm that could produce new thoughts, new ways of becoming, in this moment of worldly time and space. For as Woolf explained to Sackville-West, “Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing . . . one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it” (WL, 3:247). Ondaatje 1: “[W]e can’t rely on only one voice” This final section analyzes how Ondaatje’s three fictional autobiographies develop strategies to disavow the acceptability of present conditions, and how their shared biopoetic tactics provide the reader with transformational heterotopic experiences. Warlight (2018), Running in the Family (1982), and The Cat’s Table (2011) juxtapose two narrative points of view that together generate a critical third perspective mobilizing the reader to co-produce new relations to truth and power. (In novels and interviews, Ondaatje credits John Berger for teaching this all-important lesson. “It’s become a kind of central thing for me,” Ondaatje told an interviewer in 2015, “it’s a literary statement but also a political statement. We can no longer rely on only one speaker; we can’t rely on only one voice.”)219 Transgeneric, transhistorical, and transnational formal 219 Michael Ondaatje, “We Can’t Rely on Only One Voice,” interview with channel/louisiana. dk, June 16, 2015, 11:30. The phrase appears in Berger’s 1972 novel G (the same year as his Ways of Seeing).

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experiments dislocate the reader’s expectations. For all three novels, we will determine how various tactics both dismantle systems of thought and engage the reader in drawing a new aesthetics of life. Ondaatje 2: Warlight Ondaatje describes Warlight as “a stricter book” that “goes like a bullet; it moves pretty fast.”220 Written during a global “war on terror,” Warlight (2018) looks back to August 1945 (when The English Patient concludes) to see how the end of World War II marked the beginning of the Cold War, when state-sponsored, “silent political” extra-judicial killings and ethnic conflicts shaped a new struggle for world domination—but from the slant perspective of a fourteen-year-old boy.221 “In 1945,” the novel begins, “our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals” (War, 5). Part One of Nathaniel Williams’s autobiography satisfies realist expectations by providing the engaging and emotionally fraught story of a teenager’s coming of age.222 The boy is haunted by feelings of abandonment (both parents leave and lie about their reasons for doing so), insecurity (living in the rubble of post-Blitz London), and anxiety (“we were not sure,” “I suppose,” and “I don’t know” unsettle the text repeatedly). Such generalized dread is revealed to be more than adolescent angst when part one ends with attempted kidnapping, murder, and mayhem among foreign operatives and British intelligence officers. Part two begins in November 1959, when the twenty-eight-year-old Nathaniel, “after some years of what had felt like wilderness” (War, 123), is recruited by the government to cleanse its war archives. There had already been a worldwide “Silent Correction” at the end of the war, a “hasty, determined destruction of evidence by all sides. Anything questionable was burned or shredded under myriad hands. So revisionist histories could begin. . . . Such were the repercussions of peace” (War, 132, 133). Nathaniel’s role is to refine these efforts through a “second wave of ‘correction’” (War, 132); secretly, however, his goal is to mine the archives for records of his mother’s wartime activities. The novel’s second part also revisits 220 “Miami Book Fair,” featuring Michael Ondaatje and Jeffrey Brown, PBS News Hour, aired November 19, 2018, on PBS (14:26), https://www.pbs.org/video/michael-ondaatje-pnxt7q/. 221 Michael Ondaatje, Warlight (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), 225 (hereafter, War). Ondaatje writes histories of the present, books “more about my time than about their time.” Dawn Marie Knopf, “Michael Ondaatje: From Archives to Page,” Columbia 47 (2010): 79. 222 Warlight’s realism is correlated to the work of Pieter Brueghel (Elder and Younger [War, 221, 247]). The ethical conundrum of Brueghel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c.  1560), in which the boy’s death is off-centre, almost overlooked, has inspired other twentieth-century poets (W. C. Williams, W. H. Auden, Edward Field). Ondaatje’s intermediality always includes the visual arts (cubism in Skin, Caravaggio in Skin, EP, and TCT).

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the first, thereby revealing how much information had been withheld, delayed, or inflected by the narrator in his determination to rewrite history as though nothing untoward had happened in the family or the nation (the 1949–1959 gap is never filled [War, 133]). Avowal is the instrument that allows scaling from a “table full of strangers” (War, 3, 144) to Cold War ethnic killings (“acts of war continued beyond public hearing. . . . committed by as many sides as there were ethnic groups across the newly liberated map of Europe” [War, 132])—except that Nathaniel chooses to tie himself to lies in order to ensure personal and national safety. Thus Warlight traces the genealogy of a contemporary global desire for, and obsession with, security, through the conduct of two main characters: Rose Williams, the one who voluntarily wages war, and her son, who prefers to remain in his beloved walled garden and smooth out the past, adjust the record, and provide alibis for both his mother and himself.223 (Thus Rose is to Septimus Warren Smith as Nathaniel is to Clarissa Dalloway.) Rose knows exactly when she joined the war: “‘Everything changed the night when I was with you and Rachel [his sister] here at White Paint [her parents’ Suffolk home], when we listened to the bombers flying over us. I needed to be involved. To protect you. I thought it was for your safety” (War, 166). She confesses this allegiance, “her hand still up, as if giving evidence, something she did not want to do,” in the middle of a rare “no-holdsbarred argumen[t]” with her son, who accuses her of abandonment (War, 166, 164). Thus Rose chooses war when her contemporary Woolf, in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” advocates the opposite: “Unless we can think peace into existence we—not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born—will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead” (WE, 6:242). All too predictably, Rose’s initial choice leads to progressively more dangerous and murderous behavior. Although she and her network are “not much better than terrorists” by 1946, Rose maintains that she “‘had work to do. I had responsibilities’” (War, 241, 165). When Nathaniel and Rachel are attacked by Yugoslavian or Italian guerilla fighters224 seeking revenge, she unhesitatingly threatens her government allies: “‘I will publicly turn against all of you, none of you will be safe’” (War, 116). By 1949, Rose is isolated, living a life of mortification and silence at White Paint, uninterested in her son or his love, hated

223 References to safety and security are scatter-shot throughout the novel: see War, 18, 32, 34, 46, 48, 51, 61, 62, 74, 83, 97, 102, 105, 116, 125, 126, 137, 139, 148, 150, 174, 189, 253, 258, 283. 224 EP elides the Shoah. Warlight cites Trieste’s concentration camp “where thousands of Jews, Slovenes, Croats, and anti-Fascist political prisoners were tortured and killed” (War, 133).

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by her daughter Rachel almost as much as by the young woman who executes her to avenge the ethnic slaughters facilitated by the British operative known as Viola (War, 167, 147–148, 237). Rose/Viola’s storyline constitutes a forceful condemnation: wars beget wars, transgenerationally. Like his father before him, Nathaniel has been badly damaged by war (War, 30, 151); like his father, he never really belongs to others (War, 8), or to himself: “If you grow up with uncertainty you deal with people only on a daily basis, to be even safer on an hourly basis. . . . You are on your own” (War, 169). As narrator, however, he constantly enlists the reader’s sympathy by infusing the story of his youth with Dickensian flair: characters like The Moth and the Pimlico Darter, the Russian dame and Mr. Florence, “the verbose beekeeper” (War, 35); daring night trips down the river Thames and its canals to smuggle dogs and uncertain merchandise; scenes of artwork theft and bustling in hotel kitchens; sexual escapades in empty houses with the intriguing girl, an unforgettable green ribbon in her hair. The reader is drawn into this “confabulist pattern” and immersed in the feelings and emotions of an insecure yet always ravenous protagonist, hungry for every sensation life can offer (War, 79). Just as Woolf comments about Dickens’s David Copperfield: “What we remember is the ardour, the excitement, the humour, the oddity of people’s characters; the smell and savour and soot of London; the incredible coincidences which hook the most remote lives together; the city, the law courts; this man’s nose, that man’s limp. . . . [T]he fecundity and apparent irreflectiveness have a strange effect. They make creators of us and not merely readers and spectators” (WE, 4:286–287). Part two of the narrative returns to such tales and alters their meaning through encounters with some of those who had been ignored or left behind: Rachel’s struggles with epilepsy and feelings of utter powerlessness and hurt, the pregnancy of Agnes, his seventeen-year-old lover, the birth of his daughter Pearl, all had been erased in the autobiography’s first part. Nathaniel doubles down225 on his choice of “blind fiction” (War, 178) when he dislocates his first-person narrative by inserting a third-person, omniscient account (War, 195) of Rose Williams’s evolution from dutiful daughter, wife, and mother to Viola, courageous, patriotic, and fearless spy (thereby exchanging one normalized, gendered patriarchal role for the other). She is captured, tortured, saved, and admired. The reader is also made to share her ambitions and passionate love for Marsh Felon;

225 The text strategically multiplies doubles. All main characters have two names: Rose/Viola, Nathaniel/Stitch, Rachel/Wren, Walter/The Moth, Norman/The Darter, Marsh/LongFlew Knife, Sophie/Agnes. Felon Marsh is “also a double-sided mirror”; Nathaniel describes his relation to his mother as rhyming reflection (War, 235, 135).

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their oysters and champagne at La Coupole followed by hours in the Bibliothèque Mazarine and great sex. But an abrupt switch back to first-person narration (War, 220) reveals that this new Roman de la Rose and all its wondrous stories have been fabricated by a son who “realize[d] that [he] would in some way have to love [his] mother in order to understand who she now was and what she had really been. This was difficult” (War, 170).226 (Rose is thus to Nathaniel what Percival is to Bernard in The Waves.) In spite of being shocked by his “mother’s activities” as “tactical executioner,” Nathaniel chooses to bind himself to lies that sustain an intolerable present (War, 225, 234). The reader is left to make sense of this “‘collage’ in which nothing has moved into the past and no wounds have healed with time, in which everything is present, open and bitter, in which everything coexists contiguously” (War, 204). Early in the novel, a metatextual passage alerts the reader to this task when the narrator muses that there must be “traditions and tropes in stories like this. Someone is given a test to carry out. No one knows who the truth bearer is. People are not who or where we think they are. And there is someone who watches from an unknown location. I remember how my mother loved to speak of those ambivalent tasks given to loyal knights in Arthurian legends” (War, 8–9). The narrator and reader must share the test of discovering the truth, simultaneously revealed and hidden in the twice-told, half-told, half-dreamed fairy tales and confabulist patterns (War, 10, 13, 229, 79). For example, reading The Darter’s dog-racing subplot allegorically reveals another layer of meaning that has nothing to do with Dickensian hijinks: tales of smuggling across borders, forged identity documents, falsified medical and family histories, maltreatment and exploitation in highly profitable illegal activities near refugee camps (War, 88) inscribe the suffering of millions of war-time “displaced persons” (“DPs”) in Europe, which the narrator prefers to ignore.227 For even though he grew up “protected by the arms of strangers,” in a house that “seemed to have collided with the world outside,” and even though he was aware of the loss of their mobility rights (having “legally crossed some boundary during the war . . . suddenly . . . 226 Nathaniel’s walled garden evokes the dominant motif of the medieval allegorical dream poem, Roman de la Rose, also written in two parts, at two different times. The text was translated and circulated throughout Europe. Warlight reverses its gender roles: the man in the garden, desiring security; the woman, the warrior-knight whose tombstone states: “I have travel’d thro’ Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion” (War, 182). 227 Harlan Whatley, “Postnationalism and the Myth of England in Ondaatje’s Warlight,” HyperCultura 8 (2019), http://litere.hyperion.ro/hypercultura/, discusses War and the postwar “globalization” of Britain. Mike Marais, “Uncertainty and the Time of the Stranger: Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight,” Mosaic 53, no. 1 (March 2020): 91–107, commends Nathaniel’s openness and constant alteration.

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they could no longer cross it during peace”), the “illegal world felt more magical than dangerous” to him (War, 8, 36, 35, 99). Then and now Nathaniel “skate[s] over and ignore[s] what might be heavy or indigestible” (War, 99). The chess mastery that Rose tries to teach Nathaniel (who considers it a metaphor for their “intimate battle” [War, 167]) can also be read as a model for the conduct of conduct: “‘defence is attack’ . . . ‘The first thing a good military leader knows is the art of retreating’” (War, 167, 169). Nathaniel, who “couldn’t sleep because strategic pathways began suggesting themselves to [him] in the dark” (War, 167), uses these very tactics to devise his autobiography, strategically planning his revelations to draw out the reader’s benevolence and sympathy, so that he might be seen as victim, rather than as one willingly accepting all the consequences of a subjectivized position. Throughout Warlight, multiple allusions position the reader in the role of the detective in search of a truth invisible to others. The collection of clues, the scrutiny of photographic evidence, of hand-written cryptic maps, the translation of foreign-language prisoner-of-war interrogations, make Nathaniel into a twentieth-century Sherlock Holmes (the nickname given to him by Arthur McCash, a senior Intelligence officer [War, 143]). One of the Conan Doyle stories that McCash mentions and quotes is “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” which elicits yet another allegorical reading of Ondaatje’s novel (War, 95, 103). (Nathaniel is to Rose as Watson is to Holmes, and Bernard is to Percival). The detective story’s title refers to the makeup worn by a middle-class gentleman when he dresses like a panhandler in the city to beg for a living and thereby achieves wealth and status (the carriage, the big house in the suburbs with the wife and children). Conan Doyle’s critique of class exploitation, however, is doubled with an analysis of the limits of knowledge to alter material conditions. The reader is presented with two similar chains of events. Watson retrieves an aristocratic addict from an opium den and returns him to his wife; Holmes unmasks the middle-class beggar and returns him to his wife. While Watson’s methods are clumsy and Holmes’s, sophisticated, neither one solves the problems at hand: the addict is not cured, the fraudulent beggar can no longer sustain his lavish lifestyle. Both are simply put back in their place. The story begins by stating that the aristocrat became an addict because he read De Quincey’s Confessions of an English OpiumEater. By implication, the story asks its reader to question the power of positivist knowledge. Ondaatje’s reader of Nathaniel’s confessions is implicitly asked: has reading Warlight altered your relation to truth and to fiction?228 228 See Marie-Christine Leps, Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 191–205.

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On two occasions, Nathaniel is presented with the possibility of thinking differently to act otherwise, and both times he chooses to prevaricate or refuse.229 When Olive Lawrence, a geographer, D-Day consultant, and ethnographer always “open to alteration,” teaches him to enlarge his perspective on the world, she insists: “‘Remember that. Your own story is just one, and perhaps not the important one’” (War, 102, 57). It is at this juncture that the reader is directly invoked for the first time, to beg for indulgence rather disingenuously: “I am always curious why Rachel and I never ventured into a life like hers and her vivid example of independence as well as empathy for everything around her. But you must remember we did not know Olive Lawrence for that long” (War, 58). Yet Rachel was paying attention, and chooses a rich and varied life: she becomes an actress, mother, and partner who walks away from her biological family but names her son Walter, in memory of The Moth, the one who cared for her and lost his life saving hers. When Nathaniel tracks down The Darter in 1959, he discovers, by reading the room and the clues it contains (War, 272), that his former paternal stand-in has married Agnes, his first lover; that he is actually the father of a thirteen-yearold girl named Pearl (Agnes, pregnant and abandoned at seventeen, had shown up on The Darter’s doorstep because she had been led to believe that he was Nathaniel’s father). Both men silently feign ignorance; their decision to keep their secrets prevents both mother and daughter from knowing of Nathaniel’s existence nearby in London. A daughter’s right to know her biological father is thus exchanged for relative peace; doubling down, Nathaniel desires nothing more than imagining the possibility of a chance encounter on a London street, one day in the distant future (War, 285, 111). Fiction as palliative for inaction (Nathaniel abandons his daughter as his father abandoned him). The reader who has learned to empathize and even pity the “parentless” Nathaniel is brought to recalibrate and reconsider, with this second sight, the ethics of his choices (War, 229). What will the reader do with such lies, with such truths? Warlight shows how binding oneself to the truths of ethnic nationalism, or to the lies that maintain it, leads to mortification and death. Both mother and son end up in Suffolk, at different times—both at stalemates. Rose at White Paint, awaiting death by execution; Nathaniel in his walled garden, utterly alone, white washing both his mother’s and his nation’s past. The reader, on the other hand, is offered another 229 Nathaniel notes that most of those tasked to cleanse the archive left within a year, for it “was no longer possible to see who held a correct moral position”; he remains at his post (War, 134).

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kind of bildung. Having been asked to read strategically, with multiple tactics reversing the force of an image or the meaning of an event, the reader must transit in “that margin between what had been thought about and what had not yet been considered” (War, 85–86). Ondaatje 3: Running in the Family Running in the Family considers other kinds of transgenerational burdens, but also delineates modes for the practice of freedom and the elaboration of self. Like The Waves, it begins with an italicized passage describing daybreak in a garden gradually brought to light and heat and birdsong. Like Orlando, Ondaatje’s “new (auto) biography” romps through centuries—but the multiplicity that is Orlando is exchanged for that of an extended family forged by global economic, political, and cultural flows. Neither fact nor fiction, but a provocative mixture of both, this fragmented, transgeneric text diagrams the process of becoming worldly. The story tells of the narrator’s return to the country he was born in and left at eleven: “In my mid-thirties I realised I had slipped past a childhood I had ignored and not understood” (Run, 22). But from the beginning, the narrator and reader are positioned in a (Damroschian) elliptical space produced by the twin foci of Canada and Sri Lanka, both former British colonies. In the initial sequence entitled “Asia,” “the bright bone of a dream” (Run, 21) suddenly wakes the narrator who, sitting up on a friend’s couch in snow-bound Toronto, is “in a jungle, hot, sweating” (Run, 21). The same “I” transits between both foci, but surrenders to neither position: “I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner” (Run, 79). Both hold the reader in thrall of sensations, feelings, and desires: one is meant to enjoy family chats with whimsical aunts, savor crab curry and fresh pineapple and brandy, revel at the sight of the light on tea bushes, hear and smell monsoon rains. The “I” narrator in Running throws the reader into the middle of an extended, raucous, fraught family whose ways of life are accessed through fragments of stories, memories, gossip, rumours, church records, governmental reports, private journals, published inquiries into the island’s flora and fauna, and a few photographs.230 The tennis and shooting parties, the drinking and dancing parties, the billiards and card-playing parties of the lost generations of the 1920s and 30s are

230 Ondaatje explains: “His [Herodotus’s] method of research was essentially to listen to everybody and then write most of it down. . . . I hadn’t read Herodotus when I was writing Running in the Family, but it seems similar to the way I listened to everybody and ‘believed’ them, receiving stories and then structuring them into a shape.” Jaggi, “Michael Ondaatje in Conversation,” 9.

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partially remembered, with pleasure and even some pride at the senseless, cosmopolitan burning of youth—Ceylon style. This initial elliptical space is almost immediately crossed by another ellipsis, between Great Britain and Ceylon, with all of the life-wrenching implications of this predatory history of colonization. For the center attracts as much as it repels; the love of power crosses borders. England is where the grandfather, Philip Ondaatje, goes biyearly to buy crystal and learn the latest dance steps, for he “had a weakness for pretending to be ‘English’ and, in his starched collars and grey suits, was determined in his customs” (Run, 56); England is where the father, Mervyn Ondaatje, and his friend (and future brother-in-law) Noel Gratiaen are sent, unsuccessfully and at great expense, for their university education; England is where the mother, Doris Gratiaen Ondaatje, eventually runs to distance herself from an alcoholic, abusive husband and raise her children by working in hotels. Yet at home, the Ceylonese who “had Sinhalese, Tamil, Dutch, British, and Burgher blood in them going back many generations,” kept their distance from the English, who “were seen as transients, snobs and racists” (Run, 41).231 But, however broad the vista, the narrator’s intense desire for knowledge is serially confounded by the insistent absence of thought among family and friends (just as Orlando’s reader is confounded by the absence of thought across centuries). The world economic crisis starting in late 1929 is mentioned only once, almost absent-mindedly: “The Wall Street crash had a terrible effect on us. Many of the horses had to be taken over by the military” (Run, 48); the 1942 Japanese bombing of Galle Face Green in Colombo is related only as it negatively impacted the grandmother’s unique opportunity to win at the horse races (Run, 50); the birth of the Dominion of Ceylon (1948) and the Republic of Sri Lanka (1972) are never mentioned. Faced with such mindlessness, the narrator eventually laments, “nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other’s presence. . . . I want to talk to all the lost history like that deserving lover” (Run, 54). Extending his search to a regional history, the narrator encounters all the other invaders of the island, and the “mad mind of travellers’ tales . . . throughout Arab and Chinese and medieval records” (Run, 64); the false maps on his brother’s wall in Toronto “reveal rumours of 231 People of “European ancestry” became “grouped together for the first time under a common goal of capitalist accumulation, were Sinhalese of various castes, Eurasians and Burghers . . ., Ceylon Moors who were descendants of Arab and South Indian Muslim traders, Tamils, and the Nattukittai Chettiars.” Neloufer de Mel, Women and the Nation’s Narrative: Gender and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Sri Lanka (London: Rowan & Littlefield, 2001), 128–129. Silva argues that racial indeterminacy belies ethnic nationalism, making both geographic and ethnic boundaries contentious in the novel.

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topography, the routes for invasion and trade” (Run, 64). Other ellipses are engaged, with the Portuguese and the Dutch, who also took over the island and its populations for centuries. Reading his surname (a Dutch spelling given to an Indian Tamil ancestor by a grateful governor, along with land and a wife) on a 1650 tombstone “removes vanity, eliminates the personal” (Run, 66). Yet the narrator can only imagine his ancestors’ lives in terms of family strife, brothers disagreeing and incapable of eating together, in a scene foreboding the island’s internecine wars (Run, 67). The island is exoticized by all, reviled by some (such as D. H. Lawrence), but always feminized by men, described as seductive, the “wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible or language” (Run, 64)— karapothas [cockroaches] one and all. As is obvious by the many correlations among colonialism, imperialism, and patriarchy displayed in the previous examples, there is always a third perspective in this fictional autobiography, that of the writing subject, the critical genealogist engaged in a history of the present and of the modern subject of desire. The writer crafts an intricate structure that shapes the reader’s experience and invites the co-production of a form of worldliness. What starts as a “perverse and solitary desire” to “touch [personal ancestors] into words” (Run, 22) becomes a heterotopic process of becoming other: neither prodigal nor foreigner, but a world citizen, “a mongrel of place. Of race. Of cultures. Of many genres.”232 Three tactics realize this strategy, which we analyze in turn: juxtaposition, prevision, and the transiting of the local to the worldly. Juxtaposition: scaling local/regional/worldly chronotopes. Two modes of apprehension are juxtaposed. There is the perspective of the narrator, the avowing subject of desire longing to assume his place in the “original circle of love” (Run, 25) that a superficial encounter with the past promises to provide; and the writer’s perspective, using the example of the Ondaatje and Gratiaen families, their circles, and their ancestors, to produce a history of the subject of modernity. The former is a figure of belonging; the latter, of exile. The narrator is producing a confessional text; the writer, a critique that unfolds, like a fan, to cool off the ardor of identification and affection. For below the veneer of geniality and high spirits lurk the spectral vectors of all that will decimate both family and country.

232 McCrum, “Michael Ondaatje: The Divided Man.” See Marta Bladek, “‘The Place One Had Been Years Ago’: Mapping the Past in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family,” Life Writing 9, no. 4 (2012): 391–406; W. M. Verhoeven, “Playing Hide and Seek in Language: Michael Ondaatje’s Historiography of the Self,” The American Review of Canadian Studies 24, no. 1 (1994): 21–38, on memory and identity in Run.

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The early sequence entitled “Jaffna Afternoons” is a good case in point. The general space-time coordinates given in the title are immediately specified by the enthusiastic narrator: “2:15 in the afternoon. I sit in the huge living room of the old governor’s home in Jaffna,” in the luxurious comfort provided by favorite Aunt Phyllis (Run, 24, 25). Strategically, the reader is simultaneously immersed in pleasures and given the means to critique them. The narrator notes, for example, that the family is only temporarily lodged in the mansion while Uncle Ned heads a commission on race-riots; that the house is situated in an old Dutch fort, with a moat, a bridge, and sentries at the gate; that Aunt Phyllis acts as minotaur in “this spacious centre of the labyrinth of 18th-century Dutch defense” (Run, 26, 25). Yet the narrator seems to pay very little attention to such markers of colonialism, preferring instead to focus on local delicacies (the crunch of crab shells in his teeth, the “ice-cold palmyrah toddy from a bottle we have filled in the village” [Run, 26]) rather than think about the crisis that caused the commission’s inquiry, or about its proceedings or findings—race-riots are never mentioned again. Similarly, the sentries are taken for granted and humorously pitied for having to stand where marsh fumes congregate (Run, 25). The juxtaposition of family get-togethers to the violent history of colonization by the writer nevertheless remains for the critical reader, made to transit between both perspectives. Present family relations are also spatially juxtaposed to patriarchal tyranny by the writer. When the group assembles in a bedroom to swap stories, the narrator notes that this bedroom has a haunted twin, with “mosquito nets stranded in the air like the dresses of hanged brides, the skeletons of beds without their mattresses” (Run, 25). The Dutch governor’s daughter, who killed herself when her father forbade marriage to her lover, has been haunting the place since 1734 (Run, 26, 27). The narrator breezily continues to note that “just as the haunted sections are avoided for sleeping, the living room is avoided for conversation, being so huge that all talk evaporates into the air before it reaches the listener” (Run, 27). In this sequence and throughout the text, the reader is made to witness the effects of colonialism and racism across generations.233 The reader is made

233 Löschnigg, “Reappraising Diversity,” discusses Running and Canada’s multicultural literature as world literature. Critics who see Ondaatje as more than the agent or victim of colonialism include Matthew Bolton, “Michael Ondaatje’s ‘Well-Told Lie’: The Ethical Invitation of Historiographic Aesthetics,” Prose Studies 30, no. 3 (2008): 221–242; Kamboureli, “The Alphabet of the Self ”; Chelva Kanaganayakam, “A Trick with a Glass: Michael Ondaatje’s South Asian Connection,” Canadian Literature 132 (Spring 1992): 33–42; Pesch, “PostApocalyptic War Histories”; Sonia Snelling, “‘A Human Pyramid’: An (Un)Balancing Act of Ancestry and History in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family,”

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to witness casual misogyny in actions and discourse, without apparent protest or even judgment from the narrator who notes in passing, for example, that a gentleman picked the colors of his racehorse, “pink and black, after a certain lady’s underwear and was proud of it” (Run, 50); that it was said that “‘Women fought each other like polecats over certain men’” (Run, 47); that his grandmothers blossomed only after the death of their husbands (Run, 41); that his grandmother Lalla was fondled by a stranger on a bus and that it was funny that the offender had not noticed that he was only cupping a prosthetic breast (Run, 42–43); that his father, disbelieving that his wife had typhoid, had forced her out of bed by hitting her (she never returned home after hospitalization) (Run, 175). Such skirmishes from a more general “war between men and women” (one of the sequence titles in the section “A Fine Romance”) work to layer and extend the truths established by the juxtapositions in “Jaffna Afternoons.” Various kinds of prose and poetry are juxtaposed. Fifth-century BCE love poetry (contemporary with Herodotus) “scratched onto the rock face of Sigiriya—the rock fortress of a despot king” (Run, 84) is spliced with poems of captive 1971 insurgents (written on walls, copied by students, white-washed by the government) as well as the poem “Don’t Talk to Me about Matisse” by Lakdasa Wikkramasinha that correlates Western aesthetics and imperialist guns. Charcoal drawings of the Insurgency that are photographed and published in a book printed in Switzerland to avoid state censorship are also brought into the mix: “The artist is anonymous. The works seem as great as the Sigiriya frescoes. They too need to be eternal” (Run, 85). Thus regional and transnational forms of tyranny are countered by a jazz-like combination of the “voices I didn’t know. The visions which are anonymous. And secret” (Run, 85).234 Like Woolf ’s, Ondaatje’s production of textual rhythms is a crucial biopoetic technique of resistance. This sequence stressing invaders, tyrants, and their opponents is followed immediately by a sequence of poems, three by Ondaatje and one from Sigiriya, that stresses the labors of workers, especially women, and the intimacies of bodies and lovers—the culture that sustains the economy and life of the island. Only in poetry can palmyrah toddy and cinnamon cease to be exotica or Journal of Commonwealth Literature 32, no. 1 (March 1997): 21–33; and Swanda Sugunasiri, Step Down Shakespeare, the Stone Angel is Here: Essays on Literature, Canadian and Sri Lankan (Toronto: Nalanda Publishing Canada, 2007). Arun Mukherjee, Towards an Aesthetics of Opposition: Essays on Literature, Criticism, and Cultural Imperialism (Stratford, ON: WilliamsWallace, 1988), dismisses Ondaatje as apolitical. 234 Ondaatje considers jazz to be the “ultimate art form,” multivoiced, “communal”; it involves improvisation, and informality—as do his texts. Jaggi, “Michael Ondaatje in Conversation,” 9.

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commodities worth killing for; instead, they are recognized as the result of the skills, traditions, and grind of the people “my ancestors ignored” (Run, 87).235 The concentration of poetic discourse provides an alternate interpretive experience; like the interludes in The Waves, these tactical shifts in emotional keys, textual registers, and rhythms keep the reader off-balance, aware that “history is always present” in transiting forms of power and knowledge (Run, 85). Such juxtapositions play havoc with conventional space and time through what Dimock calls the “relativity of simultaneity”; chronotopes can be folded like a fan, “making strange bedfellows” of fifth-century BCE and twentieth-century poets.236 “The now thus begotten,” Dimock argues, “does not in the least resemble the now legislated by the . . . government. Stretching across hundreds of years and thousands of miles, it is temporally and spatially wayward, out of step with any party line, any mechanical clock of progress. Aiding and abetting this population of nows, all unsynchronized, literature stands accused as the enemy of the state. Its projective and retrospective horizons play havoc with territorial sovereignty. . . . It holds out a different map, a different time scale.”237 Prevision: textual double-take. The narrator eagerly shares his experiences with the reader;238 the writer sets puzzles, correspondences, explanations that the reader can only realize over time. Some previsions focus on dreams and the family, others complicate the text’s unfolding or star it among a constellation of others. Admiring the spacious rooms (with doors twenty feet high) of the former Dutch governor’s fortified home in Jaffna, the narrator daydreams that “a family of acrobats [could] walk from room to room, sideways, without dismantling themselves from each other’s shoulders” (Run, 24). Later that night this scene reoccurs in the narrator’s dream of his own noisy relatives stacked in a human pyramid, talking and joking all together, all at once; without any need of consultation or thought, they simply walk “through the pale pink rose-coloured walls into the next room” (Run, 27). This double-take on the evocative image of the family’s refusal to face the wall, to consider the precariousness of their privileged lives, multiplies possible meanings and refuses just one: “No story is ever told just once” (Run, 26). The exciting force of the narrative, the “bright bone of a

235 See Ajay Heble, “‘Rumours of topography’: The Cultural Politics of Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family,” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (Summer 1994): 186–203, for a discussion of the function of these poems in Running. 236 Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” 175. 237 Ibid. 238 The acknowledgments state: “This book is a composite of two return journeys to Sri Lanka, in 1978 and 1980” (Run, 205), that is, seven years after the failed insurgency, one year after the anti-Tamil pogroms, and three years before full-scale civil war convulsed Sri Lanka.

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dream [he] could hardly hold onto,” is reiterated towards the end of the novel in a sequence entitled “The Bone”: the narrator’s instigative dream of his father surrounded by barking dogs is reenacted as a harrowing, actual event the narrator “cannot come to terms with,” which took place during a drunken fugue (Run, 21, 181). Chronologically, this makes no sense, as the dreamer would have heard of this experience much later in Sri Lanka, after the dream occurs in Toronto. The materialization of dreams and nightmares invests even light-hearted moments with terrifying chaos in reversible space-time. Transgeneric and intermedial tactics double perspectives and understandings: objects are first discussed at length and then inserted into the text for the reader to experience anew. For example, the narrator describes ancient graffiti poems and the writer later transcribes one of them directly in the text: “‘Women Like You’ (the communal poem—Sigiri Graffiti, 5th century)” (Run, 84, 92–94). The narrator describes at length in all its humor and pathos the only picture of his parents together, “the one I have been waiting for all my life,” in a sequence entitled “Photograph”; the writer then drops it into the text to announce the next section by quoting his father’s caption, “What We Think of Married Life” (Run, 161–162, 163). Incongruous titles are made to make sense—or at least acquire a richer meaning—through their reiteration in the reading process. A sequence devoted to family stories of the 1920s and 30s is entitled “Historical Relations,” which seems a bit odd when first encountered. Later in the text, however, the reader sees another version of these words, the short title of Robert Knox’s captivity tale, A Historical Relation (1681),239 which in turn is tied to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, according to the Ceylon Historical Association: “‘If you peer into the features of Crusoe you will see something of the man [Knox] who was not the lonely inhabitant of a desert island but who lived in an alien land among strangers’” (Run, 82). Ondaatje’s Running in the Family is thus related both to a Scottish sailor’s adventures while in the service of the British East India Company and to The Village in the Jungle, a novel written by another civil servant working in Ceylon, Leonard Woolf, whom the narrator recognizes as one of the “very few foreigners [who] truly knew where they were” (Run, 83).240 The sequence entitled “Tabula Asiae” (which seems at first an obvious pun to counter 239 An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon in the East-Indies: Together, with an Account of the Detaining in Captivity the Author and divers other Englishmen now Living there, and of the Author’s Miraculous ESCAPE (London: Richard Chiswell, 1681), https://www.gutenberg. org/files/14346/14346-h/14346-h.htm. 240 For an account of Woolf ’s work as a civil servant in Ceylon, see Christopher Ondaatje, Woolf in Ceylon: An Imperial Journey in the Shadow of Leonard Woolf 1904–1911 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005).

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tabula rasa) recounts the false maps of the island/mirror reflecting the desires of “each European power” (Run, 64)241 and names Ptolemy (second century CE) as one of the many mapmakers who draw at “the edge of the maps . . . ferocious slipper-footed elephants” (Run, 63). And indeed, Ptolemy’s Geographia contains a map of Taprobana (as the island was then known) entitled “Tabula Asiae XII,” featuring an elephant on the side panel.242 Thus while the narrator travels “back to the family [he] had grown from—those relations from [his] parents’ generation who stood in [his] memory like frozen opera” (Run, 22), the tactical disposition of information by the writer, the repeated recourse to prevision, propels the reader forward and backward in a process of decolonizing knowledge eventually spanning centuries and continents. Worlding: adapting, expanding the now. The most obvious example of worldly expansion of the now takes place in the sequence entitled “Honeymoon,” which never mentions either the 1932 wedding or the trip but rather presents a series of notations about popular culture (foreign films, movie stars, songs), lurid press headlines (“‘Lindbergh’s Baby Found—A Corpse!’”) sporting news, public health concerns (“The lepers of Colombo went on a hunger strike, a bottle of beer cost one rupee”), transnational cultural exchange (“Charlie Chaplin was in Ceylon . . . studying Kandyan dance”), and last but not least, imperial war (“fighting in Manchuria”) (Run, 37–38). The section title generates expectations of learning how the Ondaatjes enjoyed this key experience in their relationship, but the reader’s perspective is made to transit across the world’s faits divers. Thus the text erases the most personal, or at least the most conventional, in favor of the public and superficial. Writing a life is also always worlding it. Writing a regional history is also connecting to a transnational network: references to Michael Arlen, Jane Austen, J. M. Barrie, John Berger, Paul Bowles, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, P. E. P. Deraniyagala, Gilbert and Sullivan, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Knox, D. H. Lawrence, Edward Lear, Sir John Maundeville, Pablo Neruda, William Shakespeare, Lakdasa Wikkramasinha, and Leonard Woolf burst the text wide open. The book’s soundtrack is equally transcultural: Sinhalese baila and Italian opera, monsoon rains and Beethoven, “Rio Rita” and Camelot, German lieder and “Java 241 This argument can be correlated to Woolf ’s: women “have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size” (Room, 35). 242 Sebastian Münster (1488–1552) produced a new edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia universalis vetus et nova [Universal geography old and new] (Basle, 1540), which contained the map entitled “Tabula Asiae XII”; see https://www.raremaps.com/gallery/detail/72495/ geographia-universalis-vetus-et-nova-complectens-claudii-p-munster.

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Jive,” The Mikado and “Peppermint Twist,” Rodgers and Hart, “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” the drumbeats for devil dances, and Mervyn’s drinking songs. Strategically, familial oral history is transformed into a heterotopic process, a narrative-play-poem (daily theater, musical, lyric, tragedy, myth, legend, realism, magical realism) enmeshing various cultures into a chronotope spanning centuries and genres. Yet, the value of local culture is never lost, continuously reaffirmed: the Sinhalese alphabet is proclaimed the most beautiful in the world and displayed in the text (Run, 83); Sinhalese words are used, not always translated; Sri Lankan dishes such as string-hoppers, egg rulang, and seeni sambol are simply named, not explained or described; moods are first inscribed in Sinhala (“Thanikama”) and then in global English (“Aloneness”) (Run, 185, 190); the island’s extraordinary beauty continuously haunts the narrator and the reader. Individual lives are also wrought by multicultural energies, as exemplified by the accounts of Doris Gratiaen Ondaatje’s life. Her youthful dance ambitions are fueled by “rumours of the dancing of Isadora Duncan” (Run, 33), the radical American/European artist and choreographer who often performed in ancient Greek dress; “the lover of Tennyson and early Yeats” courageously rescues her soused husband in a pitch-black railroad tunnel when no one else would, in a “moment only Conrad could have interpreted” (Run, 149). Just as Conrad’s Marlow does not abandon Kurtz, Doris is “loyal to the nightmare of [her] choice”243 in that scene, which teaches her, however, “to become tough and valiant in a very different world from then on, determined, when they divorced, never to ask him for money, and to raise us all on her own earnings” (Run, 149). Whereas her husband and father-in-law are subjugated by their love of Englishness and use western culture to elevate their status at home, Doris and her children will distance themselves from their genteel lives, move to England (and the brothers eventually to Canada), and use their worldliness to become other. For it was “as if at the age of thirty or so she had been blasted . . . and forced herself to cope with a new dark unknown alphabet” (Run, 150). Yet global flows are opposed by the effort of worlding that starts from “Here. At the centre of the rumour. At this point on the map” (Run, 64); history is always brought back to the immediate now of the narrator’s hand, writing (Run, 24, 69, 136, 190). Towards the end of the book, the narrator imagines a trip his father took to the island continent of Australia, sailing over the back of a dragon crouching on the seabed, on his way to the Diamantina crater (Run, 188). The inclusion of a dragon in the seascape can be read as an allusion to medieval Latin 243 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. R. Kimbrough (1899), 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1988), 64.

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map inscriptions, “HC SVNT DRACONES” [here are dragons] to indicate dangerous and uncharted territories; the Renaissance Hunt-Lenox Globe (c. 1503–1507) has this inscription on the waters off the east coast of Asia. The Diamantina crater, presumably caused by a catastrophic collision occurring three hundred million years ago, extends the text’s reach to planetary time: “This too was part of the universe, a feature of the earth” (Run, 188). The overall strategy of disavowal of lives subjectivized by colonialism, racism, and patriarchy is thus confirmed by the inscription of danger and solitude and madness. By then, the narrator admits, “whatever ‘empire’ my grandfather had fought for had to all purposes disappeared” (Run, 60); his father’s life is ending in thanikama. Drunk and alone, sitting on the floor next to the toilet, he looks as ants carry off page 189 of the blue book he was reading, a page he had not yet reached; this occurrence is narrated on page 189 of the blue-covered first edition of Running in the Family. Presumably, the writer and reader having experienced this heterotopic world fiction will be able to avoid dragons and become otherwise. The final sequence of the book, “Last Morning,” returns to a pre-dawn moment, this time in monsoon rain, hearing “all this Beethoven” from the adjoining room (Run, 203): here, now, in this dark room where nothing has changed for one hundred years, yet awash with another culture’s music, the writer anticipates virtualities rendered possible by such worldly transits. Ondaatje 4: The Cat’s Table As in Warlight, the autobiographer in The Cat’s Table is seated at a tableful of strangers who teach and alter him. Once assigned to the table of least significance as a boy travelling alone from Ceylon to England in 1954 (see Introduction), the adult Michael chooses to write from various cat’s tables around the world—like the Bard at the kitchen table in Orlando. For although “those at the Captain’s Table were constantly toasting one another’s significance,” a “small lesson [he] learned on the journey” was that head tables are only “held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves” (TCT, 75). The Oronsay journey is radically transformative, as if “the velocity of some space-travel experiment” (TCT, 89) affects the boy nicknamed Mynah in ways that he can feel but not express as a child, nor fully explain as an adult. He cannot answer his wife Massi when she asks him what happened on the ship, who damaged him (TCT, 203–204). The reader, however, can identify a particularly traumatic event: Mynah, tied to the ship’s deck with his friend Cassius, barely survives the cyclone and discovers, to his terror, that the real dangers are invisible, and come from “the underneath” (TCT, 97). Hours later, the Captain’s verbal lashing comes down on both

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boys with all the hateful force of racism and misogyny: calling them vipers and “loathsome little Asian polecat[s],” and threatening to set fire to their testicles as he does to such vermin, his insults culminate with, “‘Get out! You little cunt!’” (TCT, 94–95). Mynah knows that (six years after Ceylonese independence) the Captain despises his “Asian cargo,” but the clear articulation of imperialism and patriarchy manifested in the verbal attack escapes the boy (TCT, 195). Similarly, he understands that his favorite relative and machang, Emily de Saram, feels threatened by her “dangerous” father, the “punisher” (TCT, 11); although her mother “bowed under his rules,” her grandmother provided the funds for the girl’s escape to boarding school in southern India. Even as an adult, however, Michael, who knows of Emily’s nightmares and remembers full well “‘there was nothing you could do that was right,’” still insists, “‘But he loved you’” (TCT, 251). Michael also remembers that Emily, who had “no secure map that [she] could rely on,” wed cautiously to escape from disorder, and eventually “stepped out” of the marriage because “it was ‘too cold a building’ to live in” (TCT, 11, 247, 246)—yet he continues to regard this as an individual story rather than an all too typical, gendered one. A third perspective, however, is brought to this Mynah/Michael narrative: the writer’s concatenation of anecdotes, relational tactics, and familial power dynamics throughout the text strategically makes overall patterns of systemic racism and violence against women visible to the reader.244 Documenting how endemic casual racism is on the Oronsay, entertainment activities regularly feature imperialism through the introduction of films (The Four Feathers [TCT, 86–88]), lectures on the Crusades (“the English did not go far enough” [TCT, 124]), and the Captain’s derogatory poem, a favourite “party piece” (TCT, 195–196). Without understanding the meanings or implications of the sexist interactions he witnesses, Mynah overhears a husband callously dismissing his wife’s chest pains (TCT, 171); the first entry in his examination notebook is about a man who, having failed to strangle his wife in the Delilah Lounge (because she had mocked him while playing Hearts), succeeded in perforating her ear with a fork, and simply stormed “off to his cabin” while his heavily bleeding victim was urgently cared for by ship personnel (TCT, 19); he records women identifying “sexual predators on the ship” (TCT, 172); he loves and learns by heart Mr. Mazappa’s blues refrains about “bitches” and bleeding wombs, and remembers, decades later as he is “writ[ing] this now,” the spelling mnemonic (Egypt: “‘Just 244 See Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), for the inextricable links among capitalism, racism, and sexism.

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repeat the phrase “Ever Grasping Your Precious Tits” to yourself ’” (TCT, 29, 30). Cumulatively, such anecdotes establish a pattern and rhythm of misogyny. Mr. Mazappa insists, “‘I am protecting you with what I know’” about women, yet the autobiographer repeatedly registers how men charm, infantilize, and manipulate women for their own purposes (TCT, 28). Even Ramadhin, consistently described as kind, wise, and gentle, “the saint of our clandestine family,” follows the “male habit, some wish fulfilment,” of confusing love with control when, as a thirty-year old tutor, he wishes to save his teenage student Heather Cove: “‘He wanted to . . . bring me into his life, as if I didn’t have my own’” (TCT, 155, 152). When, in her early twenties, Lasqueti is hired by the archly named Horace Johnson, a rich, charming, powerful, married man, he instructs her about art and sex in a manner that renders her as docile towards him as his seven-year-old boy (TCT, 225, 227). Eventually, she discovers that she “did not control any of the paths [she] thought [she] had freely chosen” (TCT, 222). When she finally rises up to defend both the boy and herself against this “bully who hid in his courteous power and authority,” he stabs her with the pair of scissors she was aiming at him (TCT, 227), ending their relationship. For such “men, with the kind of power that comes with money and knowledge, assume the universe. . . . In their daily life there is always a cup of blood somewhere” (TCT, 221). Scenes of disempowerment and despair multiply. Consecutive sequences entitled “Two Violets” and “Two Hearts” focus on women either trawling for suitable husbands (and weeping in failure [TCT, 158–9]) or hunting them down after they have been abandoned, from port to port (“There is a madness in women” [TCT, 161–163]). The circus performer Sunil, also known as the Hyderabad Mind, seduces Emily to use her as bait in an escape plan for the ship’s prisoner, Niemeyer. The prisoner’s daughter, Asuntha, who “appeared the most powerless person on the ship,” avows that “her life was . . . for her father” (TCT, 76, 186). The proliferation of such scenes manifests the force of biopolitical techniques disciplining children and adults into submission. Strategically, three mentors reverse such power relations, to foster reflective indocility. Fonseka, as argued in the Introduction, brings world literatures and cultures within the boys’ reach; Nevil teaches that although nothing is “‘permanent, not even an ocean liner. . . . anything can have a new life’” (TCT, 72); Lasqueti is “able to force us out of ourselves in order to imagine another’s life” (TCT, 74, 168). The narrative begins in uncertainty, twice. An incognizant third-person narrator tries “to imagine who the boy on the ship was,” and avows, “I do not know, even now, why he chose this solitude” (TCT, 4). The following section switches to a first-person, autobiographical mode and yet maintains a similar ignorance: “What had there been before such a ship in my life? . . . What was I in those

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days?” (TCT, 6, 27). Writing about this journey, which he had “barely remembered” for years (TCT, 243), allows Michael to come to terms with his past and construct a different future—to realize the education he was afforded by his mentors and his heterotopic experiences. Yet Michael is no Percival, to be idealized and blindly admired. The text constantly underlines the fact that he has been damaged as well as educated; the narrator avows: “I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall” (TCT, 141). Admitting that “[w]riters are shameless,” the narrator begs the reader’s indulgence, “But let me just say . . .” (TCT, 117). This is not a book with a program or hero, but one that teaches the need to be ill at ease and alert. After witnessing decades of liberation movements, twentyfirst-century readers can discern past patterns of racism and sexism; their future is well-known. The ethical responsibility of this worldly perspective is discussed aboard ship when Lasqueti states that “‘it is only we, the spectators, who can read that face as someone who knows the future. For what will become of her son is provided by history. The recognition of that woe comes from the viewer’” (TCT, 200–01). Thus biopoetic strategies deployed by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje—and brought to light by our heterotopic critique of their world fiction—gradually loosen the ties that bind the subject to truth, provide techniques for an aesthetics of life through which one can practice freedom and elaborate a future self: “You take that older life and you link it to a stranger” (TCT, 72).

Figures

Figure 1. The English Patient

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Figure 2. The English Patient, Chapter VII, “In Situ”

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Figure 3. The Will to Know (History of Sexuality: An Introduction)

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Figure 4. The Will to Know (History of Sexuality: An Introduction)

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Figure 4: The Will To Know (History of Sexuality: An Introduction)

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Figure 5. Chapters of The Waves

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Figure 6. Interludes of The Waves

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Selected Bibliography

Adorno, Francesco Paolo. Le style du philosophe: Foucault et le dire-vrai [The philosopher’s style: Foucault and truth-telling]. Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1996. Agamben, Giorgio.  Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel HellerRoazen. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998. Alghamdi, Alaa. “Navigating Transition: Freedom, Limitation and the Post-colonial Persona in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table.” Transnational Literature 5, no. 1 (2012). http://fhrc. flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html. Alston, Richard. “Foucault and Roman Antiquity: Foucault’s Rome Introduction.” Foucault Studies 22 ( January 2017): 8–30. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1963. Aron, Raymond. Penser la guerre, Clausewitz. Vol. 1: L’âge européen. Vol. 2: L’âge planétaire [To think war, Clausewitz. Vol. 1: The European age. Vol. 2: The planetary age]. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Artières, Philippe et al., eds. Le Groupe d’Information sur les prisons: Archives d’une lutte, 1970–1972. Paris: Édition de l’IMEC, 2003. Artières, Philippe, et al., eds. Michel Foucault. Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 2011. Artières, Philippe, ed. Michel Foucault, la littérature et les arts [Foucault, literature, and the arts]. Paris: Kimé, 2004. Artières, Philippe, and Mathieu Potte-Bonneville. D’Après Foucault. Gestes, luttes, programmes [After Foucault: gestures, struggles, programs]. Paris: les Prairies ordinaires, 2007. Ashenden, Samantha, and David Owen, eds. Foucault Contra Habermas. Recasting the Dialogue Between Genealogy and Critical Theory. London: Sage, 1999. Askham, Henry. Legal Protection of Dogs from the Increasing Evil of Dog Stealers and Receivers. London: n.p., 1844. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard Trask. 1946. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. ———. “Philology and Weltliteratur” [Philology and world literature]. Reprinted in The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present, ed. David Damrosch et al., 125–138. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Austin, J. L. How To Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Avery, Donald. “Dangerous Foreigners”: European Immigrant Workers and Labour Radicalism in Canada, 1896–1932. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. ———. The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Selected Bibliography

———. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Bakhtin, Mikhail/P. M. Medvedev. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Translated by Albert J. Wehrle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Balibar, Étienne. “Dire, contredire: Sur les formes de la parrhêsia selon Foucault” [To say, to contradict: on the forms of parrhêsia according to Foucault]. In his Libre Parole, 81–125. Paris: Galilée, 2018. ———. “Foucault et Marx: L’enjeu du nominalisme” [Foucault and Marx: the stake of nominalism]. In Michel Foucault Philosophe, edited by Timothy J. Armstrong, 54–76. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Balibar, Étienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1991. Barber, Stephen. “States of Emergency, States of Freedom: Woolf, History, and the Novel.” Novel 42, no. 2 (2009): 196–206. Barry, Andrew, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, eds. Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Fontana Press, 1977. Battershill, Claire, and Helen Southworth. “Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and Global Print Culture.” In A Companion to Virginia Woolf, edited by Jessica Berman, 377–395. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019. Beer, Gillian. Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996. Benda, Julien. “L’affaire Dreyfus et le principe d’autorité” [The Dreyfus affair and the principle of authority]. La Revue blanche 20 (1899): 190–206. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Beran, Carol L. “Ex-Centricity: Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 18, no. 1 (1993): n.p. Berman, Jessica, ed. A Companion to Virginia Woolf. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019. Bernauer, James. “Confessions of the Soul: Foucault and Theological Culture.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31, nos. 5–6 (2005): 557–572. ———. Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought. New York: Humanities, 1990. Besier, Rudolf. The Barretts of Wimpole Street: A Comedy in Five Acts. New York: Little, Brown, 1930. https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/besierr-barrettsofwimpolestreet/. Beistegui, Miguel, The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Bethell, Kathleen I. “Reading Billy: Memory, Time, and Subjectivity in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 28, no. 1 (2003): 71–89. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Birnbaum, Robert. “Michael Ondaatje.” The Morning News, January 7, 2010. https://themorningnews.org/article/michael-ondaatje. Black, Naomi. Virginia Woolf as Feminist. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. ———. Introduction to Three Guineas, by Virginia Woolf, xiii–lxxv. Oxford: Shakespeare Head and Blackwell, 2001.

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Bladek, Marta. “‘The Place One Had Been Years Ago’: Mapping the Past in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family.” Life Writing 9, no. 4 (2012): 391–406. Blott, Anne. “‘Stories to Finish’: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 2, no. 2 (1977): 188–202. Blum, Léon. Souvenirs sur L’Affaire. Paris: Gallimard, 1935. Boddice, Bob. A History of Attitudes and Behaviours toward Animals in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury Britain: Anthropocentrism and the Emergence of Animals. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. Boehringer, Sandra, and Laurie Laufer, eds. Après Les Aveux de la chair. Généalogie du sujet chez Michel Foucault [After The Confessions of the Flesh. A Genealogy of the subject in Michel Foucault]. Paris: Epel, 2020. Boldrini, Lucia. Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2012. Bolton, Matthew. “Michael Ondaatje’s ‘Well-Told Lie’: The Ethical Invitation of Historiographic Aesthetics.” Prose Studies 30, no. 3 (2008): 221–242. Booth, Alison. “The Lives of Houses: Woolf and Biography.” A Companion to Virginia Woolf, edited by Jessica Berman, 13–26. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019. Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Translated by Peter Collier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Bourriaud, Nicolas. “Michel Foucault: Manet and the Birth of the Viewer.” Introduction to Manet and the Object of Painting, by Michel Foucault, translated by Matthew Barr, 9–19. London: Tate Publishing, 2009. Boyle, Brendan. “Foucault among the Classicists, Again.” Foucault Studies 13 (May 2012): 138–156. Braunstein, Jean-François, et al. Foucault(s). Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2017. Bredin, Jean-Denis. L’affaire. Paris: Julliard, 1983. Brion, Fabienne, and Bernard E. Harcourt, “Editors’ Preface.” In Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, by Michel Foucault, translated by Stephen W. Sawyer, 1–10. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. ———. “The Louvain Lectures in Context.” In Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, by Michel Foucault, translated by Stephen W. Sawyer, 271–321. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845–1846. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Bros., 1898. ———. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford 1836–1854. Edited by Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan. 3 vols. Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press and Wellesley College, 1983.  Browning, Robert, and Elizabeth Barrett  Browning. The Brownings’ Correspondence. Edited by Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson (vols. 1–8) and Philip Kelley and Scott Lewis (vols. 9–14). 14 vols. Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 1984. Brunon-Ernst, Anne. “Deconstructing Panopticism into the Plural Panopticons.” In Beyond Foucault: New Perspectives on Bentham’s Panopticon, edited by Anne Brunon-Ernst, 17–41. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.

Selected Bibliography

Burns, Christy. “Re-Dressing Feminist: Tensions between Essential and Constructed Selves in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando.” Twentieth-Century Literature 40 (1994): 342–364. Burrows, Victoria. “The Heterotopic Spaces of Postcolonial Trauma in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” Studies in the Novel 40, nos. 1–2 (Spring and Summer 2008): 161–177. Burton, Antoinette. “Archive of Bones: Anil’s Ghost and the Ends of History.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38, no. 1 (2003): 39–56. Bush, Catherine, “Michael Ondaatje: An Interview.” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (Summer 1994): 238–249. Büttgen, Philippe. “Aveu et confession” [Avowal and confession]. In Foucault, les Pères, le sexe. Autour des Aveux de la chair [Foucault, the Fathers, sex. About confessing the flesh], edited by Philippe Büttgen, Philippe Chevallier, Agustín Colombo, and Arianna Sforzini, 85–107. Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2021. ———. “Foucault’s Concept of Confession.” Foucault Studies, no. 29 (2021): 6–21. Campillo, Antonio. “On War: The Space of Knowledge, Knowledge of Space.” In Reconstructing Foucault: Essays in the Wake of the 80s, edited by Ricardo Miguel Alfonse and Silvia CaporaleBizzini, 277–299. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Campt, Tina. “Black Feminist Futures and the Practice of Fugitivity.” October 7, 2014. Barnard Center for Research on Women. http://bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/. Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 1988. http://www.solon.org/Statutes/Canada/English/C/CMA. html. Casanova, Pascale. La République mondiale des Lettres. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Casarino, Cesare. Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Cassin, Barbara. Éloge de la traduction. Compliquer l’universel [In praise of translation. To complicate the universal]. Paris: Fayard, 2016. Caughie, Pamela. “Flush and the Literary Canon: Oh Where Oh Where Has That Little Dog Gone?” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 10, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 47–66. ———. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996. ———,  ed. Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. New York: Garland, 2000. Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Chevallier, Philippe. “Michel Foucault et le ‘soi’ chrétien” [Michel Foucault and the Christian “self ”]. Astérion 11 (2013). http://journals.openedition.org.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/ asterion/2403. Clark, Katerina. “M. M. Bakhtin and ‘World Literature.’” Journal of Narrative Theory 32, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 266–292. Clements, Elicia. Virginia Woolf: Music, Sound, Language. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. Coffman, Chris. “Woolf ’s Orlando and the Resonances of Trans Studies.” Genders 51 (2010): 1–35. http://www.genders.org/g51/g51_coffman.html. Cohen, Debra Rae, et al., eds. Broadcasting Modernism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. Cole, Sara. Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

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Colesworthy, Rebecca. Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought of Exchange. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Colombo, Agustín. “What is a Desiring Man?” Foucault Studies 29 (2021): 71–90. Concilio, Carmen. “Floating/Travelling Gardens of (Post)colonial Time.” Le Simplegadi 15, no. 17 (November 2017): 162–172. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Edited by R. Kimbrough. Original publication 1899. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1988. Cook, Victoria. “Exploring Transnational Identities in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6, no. 3 (2004), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.7771/14814374.1234. Cook, Rufus. “Imploding Time and Geography: Narrative Compressions in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 33 (1998): 109–126. Cooke, Brett and Frederick Turner. Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1999. Cooley, Dennis. “‘I am here on the edge’: Modern Hero/Postmodern Poetics in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.” In Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje, edited by Sam Solecki, 211–239. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1985. Cooley, Elizabeth. “Revolutionizing Biography: Orlando, Roger Fry, and the Tradition.” South Atlantic Review 55, no. 2 (May 1990): 71–83. Cooppan, Vilashini. “Codes for World Literature: Network Theory and the Field Imaginary.” In Approaches to World Literature, edited by Joachim Küpper, 103–119. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013. ———. “The Ethics of World Literature: Reading Others, Reading Otherwise.” In Teaching World Literature, edited by David Damrosch, 34–43. New York: Modern Language Association, 2009. ———. “Time-Maps: A Field Guide to the Decolonial Imaginary.” Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory 2, no. 3 (December 2019): 396–415. ———. “World Literature and Global Theory: Comparative Literature for the New Millenium.” Symplokē 9, nos. 1–2 (2001): 15–43. ———. “World Literature between History and Theory.” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, edited by Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 194–203. London: Routledge, 2011. Cuddy-Keane, Melba. “Virginia Woolf, Sound Technologies, and the New Aurality.” In Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, edited by Pamela Caughie, 69–96. New York: Garland, 2000. D’Alessandro, Lucio, and Adolfo Marino, eds. Michel Foucault: Trajectoires au cœur du présent [Michel Foucault: trajectories to the heart of the present]. Translated by Francesco Paolo Adorno and Nadine Le Lirzin. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998. Damrosch, David. The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh. New York: Henry Holt, 2007. ———. Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. ———. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. ———,  ed. Teaching World Literature. New York: Modern Language Association, 2009.

Selected Bibliography

Damrosch, David, et al., eds. The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Daubs, Katie. The Missing Millionaire: The True Story of Ambrose Small and the City Obsessed with Finding Him. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2020. Defert, Daniel. “Foucault, Space, and the Architects.” Politics/Poetics. In Documenta X—The Book, 274–283. Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1997. ———. “Glissements progressifs de l’œuvre hors d’elle-même.” In Au risque de Foucault, by Dominique Franche et al., 151–160. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1997. ———. “‘Hétérotopie’: Tribulations d’un concept entre Venise, Berlin et Los Angeles.” Postface to Le corps utopique, Les hétérotopies [The utopian body, heterotopias], by Michel Foucault, 37–61. Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2009. Dehaene, Michel, and Lieven De Cauter, “Heterotopia in a Postcivil Society.” In Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, edited by Michel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, 3–9. London: Routledge, 2008. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 2004. ———. Foucault. Translated by Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. ———. “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?” [What is a dispositif?]. In Michel Foucault Philosophe, edited by Timothy J. Armstrong, 185–193. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massoumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. de Mel, Neloufer. Women and the Nation’s Narrative: Gender and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Sri Lanka. London: Rowan & Littlefield, 2001. Denisoff, Dennis. “Homosocial Desire and the Artificial Man in Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (1994): 51–70. Derrickson, Teresa. “Will the ‘Un-Truth’ Set You Free? A Critical Look at Global Human Rights Discourse in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” Literature Interpretation Theory 15, no. 2 (2004): 131–152. Detienne, Marcel. Comparing the Incomparable. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Detloff, Madlyn. “Thinking Peace into Existence: The Spectacle of History in Between the Acts.” Women’s Studies 28, no. 4 (September 1999): 403–433. DiBattista, Maria. “Introduction” and Notes. In Orlando, by Virginia Woolf, edited by Maria DiBattista, xxxv–lxvii, 247–310. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006. Dick, Susan, and Mary Millar. Introduction to Between the Acts, by Virginia Woolf, xi–liii. Oxford: Shakespeare Head and Blackwell, 2002. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents.” Narrative 14, no. 1 (2006): 85–101. ———. “Gilgamesh’s Planetary Turns.” The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru, 125–141. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2015. ———. “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge.” PMLA 122, no. 5 (October 2007): 1377–1388. ———. “Literature for the Planet.” PMLA 116, no. 12 (2001): 173–188. ———. “Low Epic.” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 614–631.

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———. “Nonbiological Clock: Literary History against Newtonian Mechanics.” South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 153–177. ———. “Scales of Aggregation: Prenational, Subnational, Transnational.” American Literary History 18, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 219–228. ———. “A Theory of Resonance.” PMLA 112, no. 5 (October 1997): 1060–1071. ———. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Disher, Maurice. Victorian Song: From Dive to Drawing Room. London: Phoenix House, 1955. https://archive.org/details/victoriansong029921mbp/page/n10/mode/2up. Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Donnell, David. “Notes on The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.” In Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje, edited by Sam Solecki, 240–245. Montreal: Véhicule, 1985. Dorn, Edward. Gunslinger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Douglas, Mary. Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Doyle, Arthur Conan. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Cambria, CA: Anodos Books, 2017. Duffy, Dennis. “A Wrench in Time: A Sub-sub-librarian Looks beneath the Skin of a Lion.” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (Summer 1994): 125–140. Dumm, Thomas L. Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom. London: Sage, 1996. During, Simon. Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing. London: Routledge, 1992. Dyrberg, Torsten Bech. Foucault and the Politics of Parrhesia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Edited by N. K. Sandars. London: Penguin, 2000. Elden, Stuart. Foucault: The Birth of Power. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. Eribon, Didier. Foucault et ses contemporains [Foucault and his contemporaries]. Paris: Fayard, 1994. ———.  Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Paris: Flammarion, 1989. Esposito, Roberto. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Translated by Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Esty, Jed. “Amnesia in the Fields: Late Modernism, Late Imperialism, and the English PageantPlay.” ELH 69, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 245–276. ———.  A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Fang, Weigui, ed. Tensions in World Literature: Between the Local and the Universal. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Farrier, David. “Gesturing towards the Local: Intimate Histories in Anil’s Ghost.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 41, no. 1 (2005): 83–93. Faubion, James D. “Heterotopia: An Ecology.” In Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, edited by Michel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, 31–39. London: Routledge, 2008. Felski, Rita, and Susan Stanford Friedman. Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

Selected Bibliography

Flynn, Thomas. “Philosophy as a Way of Life: Foucault and Hadot.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 31, nos. 5–6 (September 2005): 609–622. Foldy, Michael S. The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Fordham, Finn. I Do I Undo I Redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves in Hopkins, Yeats, Contrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Forth, Christopher E. “Intellectuals, Crowds and the Body Politics of the Dreyfus Affair.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 24, no. 1 (1998): 63–91. Fortier, Frances. Les stratégies textuelles de Michel Foucault: un enjeu de véridiction [The textual strategies of Michel Foucault: The stake of veridiction]. Paris: Nuit blanche, 1997. Foucault, Michel. About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980. Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud et al. Translated by Graham Burchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. ———. Les Anormaux: Cours au Collège de France, 1974–1975. Paris: EHESS, Gallimard, and Seuil, 1999. English translation: Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2003. ———. L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. English translation: The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1972. ———. Le corps utopique, Les hétérotopies [The utopian body, heterotopias]. Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2009. ———. Le Courage de la vérité: Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II: Cours au Collège de France, 1983–1984. Paris: Gallimard, 2008. English translation: The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ———. Dire vrai sur soi-même. Conférences prononcées à l’Université Victoria de Toronto, 1982 [Truth-telling about one’s self. Conferences delivered at the University of Victoria, Toronto]. Paris: Vrin, 2017. ———. Discours et vérité; précédé de La parrêsia. Paris: Vrin, 2016. English translation: Discourse and Truth and Parrēsia. Translated by Nancy Luxon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. ———. Dits et écrits 1954–1988. Edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. 4 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. ———. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Translated by Robert Hurley et al. Vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. Vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Edited by James D. Faubion. Vol. 3, Power. Edited by James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 1997–2000. ———. Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Collège de France, 1976. Paris: EHESS, Gallimard, and Seuil, 1997. English translation: Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. ———. Fearless Speech. Edited by Joseph Pearson. New York: Semiotext(e), 2001. ———. Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. 1964. Rev. ed. with the new title, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. English translation: History of Madness. Edited by Jean Khalfa. Translated by Jonathan Murphy. London: Routledge, 2006. ———. Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966–84). Edited by Sylvère Lotringer. Translated by John Johnston. Paris: Semiotext(e), 1989.

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———. “The Gay Science,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 385–403. ———. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours au Collège de France, 1982–1983. Paris: EHESS, Gallimard, and Seuil, 2008. English translation: The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ———. Le gouvernement des vivants: Cours au Collège de France, 1979–1980. Paris: EHESS, Gallimard, and Seuil, 2012. English translation: On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2014. ———. Herméneutique du sujet: Cours au Collège de France, 1981–1982. Paris: EHESS, Gallimard, and Seuil, 2001. English translation: The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ———. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. English translation: The History of Madness. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006. ———. Histoire de la sexualité 1. La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. English translaton: History of Sexuality 1. An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. ———. Histoire de la sexualité 2. L’Usage des plaisirs. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. English translation: History of Sexuality 2. The Use of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. ———. Histoire de la sexualité 3. Le Souci de soi. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. English translation: History of Sexuality 3. The Care of the Self. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. ———. Histoire de la sexualité 4. Les Aveux de la chair. Paris: Gallimard, 2018. English translation: History of Sexuality 4. Confessions of the Flesh. Translated by Robert Hurley. New: Pantheon, 2021. ———. “How We Behave. Interview with Paul Rabinow and Hubert L. Dreyfus.” Vanity Fair (November 1983): 61–69. ———. Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. ———. Leçons sur la volonté de savoir. Cours au Collège de France, 1970–1971. Paris: EHESS, Gallimard, and Seuil, 2011. English translation: Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970–1971. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ———. “The Lost Interview.” 1971. In Open Culture. Video, 15:46. http://www.openculture. com/2014/03/lost-interview-with-michel-foucault.html. ———. Maladie mentale et psychologie [Mental illness and psychology]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954. ———. Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonction de l’aveu en justice. Cours de Louvain, 1981. Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2012. English translation: Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice. Edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. Translated by Stephen W. Sawyer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. ———. Les Mots et les Choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. English translation: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1971. ———. Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979. Paris: EHESS, Gallimard, and Seuil, 2004. English translation: The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2008.

Selected Bibliography

———. Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963. English translation: The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1973. ———. Œuvres [Works]. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. ———. L’ordre du discours. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. English translation: The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1972. ———.L’Origine de l’herméneutique de soi. Conférences prononcées à Dartmouth College, 1980. Paris: Vrin, 2013. English translation: About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980. Translated by Graham Burchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. ———. “La Parrêsia.” Anabases 16 (2012): 157–188. ———. La peinture de Manet. Paris: Seuil, 2004. English translation: Manet and the Object of Painting. Translated by Matthew Barr. London: Tate Publishing, 2009. ———. The Politics of Truth. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth. New York: Semiotext(e), 1997. ———. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984. Edited by L. D. Kritzman. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. ———. Le pouvoir psychiatrique: Cours au Collège de France, 1973–1974. Paris: EHESS, Gallimard, and Seuil, 2003. English translation: Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973– 1974. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Picador, 2006. ———. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980. ———. “Qu’est-ce que la critique?” Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie 84, no. 2 (April– June 1990): 35–63. English translation: “What is Critique?” The Politics of Truth. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth. Semiotext(e) (1997): 41–82. ———. Qu’est-ce que la critique? Suivi de La culture de soi [What is critique? Followed by the culture of self]. Paris: Vrin, 2015. ———. Remarks on Marx: conversations with Duccio Trombadori. Edited and translated by Paul Virilio. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999. ———. Sécurité, territoire, population: Cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978. Paris: EHESS, Gallimard, and Seuil, 2004. English translation: Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ———. La société punitive: Cours au Collège de France, 1972–1973. Paris: EHESS, Gallimard, and Seuil, 2013. English translation: The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. ———. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. English translation: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1978. ———. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Edited by Luther Martin and Huck Gutman, et al. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. ———. Vérité et subjectivité: Cours au Collège de France, 1980–1981. Paris: EHESS, Gallimard, and Seuil, 2014. English translation: Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980–1981. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

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———,  ed. Herculine Barbin, dite Alexina B. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. English translation: Herculine Barbin (Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite). Translated by Richard McDougall. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. ———, ed. Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère. Un cas de parricide au XIXe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother. . . . A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century. Translated by Frank Jellinek. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Fowler, Rowena. “Moments and Metamorphoses: Virginia Woolf ’s Greece.” Comparative Literature 51, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 217–242. Franche, Dominique, et al. Au risque de Foucault [At the Risk of Foucault]. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1997. Fraser, C. F. Control of Aliens in the British Commonwealth of Nations. London: Hogarth, 1940. Freeman, Mark. “‘Splendid Display; Pompous Spectacle’: Historical Pageants in TwentiethCentury Britain.” Social History 38, no. 4 (2013): 423–455. Friedman, Rachel D. “Deserts and Gardens: Herodotus and The English Patient.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 15, no. 3 (Winter 2008): 47–84. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Why Not Compare?” In Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, 34–45. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Gabler, Neal. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. New York: Anchor, 1989. Galison, Peter. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. New York: Norton, 2003. Ganguly, Debjani. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Garber, Marjorie. Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses. London: Pantheon, 2000. Gefen, Alexandre. Inventer une vie. La fabrique littéraire de l’individu [To invent a life. The literary factory of the individuum]. Paris: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2015. Genocchio, Benjamin. “Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference: The Question of ‘Other’ Spaces.” In Postmodern Cities and Spaces, edited by Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson, 35–46. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Gilgamesh. Translated by Stephen Mitchell. New York: Free Press, 2004. Gill, Richard. Happy Rural Seat: The English Country House and the Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972. Gilsenan, Nordin, et al., eds. Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. Goffman, Erving. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Anchor Books and Random House, 1961. Goldman, Marlene. “Representations of Buddhism in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6, no. 3 (2004), Article 4. ———.  Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2005. Gordon, Colin. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Goudie, Andrew. Great Desert Explorers. London: Silphium Press, 2018. Graham, J. W. “Manuscript Revision and the Heroic Theme of The Waves.” Twentieth-Century Literature 29, no. 3 (Autumn 1983): 312–332.

Selected Bibliography

Graham-Dixon, Andrew. Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. London: Allen Lane and Penguin Press, 2010. Granjon, Marie-Christine, ed. Penser avec Michel Foucault. Théorie critique et pratiques politiques [Thinking with Michel Foucault: Critical theory and political practices]. Paris: Karthala, 2005. Greenberg, Jonathan. The Cambridge Introduction to Satire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Gros, Frédéric. “Avertissement” [Notice]. In Les Aveux de la chair. Histoire de la sexualité 4 [The confessions of the flesh. History of Sexuality 4], by Michel Foucault, I–XI. Paris: Gallimard, 2018. ———. “Course Context.” In Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980–1981, by Michel Foucault, translated by Graham Burchell, 301–15, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. ———. “Notice.” In Histoire de la sexualité 2 et 3, by Michel Foucault. In his Œuvres. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols., 1529–1542. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. ———.“De la supériorité des cours” [On the superiority of the courses]. In Michel Foucault, edited by Philippe Artières et al., 156–159. Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 2011. Le Groupe d’Information sur les prisons: Archives d’une lutte, 1970–1972. Edited by Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel. Paris: IMEC, 2003. Guarrasi, Vincenzo. “Paradoxes of Modern and Postmodern Geography: Heterotopia of Landscape and Cartographic Logic.” In Postmodern Geography: Theory and Praxis, edited by Claudio Minca, 226–237. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Gurria-Quintana, Angel. “Skins of the Lion.” Financial Times, September 15, 2007. Hadot, Pierre. “Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy.” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 483–505. ———. “Réflexions sur la notion de ‘culture de soi’ [Reflections on the notion of ‘the culture of the self ’].’” In Michel Foucault Philosophe, edited by Timothy J. Armstrong, 54–76. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Halperin, David M. “Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality.” Representations 63 (Summer 1998): 93–120. Hankins, Leslie Kathleen. “Orlando: ‘A Precipice Marked V: Between ‘A Miracle of Discretion’ and ‘Lovemaking Unbelievable: Indiscretions Incredible.’” In Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer, 180–202. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Harrison, Gary. “Conversation in Context: A Dialogic Approach to Teaching World Literature.” In Teaching World Literature, edited by David Damrosch, 205–215. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009. Harrison, Jane. Alpha and Omega. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915. ———. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1st ed. 1903, 2nd ed. 1908. https://archive.org/details/prolegomenatostu00harr. Harrison, Keith. “Montage in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.” Journal of Canadian Poetry 3, no. 1 (1980): 32–38. Hart, Antonio, and Michael Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Hart-Davis, Rupert, and Merlin Holland, eds. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. London: Fourth Estate, 2000.

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Havens, Earle. Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. Boston: University Press of New England, 2001. Heble. Ajay. “Michael Ondaatje and the Problem of History.” Clio 19, no. 2 (1990): 97–110. ———. “‘Rumours of topography’: The Cultural Politics of Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family.” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (Summer 1994): 186–203. Hekman, Susan, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Helgesson, Stefan, and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen. Literature and the World. London: Routledge, 2020. Herodotus. The Histories. Edited by Robert B. Strassler. Translated by Andrea L. Purvis. New York: Anchor Books, 2009. Hetherington, Kevin. The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. London: Routledge, 1997. Higgins, Lesley, and Marie-Christine Leps. “Becoming Pluricultural in Ondaatje’s Oronsay.” In Pluri-Culture and Migrant Writings, edited by Elizabeth Sabiston and Robert Drummond, 383–394. Sudbury: Laurentian University, 2014. ———. “A ‘Complex, Multiform Creature’ No More: Governmentality Getting Wilde.” College Literature 35, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 96–119. ———. “‘Facing Governments’: Imagining World Citizenship with Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje.” In Mapping Nations, Locating Citizens: Interdisciplinary Discussions on Nationalism and Identity, edited by Daniel Hambly, 7–21. Toronto: Humber Press, 2017. ———. “Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando: The Subject of Time and Generic Transactions.” In Classics in Film and Fiction, edited by Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, et al., 116–36. London: Pluto Press, 2000. ———. “Passport, Please: Legal, Literary, and Critical Fictions of Identity.” In Undisciplining Literature: Literature, Law, and Culture, edited by Kostas Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades, 117–168. Bern: Peter Lang, 1999. ———. “The Politics of Life after Death: Ondaatje’s Ghost.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45, no. 2 ( June 2009): 201–212. ———. “‘Something so varied and wandering’: ‘Restless’ Subjectivity in Virginia Woolf ’s Fiction.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 95 (Spring/Summer 2019): 44–47. Hilgert, Emilia. “Nous autres/vous autres/eux autres, pronoms catégoriels” [We others, you others, those others, categorical pronouns]. Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française—CMLF 2012 SHS Web of Conferences, 1 (2012). https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/. Holland, Merlin, ed. Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde. London: Fourth Estate, 2003. Hovey, Jaime. “‘Kissing a Negress in the Dark’: Englishness as a Masquerade in Woolf ’s Orlando.” PMLA 112, no. 3 (May 1997): 393–404. Howell, Phillip. At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. ———.  A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

Selected Bibliography

Ingham, John M. “Matricidal Madness in Foucault’s Anthropology: The Pierre Rivière Seminar.” Ethos 35, no. 2 ( June 2007): 130–158. Ittner, Jutta. “Part Spaniel, Part Canine Puzzle: Anthropomorphism in Woolf ’s Flush and Auster’s Timbuktu.” Mosaic 39, no. 4 (2006): 181–196. Jaggi, Maya. “Michael Ondaatje in Conversation with Maya Jaggi.” Wasafiri 16, no. 32 (September 2000): 5–11. Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 347–357. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Jardim, Fabiana. “A Brief Genealogy of Governmentality Studies: The Foucault Effect and Its Developments. An Interview with Colin Gordon.” Educação e Pesquisa 39, no. 4 (2013): 1067–1087. Johnson, Peter. “The Geographies of Heterotopia.” Geography Compass 7 (2013): 790–803. ———. “Brief History of the Concept of Heterotopia (revised).” Heterotopian Studies (2016). http://www.heterotopiastudies.com. ———. “Unravelling Foucault’s ‘different spaces.’” History of the Human Sciences 19, no. 4 (2006): 75–90. Johnston, Judith. “The Remedial Flaw: Revisioning Cultural History in Between the Acts.” In Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration, edited by Jane Marcus, 253–277. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Jones, Colin, and Roy Porter, eds. Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine, and the Body. London: Routledge, 1994. Jones, Manina. “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Scripting the Docudrama.” In That Art of Difference: ‘Documentary-Collage’ and English-Canadian Writing, 68–84, 165–166. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Kadir, Djelal. Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. ———. “To World, To Globalize: World Literature’s Crossroads.” In World Literature in Theory, edited by David Damrosch, 264–270. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. Kamboureli, Smaro. “The Alphabet of the Self: Generic and Other Slippages in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family.” In Reflections: Autobiography and Canadian Literature, edited by K. P. Stich, 79–91. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988. ———. “Outlawed Narrative: Michael Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid.” Sagetrieb 7, no. 1 (1988): 115–129. Kamuf, Peggy. “Penelope at Work: Interruptions in A Room of One’s Own.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 16, no. 1 (Autumn 1982): 5–18. Kanaganayakam, Chelva. “A Trick with a Glass: Michael Ondaatje’s South Asian Connection.” Canadian Literature 132 (Spring 1992): 33–42. ———. “In Defense of Anil’s Ghost.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 37, no. 1 (2006): 5–26. Karlin, Daniel, ed. Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Courtship Correspondence 1845–1846. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Kelley, Ninette, and Michael Trebilcock. The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Kertzer, J. M. “On Death and Dying: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.” English Studies in Canada 1, no. 1 (1975): 86–96.

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Khor, Lena. Human Rights Discourse in a Global Network: Books beyond Borders. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Kleeblatt, N. L., ed. The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, Justice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Kleiber, Georges. “Déictiques, embrayeurs, ‘token-reflexives,’ symboles indexicaux: comment les définir?” [Deictics, shifters, ‘token-reflexives,’ indexical symbols: how to define them?]. L’information grammatical 30 (1986): 3–22. ———.  Anaphores et pronoms [Anaphores and pronouns]. Brussels: Duculot, 1994. Knopf, Dawn Marie. “Michael Ondaatje: from Archives to Page.” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art 47 (2010): 76–85. Küpper, Joachim, ed. Approaches to World Literature. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013. Latham, Robert. “What Are We? From a Multicultural to a Multiversal Canada.” International Journal 63, no. 1 (Winter 2007/2008): 23–41. Laurence, Patricia. “The Facts and Fugue of War: From Three Guineas to Between the Acts.” In Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth, edited by Mark Hussey, 225–245. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991. le Blanc, Guillaume. La pensée Foucault [The Foucault thought]. Paris: Ellipses, 2006. Lee, Judith. “‘This Hideous Shaping and Moulding’: War and The Waves.” In Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth, edited by Mark Hussey, 180–202. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Lemke, Thomas. Bio-Politics: An Advanced Introduction. Translated by Eric Frederick Trump. New York: New York University Press, 2011. ———. Foucault’s Analysis of Modern Governmentality: A Critique of Political Reason. Translated by Erik Butler. London: Verso, 2019. Leps, Marie-Christine. Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in NineteenthCentury Discourse. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. ———. “Normal Deviance: The Dreyfus Affair.” Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 61 (April 2005): 287–301. ———. “Terror-Time in Network-Centric Battlespace: DeLillo’s Later Fiction.” Canadian Review of American Studies 45, no. 3 (Winter 2015): 400–429. Littlejohn, David. The Fate of the English Country House. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Lorenzini, Daniele. “The Emergence of Desire: Notes toward a Political History of the Will.” Critical Inquiry 45 (2019): 448–470. Löschnigg, Martin. “Reappraising Diversity: Canadian Multicultural Literature as World Literature in English.” In Ideas Crossing the Atlantic: Theories, Normative Conceptions, and Cultural Images, edited by Waldemar Zacharasiewicz and Christoph Irmscher, 343–360. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2019. Lokke, Kari Elise. “Orlando and Incandescence: Virginia Woolf ’s Comic Sublime.” Modern Fiction Studies 38, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 235–252. Lowry, Glen. “The Representation of ‘Race’ in Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6, no. 3 (2004), Article 7. http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/ vol6/iss3/. Lundgren, Jodi. “‘Colour Disrobed Itself from the Body’: The Racialized Aesthetics of Liberation in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion.” Canadian Literature 190 (Autumn 2006): 15–29.

Selected Bibliography

Luxon, Nancy, ed. Archives of Infamy: Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Marais, Mike. “Uncertainty and the Time of the Stranger: Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight.” Mosaic 53, no. 1 (March 2020): 91–107. Marcus, Jane. “Britannia Rules The Waves.” In Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of TwentiethCentury “British” Literary Canons, edited by Karen Lawrence, 136–162. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Martin, Gary D. “Ring Composition and Related Phenomena in Herodotus.” MA independent study, University of Washington, Seattle, 2004. https://faculty.washington.edu/garmar/RingCompositionHerodotus.pdf. Martin, Luther, Huck Gutman, et al., eds. Introduction to Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther Martin et al., 3–8. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. ———. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. McCrum, Robert. “Michael Ondaatje: The Divided Man.” The Guardian, August 27, 2011. http:// www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/28/. McDonell, Jennifer. “Ladies’ Pets and the Politics of Affect: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush.” Australian Literary Studies 25, no. 2 (2010): 17–34. McGee, Patrick. “The Politics of Modernist Form: Or, Who Rules The Waves?” Modern Fiction Studies 38, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 631–650. McGushin, Edward F. Foucault’s Askēsis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. McHale, Brian. “Telling Stories Again: On the Replenishment of Narrative in the Postmodern Long Poem.” The Yearbook of English Studies 30 (2000): 250–262. McLaren, Margaret A. Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity. New York: SUNY Press, 2002. McNay, Lois. Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Melzak, R., et al. “The Brompton Mixture versus Morphine Solution Given Orally: Effects on Pain.” The RVH Manual on Palliative/Hospice Care: A Resource Book, edited by Ina Ajemian and B. M. Mount. Montreal: Royal Victoria Hospital, Palliative Care Service, 1980. https://www. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1818901/. Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000; reissue with a new preface, 2012. ———. “On Comparison: Who is Comparing What and Why?” In Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, 99–119. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Miller, Marlowe. “Unveiling ‘the dialectic of culture and barbarism’ in British Pageantry: Virginia Woolf ’s Between the Acts.” Papers on Language and Literature 13, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 134–161. Mitchell, Stephen. “Introduction.” To Gilgamesh, translated by Stephen Mitchell, 1–64. New York: Free Press, 2004. Moignet, Gérard. Systématique de la langue française [Systematics of the French language]. Paris: Klincksieck, 1981. Monk, Ray. “This Fictitious Life: Virginia Woolf on Biography, Reality, and Character.” Philosophy and Literature 31, no. 1 (April 2007): 1–40.

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Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review ( January–February 2000): 54–68. ———. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. London: Verso, 2007. Moss, Ann. Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Mukherjee, Arun. Towards an Aesthetics of Opposition: Essays on Literature, Criticism, and Cultural Imperialism. Stratford, ON: Williams-Wallace, 1988. Nemerow, Vara, and Merry Pawlowski, eds. Three Guineas Scrapbooks: A Digital Archive. http:// woolf-center.southernct.edu/. Novak, Amy. “Textual Hauntings: Narrating History, Memory, and Silence in The English Patient.” Studies in the Novel 36, no. 2 (2004): 206–231. O’Malley, Michael. Keeping Time: A History of American Time. New York: Viking, 1990. Ondaatje, Christopher. Woolf in Ceylon: An Imperial Journey in the Shadow of Leonard Woolf 1904–1911. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005. Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2000. ———. The Cat’s Table. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2011. ———. Coming Through Slaughter. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1976. ———. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1970. ———. The Cinnamon Peeler. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997. ———. The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. Toronto: Vintage, 2002. ———.  Divisadero. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007. ———. The English Patient. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992. ———.  In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987. ———. “Miami Book Fair.” Featuring Michael Ondaatje and Jeffrey Brown. PBS News Hour. Aired November 19, 2018, on PBS. https://www.pbs.org/video/michael-ondaatje-pnxt7q/. ———. “Pale Flags: Reflections on Writing Anil’s Ghost.” Wasafiri 42 (2004): 61–2. ———. Running in the Family. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982. ———. Warlight. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. ———. “We Can’t Rely on Only One Voice,” Interview with channel/louisiana.dk, June 16, 2015. Oram, Alison. “Sexuality in Heterotopia: Time, Space, and Love between Women in the Historic House.” Women’s History Review 21, no. 4 (September 2012): 533–551. Overbye, Karen. “Re-Membering the Body: Constructing the Self as Hero in In the Skin of a Lion.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 17, no. 2 (1992): n.p. https:// journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/8161/9218. Paltrinieri, Luca. “Biopouvoir, les sources historiennes d’une fiction politique” [Biopolitics, the historical sources of a political fiction]. Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 60, nos. 4/5 bis (2013): 49–75. Pawlowski, Merry M., ed. Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the Dictators’ Seduction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Peach, Linden. “Editing Flush and Woolf ’s Editing in Flush.” In Woolf Editing/Editing Woolf: Selected Papers from the Eighteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, edited by Eleanor McNees and Sara Veglahn, 201–205. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2009.

Selected Bibliography

Pease-Watkin, Catherine. “Bentham, Samuel  (1757–1831).” Oxford Dictionary of National Bio­ graphy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. http://www.oxforddnb.com/. Pesch, Josef. “Cultural Clashes? East meets West in Michael Ondaatje’s novels.” In Across the Lines: Intertextuality and Transcultural Communication in the New Literatures in English, edited by Wolfgang Klooss, 65–76. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. ———. “Post-Apocalyptic War Histories: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 28, no. 2 (1997). https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index. php/ariel/article/view/33901. Pollock, Griselda. Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. Ramazanoglu, Caroline, ed. Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism. London: Routledge, 2002. Ransom, John S. Foucault’s Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Ratti, Manav. “Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and the Aestheticization of Human Rights.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 35, nos. 1–2 (2004) https://journalhosting.ucalgary. ca/index.php/ariel/issue/view/2406. Rauwerda, Antje M. “Third Culture Time and Place: Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table.” Mosaic 49, no. 3 (September 2016): 39–53. Ray, Sangeeta. “Memory, Identity, Patriarchy: Projecting a Past in the Memoirs of Sara Suleri and Michael Ondaatje.” Modern Fiction Studies 39, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 37–58. Reid, Julian. “Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault.” Social Text 24, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 127–152. Richlin, Amy. “Foucault’s History of Sexuality: A Useful Theory for Women?” In Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity, edited by David H. J. Larmour et al., 138–170. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Roberts, Barbara. “Shovelling Out the ‘Mutinous’: Political Deportation from Canada Before 1936.” Labour/Le Travail 18 (Fall 1986): 77–110. ———. Whence They Came: Deportation from Canada 1900–1935. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988. Rose, Nikolas. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Rosenbaum, S. P., ed. Preface and Introduction to Women & Fiction, by Virginia Woolf, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum, ix–xlii. Oxford: Shakespeare Head and Blackwell, 1992. Ryan, Deborah Sugg. “The Man who Staged the Empire: Remembering Frank Lascelles in Sibford Gower, 1875–2000.” In Material Memories: Design and Evocation, edited by Marius Kwint et al., 159–179. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1999. ———. “Staging the Imperial City: The Pageant of London, 1911.” In Imperial Cities: Landscape, Performance and Identity, edited by Felix Driver and David Gilbert, 117–135. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. ———. “‘Pageantitis’: Frank Lascelles’ 1907 Oxford Historical Pageant, Visual Spectacle and Popular Memory.” Visual Culture in Britain 8, no. 2 (2007): 63–82. Ryan, Derek. “Orlando’s Queer Animals.” In A Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Jessica Berman, 109–120. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019.

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———. “The Question of the Animal in Flush.” In his Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2013. Ryan, Oscar. Deported! Ottawa: Canadian Labour Defense League, 1932. Saint-Amour, Paul K. “Mrs. Dalloway: Of Clocks and Clouds.” In A Companion to Virginia Woolf, edited by Jessica Berman, 79–94. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2019. Sakellariadis, Artemi. “A Wider Sense of Normal? Seeking to Understand Pierre Rivière through the Lens of Autism.” Emotion, Space and Society 5, no. 4 (November 2012): 269–278. Saldanha, Arun. “Heterotopia and Structuralism.” Environment and Planning 40, no. 9 (2008): 2080–2096. http://www.swetswise.com. Sawicki, Jana. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body. London: Routledge, 1991. Sawyer, Stephen W., and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, eds. Foucault, Neoliberalism, and Beyond. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. Scanlan, Margaret. “Anil’s Ghost and Terrorism’s Time.” Studies in the Novel 36, no. 3 (2004): 302–317. Schaefer, Josephine. “The Great War and ‘This Late Age of World’s Experience’ in Cather and Woolf.” In Virginia Woolf and War, edited by Mark Hussey, 134–150. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Schneider, Karen. “Re-Plotting the War(s): Virginia Woolf ’s Radical Legacy.” Loving Arms: British Women Writing the Second World War. Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1996. Schrift, Alan D. “Reconfiguring the Subject: Foucault’s Analytics of Power.” In Reconstructing Foucault: Essays in the Wake of the 80s, edited by Ricardo Miguel Alfonse and Silvia CaporaleBizzini, 185–199. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Scobie, Stephen. “The Reading Lesson: Michael Ondaatje and the Patients of Desire.” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (Summer 1994): 92–106. ———. “Two Authors in Search of a Character.” Canadian Literature/Littérature Canadienne 54 (Autumn 1972): 37–55. Scott, Bonnie Kime, “The Subversive Mechanics of Woolf ’s Gramophone in Between the Acts.” In Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, edited by Pamela Caughie, 97–114. New York: Garland, 2000. ———. “Woolf, Barnes and the Ends of Modernism: An Antiphon to Between the Acts.” In Virginia Woolf: Themes and Variations. Selected Papers from the Second Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, 25–32. New York: Pace UP, 1993. Scott, F. R. “Immigration Act: False Arrest, Illegal Treatment of Arrested Person.” Canadian Bar Review 14, no. 1 ( January 1936): 62–67. Senellart, Michel. “Gouverner l’être-autre. La question du corps chrétien” [To govern the beingother. The question of the Christian body]. In Foucault(s), edited by Jean-François Braunstein, et al., 205–221. Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2017. Seshagiri, Urmila. “Orienting Virginia Woolf: Race, Aesthetics, and Politics in To the Lighthouse.” Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 58–84. Sheringham, Michael. “Michel Foucault, Pierre Rivière and the Archival Imaginary.” Comparative Critical Studies 8, nos. 2–3 (2011): 235–257. Shih, Shu-mei. “Comparison as Relation.” In Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, 79–98. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Silva, Neluka. “The Anxieties of Hybridity: Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37, no. 2 (2002): 71–84. Silver, Brenda R. Virginia Woolf Icon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Selected Bibliography

———. Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Silver, Brenda R., ed. “‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’: Virginia Woolf ’s Last Essays,” Twentieth-Century Literature 25, nos. 3–4 (Autumn‒Winter 1979), 356–441. Simpson, D. Mark. “Minefield Readings: The Postcolonial English Patient.” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (1994): 216–237. Siskind, Mariano. “The Genres of World Literature: the Case of Magical Realism.” In The Routledge Companion of World Literature, edited by Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 345–355. London: Routledge, 2011. Smith, Neil. “Contours of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographical Scale.” Social Text 33 (1992): 54–81. Snaith, Anna. “Of Fanciers, Footnotes, and Fascism: Virginia Woolf ’s Flush.” Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 614–636. ———. “Late Virginia Woolf.” Oxford Handbooks. October 2015. https://www.oxfordhandbooks. com/ ———. Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations. London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s, 2000. Snelling, Sonia. “‘A Human Pyramid’: An (Un)Balancing Act of Ancestry and History in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 32, no. 1 (March 1997): 21–33. Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies. London: Verso, 1989. Solecki, Sam, ed. Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje. Montréal: Véhicule Press, 1985. Southworth, Helen. “Women and Interruption in Between the Acts.” In Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place, edited by Anna Snaith and Michael H. Whitworth, 46–61. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Spearey, Susan. “Mapping and Masking: The Migrant Experience in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 29, no. 2 (1994): 45–60. Spiro, Mia. Anti-Nazi Modernism: The Challenges of Resistance in 1930s Fiction. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012. Spiropoulou, Angeliki. Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. ———. “Rethinking Comparativism.” In Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, 253–270. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Steele, Elizabeth. Introduction. To Flush: A Biography, by Virginia Woolf, xi–xxxi. Oxford: Shakespeare Head and Blackwell, 1999. Stone, Marjorie. “Browning [née Moulton Barrett], Elizabeth.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. http://www.oxforddnb.com/. Sturgis, Matthew. Oscar: A Life. London: Head of Zeus, 2018. Sugunasiri, Swanda. Step Down Shakespeare, the Stone Angel is Here: Essays on Literature, Canadian and Sri Lankan. Toronto: Nalanda Publishing Canada, 2007. Suh, Judy. Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Twentieth-Century British Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Sulieman, S. R. “The Literary Significance of the Dreyfus Affair.” In The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, Justice, edited by N. L. Kleeblatt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

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Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. Buddhism and the Spirit Cults of North-East Thailand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Teyssot, G. “Heterotopias and the History of Spaces.” Architecture and Urbanism 121 (1980): 79–100. Thacker, Andrew. Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Thieme, John. “‘Historical Relations’: Modes of Discourse in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family.’” In Narrative Strategies in Canadian Literature: Feminism and Post-Colonialism, edited by Coral A. Howells and Lynette Hunter, 40–48. Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991. Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures. London: Continuum, 2008. Tihanov, Galin. The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. ———. “The Location of World Literature.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/ Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 44, no. 3 (September 2017): 468–81. Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. “The English Patient: ‘Truth is stranger than fiction.’” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (Summer 1994): 141–153. Upton, Anthony. The Communist Parties of Scandinavia and Finland. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973. Vadde, Aarthi. Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Van Vleck, William. The Administrative Control of Aliens: A Study in Administrative Law and Procedure. New York: The Commonwealth Fund, 1932. Venn, Couze. “Beyond Enlightenment? After the Subject of Foucault, Who Comes?” Theory, Culture and Society 14, no. 3 (1997): 1–28. Verhoeven, W. M. “Playing Hide and Seek in Language: Michael Ondaatje’s Historiography of the Self.” The American Review of Canadian Studies 24, no. 1(1994): 21–38. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. L’individu, la mort, l’amour: Soi-même et l’autre en Grèce ancienne [The individual, death, and love: the self and the other in ancient Greece]. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Veyne, Paul. “Foucault Revolutionizes History.” In Foucault and his Interlocutors, edited by Arnold I. Davidson, 146–182. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. ———. Foucault. Sa pensée, sa personne [Foucault: his thought, his person]. Paris: Albin Michel, 2008. ———. “The Final Foucault and His Ethics.” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (Autumn 1993): 1–9. Visker, Rudi. Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1995. Wagner, Vit. “Ondaatje’s Billy rides again . . .” Toronto Star, April 6, 1990, D9. Walker, Laura Savu. “Rites of Passage: Moving Hearts and Transforming Memories in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 45, no. 1 (2014): 35–57. Wallis, Mick. “Pageantry and the Popular Front: Ideological Production in the ‘Thirties.”’ New Theatre Quarterly X, no. 38 (1994): 132–156. Wang, Ban. “‘I’ on the Run: Crisis of Identity in Mrs. Dalloway.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 38, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 177–91.

Selected Bibliography

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Index

Page numbers for the “ring composition” figures are indicated in bold.

abnormality, 29, 40, 53, 55–56 aesthetics of existence: 2, 32, 100, 103, 109–110, 113, 117n27, 122–23, 194, 199, 220, 238; aesthetico-ethical conduct, 27, 32, 97, 99, 100. See also biopoetics, self, subjectivity agency: 6, 23, 28, 31, 45, 91n94, 99, 102–3, 113, 119, 121, 182, 196n175. See also freedom, practices of alethurgy, 45, 102, 111 Almásy, László Ede Almásy de Zsadány et Törökszentmiklós. See Ondaatje, Michael, The English Patient Althusser, Louis, 65 Amacker, Frank, 131 amygdala, 115 anarcheology, 45, 78 anarchy, 30, 64, 84, 86, 92 anatomo-politics, 42 ancient Greece: and Foucault, 12, 100, 102–3, 107, 110–11, 113–14, 127, 187, 189–99; and Ondaatje, 12, 110, 170–72; and Woolf, 12, 72, 97, 142, 145, 188n160, 200, 215–17 “Angel in the House,” 120, 140 anti-feminism. See misogyny anti-Semitism: in 1930s, 88; and Dreyfus “affair,” 24–25 archaeology (Foucault’s method): of knowledge, 23–24, 29, 35,

43n20, 46–47, 53–54, 62n44, 68, 78, 80–81, 194 archipelago: carceral. See Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish; gulag. See Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr architecture: and discipline, 52–53, 55–59 archives: and curatorial tactics, 12, 29, 30–31, 46–47, 51, 54, 80–81, 99, 122–26, 131–32, 139–41, 146; dynamic, 47–49, 129, 130 Ariosto, Ludovico, 203 Arnold, Matthew: Sohrab and Rustum, 154 art history: and gender and race, 130–31 “art of the self.” See aesthetics of existence, and self askēsis: to cultivate the self, 30–31, 113–18, 123, 197, 199–200; as “gymnastics,” 113 Auerbach, Erich: 21, 152n91; “Philologie der Weltliteratur” [Philology of world literature], 21 Augustine of Hippo, 195 autobiography, 21, 32, 219–38 avowal: 99; Foucault lectures on, 102–3, 189–92, 196–97; compared with parrhēsia, 102–3; function of, 189–90, 196–97; and Ondaatje, 219, 221, 235; and Woolf, 200–201,

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209–211, 217–19. See also disavowal, and Foucault, Michel, Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling Baader-Meinhof group, 84 Bachelard, Gaston, 15 Bakhtin, Mikhail: carnivalesque, 37; chronotope, 9, 33; dialogism, 6, 8; transgredience, 10–11, 16, 21–22, 30, 35, 55, 78–79, 97, 123, 161, 188, 201; Art and Answerability, 10; Dialogic Imagination, 9n30, 9n31, 89; “Discourse in the Novel,” 88n84 Balibar, Étienne, 102n6, 178n144, 236n244 Barbin, Herculine, 27 Barrie, James M., 170–71, 233 Barthes, Roland, 5n18, 153, 158n103 Beames, Thomas: The Rookeries of London, 125, 142 de Beauvoir, Simone, 185 Beccaria, Cesare, Marquis of Gualdrasco and Villareggio, 44 becoming. See subjectivity Bell, Angelica, 203n191 Bell, Vanessa, 27, 125 Benjamin, Walter, 76n63, 216 Bentham, Jeremy: Panopticon: or, the Inspection-House, 57, 58 Bentham, Samuel, 57 Berger, John, 219, 233 Bergson, Henri, 72, 137 Besier, Rudolf: The Barretts of Wimpole Street, 139 Bethell, Kathleen, 136–37 Bhabha, Homi, 8n25 bildungsroman, 16, 19, 21, 30, 80, 89, 144, 226 Billy the Kid (William H. Bonney): death of, 131–32, 136, 138; and Lincoln County War, 125, 133–34; and Pat Garrett, 131, 134, 136–37;

photographs of, 125, 132–133, 205n195. See also Ondaatje, Michael, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid biography: 125, 127, 133, 226; parodied by Woolf, 124, 142, 144, 188, 201–3, 207; “revolutionised” by Woolf, 202–3 biopoetics: aesthetico-ethical relations, 27, 97, 99–100; disruption tactics, 147–49; Foucault’s tactics, 96, 120, 126–27, 131, 177, 181, 187, 238; Ondaatje’s tactics, 80, 84, 89–90, 96–97, 107, 110, 120, 131, 134, 161–62, 165, 169–74, 219, 228, 230, 233, 238; Woolf ’s tactics, 71, 73, 78, 96–97, 104–6, 115, 120, 140–42, 147–52, 159, 161, 201, 210, 238 biopolitics: and discipline, 1, 28, 36, 237; and fostering of life, 1, 23, 28, 31, 41–42, 75, 81, 92, 177, 187; and governmentality, 1, 12, 26, 36, 75, 92; and mass death, 168 biopower, 10, 199 bios: bios/logos, 30, 110–11; and zōē, 100 bodies: docile, 10, 19, 35, 42–44, 46, 52, 54–56, 62, 97; gendered, 10, 204, 206; and pleasure, 187; racialized, 10, 42; species-body, 42 body politic, 55 La Bohème [Bohemian Life] (Puccini), 86 Bonney, William H. See Billy the Kid Borges, Luis, 15 Bourdieu, Pierre, 67n55 bourgeoisie, 59, 186 Brueghel, Pieter, Elder and Younger, 220n222 Brigate Rosse [Red Brigade], 84 Britannia, 75, 216 British East India Company, 232 British Museum, 87, 106 British Society of Biblical Archaeology, 88

Index

Brompton cocktail, 162 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett: correspondence, 124n37, 125, 140; elopement, 124n37, 139; Flush as her “double,” 140; life in England, 142; life in Italy, 145; poetry of, 144, 146; and spiritualism, 145; Aurora Leigh, 139, 144; Casa Guidi Windows, 146; Poems Before Congress, 146. See also Woolf, Virginia, Flush Browning, Robert Browning, 124n37, 125, 139n67, 143–44. See also Woolf, Virginia, Flush Bush, Catherine, 12n41 Calder, Alexander, 132 Campt, Tina, 115 Canada: colonial history of, 11–12, 229; and multiculturalism, 30, 79, 84, 89, 229; War Measures Act, 1970, 84, 91 Canadian Immigration Act, 1910, 82, 91 Canguilhem, Georges: Le normal et le pathologique [The normal and the pathological], 40 capitalism: and cash nexus, 84; and economics, 54, 184; transnational, 30, 81, 90; as war on workers, 30, 54, 81, 90, 97 Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio), 93–94, 162 “carceral archipelago,” 45, 61n42 carceral society. See Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish “care of the self.” See aesthetics of existence, self Carlyle, Thomas: On Heroes, Hero-Worship, 202n189 Casanova, Pascale, 8, 9n32 Ceylon. See Sri Lanka Cheah, Pheng, 2n3, 9n32 chiaroscuro, 94

Christianity: and mortification, 103; and parrhēsia, 102–103; and self-examination, 103, 114 chronotope, 1, 9, 13, 29, 33, 73, 76, 137, 140, 147, 159, 218, 231, 234 citizenship: for women, 12, 102–103; international, 12, 144, 198–99, 228 Cixous, Hélène, 185 class, 10, 25, 29–30, 41, 59, 63–65, 67, 97, 130, 140, 142–44, 186, 207, 224 Clausewitz, Carl von, 38 Cold War, 189, 220–21 collage, 5, 6, 12, 223 colonialism, 1, 7, 11, 12n42, 18, 31, 71, 154, 226–29, 235 commonplace books. See hupomnēmata community: 7, 12–13, 30, 83–84, 89, 93, 96, 103n8, 161–65, 169, 172–73; ethnic, 18, 86, 93; as “table full of strangers,” 17, 19, 21, 235; worldly, 28 comparative literature, 2, 5, 8, 32n80 “conduct of conduct,” 24, 93, 147, 224 confession: as religious coercion, 189, 196; of truth, 178, 181, 183–85, 209, 228 Conrad, Joseph, 30, 87, 92n96, 233–34 Cooper, James Fenimore, 170 Cooppan, Vilashini, 2, 3, 7n20, 10n35 cosmopolitanism, 2, 4, 11, 33, 227 counter-spaces, 15, 93. See also heterotopia country house novel, 147–49, 153n93 crime: and broadsheets, 125–26, 128–29, 133–34; and criminality, 38–39; and imprisonment, 126; and penal sentences, 24n67, 25–26, 126–27, 138, 143, 197 crime stories, 59, 126, 128 Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885, 25, 26

275

276

H e t e r o t o p i c Wo r l d F i c t i o n

criminals: and discipline, 57–58, 60; and torture, 46–49, 57, 62 critique, 13, 14, 22–24, 78, 111, 117, 121, 216 Cubism, 12, 30, 87, 220n222 Cynics and Cynicism, 27, 103, 105, 111–12, 145, 206 Damrosch, David, 2–3, 5n17, 8, 9n32, 11n38, 13, 87, 192, 226 daylight saving time. See standardization of time decolonization: and knowledge, 107–108, 233 “deep time,” 3, 9, 187, 217 Defert, Daniel, 14n49, 36, 37n4, 43, 101 Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe, 232 deindividualization, 28, 148. See also individuals Deleuze, Gilles, 37, 93n99, 129n45, 185, 209n202 delinquency: and prisons, 30, 46, 57, 60–61. See also Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish Deraniyagala, P. E. P., 233 Descartes, René, 107 d’Estaing, Valéry Giscard, 61 De Quincey, Thomas: Confessions, 224 Detienne, Marcel, 4–5, 7 dialogism: dialogic encounter, 22, 79, 84, 89. See also Bakhtin, Mikhail Dick, Susan, 153n93 Dictionary of National Biography (Stephen), 202 Dimock, Wai Chee, 2, 4, 8–9, 88n84, 231 disavowal, 99, 188, 189, 195, 200–201, 210, 219, 235. See also avowal discipline: disciplinary strategies, 55–56; and docile bodies, 42, 52, 55; examinations, 38, 52–53; infra-penality, 53; normalizing, 53, 60; and

punishment, 46, 53, 57–58; surveillance, 55–59. See also Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish discourse analysis: anonymous discourse, 50; direct discourse, 6, 47–49, 162, 183, 209; free indirect discourse, 6, 47–49, 78, 145, 165, 176, 180, 183, 192, 194–95; narrativization, 7, 47, 50–51, 96; personification, 50, 182–83; staged dialogue, 6, 100 discursive practices, 10–11, 19, 23, 29, 37, 48, 54, 183 dispositif, 32, 52, 55, 56n35, 61, 82, 93n99, 177, 179–81, 184–86, 188, 201, 203 dislocation. See heterotopic processes disposition. See heterotopic processes distraction. See heterotopic processes docile bodies, 10, 35, 43–44, 46, 52, 54–56, 62, 68–69, 97, 140, 237. See also discipline dognapping: Report from the Select Committee on Dog Stealing, 143. See also Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, and Woolf, Virginia, Flush Domenach, Jean-Marie, 36, 39 Dorn, Edward, 133 Douglas, Mary, 171–172, 174n136 Doyle, Arthur Conan: “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” 224; A Study in Scarlet, 167n119 Dreyfus, Alfred: “Affair,” 25; and antiSemitism, 24–25; and trial, 24, 41; and Zola, 24n67, 25 During, Simon, 10 Eckerman, Johann Peter, 8 écriture, 5, 126 ekphrasis, 132 elaboration of self. See self

Index

Enlightenment: as Age of Reason, 22, 37, 54, 115n24, 144–45, 172 epic: novelization of, 7, 87–89, 95, 97 ethical subject. See self ethics: 1, 22, 31, 53n33, 99–100, 102, 103n7, 113–14, 119, 121, 134, 161, 188n159, 191, 194, 197, 204, 225, 238; ancient, 113, 193; and biopoetics, 27, 99; of reading, 1–2, 4, 32, 139, 208; and subjectivity, 100, 110, 114, 192, 199 ethopoeisis, 113–14 eugenics, 141, 180 eventalization, 22 experience-book: as agent of change, 6, 27, 120, 123, 146; defined by Foucault, 30, 120–121, 129; and subjectivity, 31, 121, 134 Fabian, Johannes, 146n82, 154 facts: “archaeological surround of,” 109, 139; critiqued by Woolf, 52n30, 105; and fiction, 7, 105, 109, 113, 203, 226; and patriarchal privilege, 105 families: 21, 36, 64, 83, 85, 125, 141, 155, 163, 169, 183, 189, 221, 224, 226, 228–29, 231, 234; alternative “table full of strangers,” 17, 19, 21, 164, 235, 237; and biopolitics, 23, 157n102; and birth rates, 82n74; and disciplinary power, 55–56, 179n146, 128; and domestic tyranny, 56n35; and patriarchy, 74–75, 148, 157n102, 161, 169; and violence, 148, 229 fascism, 1, 42, 91n94, 105–6, 112, 114, 124, 141, 213–14 “fearless speech.” See parrhēsia Ferdowsi (pseud. for Abū al-Qasem Manşūr), 154 félhomály, 123, 160 femininity. See gender

fiction: and fact, 7, 105, 203, 226; and truth, 13–14, 105, 120, 189, 201 FLQ (Front de Libération du Québec [Québec Liberation Front]), 84 Flush (the cocker spaniel): pedigree of, 141, 144–145; focalization, 48, 66, 137, 138 Fonseka, Joseph Peter de, 19 Foucault, Michel: activism, 36–37, 39–40; and ancient Greece, 12, 100, 102–3, 107, 110–11, 113–114, 127, 187, 189–199; changes in style and rhetoric, 28, 30, 38–39, 42, 45, 100–101; critique (archaeology, genealogy, strategics), 23–24, 53–54, 57, 84, 188; lectures at the Collège de France, 27–28, 30, 37–38, 40, 42, 43n19, 45n22, 52n32, 102n4, 103n8, 111n18, 119; and prisons, 36–37, 46, 54, 57–62; books: Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, 40; About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self, 199n182; Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 14–15; Birth of Biopolitics, 44, 188; Birth of the Clinic, 40n16, 52, 186; Corps utopique. Les hétérotopies, Le, 16n53; Courage of Truth, 103n8, 110–11, 118; Discipline and Punish, 6, 28–29, 30, 37, 40, 44–62, 96, 97, 101, 111, 121, 131n53, 186; Discourse and Truth and Parrēsia, 103n8, 103–4, 105n10, 107, 111; Dits et écrits, 1954–1988, 13n46, 28, 36n3, 37n4&7, 39n11, 41, 43, 46, 51n29, 59, 101, 119, 121–22, 126, 129, 130, 192n167, 193, 197–98, 200; Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, 5, 12, 15, 17, 26, 28, 37n7, 38, 41n17, 46–47, 51, 53n33, 63, 70n59, 75, 85, 100, 113–14, 117,

277

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H e t e r o t o p i c Wo r l d F i c t i o n

120–21, 124, 159, 197–98, 199, 200n184; Fearless Speech, 103–4, 105n10, 107, 111, 113; Foucault Effect, 11n39; Foucault Live, 39n12, 103, 126, 128; Government of the Living, On the, 44–45, 78, 100, 102, 113; Government of Self and Others, 103n8, 112; Hermeneutics of the Subject, 111n18, 113, 116n26, 117, 118n28; History of Madness, 6n19, 10, 186; History of Sexuality, 31, 42, 74–75, 95, 100–101, 113, 123, 146–47, 175–195, 200, 242–245; Vol. 1: An Introduction, 32, 74, 75, 95, 100–101, 114, 146–47, 175–187, 191–92; Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, 100, 113, 189–94; Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, 100, 113–14, 189–90, 194; Vol. 4: Confessions of the Flesh, 189–90, 195; I, Pierre Rivière, 31, 122–123, 124–131, 139; Lectures at the Collège de France, 27–28, 30, 37–38, 40, 42, 43n19, 45n22, 52n32, 102n4, 103n8, 111n18, 119; Lectures on the Will to Know, 37–38; Manet and the Object of Painting, 129–31; Œuvres, 189n163; Order of Things, 14–16, 43n20, 101, 118–19, 186, 195; Penal Theories and Institutions, 38; Politics of Truth, 13n45, 22–24, 121, 146; Politics Philosophy Culture, 101, 189, 203n192; Power/Knowledge, 39n12, 40, 43, 47, 84, 96, 107, 121, 195; Punitive Society, 38–39, 41, 59, 60n40; Psychiatric Power, 39, 55n34, 56n35; Remarks on Marx, 167n120; Security, Territory, Population, 43n19, 44, 66; Society Must be Defended, 38, 40n16, 41, 42; Subjectivity and Truth, 27, 99–100, 113, 118; La volonté de savoir [History of Sexuality,

volume I: Introduction], 31, 40, 175–87; Wrong-Doing Truth-Telling, 102n4, 196–97, 199n181; essays: “Friendship as a Way of Life,” 70n59; “How We Behave,” 193; “Lives of Infamous Men,” 51n28, 53n33; “The Subject and Power,” 163; “Truth and Power,” 39n13; “Two Lectures,” 84; “What is an Author?” 5n18; “What is Critique?” 22; “What is Enlightenment?” 22 France-Culture, 15 freedom: practices of, 28, 30–31, 95–96, 162, 175, 214, 226 free indirect discourse. See discourse analysis Freud, Sigmund, 178, 180, 183 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 4n11, 5n16, 8 friendship, 30, 70n59, 133, 135, 164, 171, 197 futurity, 115 Gao Xingjian, 32 Geismar, Alain, 39 genealogy (Foucault’s method), 23–24, 28–30, 41, 54–57, 71, 73, 84, 86, 90, 96, 99, 107, 123, 146–94, 196, 221 gender: 1, 7, 10–11, 18, 29, 31, 63, 65, 70, 74, 86, 88, 95, 97, 105–6, 115, 125, 139, 141–42, 164, 185–86, 189, 201, 204, 206–7, 211, 215, 236; and art history, 131n51; femininity, 69, 73, 140; masculinity, 18, 69, 133, 214; and power-knowledge relations, 186; and world literature, 89 genocide, 31, 32, 42, 77, 99, 123, 139, 146, 178, 181 genre: 2n6, 3–4, 7, 9n30, 16, 88n84, 89n86, 97, 114, 133n58, 138, 147–48, 161, 234; generic transactions, 90, 203n193 geopolitical forces, 29, 68, 110, 146, 204

Index

Gilgamesh, 8, 27, 30, 80n69, 87–89, 92–93, 95–96. See also Ondaatje, Michael, In the Skin of a Lion globalization, 2, 4, 33, 223n227 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 8, 233 governmentality: 1, 7, 11, 11n39, 21, 24n68, 26, 28, 36, 43–45, 66, 75, 90, 96, 100, 216; fostering desire and pleasure, 26, 63, 90, 169; governmental forces, 44, 73, 92. See also biopolitics grids of intelligibility, 23, 33, 68, 111–12 Gros, Frédéric, 100–101, 190n164, 191n166, 196, 199 GIA Groupe information asiles [Group Information on Asylums], 39 GIP Groupe d’information sur les prisons [Group Information on Prisons], 36–37, 39, 196 GIS Groupe information santé [Group Information on Health], 39 Gurria-Quintana, Angel, 121n33 Hall, Radclyffe, 106 Halperin, David, 186, 193n170 Harrison, Jane: 12n43, 27; Prolegomena, 217n217 Helgesson, Stefan, 3, 7n23 Hellenistic era, 102, 189–90, 195, 197, 199 Herodotus, 27, 162, 165, 170–72, 174, 179, 217, 226n230 Herzl, Theodor, 25 heteroglossia, 19 heteronormativity. See sexuality heterotopia: 3, 7; definition of, 14–16, 19; destabilizing, 15; dislocating established truths, 15, 20; in Foucault’s writings, 14–17, 23, 29, 46, 54, 60, 124, 194; in Ondaatje’s writings, 16–22, 95–96, 118, 124, 134–36, 163, 165; and prison, 60;

and ship, 16–20; and temporality, 17; in Woolf ’s writings, 63, 67–68, 75–76, 124, 159 heterotopic processes: dislocation (dislocate to transit), 13, 18, 20–23, 29–32, 35, 57–58, 61, 63, 73–76, 80, 90, 95, 123, 184, 188–235; disposition (dispose to transpose), 18–19, 22–23, 29–31, 35, 46–54, 56, 59, 63–68, 80–90, 123–146, 233; distraction (distract to transact), 19–20, 23, 29, 31–32, 35, 44, 54, 63, 68–73, 78, 84–85, 90, 95, 123, 146–187 heterotopic world fiction, 1–4, 7, 13–14, 17–18, 21–22, 24, 28, 32–33, 35, 67, 89, 96, 99, 122–23, 195, 235 Higgins, Lesley, 17n56, 24n67, 66n52, 77n65, 108n14, 115n24, 167n118, 199n179, 203n193 Hippocrates, 194 historiographic metafiction, 79, 81, 86, 131n53 history: effective, 47; monumental, 62; official, 84, 107–8, 123, 187; of the present, 60n41, 61n42, 151, 193n170, 202, 228; totalizing, 30, 107, 177 Hogarth Press, 125, 213n212; and global print culture, 213n212 Homer, 217n217 homosexuality: 186; criminalization of, 24–26 homosociality, 138 Huffman, L. A., 125, 132 Hunt-Lenox Globe, 235 Hutcheon, Linda, 81, 86, 202n187 hupomnēmata, 12, 114, 137 Hyppolite, Jean, 119 identity: identity politics, 16, 28, 47, 53, 123, 159, 163, 170, 174, 176, 189,

279

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198–99, 209; racialized, 21, 29, 31, 120–21, 142, 168 indirect discourse. See discourse analysis individuals: and governmentality, 42, 66. See also de-individualization immigration: in Canada, 30, 78–79, 82–86, 91–93, 179n146; and deportation, 82, 91; and racism, 82 imperialism: critique of, 1, 6, 31, 56n35, 62, 71, 88, 97, 106, 112, 114, 119–21, 154, 157n102, 169, 178, 186, 216–17, 230, 233, 236. See also Ondaatje, Michael, and Woolf, Virginia Impressionism, 12. See also Foucault, Michel, Manet and the Object of Painting India: and imperialism, 27, 72–73, 142n76, 148, 154, 174–175, 215; partitioning of, 169n123; self-rule movement, 215; in Woolf ’s texts, 72–73, 148, 154, 209, 211, 214–15 Indigenous peoples: of Canada, 85n79; of the USA, 133, 139, 170 “intellectual operations,” 5, 111, 121 intellectuals, specific and universal, 121n31 interiority: free indirect discourse, 6, 47–49, 78, 145, 165, 176, 180, 183, 192, 194–95; narrated interior monologues, 6, 47–48, 73 intermediality, 209n202, 220n222, 232 jazz, 12, 30, 87, 131n53, 161, 230 judiciary, 25, 29, 40, 47–49, 54, 58, 60–61, 64, 75, 116, 203 justice: 58, 59, 182, 196; mitigating circumstances, 127; retributive, 46; social justice, 115 Kadir, Djelal, 2, 12n42 Kant, Immanuel: “Was ist Aufklärung? [What is Enlightenment],” 22

Kipling, Rudyard: Kim, 169n123, 170–71 knowledge: connaissance, 37, 92, 120, 140, 167, 169, 190; decolonizing, 107–8, 233; domains of, 1, 28, 43n20, 62, 181; erudite, 84, 92, 107; and examinations, 38, 53; insurrection of, 84; relations of, 3–4, 54, 123, 183, 184; savoir, 37, 167, 191; subjugated, 30, 84, 107; will to know, 37–38, 45, 175, 184, 189n163; will to truth, 37, 51 Knox, Robert: A Historical Relation, 232 Labouchere Amendment, 25, 26n73 Layard, Austen Henry, 8, 87 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas: and Royal Saltworks, 57 Leps, Marie-Christine, 17n56, 24n67, 26n74, 66n52, 77n65, 108n14, 115n24, 167n118, 199n179, 203n193, 224n228 liberalism: and civil society, 44; liberaldemocratic regimes, 1, 45–46, 61 life-writing, 32, 99, 203–9 Ligue de la patrie française [League of the French Homeland], 25 Ligue des droits de l’homme [League of the Rights of Man], 25 Lowry, Glen, 85n79, 94 madness: and French penal code, 58; history of, 22, 39, 186; and psychiatry, 39 Ma Jian, 32 Manet, Édouard: At the Bar at the Folies Bergères, 130, 138; Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 131 Marcus, Steven: The Other Victorians, 175 marriage: patriarchal institution, 50n26, 73, 116, 128, 195n171, 236 masculinity. See gender Matisse, Henri, 27

Index

Mauss, Marcel, 63n46 May 1968, 38–39, 178n143 Mayhew, Henry, 143n79 McCrum, Robert, 12n41, 228n232 Médecins sans frontières [Doctors Without Borders], 199 Menchú, Rigoberta, 8 metafiction. See historiographic metafiction Mignolo, Walter D., 7, 31 militarism, 24–25, 44, 55–57, 64, 69, 73, 110, 115n23, 116–17, 128, 157, 203, 224 military camp, 52, 56–58 misogyny, 19, 73, 105, 114, 130–31, 205n194, 206, 230, 235–37. See also Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas Mitchell, Stephen, 87 Mitford, Mary Russell, 125, 144 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 36 modernism, 4, 47, 63n46, 87, 153n92, 201, 207 modernity, 12n42, 14n49, 154, 200, 228 “moment of being.” See Woolf, Virginia morality, 42, 56, 60, 100, 103–4, 107, 113–14, 185, 190, 191–93 Moretti, Franco, 2, 8, 9n32 Mufti, Aamir, 12n42 multiculturalism. See Canada murder: and the state, 31, 109–110, 128, 134 Mussolini, Benito: 71, 105, 213; The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, 213n212 Muybridge, Eadweard, 132n56 nation, 12, 18, 23, 25–27, 29–30, 41, 74–75, 99, 140, 147–48, 152, 161, 163, 166, 168–69, 202, 221 nationalism: 77n65, 107; ethnic, 7, 174, 225, 227n231

Napoleonic Code, 128 Nazi Germany: Night of the Long Knives, 115n23 Nietzsche, Friedrich: 37, 47, 85, 175; Genealogy of Morals, 41n17 normalization: 31, 40–42, 58, 60, 62n43, 67, 103, 179; and conformity, 53. See also abnormal norms: biopolitical, 23, 27, 175 Ondaatje, Christopher, 232n240 Ondaatje, Michael: family, 226–27, 229, 234; fictional autobiographies, 219–38; and imperialism, 119, 120, 165, 169, 188, 228, 229, 235, 236; as “mongrel,” 12, 150, 228; and Sri Lanka, 107–8, 110, 226–28, 234; novels: Anil’s Ghost, 6, 11n40, 12n41, 13, 16n53, 17, 31, 48n24, 107–110, 112, 115n24, 117–18, 167n119, 168; Cat’s Table, 16–21, 31–32, 48n24, 120–21, 189, 235–38; Coming through Slaughter, 131n53; The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 10, 31, 122, 131–39; Divisadero, 56n35, 131n53; English Patient, 13n44, 26, 31, 48n24, 77n64, 118n28, 123, 146–47, 159–75, 178–79, 186–87, 220, 239–41; Running in the Family, 32, 136n63, 188, 219, 226–35; Skin of a Lion, 10, 28–30, 35–36, 38, 55, 78–97, 119, 162, 165; Warlight, 26, 32, 77n64, 123, 186, 189, 219–26 Oronsay (ocean liner), 16–20, 110, 235–36 “outsider,” 12, 20, 112, 114, 117, 123, 161–65, 167, 173 pageants: and English history, 31, 116, 147–58. See also Woolf, Virginia, Between the Acts

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Panopticon, 28, 43, 57–59 Panopticon: or, the Inspection-House (Bentham), 57 Paranavitana, Senerat, 108n14 parody: in Foucault, 47, 48, 51, 179; in Woolf, 124, 153n93, 188, 202, 206–7 parrhēsia: in ancient texts, 102–3, 107, 111; and dialogue, 105n10, 109; in Foucault, 102–4, 107, 110–12, 196n175; in Ondaatje, 104, 107–110, 112; and power, 31, 102–3, 105–7, 110, 111–12; as resistance, 31, 104, 108, 110, 123; and risks, 104–5, 110; in Woolf, 104–7, 112, 151 parrhēsiastes, 104, 107, 110–11, 197 patriarchy: critique of, 1, 6, 30–31, 62, 68, 97, 112, 119–20, 147, 165, 169, 186, 198, 201–2, 228–29, 235–36 peace: “think peace into existence,” 187, 221; as war, 27, 41, 51, 55, 59, 61, 74, 100 penal systems: in 18th c., 44, 57, 59; and reform, 58, 196. See also Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish penitentiary. See prison photographs: in Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid, 125, 132–33, 136; in Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, 226, 232; in Woolf ’s Orlando, 203; in Woolf ’s Three Guineas, 109n17, 114 Plato, 113, 191, 215 pleasure: ancient Greek, 189–91, 193; theorized by Foucault, 26, 100, 147, 169, 177–82, 184–85, 187–90, 193, 197, 201 political anatomy, 54–55 Poliziano (Agnolo Ambrogini), 163 Pope, Alexander, 205–6 population: and governmentality, 1, 42, 43–44, 148, 178; management of, 1, 40, 61, 186

Porter, Cole, 153n93 postmodernism, 4, 133n58 power: as civil war, 38, 41; as continual war, 38, 40–41; exercise of, 12, 40, 42–43, 53; intentional, 42, 74; nonsubjective, 74; power-knowledge relations, 6, 15n51, 23, 32, 35, 38, 42, 44, 52, 58, 60–62, 68, 71, 74, 78, 82n72, 96, 100, 104, 127, 157n102, 181, 184–85; to punish, 49, 58; relations of, 3, 15, 28, 37–38, 40, 42, 49, 50, 55, 61–63, 71, 90, 110, 126, 159n104, 182; and spatial control, 56, 59, 64–66; and temporal control, 56, 59, 64; and xenophobia, 82 primeval, 71, 97, 155, 218 prisons: inmates, 36–37, 59, 60; penal systems, 58, 59; prison reform, 49; uprisings, 36–37. See also Ondaatje, Michael, In the Skin of a Lion, and Panopticon propaganda: and war, 116–17, 216 psychoanalysis: as prostitution, 183–84. See also Freud, Sigmund Ptolemy: Geographia, 233 Puccini, Giacomo: La Bohème [Bohemian Life], 86 Purdy, Al, 94 Queensberry, Marquess of, 25 Quiney, Judith Shakespeare, 106 racism: 69, 72, 74, 114, 164n114, 168–69, 175, 229, 235–36, 238; and the state, 32, 41–42, 73, 82 Rawlence, Ben: and Dadaab refugee camps, 32 readers: 1, 2, 6, 7, 13, 16, 18, 21, 29, 49, 61; as accomplices, 91, 121–22, 135, 178, 183; and experience-books, 118, 121, 124–25, 132, 136–39, 146; participatory aesthetics, 3, 121–22,

Index

161–62, 219; reader/narrator relations, 18, 31, 47–49, 78, 156–58, 183, 223, 231; and reading practices, 3, 7, 14, 18, 20, 28, 30–32, 66, 78, 146, 149, 160, 165, 176, 202, 207–8, 219, 224, 225–26, 229 reading: new modes of, 3, 14, 121–22, 124–26; as un-learning, 114, 125, 192 realism: in literature, 20, 47–49, 53, 78, 132, 137–38, 207, 210–211, 220, 234; mock realism, 203; in painting (Manet), 94, 129–30 reason: “absolute,” 46; and Kant, 22 “reflective indocility,” 7, 22, 237 refugees, 1, 12, 32, 61, 84, 179n146, 198, 223 resistance, 12, 37, 39, 41–42, 59, 79, 90, 104, 147, 154, 175, 182, 230 ring composition: definition, 162, 171–72; in Foucault’s La Volonté de savoir, 181, 183; in Herodotus’s Histories, 162, 171–72; narrative “latch,” 123, 174, 178; in Ondaatje’s The English Patient, 171–75; parallelism, 171, 173–74; in world literature, 12; in Woolf ’s The Waves, 217–18. See also 239–48 “Rise of Man,” 62 Rivière, Pierre: analyzed by experts, 124n38, 126–27; crimes, 126, 129; death, 126; memoir, 10, 101, 126–30; trial, 126. See Foucault, Michel, I, Pierre Rivière Roman de la rose (de Lorris, de Meun), 223 Rosvall, Viljo, 90n89 Royal Geographical Society, 159n105, 166 “Rule, Britannia,” 216 Sackville-West, Vita, 201–3, 219 satire: in Foucault, 177, 186; in Woolf, 31, 75, 106, 119, 125, 139–41, 145–46,

148, 156–57, 159, 161, 200–2, 204–7, 211, 213, 218 Savonarola, Girolamo, 145 schools: and architecture, 56; and discipline, 28, 43, 52, 56, 58–59; and examinations, 38, 53 security: and normalization, 40, 189, 221; security measures and mechanisms, 1, 23, 40n16, 43–44, 64, 67, 92 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 186 self: care of, 113–18, 199; elaboration of, as practice of freedom, 1, 21, 95–97, 99, 113–18, 177n142, 226; nonidentitarian, 32, 113; self-fashioning, 27, 105, 116; technologies of, 27–28, 30, 99–100, 102n4, 199; transversal, 27–28, 100, 113, 199, 201; worldly, 28, 30, 226, 233–34. See also askēsis, subjectivity sex: “monarchy” of, 177 sexuality: 10, 22, 28, 32, 42, 56, 71, 95, 99, 101, 129; and biopolitics, 27, 177–78, 181; and childhood, 179–80; conventional theories of, 175, 177, 180, 184; dispositif of, 31, 177, 180–81, 184–85, 203; “Scientia sexualis,” 179; and Victorian prudery, 101, 176, 185. See also homosexuality, and Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality Shahnameh [Book of kings], 154 Shakespeare, Judith, 27, 106, 120. See also Woolf, Virginia, Room of One’s Own Shakespeare, William, 70, 106, 120, 203, 207n199, 209n201, 233 shell-shock: domestic, 69; and WWI, 6, 29, 65, 71, 160; and WWII, 160. See also Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway Shih, Shu-mei, 4 Small, Ambrose, 80, 83, 85, 93 Sigiriya frescoes, 230 Silver, Brenda, 11n38, 140n70

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Sinhalese language, 108n14, 227, 233–34. See also Sri Lanka slums of London: St. Giles, 142–43; Whitechapel, 142–45 social Darwinism, 105 Society of Outsiders, 12, 114, 117, 123. See also Woolf, Virginia, Three Guineas Socrates, 103, 105, 111–12, 188, 191 soldiers: “mobile fragment of space,” 111 Sophocles: 215, 217n218 sovereignty, 22n64, 29, 41, 43–44, 46, 51, 56n35, 57–58, 68, 89–92, 95–97, 231 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: The Gulag Archipelago, 61 Spanish Civil War, 109n17, 115n23 spies and spying: and delinquents, 61; and novels, 161, 26. See also Ondaatje, Michael, English Patient and Warlight Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 2n1, 5, 32n80, 165n116 Sri Lanka: in 1920s, 226; ancient poetry, 230, 232; civil war, 17, 110, 231n238; food, 234; invasions of, 227–28 standardization of time: daylight saving time, 65; International Congress on Chronometry, 65n47; and railroads, 64; and WWI, 65. See also Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway Stephen, Leslie, 202 Stoicism, 103n8 strategics (Foucault’s method), 23–24, 29, 35, 44, 55, 62, 182 stultification, 116, 154 subaltern, 7 subjectivity: and becoming, 27, 31, 120, 174, 226, 228, 234; and desire, 95, 190–91, 200, 213, 228; hermeneutics of, 111n18, 162,

189, 197; and identity, 19, 28, 74, 134, 144, 148, 165, 174, 188, 198; juridical subject, 100, 189; and liberal humanism, 53, 54; subject of law, 46, 114, 188; transcendental subject, 47, 54. See also self subjectivization: modes of, 191–92; and prison, 59; and sex, 185 subjugation, 30, 45, 53, 61–62, 74, 77, 84, 105, 107, 116, 123, 131, 146, 157n102, 192, 203, 206, 219, 234 Suez Canal: Suez “crisis,” 18n60 surveillance, 26, 43, 54–59, 68, 93 technologies of the self. See self Temelcoff, Nicholas, 80, 83, 86, 93 temporality: 16, 21, 27, 55; “deep time,” 3, 9, 97; “felt time,” 72, 137; and Foucault, 16, 17, 47, 55n34, 56, 60; narrative strategies of, 85–86, 137, 155; and Ondaatje, 85–86, 137, 231–32; ode to time in Mrs. Dalloway, 72; theorized by Henri Bergson, 72, 137; and Woolf, 29, 64–66, 71–73, 154–55, 215–18. See also chronotope, standardization of time terrorism: War on Terror, 26, 220 time. See temporality thanatopolitics, 26–27, 96, 99, 125, 133 Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl, 2–3, 7n23 Tihanov, Galin, 8n25, 32–33 torture, 46–49, 57, 62, 110, 160, 162, 171, 221n224, 222. See also criminals transgression, 17, 22, 31, 46, 60, 67, 73, 90, 97, 108 transnational forces: economic, 29–30, 90; political, 13, 29, 124 truth regimes: ancient Greek, 102–3; bonds of, 194; Christian, 102–3; defamiliarization of, 6, 29, 54, 124;

Index

doxa, 151; games of truth, 188, 192–94 Turing, Alan, 26n73 unions, 59, 92, 39; Canadian organizers, 30, 90 utopia, 15, 19 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 199–200 Veyne, Paul, 11, 188n159 Victorian era, 25–26, 101, 120, 175–77, 182–183; satirized by Woolf, 125, 139–43, 150, 157n102, 201–2, 206 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 36 Vietnam war, 123, 139, 178n143 violence, 12n42, 23, 30–31, 39n10, 40–41, 56n35, 58, 70, 72–73, 118, 122, 125, 131–36, 139, 146–48, 157, 171, 178, 194, 207, 229, 236 Voutilainen, Janni, 90n89 Waller, Thomas (“Fats”), 27, 86n81, 87 Wall Street “crash” (1929), 227 war: “between men and women,” 230; bomb disposal, 164, 170; and capitalism, 72, 74, 81, 90, 97, 134; civil, 17, 38–39, 41, 59, 96, 109–110, 231n238; and class struggle, 38, 41, 59, 81, 144; learning to hate it, 116; model of everyday power relations, 40–42; Napoleonic, 128, 170–71; nuclear, 123, 168, 173; “peace by other means,” 27, 41, 51, 55, 61; “preposterous masculine fiction,” 96, 215n214; of the races, 40–42, 141n75; social, 38. See also Cold War, War on Terror, World War I, and World War II War Measures Act, 1970. See Canada War on Terror, 26, 220 Wells, H. G., 27, 149, 151; The Outline of History, 154

Weltliteratur, 8, 21 What is World Literature? (Damrosch), 8 Wikkramasinha, Lakdasa, 230, 233 “Wild West” in USA, 27, 132–33, 134n60; Lincoln County War, 125, 133–34, 139 Wilde, Oscar: and homophobia, 24–26; “St. Oscar,” 26; three trials, 24–25, 27, 41 Wilkinson, Anne, 94 Wilson, Lily, 141, 142n77 Windsor, House of, 71 Wittig, Monique, 185 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 188n159 women: abused in 19th c. medicine, 180, 186; in ancient world, 103; friendship of, 125, 144n80; hystericization of bodies, 175, 180, 186; and liberation movements, 104, 148n86, 197–98; socialization of, 180; subjugation of, 105–6, 115–16, 140, 207; violence against, 72n60, 160n93, 236. See also gender and patriarchy Woolf, Leonard, 150, 232–33 Woolf, Virginia: BBC broadcasts, 153n92; biography, 125, 139–146, 202–6, 218; feminist critique, 74–75, 105–6, 116–17, 119–20, 140, 201, 207; and imperialism, 62–63, 207, 216; “moment of being,” 207; narrative techniques, 29, 66–67, 73–74, 78, 106, 140–41, 144, 148–50, 200, 204, 206–7, 209–210; and reading notebooks, 114, 212; as satirist, 31, 75, 106, 119, 125, 139–41, 145–46, 148, 156–57, 159, 161, 200–2, 204–7, 211, 213, 218; Society of Outsiders, 12–13, 114; novels: Between the Acts, 48n24, 116, 123, 146–59, 160n106, 161, 169, 174, 182, 186–88; Flush:

285

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H e t e r o t o p i c Wo r l d F i c t i o n

A Biography, 31, 122, 124–25, 139– 46; Jacob’s Room, 116, 202n189; Mrs. Dalloway, 6, 10, 17n58, 28–29, 35, 38, 48n24, 55, 62–79, 82n72, 90, 96–97, 116, 157, 174, 197n147, 207, 221; Orlando, 32, 123, 153n93, 188, 200–9, 210–11, 213–16, 226, 227; Pargiters, 150; Room of One’s Own, 13–14, 31, 52n30, 104–7, 110, 120, 148n86, 214n213, 233n241; Three Guineas, 12n43, 31, 42, 52n30, 109n17, 112, 114–17, 121n31, 150, 163, 186, 191n166; To the Lighthouse, 50n26, 117, 120, 150, 153n93, 207; Voyage Out, 116; The Waves, 32, 123, 150, 188, 200–201, 203, 209–219, 223, 231, 246–48; The Years, 153n93, 191n166; essays: “Aurora Leigh,” 139; “How Should One Read a Book,” 52n30; “Lives of the Obscure,” 51n28; “Modern Fiction,” 62n45, 149n87; “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 149n87, 207; “The New Biography,” 202n188; “On Not Knowing Greek,” 211n207; “Thoughts on Peace,” 221; other writings: Carlyle’s House

and Other Sketches, 202n189; Diaries, 66, 115n23, 150, 188, 201, 207, 210, 212, 217n217, 218; Essays, 51n28, 52n30, 62n45, 120–24, 139, 146, 153, 156n100, 183, 187, 188n160, 202, 205n195, 211n207, 221–22; Letters, 96n103, 202, 215n214, 219 workers (and working classes), 26, 30, 54, 59, 79–84, 86, 88, 90–91, 97, 142, 184, 230 World War I, 29, 70–71, 90, 216 World War II: Battle of Britain, 147; and Ceylon, 227; Italian campaign, 160; London Blitz, 147, 160; North Africa campaign, 160 working classes. See workers world literature, 1–4, 7–11, 21, 33, 97, 153, 171, 173, 187, 229n233, 237. See also heterotopic world fiction xenophobia, 82, 208 Yousafzai, Malala, 32 Zionism, 25 Zola, Émile: and Dreyfus trial, 25